A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements, and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Published Recently 47. A Companion to William Faulkner 48. A Companion to the History of the Book 49. A Companion to Emily Dickinson 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.
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Edited by Richard C. Moreland Edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose Edited by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz Edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman Edited by David Paroissien Edited by Richard Brown Edited by Sara Castro-Klaren Edited by Haruko Momma and Michael Matto Edited by Greg Zacharias Edited by Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm Edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite Edited by Helen Fulton Edited by John T. Matthews Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh Edited by Keith Wilson Edited by David E. Chinitz Edited by S. E. Gontarski Edited by David Seed Edited by Kent Cartwright Edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley
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T WENTIETHC ENTURY U NITED S TATES F ICTION EDITED BY DAVID SEED
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition first published 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 David Seed Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley. com/wiley-blackwell. The right of David Seed to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to twentieth-century United States fiction / edited by David Seed. p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-4691-3 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction–20th century–History and criticism–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Literature and society–United States–History–20th century–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Seed, David. II. Title: Companion to twentieth-century United States fiction. PS379.C635 2010 813′.509–dc22 2009011985 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 11/13pt Garamond 3 by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Singapore 1
2010
Contents
Notes on Contributors
ix
Introduction David Seed
1
Part I
9
Genres, Traditions, and Subject Areas
1
U.S. Modernism Susan Hegeman
11
2
The City Novel James R. Giles
24
3
The Western Neil Campbell
36
4
Postmodern U.S. Fiction Hans Bertens
48
5
Modern Gothic Marilyn Michaud
60
6
The Short Story Mark Whalan
72
7
Southern Fiction Sharon Monteith
84
8
Jewish American Fiction David Brauner
96
9
“Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me”: Modern African American Fiction A. Robert Lee
109
vi
Contents
10
U.S. Detective Fiction Cynthia S. Hamilton
122
11
Hard-Boiled/Noir Fiction Lee Horsley
135
12
Chicano Fiction Helen Oakley
147
13
Black Humor Fiction David Seed
159
14 Fiction on the Vietnam War Philip Melling and Subarno Chattarji
171
15 The Rediscovery of the Native American Joy Porter
183
16
195
Trash Fiction Stacey Olster
Part II
Selected Writers
207
17
Edith Wharton Pamela Knights
209
18
Willa Cather’s Entropology: Permanence and Transmission Guy J. Reynolds
219
19 Gertrude Stein and Seriality Ulla Haselstein
229
20
Ernest Hemingway Peter Messent
240
21
John Dos Passos Andrew Hook and David Seed
251
22
Thomas Wolfe Anne Ricketson Zahlan
261
23
F. Scott Fitzgerald William Blazek
271
24
Zora Neale Hurston Lovalerie King
282
25
Theodore Dreiser Clare Virginia Eby
292
Contents
vii
26
William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Charles A. Peek
302
27
H.D.’s Visionary Prose Rachel Connor
313
28
John Steinbeck Brian Railsback
322
29
Raymond Chandler Sean McCann
332
30
Richard Wright Tara T. Green
342
31
Ralph Ellison Rachel Farebrother
352
32
James Baldwin D. Quentin Miller
361
33
Vladimir Nabokov Barbara Wyllie
369
34
Norman Mailer Michael K. Glenday
377
35
William S. Burroughs Davis Schneiderman
386
36
Saul Bellow Michael Austin
395
37
Gore Vidal Heather Neilson
403
38
Joseph Heller David M. Craig
411
39
Kurt Vonnegut Jerome Klinkowitz
420
40
Thomas Pynchon Ian Copestake
428
41 Ishmael Reed: American Iconoclast Darryl Dickson-Carr
436
42
445
Joyce Carol Oates Gavin Cologne-Brookes
viii 43
Contents Philip Roth Timothy Parrish
454
44 The Fiction of John Updike: Timely and Timeless Brian Keener
462
45
Maxine Hong Kingston Helena Grice
471
46
Toni Morrison Jennifer Terry
480
47
Alice Walker Maria Lauret
489
48
Don DeLillo Mark Osteen
497
49
Gerald Vizenor: Postindian Gamester A. Robert Lee
505
50
Bret Easton Ellis James Annesley
514
51
Amy Tan: “American Circumstances and Chinese Character” Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson
522
52 Paul Auster: Poet of Solitude Mark Brown
530
53
539
Index
Bharati Mukherjee Judie Newman
547
Notes on Contributors
James Annesley is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Newcastle University. A specialist in contemporary U.S. fiction, he is the author of Blank Fictions (1998) and Fictions of Globalization (2006). Michael Austin is Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. He has published books and articles on a wide variety of topics in twentieth-century American and eighteenth-century British literature. His most recent project is a great ideas anthology and rhetorical instruction guide, Reading the World: Ideas that Matter (2006). Hans Bertens is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Utrecht University. His books include The Idea of the Postmodern (1995), Contemporary American Crime Fiction (2002, with Theo D’haen), and Literary Theory: The Basics (2007). His most recent book in Dutch, co-authored with Theo D’haen, is an in-depth history of American literature. William Blazek, Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool Hope University, is a coeditor of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. He co-edited (with Michael K. Glenday) the collection, American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature (2005), and his other publications include essays on American literature, World War I literary culture, and modernism. David Brauner is a Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He is the author of two books – Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (2001) and Philip Roth (2007) – and of numerous articles and essays on twentieth-century Jewish and American fiction. He is currently working on a book entitled Contemporary American Fiction. Mark Brown is a Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Northampton. His research work takes place at the porous boundary between urban
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Notes on Contributors
cultures, particularly literature, and cultural geography. He is the author of Paul Auster (2007). Neil Campbell is Professor of American Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Derby. He has published widely in American studies, including American Cultural Studies (with Alasdair Kean), and he has edited American Youth Cultures (2004) and co-edited Issues in Americanisation and Culture (2004). His major research project is a trilogy of books examining different aspects of the contemporary American West: The Cultures of the American New West (2000); The Rhizomatic West (2008); the final part, Post-Westerns, will be on the cinematic representation of the New West. Subarno Chattarji is a Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Swansea. His publications include Memories of a Lost War (2001) on the poetry of the Vietnam War, and Tracking the Media (2008). Gavin Cologne-Brookes is Professor of American Literature at Bath Spa University. He is the author of Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (2005) and guest editor of a Studies in the Novel special number on Oates (2006). His other work includes The Novels of William Styron (1995) and Writing and America (1996, co-edited with Neil Sammells and David Timms). Rachel Connor was formerly a Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Glasgow, and is the author of H. D. and the Image (2004). She lives in West Yorkshire, where she writes fiction and teaches creative writing. Ian Copestake is President of the William Carlos Williams Society and has edited several books of essays, including American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon (2003) and The Legacy of William Carlos Williams: Points of Contact (2007). He currently lives and works in Frankfurt. David M. Craig is the author of Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction (1997), as well as a number of essays and articles on Joseph Heller. He serves as the Director of the Honors Program and Headmaster of the Clarkson School at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. Darryl Dickson-Carr is Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he teaches courses in African American literature, twentieth-century American literature, satire, and postmodernism. He is the author of African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001) and The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction (2005). Clare Virginia Eby is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, author of Dreiser and Veblen (1998), editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (2002) and the Dreiser Edition of The Genius (2008), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser (2004).
Notes on Contributors
xi
Rachel Farebrother is a Lecturer in American Studies at Swansea University. She has published articles on the Harlem Renaissance and post-colonial literature in Comparative American Studies, Interactions, Moving Worlds, and the Journal of American Studies. She is the author of Tracking the Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (2009). James R. Giles is Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of nine books, including The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America (1995), Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr. (1998), Violence in the Contemporary American Novel (2000), and The Spaces of Violence (2006). He is also the co-editor of seven volumes, including Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich (2004) and five volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Michael K. Glenday is Honorary Research Affiliate in the Department of Literature at the Open University, United Kingdom, and has taught American literature at the University of Manchester and the University of Liverpool. Amongst his publications on the American novel are books on Saul Bellow (1990) and Norman Mailer (1995). With William Blazek, he co-edited American Mythologies: Essays on American Literature (2005). He is a founding editor of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review and a board member of the Norman Mailer Review. Tara T. Green is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and the Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has published articles on Richard Wright, Tina McElroy Ansa, and August Wilson. Her books, From the Plantation to the Prison: African American Confinement Literature (2008) and A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men (2009), reflect her broad interests in African American literary studies. Helena Grice is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Aberystwyth University. Her publications include Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (2001, co-author), Negotiating Identities (2002), and, most recently, Maxine Hong Kingston (2006). Cynthia S. Hamilton is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English at Liverpool Hope University. Her work focuses on the dynamics of the American popular literary genre, looking at particular developments in relation to the intellectual, cultural, and social history of the time. Her publications include Western and Hard-Boiled Fiction in America (1987) and, with Fritz Gysin, Complexions of Race (2006). Ulla Haselstein is a Professor of American Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. She has worked on modernist and postmodernist literature and psychoanalytic literary theory. Another focus of research is Native American literature. Her book publications include Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation (2003, coedited with Berndt Ostendorf and Peter Schneck), and Cultural Transactions: 50 Years of American Studies in Germany (2005, co-edited with Berndt Ostendorf). She is currently completing a book on Gertrude Stein’s literary portraiture.
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Notes on Contributors
Susan Hegeman teaches at the University of Florida. She is the author of Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (1999), which examines the joint modernist project of anthropologists and literary figures at the turn of the century to define and deploy the idea of culture. She is currently completing a book entitled The Cultural Return, which traces the history of the cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s and argues for the continued relevance of cultural analysis in the moment of globalization. Andrew Hook is Emeritus Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His books on American literature include American Literature in Context, 1865–1900 (1983) and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life (2002). He has a continuing interest in the cultural relationship between Scotland and America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lee Horsley is a Reader in Literature and Culture at Lancaster University. She has written two books on literature and politics, Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900–1950 (1995); more recently, she has published The Noir Thriller (2001) and Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2005). She is currently co-editing the Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction with Charles Rzepka, and is working jointly with Katharine Horsley on a book called Criminal Confessions. Brian Keener is Professor of English at New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York. He is the author of John Updike’s Human Comedy: Comic Morality in The Centaur and the Rabbit Novels (2005) and the co-author of The Place Where We Dwell: Reading and Writing About New York City (2005). Lovalerie King is an Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s Studies and Director of the Africana Research Center at Penn State University. She has authored or co-edited five books, including James Baldwin and Toni Morrison (2006), Race, Theft and Ethics: Property Matters in African American Literature (2007), and The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston (2008). Her current projects include a study of African American cultural interfaces with American legal discourse and a book-length autobiography. Jerome Klinkowitz is Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. He is an editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and is the author of over forty books, including novels, collections of short stories, and studies of literature, philosophy, art, music, air combat narratives, and sports. His publications include several studies of Vonnegut. Pamela Knights is a Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at Durham University. She has written widely on Edith Wharton and a range of other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century U.S. writers, and on children’s fiction. Recent work includes a co-edited guide to Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2007) and The
Notes on Contributors
xiii
Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (2009). She is also one of the founding editors of a new journal, International Research in Children’s Literature. Maria Lauret is Reader in American Studies (Literature) at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (1994), Alice Walker (2000), and Wander Words: Language Migration in American Literature (2009), and the co-author of Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (2001). A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent at Canterbury, is Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo. His recent publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998), Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won an American Book Award in 2004, and Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2008). Sean McCann is Professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government (2008) and (with Donald Pease) of Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000), among other publications. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson is Professor and Dean of Humanities at De Montfort University, Leicester, and Chair of the British Association of American Studies. She is the author of Women’s Movement (2000), Courting Failure (2007), and Transatlantic Women’s Literature (2008). She has also co-edited Britain and the Americas (2005). Philip Melling is Professor of American Studies at Swansea University. He is the author of Vietnam in American Literature (1990), Fundamentalism in America (1999), and America in the 1920s (3 vols., 2004). His current topic of research is Ernest Hemingway and he is a regular contributor to The Hemingway Review. Peter Messent is Professor of Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham. His most recent books are The Short Works of Mark Twain (2001) and The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain (2007), but he has also written widely in other areas of American and Canadian fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on narrative theory and on crime fiction. He has just completed a book on Mark Twain and male friendship. Marilyn Michaud has taught English and American Literature at the University of Stirling, and is the author of Republicanism and the American Gothic (2009), as well as several articles on American popular literature and culture. D. Quentin Miller is Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. He has published a book on John Updike (2001) and has edited the collections ReViewing James Baldwin (2000) and, on U.S. prison literature, Prose and Cons (2005). He is on the editorial board of the Heath Anthology of American Literature. His essays have been published in such journals as Forum for Modern Language Studies, American
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Notes on Contributors
Literature, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. He is currently working on a book on James Baldwin. Sharon Monteith is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her books include Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction (2000), Film Histories (2006), and American Culture in the 1960s (2008). She has co-edited Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (with Peter Ling, 1999, 2004), South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (with Suzanne W. Jones, 2002), and The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Media (with Allison Graham, 2009). She has also contributed to collections such as Media, Culture and the Modern African Freedom Struggle (2001) and the Blackwell Companion to the American South (2004). Heather Neilson teaches American Literature and Classic Literary Texts in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Defence Force Academy campus of the University of New South Wales. Her D.Phil. from Oxford University was awarded for a thesis on the fiction of Gore Vidal. Judie Newman is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Saul Bellow and History (1984), John Updike (1987), Nadine Gordimer (1988), The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions (1995), Alison Lurie: A Critical Study (2000), Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter: A Casebook (2003), and, most recently, Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire (2007). She has edited Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1992) and Public Art, Artefacts and Atlantic Slavery (with C.-M. Bernier, 2008). She is currently working on essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe and Andre Dubus III. Helen Oakley is currently working as a temporary Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of The Recontextualization of William Faulkner in Latin American Fiction and Culture (2002). She is currently writing a book on the subject of contemporary Cuban and Cuban-American crime fiction. Stacey Olster is Professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is the author of Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction (1989) and The Trash Phenomenon: Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture, and the Making of the American Century (2003), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (2006). Mark Osteen, Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at Loyola College in Maryland, is the author or editor of six books, including The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (1995), American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000), and, most recently, Autism and Representation (2008). He is currently at work on a study of film noir and postwar American culture. Timothy Parrish is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (2007), and the author of Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis (2001) and From the Civil War to the Apocalypse (2007). He teaches at Florida State University.
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Charles A. Peek is Professor Emeritus of the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the veteran of twenty-four Faulkner Conferences, at most of which he has presented sessions on Teaching Faulkner. In addition to writing several articles on Faulkner, he is co-editor of both the William Faulkner Encyclopedia (1999) and A Companion to Faulkner Studies (2004). Joy Porter is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and lectures in the Department of American Studies at the University of Wales, Swansea, where she teaches American and Native American history and literature. She is the author of To Be Indian: The Life of Seneca-Iroquois Arthur Caswell Parker, 1881–1955 (2002), co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (with Kenneth Roemer, 2005), and editor of Place and Indian History, Literature and Culture (2007). Her next books are three monographs: Native American Freemasonry (2009), Land and Spirit in Native America (2010), and The American Indian Poet of World War One (2011). Brian Railsback, Professor of English and founding Dean of the Honors College at Western Carolina University, is a noted Steinbeck scholar. Among his publications are Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck (1995), A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia (as co-editor, 2006), and The Library of America edition of Travels with Charley and Later Novels (2007). He was named University Scholar at Western Carolina University in 2004. Guy J. Reynolds is a Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the General Editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. His most recent book is a study of literary and cultural internationalism in the postwar period, Apostles of Modernity: American Writers in the Age of Development (2008). Davis Schneiderman is a multimedia artist and co-author of Abecedarium (2007), as well as author of DIS (2008) and Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader (2006). He is co-editor of the collections Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (2004) and The Exquisite Corpse (forthcoming). His creative work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and accepted by numerous publications including Fiction International and The Iowa Review. He is an Associate Professor of English at Lake Forest College, and Director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books. David Seed is Professor of American Literature at the University of Liverpool. He has published studies of Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, and his other publications include American Science Fiction and the Cold War (1999) and Brainwashing (2004). He edited the Blackwell Companion to Science Fiction (2005). Jennifer Terry is a Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Durham. Her teaching and research interests lie in American literature, postcolonial studies, and writings of the black diaspora. Her doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Warwick, examined the novels of Toni Morrison. Her current projects include a comparative exploration of African American and Caribbean fiction.
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Mark Whalan is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. He has published on short fiction in early American modernism, the relationship between the Harlem Renaissance and the Great War, and American culture in the 1910s. Barbara Wyllie is Deputy Editor of the Slavonic and East European Review at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She has contributed articles on Nabokov to the Reference Guide to Russian Literature (1998), Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries (1999), and Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (2000). Her first book, Nabokov at the Movies: Film Perspectives in Fiction, was published in 2003, and she is currently working on a literary biography of Nabokov. Anne Ricketson Zahlan, Professor Emerita at Eastern Illinois University, has published on such British authors as V. S. Naipaul and Lawrence Durrell, as well as American writers, Anne Tyler, Vardis Fisher, Wallace Stegner, and Thomas Wolfe. A former president of the International Lawrence Durrell Society, she currently serves as editor of The Thomas Wolfe Review.
Introduction David Seed
Since the 1990s, the New Americanist critics have been warning us against an uncritical use of the epithet “American.” As if following the Monroe Doctrine, it has taken on a hegemonic dimension and come to privilege the U.S.A at the expense of other countries and cultures on that continent. In this Companion, “American” is used to signify the United States, in implied scare quotes because the term has been constantly problematic and contested throughout the twentieth century. Though coined a century earlier, its apparent opposite, “un-American,” achieved institutional notoriety through the House Committee on Un-American Activities (H.U.A.C.), which served from 1934 through to the 1970s. The very existence of this committee was premised on a set of identifiable national characteristics and practices; in other words, the very notion that these novelists question. Whenever the term “American” appears in the titles of modern U.S. novels, as often as not its meaning is ambiguous and ironic. Norman Mailer’s An American Dream (1965) undermines the singularity of a cultural catchphrase and gives a surreal account of power networks. Jerome Charyn’s American Scrapbook (1969) describes the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans in World War II, punning in its title on the human “scrap” ignored by the authorities. The title story of Max Apple’s The Oranging of America (1976) echoes Charles Reich’s account of the counterculture in The Greening of America (1970), but opens with facetious reflections on Howard Johnson, founder of the U.S. restaurant and hotel chain. Scott Bradfield’s What’s Wrong with America (1994) is unusually direct in its criticism and couches its narrative in the form of a journal bequeathed to her progeny by a grandmother disenchanted with the contemporary U.S.A. And so the list could continue. But there is an even more fundamental problem with the national epithet. Toni Morrison has asserted that “American means white” and that therefore the Africanist presence can only be registered in the interstices of texts: “the shadow hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation” (Morrison: 46–7). Gerald Vizenor, in a spirit similar to Morrison’s, uses the term “postindian” to identify a new generation
2
David Seed
of Native American writers working in the period after the “literature of domination,” when they were confined within the picturesque Other (see chapter 49 of this volume). In both these cases, cultural production has emerged from oral storytelling and the vernacular continues to invigorate American fiction from a variety of different sources. “American” sometimes functions as a hegemonic term concealing different cultural groups, and one of the most important historical developments in U.S. fiction throughout the twentieth century was the progressive pluralization of American identities so that new voices could be heard and different presences registered. In My Ántonia (1918), Willa Cather describes the patchwork of social groups settled in the prairies. According to the ideal of the melting pot, all these groups would merge into a new, homogeneous society, but Cather addresses the constant resistance by emigrants to what many see as a loss of identity. Cather dramatizes a tension common to immigrant fiction: the rival pulls of the old and new countries. Her eponymous protagonist is American and Bohemian, living between identities. In that sense, she embodies the double consciousness attributed to African Americans in W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk. Contemporary commentators such as Winfried Siemerling (The New North American Studies, 2005) have argued that this notion of doubleness is central to all American fiction, not simply those novels representing a particular ethnic group. It is ironic that “American” can carry such severe exclusions as those described above given that many novelists subscribe to an aesthetic of openness. The critics Richard Poirier and Tony Tanner have both mounted cogent arguments that U.S. writers have tried to articulate ways of being outside that society. Tanner particularly expresses this notion as a tension between the dream of an unpatterned life offset by the “dread that someone else is patterning your life” (Tanner: 15). As James Giles shows in chapter 2 of this volume, this tension also informs perceptions of the city as both a place of opportunity and one of betrayal and failure. Tanner’s title, City of Words, suggests that novelists are, to an important extent, constructing stylistic environments for their characters, as much verbal constructs as topographical descriptions. Similarly, Neil Campbell (chapter 3) demonstrates that the Western offers not portraits of places but rather stylized versions of power struggles revolving around identity. Although its roots lie in the 1890s and therefore outside the scope of the present volume, the tradition of naturalism, Donald Pizer argues, continued into the twentieth century and flourished particularly in the 1930s, late 1940s, and 1950s. For Pizer, “naturalistic fiction usually unites detailed documentation of the more sensationalistic aspects of experience” with a demonstration that Americans are “more circumscribed than ordinarily assumed” (p. xi). Pizer’s argument is empirical and could be extended into the second half of the twentieth century to include the massively documented narratives of William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace. Indeed, if the loss of freedom is central to naturalism, this tradition could even include noir thrillers and spy fiction.
Introduction
3
Twentieth-century U.S. novelists were the heirs to an established tradition of naturalism that persisted in a number of different forms. As Charles A. Peek shows with Faulkner (chapter 26), this might involve a detailed evocation of setting, as if that in itself could reveal local lifestyles. Certainly for Native American writers a relation to the land carries a crucial symbolism. Alternatively, naturalism might include the impulse to report on contemporary life. When he was asked how a writer should prepare himself, Hemingway replied quite simply that he should watch what was happening and describe it. In fact, of course, his answer was totally disingenuous since no novelist took greater care over perspective, vocabulary, and a host of other aspects of representation. The fact that Hemingway, like Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, and others, had a second successful career in journalism reflects the proximity of reportage to fiction throughout the century, especially during the 1930s. This impulse to document situations is one feature of American novelists’ pursuit of an elusive authenticity, which has produced the so-called “non-fiction novel,” closely based on a particular crime or event and exemplified in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), although many earlier works could be cited which strategically blur the distinction between fact and fiction. Conversely, in the 1980s, a new mode of so-called “Dirty Realism” emerged, “devoted to the local details, the nuances, the little disturbances in language and gesture” particularly suited to the short story (Buford: 4). Novels might even masquerade as collections of documents, which is what happens in Charles McCarry’s The Miernik Dossier (1973) and James Ellroy’s White Jazz (1992). The fact that these works operate within the respective genres of spy novel and crime narrative is no coincidence since both privilege the act of investigation, and accordingly these novels invite the reader to participate in their own narrative construction. The relation of the U.S. novelist to the nation has been a consistently tense one. In 1930, Sinclair Lewis used the award of the Nobel Prize for literature – the first such award to an American writer – to reflect on the cultural standing of fiction in the U.S.A. He found a persistent timidity, a residual inheritance from the genteel tradition, which exerted a pressure on American writers to celebrate their nation. Lewis clearly felt obliged to speak up for a new generation of writers (Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Michael Gold, and others) who were addressing the failures and hypocrisies of American life. Susan Hegeman shows in chapter 1 how the American modernists willfully set their faces against social conventions to pursue their experiments. Their decision to spend time in Paris and other cities can be read at once as a desire to experience European culture at first hand and also as an attempt to distance themselves from the increasing Puritanism of American life. The Great American Novel was a literary/nationalistic concept from the Civil War period, a phrase expressing the hope for a novel which would give ultimate expression to the U.S.A. In the twentieth century, its occurrence was largely ironic as that hope faded. William Carlos Williams’s Great American Novel of 1923 mocks the notion in its very brevity and in its lack of definable genre or plot. Instead, the narrative presents reflections on how a novel might be written, leaving the question open whether
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any writer could fulfill this purpose. It might appear that Philip Roth had done so in his own Great American Novel of 1973, but here again contradictions abound. The voice of the narrator Word (“Call me Smitty”) Smith resembles that of a stand-up comedian, at the same time echoing the opening of Moby-Dick; the novel describes a baseball team, doomed to wander America precisely because they don’t have a base. Displacement and mobility underpin a freewheeling plot, whose comedy is an end in itself. Despite the oppositional stance taken by many U.S. novelists toward their national culture, an important act of institutionalization took place in 1918 when the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel was established. In its first cycle, awards were made, among others, to Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence, 1921), Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind, 1936), and John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940). In 1948, the award was redesignated the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Since then, the range of recipients has broadened, including writers from very different backgrounds, such as Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex, 2003), and Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 2008). The American modernists and their successors were exploring ways in which other media could inform new narrative practice. Gertrude Stein’s experiments with Cubist description are one famous example. Later in the century, Jack Kerouac’s application of jazz improvisatory technique to his own prose rhythms is another. But at the same time that American novelists were trying out new experimental forms of expression, a second medium was evolving which had a lasting impact on the novel – the cinema. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Chandler – to name only three writers who tried their hand at screenwriting in Hollywood – were among the most famous to be attracted to the movie capital. Others, like Steinbeck, H.D., and Mailer, experimented with film production. But, more generally, the movies helped to induce a heightened consciousness of visual representation in novelists which manifested itself in a new attention to perspective, scene, and montage in narrative construction. In the period between the world wars, there was scarcely a novelist who did not register their awareness of the cinema, even if it was to register disapproval, but that disapproval was mainly directed at the Hollywood system rather than at the medium itself. Movies played their part in the cultural debate over high and popular art after World War I and their influence spread into every area of the U.S.A. Novelists like Nathanael West and Ben Hecht turned the spotlight on the movie business itself with the evolution of the Hollywood Novel. As early as the 1910s, one motivation for novelists’ interest in the cinema lay in the sums paid for film rights, but resulting adaptations have radically altered the autonomy of the novels concerned. Gone with the Wind, for instance, was the title of both the 1936 novel and the 1939 adaptation. There then followed an authorized sequel (Scarlett, 1991), an “unauthorized parody” (Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, 2001), an unauthorized sequel which was withdrawn (The Winds of Tara, 2002), and yet another authorized sequel, Rhett Butler’s People (2007). By this point, Gone with the Wind had come to designate less a novel than a franchise or a serial commodity.
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Language and Style There is a strong tradition of the vernacular in American fiction growing out of an abiding skepticism toward literary formality and also out of a sense of the sheer variety of U.S. society. Authenticity became associated with regionalism (Faulkner’s representations of Mississippi inflections) or subgroups, hence the emergence of the “hard-boiled” style in the works of Dashiell Hammett and his successors. But, more importantly, these developments suggested that, like the novel, the language was not fixed. Raymond Chandler recorded with a certain pride that American English “is a fluid language … and easily takes in new words, new meanings for old words, and borrows at will and at ease from the usages of other languages” (Chandler: 80). In short, American usage, as David Foster Wallace declared in the 1990s, is not fixed. In that sense, the language mirrors and articulates a similar fluidity of genres in American fiction. Despite the continuing efforts of publishers and distributors to classify fiction within easily marketable generic categories, U.S. novelists have shown a consistent impatience, especially since World War II, with such classifications. Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy famously sectionalizes its narrative according to biographies, newsreels, camera eye, and realist sequences. In the 1930s, Henry Miller declared his hostility to limits and produced a series of free-flowing monologue-narratives. From the 1960s onward, generic experimentation gathered head. Richard Brautigan gave his novels subtitles such as A Gothic Western or A Perverse Mystery, calculated to disorient the reader from a routine generic response. Titles now became deliberately cryptic or might – misleadingly – echo those of earlier works. Kathy Acker’s appropriation of texts by Dickens (Great Expectations, 1982), Hawthorne (Blood and Guts in High School, 1984), and Cervantes (Don Quixote, 1986) is only a startling example of a more general strategy, in her case directed toward a re-gendering of those classics. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five presented the reader with a picaresque narrative, framed by a memoir on writing war stories and interspersed with episodes on another planet. Apart from its hybridity, Vonnegut’s incorporation of science fiction reflected the collapse of the old high/low distinction within the genres and also a recognition that science fiction imagery was more and more informing U.S. culture. Thus, some writers include science fiction elements (Thomas Pynchon); others move comfortably between genres (Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ). Surveying the field in the 1990s, Thomas M. Disch (himself a practitioner of the New Gothic as well as science fiction) noted that “mainstream” writers like Paul Theroux were making excursions into science fiction and that Michael Crichton had achieved his success partly “because he has not been labeled as an SF writer” (Disch: 3). In other words, the generic label is seen yet again as a form of limitation. The sheer proliferation of science fiction makes it impossible to cover in this volume through one or two chapters. The reader is therefore referred to the Blackwell Companion to Science Fiction (Seed 2005) for detailed coverage.
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One of the central intentions of the present Companion is to convey the sheer extent and diversity of U.S. fiction. For far too long critical discussion has tended to concentrate on a number of canonized big names, names that obviously must figure here, but without denying visibility to other important writers. The history of critical writing on U.S. fiction throughout the twentieth century was one of constant rediscovery and flux. Zora Neale Hurston, a leading member of the Harlem Renaissance, presents an obvious example: her fiction sank into total neglect until her rediscovery in the 1970s. John W. Aldridge’s After the Lost Generation (1951), to take one example, confines its interwar discussion to Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. When Aldridge turns to post-1945 writers his range expands to cover Mailer, Vidal, and lesser-known figures like Merle Miller and Vance Bourjailly, whose fiction is characterized as “lacking the focus of negation and loss, a new world to discover, and a single perspective for protest” (Aldridge: 243). Aldridge’s sheer difficulty in finding any common ground between these new writers is striking, but not as much as his exclusions. Not a single female writer features, nor any African American. It is as if they do not exist. Happily, nothing could be farther from the current state of fictional output or criticism. The systematic study of fiction from different ethnic and cultural groups can be witnessed in the contemporary proliferation of companions and guides: for examples, see Lattin, Fleck, Dickson-Carr, and Cronin in the Reference list below. In two ground-breaking studies of African American writing, The Signifying Monkey (1985) and Figures in Black (1987), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. decisively shifted our focus away from subject matter on to the notion of “signifying,” i.e. an irreverent performance around an earlier text or narrative. This might involve echo, parody, or other strategies, but it helpfully identifies an intertextual energy informing this body of writing. A pattern emerges of writing across social and ethnic groups, which extends into contemporaries like Amy Tan and Bharati Mukherjee. Here narrative sets up a series of dialogues across cultural groups. Questioning the literary canon has repeatedly involved questioning orthodoxies of expression, literary decorum, and even reality itself. In 1961, Philip Roth made his famous complaint that “the American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then to describe, and then make credible much of the American reality” (Roth: 176). Whereas to earlier writers like Dreiser and Hemingway, news reportage offered a certain ideal of writing, the news media were seen by Roth as challenging his desire for national centrality in his fiction and also the then dominant tradition of realism. Black humor fiction was a response to this perception of the frenzied pace and sheer grotesqueness of American life. More radically, the question was asked: whose reality? In Nova Express (1964), William S. Burroughs’s narrator attributes reality to a malign, anonymous agency: “the scanning pattern we accept as ‘reality’ has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet” (Burroughs: 51–2). In these terms, reality ceases to be a consensual set of assumptions and becomes a script or “pattern” which can only be resisted
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through the repeated subversion of narrative forms. E. L. Doctorow asserted in the 1970s that “novelists know explicitly that … reality is amenable to any construction that is placed upon it” (Doctorow: 164) in order to articulate the beneficial opposition between writers and politicians. Since the 1970s, postmodern fiction has exemplified a new climate of skepticism toward official versions of reality, traditional narrative practice, and the exclusions of a fictional canon. In its early phase, the flamboyant twists and turns of metafiction, the self-reflexive narratives of John Barth, Ronald Sukenick, and others, have forcibly blocked the reader’s desire for fictional illusion and stable plot. Later writing like Harold Jaffe’s “docufiction” has strategically challenged the dividing line between fictional narrative and news items or government reports, as all being cultural productions inflected by the ideology of different interest groups. It is helpful to think of American fiction as opening up fields of contestation, whether of social or of political issues. As Judie Newman has shown, even when the focus seems to be national, many of these works refer well beyond the limits of the U.S.A. To give the reader some indication of these ongoing critical debates about writers and key issues, this volume follows the practice of other Blackwell Companions in concluding chapters with suggestions for further reading.
References and Further Reading Aldridge, John W. (1966). After the Lost Generation [1951]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Bradbury, Malcolm (1992). The Modern American Novel, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buford, Bill, ed. (1983). Granta 8: Dirty Realism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Burroughs, William S. (1965). Nova Express [1964]. New York: Grove. Chandler, Raymond (1988). Raymond Chandler Speaking, eds. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cronin, Gloria L., Hall, Blaine H., and Lamb, Connie, eds. (1991). Jewish American Writers: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland. Dickson-Carr, Darryl, ed. (2005). The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press. Disch, Thomas M. (1998). The Dreams our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Free Press. Doctorow, E. L. (1994). Poets and Presidents: Selected Essays, 1977–1992. London: Macmillan.
Fleck, Richard F. (1993). Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction. Pueblo, C.O.: Passeggiata. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1985). The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1987). Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Lattin, Vernon E. (1986). Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A Critical Survey. Tempe, A.Z.: Bilingual Review. Morrison, Toni (1993). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Newman, Judie (2007). Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire. London: Routledge. Perkins, George, ed. (1970). The Theory of the American Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Pizer, Donald (1982). Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism. Carbondale, I.L.: Southern Illinois University Press.
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Poirier, Richard (1967). A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. London: Chatto and Windus. Roth, Philip (1985). Reading Myself and Others. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Seed, David, ed. (2005). A Companion to Science Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Siemerling, Winfried (2005). The New North American Studies. London: Routledge. Tanner, Tony (1971). City of Words. London: Jonathan Cape. Wallace, David Foster (2007). “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, pp. 66–127. London: Abacus.
Part I
Genres, Traditions, and Subject Areas
1
U.S. Modernism Susan Hegeman
From the 1910s to the end of World War I, modernism in the United States was synonymous with experimentation, creative ambition, and an aggressive disregard for social, moral, political, and aesthetic conventions. For those who welcomed such innovation, such as the literary critic Alfred Kazin, the emergence of modernism in the U.S. represented a “joyous season,” an efflorescence of youthful energy and fresh ideas that seemed to renovate both aesthetic traditions and daily life (Kazin: 165). For others, modernism’s aggressive flouting of artistic forms and conventions of behavior and belief was nothing less than shocking or nothing more than trickery and pretension. Yet the great works of modernist art remain some of the most lasting and inarguable monuments of twentieth-century culture, and modernist thought still in many respects defines current debates about life and art in the twenty-first century.
Modernism and its Contexts Some of the most celebrated modernist fiction writers – Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos, among them – were Americans. Yet it is difficult for a number of reasons to talk about “American modernist fiction” as a discrete entity. First, the spirit of modernism was in no way confined to fiction as a medium. Modernism encompassed all genres and formats in literature, the plastic arts, painting, film, photography, music, dance, theater, and architecture, and modernist artists frequently combined media and genres in surprising ways. While Gertrude Stein, a famous art collector, wrote short prose “portraits” of friends and acquaintances, other literary modernists were interested in the visual elements of literature, including typography and illustration, or found inspiration in art forms such as jazz, photography, and the cinema. Moreover, certain radically innovative projects in the intellectual history of the early twentieth century are also often characterized as modernist, among them the uncertainty principle and the theory
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of relativity in physics; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s psychoanalysis; the participant-observer anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas; the language philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford’s techniques of labor management; and the economics of John Maynard Keynes. All of these thinkers may be said to have imbibed some of the spirit of modernism, even while they influenced their artistic contemporaries in important ways. If it is hard to define a discrete modernist fiction, then it is equally difficult to imagine a specifically American modernist tradition in isolation from other national contexts. Though there were important issues distinctive to modernism in the United States, which I will elaborate below, modernism was fundamentally an international movement. Modernism would not have existed in the U.S. without the influence of new ideas and events arriving from Paris, London, and other locales. Modernist writers were attracted to, and often traveled between, the various bohemian communities of Europe and the Americas. Important artists’ enclaves existed not only in cosmopolitan centers like Paris, London, Berlin, and New York, but also in more regional locales including Chicago, Mexico City, Davenport, Iowa, and Taos, New Mexico. These became bohemian hot spots for a variety of reasons: the cheap cost of living, relaxed social attitudes, the stimulation of like-minded artists and intellectuals, and the excitement of picturesque surroundings and cultural diversity. As the radical journalist John Reed said of his Greenwich Village enclave in New York City, “Within a block of my house was all the adventure in the world; within a mile was every foreign country” (quoted in Kazin: 170). The spirit of innovation that swept into the United States beginning in the 1910s must thus be understood in the context of the global movement in modernist art that began in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. What unites the diversity of modernist projects is a profound self-consciousness of the experience of modernity – of being “modern” – and a concomitant sense that the comprehension and expression of modern experience required new artistic approaches and techniques. The older conceptions of “proper” aesthetic forms, styles, and subjects were aggressively discarded in the pursuit of new topics, ideas, and expressive modes. All this radical innovation took place in the context of a rapidly and often violently transforming world. Two unprecedentedly bloody world wars would effectively end the nineteenth-century imperial order centered in Europe, and begin the slow process of decolonization that would continue through much of the rest of the twentieth century. As Europe and North America became increasingly industrialized, workers from the rural peripheries were lured into ever more densely crowded and culturally diverse cities. Labor activism and radical political movements were common in this period, as workers sought to assert their power in industrialized societies. The 1917 Russian Revolution was but the most dramatic example of the profound importance and success of radical politics in this period, but the Great Depression of the 1930s, a global crisis in the capitalist system, also inspired the proliferation of radical political views. For many, modern life was synonymous with crisis, violence, displacement,
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and destruction. But the palpable proximity to revolutionary change also brought with it a sense of radical hope for a dramatically transformed future. For some, this hope took on explicitly political dimensions, whether in a commitment to socialist or communist party politics, or in a more romantic attachment to the working class. The I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World, a.k.a. “the Wobblies”) was particularly attractive to many American modernists, including Hutchins Hapgood, John Reed, Floyd Dell, and John Dos Passos, for its syndicalist politics and confrontational tactics, a romantic image associated with immigrants and hoboes, and its strong tradition of political art, especially poetry and folk songs. In the image of the folk-singing Wobbly vagabond, modernists could imagine a way not only to meld art and politics, but to escape what they saw as the repressive society of post-Victorian middle-class America. For indeed, another central element of the modernist spirit of revolution was a desire to renovate conventional middle-class mores and prejudices. Thus, the modernists were often proponents of feminism and sex radicalism and a thoroughgoing critique of social convention. The horror of bourgeois marriage was a favorite theme of writers including Floyd Dell (Moon Calf, 1920; Love in the Machine Age, 1930), Sherwood Anderson (Many Marriages, 1923), Djuna Barnes (Nightwood, 1936), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time, 1925). In a much more complex way, xenophobia and the rigid racism of the turn-of-the-century color line was also challenged, largely through a celebration of the folk traditions of immigrants, native peoples, and African Americans. Via an embrace of these seemingly more authentic cultures, middle-class and urban writers strove to challenge the entrenched aesthetic and cultural attitudes of the bourgeoisie. For many American modernists, both black and white, blues and jazz represented a significant site of anti-bourgeois freedom, and a connection between life and art, that other modernists found in the folk songs of the Wobblies. In addition to political and economic upheaval, this period witnessed significant changes of other kinds. In this general moment, such quintessential modern technologies as electric lighting, the automobile, the airplane, radio, telephone, sound recording, typewriting, photography, and film all came into widespread use. These technologies, in turn, radically transformed the way in which people lived, perceived their surroundings, and created art. Electric lights alone enabled the development of new urban public entertainment centers, such as amusement parks and dance halls, while automobiles profoundly altered not only where and how people lived but suggested all kinds of new freedoms. Youth culture, with its own tastes in music and dress and its own values and styles of socializing – epitomized by the “flappers” and “flaming youth” of the 1920s – emerged in this context of new technologies and new urban spaces. Mass culture also flourished in this moment. Industrial printing and communication technologies enabled the proliferation of “dime novels” and the similarly cheap and available “pulp” magazines and novels of the 1920s and onward. Here, all the familiar conventions of genre fiction and film – detective stories, horror, Westerns, romances, and science fiction – were developed, often by stables of anonymous writers.
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It has often been said that modernism – difficult, idiosyncratic, and self-consciously dedicated to art and creative genius – was antithetical to formulaic mass-market fiction, or to the middlebrow fiction of the wide-circulation magazines and the book clubs. But, in fact, the picture is more complex. The dividing line between genre and pulp fiction and “high” modernism is frequently blurred by such writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Kenneth Fearing, and Horace McCoy, on the one hand, and by Faulkner (especially his “pot-boiler,” Sanctuary, 1931) and Hemingway, on the other. Though modernist fiction was largely excluded from the book-of-themonth club selections, readers of publications such as Vanity Fair could sample the work of Stein, Anderson, and Djuna Barnes (see Leick; Rubin: 147). Moreover, even though modernist literature was often circulated by small presses and non-commercial “little magazines” for a presumably rarified audience, modernist literature and its important authors were frequently discussed in the mainstream press. While modernism, with its difficulty, was often greeted with bafflement or even derision in these mainstream contexts, and though modernist works may not have been widely read or understood, the modernists nevertheless benefited from the nascent culture of celebrity, becoming recognizable public figures. Technology affected the practice of fiction writing in both subtle and profound ways. With the widespread use of the typewriter, even the mechanical act of writing changed. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan would later explain, the legibility of typewriting and its visual similarity to published literature gave writers the feeling of being able to simultaneously compose and publish their work: “Seated at the typewriter, the poet, much in the manner of the jazz musician, has the experience of performance as composition” (McLuhan: 283–4). Arguably, the very rhythms of written prose changed with this new technology; speed, sketchiness, and immediacy could now, for some, take precedence over polish, durability, and revision. But in a more conceptual sense, technologies such as these also had the effect of radically disorienting older ways of apprehending the world: just as perspective was dramatically altered once it was possible to see the world from the air, so everything simply looked different after it had been photographed or filmed, and sounded different once it was possible to hear a familiar voice from afar. These changes were potentially liberating to artists in a number of respects. It was not just that new perspectives and techniques were now available for use and exploration; more profoundly, the fact that “real life” could be mechanically captured on film, photo, or phonograph freed artists from the traditional obligation to mimetically represent reality. The new art for a new time was unmoored from these conventional requirements of verisimilitude.
Modernist Forms Modernist fiction writers shared with artists of other genres both the view that new forms were needed to express the experience of the modern world and the sense of liberation from the requirements of realistic representation. For fiction writers, this departure from verisimilitude entailed the abandonment of several conventions of
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realist fiction, including an unobtrusive and omniscient narrative perspective and an emphasis on the complexities of character, social context, and ethical situations. But, in a larger sense, it broke as well from what one might see as the social premise behind literary realism: the idea that one could represent a character’s social environment as a coherent and complex totality. Modernist fiction, then, would be characterized not only by experiments in narrative mode and perspective, genre, characterization, and plot, but also by a sense of the larger fragmentation of fiction’s social vision: for the modernists, the complex and chaotic world of the twentieth century was no longer understood as fully representable in the confident and complete way of the nineteenthcentury realists. We see the beginnings of this transition in the later work of Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, two of the most important practitioners of literary realism. For James, signs of this transition – for example, in The Golden Bowl (1904) – include an increasingly subtle and complex emphasis on the interior thoughts and feelings of his characters. At the same time, his already complex prose becomes increasingly laden with deliberate ambiguities and nuance, resulting in what has come to be seen as the signature James style. The very idea of a signature authorial style is itself a modernist departure from realism’s emphasis on verisimilitude: the reader’s attention is now directed both to a strong authorial presence and to issues of language and narration. The idea of a signature style would be important for a number of significant American writers who may be considered modernist, including Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Another important transitional figure is Stephen Crane. Though Crane’s first novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is centrally a naturalist case study of a fallen woman and of the brutal effects of poverty and alcohol, it anticipates modernism in a number of ways. The narrative perspective oscillates between a number of characters, including the weak and romantic Maggie, her violent and hypocritical brother Jimmie, and her arrogant lover Pete. The use of these very different perspectives leads not to a realist or naturalist vision of their social environment, but to a fragmented and highly ironized depiction of how, from their different points of view, these characters ultimately misperceive their brutal underclass world. Crane’s recognition that different individuals can apprehend the world in dramatically different ways begins to explain why his work has been likened to that of the French impressionist painters, who similarly emphasized the idiosyncrasy and evanescence of perception. But he is also a startlingly visual writer, whose signature style is associated with dramatic and even shocking color imagery (“Over on the Island, a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a grey ominous building and crawled slowly along the river’s bank,” Crane: 7). Crane refined both this play with perspective and his highly stylized visual imagery in The Red Badge of Courage (1895), whose unflinchingly unheroic portrayal of the Civil War also anticipated the modern novels about World War I. James Weldon Johnson, a poet and important anthologizer of African American literature, also anticipated modernism in his picaresque tour of turn-of-the-century African American life, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). This
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pseudo-confessional story of a mixed-race ragtime musician’s travels through black America not only demonstrated the diversity of experiences across classes and regions, but it was premised on the assertion that white America simply did not know how those on the other side of the “color line” lived. Moreover, when the anonymous narrator finally crosses over that line to live as a white man, readers are confronted with the basic instability of social categories such as race and the ultimate unknowability of others. In Johnson’s work, the social stability and surety of the realist text has been demolished, to be replaced by a jazz-like improvisation on social identity. Abraham Cahan, a Jewish immigrant and prominent socialist journalist, was another significant realist with proto-modernist tendencies. Like Crane, he was interested in rendering characters’ idiosyncratic and even flawed perspectives; like Johnson, he participated in the picaresque destabilization of social coherence (especially in The Rise of David Levinsky, 1917). In Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), his first literary work in English, Cahan upended the conventions of dialect, typical of nineteenth-century local color fiction, by representing his characters’ spoken Yiddish in plain English, while their accented and broken English was laboriously rendered – with explanatory footnotes – as dialect. The English reader comprehended the “Yiddish” speech with ease, whereas the immigrant characters’ English was painfully foreign. The effect not only puts the reader in the immigrant’s position of linguistic outsider, but forces a very modernist self-consciousness upon the reader about the nature and use of language itself. All of these challenges to the conventions of literary realism – the fragmentation of narrative point of view; the attempt to render unique psychologies and perspectives; the self-conscious estrangement of language and imagery – were explored and extended by the properly modernist writers. Gertrude Stein, an early modernist innovator in several respects, can be seen as offering one of the clearest early examples of such innovation. Three Lives (1909) is composed of three discrete sections, each portraying a socially marginal female figure, the German-American servant-class women “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena,” and, in the longest and most artistically adventurous section, “Melanctha,” a young woman of mixed race. Though Stein’s representation of black life in “Melanctha” is marred by her participation in racial stereotypes typical of her moment – a characteristic shared by other white modernist writers, including Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter, 1925) and Carl Van Vechten (Nigger Heaven, 1926) – the very attempt by white writers to grapple with African American vernacular culture represented both a departure from the rigid racial separation that defined conventional social behavior in early twentieth-century America and a desire to imagine alternatives to white bourgeois society. Indeed, critics have long noticed that the character of Melanctha served for Stein as a kind of racial mask that allowed her to address with some protective cover the personally implicating topic of lesbian desire (North: 70–6). With “Melanctha,” Stein also broke important formal and conceptual ground. Both narration and dialogue progress by a style that is at once simple and repetitious and deeply complex:
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Every day now, Jeff seemed to be coming nearer, to be really loving. Every day now, Melanctha poured it all out to him, with more freedom. Every day now, they seemed to be having more and more, both together, of this strong, right feeling. More and more every day now they seemed to know more really, what it was each other one was always feeling. More and more now every day Jeff found in himself, he felt more trusting. More and more every day now, he did not think anything in words about what he was always doing. Every day now more and more Melanctha would let out to Jeff her real, strong feeling. (Stein: 109)
While this prose can be seen as an attempt to replicate the unadorned speech and thoughts of simple people, Stein’s repetitions also create some complex effects. As words (for example, “feeling”) subtly change meaning with each iteration, Stein demonstrates the relationship between language and time, and the way that meaning subtly shifts through context. Hence her fascination with past continuous tense (“they seemed to be having,” “what he was always doing”): it both offers and then removes the idea that language refers to some constant state of being. Indeed, the technique also explores the relationship of psychology to language, showing that the feelings of the lovers are not easily rendered into either conventional prose or the expected romantic figures of speech. Stein’s prose experiment, in other words, involves creating a new rhetoric with which to convey the elusiveness of how people really think and feel through the moment-to-moment passage of time. This interest in finding new ways to express unconventional perspectives was characteristic of much modernist narrative experimentation. Important works of the period portray the perspective of a young immigrant child (Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, 1934), a baby (William Carlos Williams’s White Mule, 1937), the insane and socially outcast (Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, 1936), and historical figures like the Viking explorer, Eric the Red (Williams, In the American Grain, 1925). William Faulkner frequently structured his narratives as composites of the perspectives of multiple characters. In As I Lay Dying (1930), the story of the death and burial of Addie Bundren is related from the limited first-person perspective of fifteen different characters. Faulkner’s difficult and temporally complex work The Sound and the Fury (1929) is also told from multiple perspectives, including that of a mentally disabled man, Benjy Compson. In a more popular, but equally experimental vein, Ring Lardner and Anita Loos comically rendered the written language of the uneducated and semiliterate: respectively, in a bluster-filled baseball player’s letters home to his buddy in You Know Me Al (1916), and in the diary of a gold-digging flapper in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). Such related experiments in perspective and style may be seen as symptomatic of the larger modernist sense of society’s complexity. This recognition also influenced the length and structure of much modernist prose fiction. Experimenters with prose were often attracted to very short forms that abandoned conventional requirements of plot and closure. Here again Stein was an important innovator, with her short portraits. But we may also see this brevity and fragmentation appearing in longer works
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as well. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) can be read as a collection of short stories, all of which share the common setting of a small Ohio town and a set of themes regarding the personal isolation of individuals within small-town Protestant America. But read as an arranged ensemble, the stories also comprise a fragmented bildungsroman of George Willard, a continuing character throughout many of the stories, whose sexual and emotional maturation is loosely charted throughout the work. While Anderson was himself indebted to Stein, Winesburg, Ohio directly influenced other important modernist works such as Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925) and Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923). These works are also loosely assembled collections of fragments. Though a number of the stories in In Our Time also seem to suggest the development of a unifying protagonist, Nick Adams, it also contains stories that seem wholly unrelated to Nick or his experiences. Moreover, the stories are separated by inter-chapters, sketches of only a few paragraphs in length. Though one of these inter-chapters is usually read as referring to Nick Adams and his experience in World War I (and, thence, to Hemingway’s autobiography), the ensemble cannot be seen to cohere around a common plot, character, or setting. Instead, the unity of the work is thematic, addressing the breakdown of late-Victorian ideas of masculine honor and prerogative. In other words, the formal principle fragmentation simply mirrors the thematic issue of the fragmentation of modern life and its values. In the case of Toomer’s Cane, the form is even more complex. It is comprised not only of short narratives, but of lyric poetry, sketches, songs, and drama. There are no significant common characters, and no concrete shared setting. What unites the complex whole of this important work – often cited as the inaugurating masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance – is an extremely elaborate conceptual structuring. Cane is divided into three parts, which move geographically from the South of the rural Georgia black belt, north to the middle-class black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., and then south again to a fictional small Georgia town. Each of the sections is associated with a season and a time of day: rural Georgia with autumn, harvest, and dusk; urban Washington with winter, sterility, and night; small town Georgia with dawn, spring, and rebirth. Indeed, as Toomer himself noted, “From three angles, CANE’S design is a circle” (Toomer: 152). There is significant tension here between the fragmentary nature of the text and Toomer’s insistence upon conceptual design and closure. For indeed, Toomer’s desire here is both to try to describe African American life in its cultural entirety and to re-imagine it in such a way that closes what he sees as the gap between the tragic violence and ignorance of the authentic rural folk and the alienation and sterility of the urban black middle class. The book ends, however, on what is perhaps a necessarily inconclusive note, given the ambition and grandiosity of the project. Closure is less achieved than insisted upon through a heavy-handed use of symbolism. Cane closes the circle with a scene in a basement, where an old, blind ex-slave makes oracular pronouncements as the sun rises: “Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town” (Toomer: 117).
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Thus we see that, even in the case of these fragmented narratives, there remains a strong desire for something like a totality. This helps account for the fact that, in the moment of the short, sketchy narrative, monumentally long works were also characteristic of modernist fiction. Notable examples of this are Stein’s thousand-page long family epic, The Making of Americans (1925) and the linked autobiographical fictions of Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel, 1929; Of Time and the River, 1935; The Web and the Rock, 1939; You Can’t Go Home Again, 1940). Another important attempt at this kind of total vision is William Faulkner’s invented world of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The setting for most of Faulkner’s fiction from 1929 on, Yoknapatawpha County came to define the total project of Faulkner’s major work, bounding his creation both spatially and temporally, as he explored the deep history of the place and its people back to the time of contact between the Europeans and the Choctaw Indians who gave the county its name. In some ways combining the competing impulses toward monumental totality and fragmentation was John Dos Passos’ massive U.S.A. trilogy. Each volume of the trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1930; Nineteen Nineteen, 1932; The Big Money, 1936) is structured as a composite of four discrete kinds of text: “Camera Eye,” “Newsreel,” a series of biographies of historical personages, and extended fictional narratives. Each of these different strands has its own distinct style and function in the text, and yet all serve to illuminate modern American life in different ways. The long fictional sections narrate the loosely interconnected lives of a distinctly twentieth-century set of characters, including an itinerant worker, an advertising executive, a Hollywood actress, and a radical social worker. The biographies, of real people including Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, and Henry Ford, are works of popular history, often detailing the tragedies and failed promises of historical change. The “Newsreels” are collages of newspaper headlines, advertisements, popular songs, representing a kind of mass chorus of noise surrounding the passage of historical time. Finally, the “Camera Eye” sections are stream-of-consciousness recordings of events and impressions of a given moment in American life. Dos Passos himself described his epic project in U.S.A. as a giant “four way conveyor system” (Denning: 170). Whether or not the whole trilogy transcends Dos Passos’ rigid structure to present either a coherent or comprehensive picture of the early twentieth-century United States is a topic of critical controversy. Nevertheless, we may understand the very effort to render the totality of a moment’s events, senses, and characters, and the slightly precarious result, as exemplary of the modernists’ desire to grapple with the impossibility of representing the ever-more complex modern world.
Modernist Themes Of course, modern complexity was not unique to the United States, and neither were these types of formal experiments. But it is possible to locate certain themes and concerns that were characteristic of the American modernists in particular. The first
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involved Americans’ desire to see themselves as having their own cultural traditions separate from those of Europe – especially England, North America’s most significant colonizer. The second concerned the persistence of essentially pre-modern ways of life in the context of American hypermodernity. In some ways, these issues were related as two elements of a new cosmopolitan vision of America. For the bohemians of Greenwich Village, America was a rich amalgam of immigrant and indigenous cultures. Polemicists including Van Wyck Brooks and Randolph Bourne asserted that Americans had for too long viewed themselves as England’s cultural inferiors; with the increasing financial and industrial power of the United States, it was time to assert a distinctively American cultural identity. In this vein, it is significant that Stein, writing from Paris, repeatedly addressed the topic of the American character (The Making of Americans; The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, 1935; Four in America, 1947). Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), a fascinating mix of historical fiction and cultural commentary, resituates American history within a complex and multinational story of contact and conquest: from the early Viking explorations of the Atlantic seaboard to Spanish contact and conquest and the French missionary efforts in the Great Lakes region. In this deeply complex historical vision (which anticipates current efforts to reconceptualize American history as a story of transatlantic contact), English settlement not only figures as less central to American history, but as a culturally repressive influence that has hindered the development of a uniquely American voice. But for others, history hardly mattered. As the Great War raged on the continent, Americans could imagine themselves (at least until 1917 when the U.S. entered the conflict) as beyond the struggles of the Old World. In the rising global capital of New York, as elsewhere around the world, it was possible to see America as nothing less than the home of the future: an amalgamation of races and nationalities living in a mechanized paradise of automobiles, airplanes, electricity, motion pictures, and stock ticker tape. And yet, even for writers who celebrated this sleek, mechanized America (for example, Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer, 1925), there is also a strong critical awareness of the alienation of modern society and the degradation of modern mass culture. Many modernist writers worried that, as a young country, America had no deep and abiding culture capable of developing beyond what many saw as the trashy and commercial products of the emergent mass culture. Most famously, this is a central concern of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), in which a man with apparently no past – and a rather indefinite personality – very nearly succeeds in becoming a big shot through extravagant expenditure on clothes, cars, houses, and parties. Similarly, Sinclair Lewis satirized the pathetic pretensions to real culture of a typical Midwestern middle-class woman in Main Street (1920), while Nathanael West offered up grotesque visions of Americans both seduced, and then incited to fury, by a “surfeit of shoddy”: the fake, cheap, mass-produced objects, songs, and narratives of mass culture (West: 157). In the 1930s, both West and Lewis would connect their diagnosis of a degraded culture to the threat of fascism (Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, 1935; and West in A Cool Million, 1934, and The Day of the Locust, 1939).
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For others, however, the very idea of American newness seemed questionable. From the perspective of, say, a sharecropper in the Southern black belt, life was hardly different from the days of slavery. Indeed, especially before the modernization projects of the New Deal, the United States as a whole represented an interesting example of uneven development. While the U.S. stood out among nations for the number of people who owned radios or cars, this was juxtaposed to the disproportionate number whose lives were largely untouched by modern conveniences and media. This was notoriously the case in Appalachia and the rural South, but also true for the Great Plains and mountain West as well. These peripheral regions provided the raw materials devoured by the great American metropolitan and industrial centers of the Northeast and upper Midwest. But they also presented sites of stark contrast to urban industrial modernity. Modernist writers addressed this cultural divide (and its political and economic contexts) in different ways. For some, events like the famous 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial, in which a high-school biology teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a Tennessee public high school, simply confirmed the backwardness of rural America. Such views informed a number of novelists including Lewis, whose controversial Elmer Gantry (1927) portrayed a hucksterish preacher and his gullible followers. But for others, the culture of the periphery could also be seen as an antidote to the excesses and horrors of modernity, or indeed as a source for locating authentic American values and traditions. For the “Twelve Southerners” (including John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, and Robert Penn Warren) who wrote the Southern agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930), traditional Southern culture – which they understood narrowly as the inheritance of the genteel white planters – needed to be protected from the encroachment of the industrial and commercial modernity that they associated with the North. For many modernists, what proved most interesting was the intersection of these various regions and modes of life, and the way this translated into the complexity of American modernity. Willa Cather’s work is exemplary for addressing the relationship between such peripheral areas as the Nebraska prairie or highland New Mexico and the more sophisticated and industrially developed urban centers (see, for example, My Ántonia, 1918; The Professor’s House, 1925; and Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927). Faulkner also touched upon these issues of regional difference and uneven development. Indeed, regional difference is built into the very narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), where one of the central scenes in the telling of the rise and fall of the Sutpen family is in a dorm room at Harvard College. There, a Canadian interlocutor, Shreve, is, by turns, honestly engrossed and condescendingly invested in reducing events and characters of Quentin’s story into his stereotypes of a hopelessly traditionbound American South. For the black modernist writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the problem of uneven modernity was central for a number of reasons. The first was historical and even biographical, for many of these writers were part of the Great Migration that brought thousands of African Americans from the rural periphery to Harlem and other urban
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centers in the first few decades of the twentieth century. But the issue of rural black life was also central to the problem of trying to conceptualize an African American culture that could serve as the basis for new artistic efforts. The rural South and Caribbean simultaneously represented the site of the pain and degradation of slavery and of important cultural traditions, and from thence to Africa itself. Toomer’s Cane is again exemplary in this context for its attempt to map African American life between North and South, as is Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), which explores similar geographic terrain, with an additional side trip to Europe and its exotic fascination with African Americans. The work of Zora Neale Hurston, set largely in the South, also participates in this exchange between the rural folk and the centers of modern life. For, while Hurston is most obviously a chronicler of rural African American and Caribbean life in such novels as Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), and in folklore collections including Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1937), she was also a participant in the Harlem Renaissance and an academically trained ethnographic observer, who brought with her the perspectives and interests of the metropole. For indeed, the folk – whether rural African Americans, white Appalachians and Midwesterners, or immigrants – were ultimately the creation of the urban struggle to understand how America was to become a wholly modern nation.
Conclusion The shared project of the American modernists was to find new ways to address the special context of modern life and art in the United States. The drive toward experimentation was intense precisely because this was a transitional period for Americans, who had yet to understand themselves either as holders of a major aesthetic tradition or as living in a fully modernized country. This self-perception would change dramatically, however, after World War II, when the U.S. became an undisputed military, political, and economic superpower. With significant consequences for our subsequent understanding of modernist literature, it was in this postwar period that the canon of modernist literature was also established, as part of the drive to assert a U.S. cultural presence on the international stage commensurate with its geopolitical might. Certain prose experiments, such as Hemingway’s famously concise diction or Faulkner’s fragmented and temporally discontinuous narrations, were enshrined as touchstones of a postwar literature with truly international aspirations; Faulkner would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, and Hemingway would win in 1954. Subsequently, postmodernist writers and polemicists would react to this canonical modernism, particularly what they saw as its off-putting difficulty, its aversion to popular culture, and its desire to represent a social totality. Meanwhile, what was often lost in this retrospective view was the sense of American modernism’s “joyous season”: its political and social radicality, its experimental energy and diversity, and its engagement with a modern world still in the making.
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References and Further Reading Anderson, Perry (1988). “Modernity and Revolution,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, pp. 317–33. Chicago, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Baker, Houston A., Jr. (1987). Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago, I.L.: University of Chicago Press. Barbour, Scott, ed. (2000). American Modernism. Farmington Hills, M.I.: Greenhaven. Barnard, Rita (1995). The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crane, Stephen (1996). Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson. New York: Library of America. Denning, Michael (1996). The Cultural Front. New York: Verso. Gilbert, James Burkhart (1968). Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in the United States. New York: John Wiley. Hegeman, Susan (1999). Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kalaidjian, Walter (1993). American Culture between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press. Kalaidjian, Walter, ed. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, Daniel (2007). American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kazin, Alfred (1982). On Native Grounds [1942]. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Kenner, Hugh (1975). A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. Baltimore, M.D.: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kern, Stephen (1983). The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. Leick, Karen (2008). “Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press,” Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association, 123 (1): 125–39. McLuhan, Marshall (2005). Understanding Media [1964]. New York: Routledge. North, Michael (1994). The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. North, Michael (2005). Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. New York: Oxford University Press. Rubin, Joan Shelley (1992). The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Stansell, Christine (2000). American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitan Books. Stein, Gertrude (1990). Three Lives [1909]. New York: Penguin. Tichi, Cecilia (1987). Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Toomer, Jean (1988). Cane [1923], ed. Darwin T. Turner. New York: Norton. Watson, Steven (1991). Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde. New York: Abbeville. West, Nathanael (2006). A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Williams, Raymond (1989). The Politics of Modernism, ed. Tony Pinkney. London: Verso.
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The City Novel James R. Giles
Two disparate visions dominate the twentieth-century American urban novel, which initially focused upon New York City and Chicago. The city is frequently envisioned as a seductive space of exotic adventure and fresh opportunity, and just as often as a suffocating, closed space corrupted by racism and economic oppression. Moreover, these contrasting approaches are not mutually exclusive. Twentieth-century American novels either emphasize one half of this dichotomy over the other or, in some of the most memorable American urban fiction, explore the city as a simultaneously open and closed space. The model for this dual approach was set precisely at the beginning of the century by Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Subsequently, John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer (1925), which has been seen as a kind of modernist updating of Dreiser’s novel (Wrenn), walks a deliberate and controlled tightrope between visions of New York City as an open and closed space. Dos Passos’ New York City is, on one level, alluring and fascinating, a magnet for European immigrants and the center of new technology that promises to revolutionize society. Intrigued by the still new medium of film, Dos Passos brings a panoramic perspective to his novel, attempting to capture the diverse ethnic cultures of New York, with the significant exception of the African American. His narration conveys the immediacy of cinema verité without sacrificing essential depth. In the early stages of the novel he introduces a bewildering number of characters, some of whom will emerge as primary actors and some of whom will never reappear. In the text, the New York theatrical world images the city’s unique fascination. But a pervasive corruption underlies this surface excitement, a corruption that infects the novel’s female protagonist, Ellen Thatcher, and from which her male counterpart, Jimmy Herf, ultimately flees. Dos Passos incorporates the metaphor of fire to symbolize a distinctly urban corruption that destroys, but does not purify or redeem. New York City plays a memorable part in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s modernist classic The Great Gatsby (1925). It is the scene, after all, of Tom Buchanan’s climactic exposure of Gatsby’s criminal associations. The city is also central to Thomas Wolfe’s Of
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Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939), and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). For Wolfe, New York was “the rock,” simultaneously exhilarating and threatening. Wolfe’s sensibility in these novels is truly unique, the product of an Asheville, North Carolina childhood mingled with an intensely romantic response to the city; and its result is a richly evocative prose: “how can we speak of such a man coming first to the great city, when really the great city is within him, encysted in his heart, built up in the flaming images of his brain: a symbol of his hope, the image of his high desire, the final crown, the citadel of all that he has ever dreamed of or longed for or imagined that life could bring to him” (Wolfe: 223). Not surprisingly, given the historic population patterns in urban America, ethnic voices quickly assumed a vital role in the American city novel. Novelists focusing primarily on Jewish immigrants, especially in New York City, have, to a lesser degree and from a unique perspective, tended to repeat the duality of vision that informs Manhattan Transfer and An American Tragedy (1925). In Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), Michael Gold’s Jews without Money (1930), and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), the dual response is dramatized through generational conflicts. All three novels are set in the tenement world of New York City’s Lower East Side and depict first-generation Jewish immigrants drawn from Eastern Europe to America by a myth of unlimited opportunity and prosperity, of gold in the streets, only to be soon disillusioned by grinding poverty. The father in Call It Sleep, a novel narrated from the perspective of his young son, is transformed into an embittered and terrifying character. David Schearl, the young boy at the center of the novel, finds his tenement world both frightening and intriguing. An intense oedipal conflict is a central motif in Roth’s novel. Roth’s career is an especially fascinating one, since, after Call It Sleep, he published nothing for sixty years. In 1994, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, the first of a quartet of autobiographical novels with the unifying title Mercy of a Rude Stream, appeared. The four novels continue the fictional life of David Schearl under a new name; and, in them, New York City continues to be a defining background. Over the four volumes, we see Roth’s protagonist enter the City College of New York and become involved in radical leftist politics; and we see him confront the terrible secret of his youthful incest with his sister. The female protagonist of Yezierska’s Bread Givers, the youngest daughter of a demanding and unrealistic rabbi, ultimately defies her other-worldly father and becomes assimilated into American culture. The title of the novel’s first chapter, “Hester Street,” signifies the desperate poverty and claustrophobia of the tenement world, while the third and last section of the novel is significantly named “The New World.” Yezierska especially pays tribute to American education as the secret of female liberation. Michael Gold’s Jews without Money is the most overtly political of the three novels. Indeed in 1921, Gold (born Itshok Isaac Granich) had published a manifesto entitled “Towards Proletarian Art,” which proclaimed that “the tenement is in my blood” and reads like a prologue to Jews without Money (Folsum: 245). The protagonist of Jews without Money is significantly called “Michael,” Gold’s own adopted first name. Moreover, abruptly on the novel’s last page, Michael finds redemption for
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the failures of his immigrant father, as well as his own economic suffering and adolescent sexual transgressions, in the American Communist Party, to which Gold remained fervently loyal until his death in 1967. The tenement world of the East Side and the Party were the cornerstones of Gold’s identity until the end. The tenement novels of Roth, Yezierska, and Gold were anticipated by Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the very prototype of Jewish American assimilation fiction. Initially, its protagonist is a young Talmudic scholar in Russia who emigrates to the United States and New York City, where he struggles to remain a serious student before yielding to New York’s economic and social temptations and becoming a successful businessman. When last seen in the novel, Levinsky is mourning the cultural cost of his assimilation. A Jewish American novel also set in New York City but published almost thirty years later, Sholem Asch’s East River (1946) was written originally in Yiddish and presents a more clearly affirmative vision of urban America. Harlem is, for several African American novels, what the Lower East Side tenement world is for pre-World War II Jewish American fiction. Like The Rise of David Levinsky, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) is a fictional investigation of the price of cultural assimilation. When, in the climactic section of the novel, its anonymous protagonist first encounters New York City, he comes alive to the rich diversity and possibility of African American life. In Harlem, he is introduced to ragtime, which serves as the starting-point for several expository passages about black music, and discovers the Harlem cabaret scene with its African American musicians and predominantly white patrons. One memorable paragraph in the novel pays tribute to the fascination of New York City while warning of its dangers for the innocent. Johnson writes that “the buildings of the town shone out in a reflected light which gave the city an air of enchantment; and, truly, it is an enchanted spot … New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America.” Still the paragraph warns that those who come to the city will be at the mercy of sheer “caprice” (Johnson: 310). Central to the plot of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is the trope of “passing,” the passing of light-skinned characters of African blood as white. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), set in Chicago and New York, explores the same phenomenon. Lawrence R. Rodgers writes that the Harlem Renaissance novels, Jessie Fauset’s There is Confusion (1924), Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), Rudolph Fisher’s Walls of Jericho (1928), and Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932), are devoted to “bringing to life the hum and buzz of Harlem’s spirited, almost-human personality” (Rodgers: 78). Fisher’s and Thurman’s texts are amusing satires of Harlem’s emerging black bourgeoisie, and Thurman works in a subplot devoted to satirizing central figures of the Renaissance, including himself. Still the most important of these novels is McKay’s Home to Harlem, which is characterized by the same kind of dual response to Harlem found in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In McKay’s novel, affirmative and negative visions of Harlem are expressed through its two central characters. Jake, McKay’s prototype of the African American common man, returns
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to Harlem from England and World War I and is immediately enraptured by the sensual diversity of the community: “ ‘Harlem! Harlem!’ thought Jake. ‘Where else could I have all this life but Harlem? Good old Harlem! Chocolate Harlem! Sweet Harlem!’ ” (McKay: 15). In contrast, Ray, McKay’s prototype of the black artist and intellectual, is hindered in realizing his literary ambitions by a crippling self-hatred and an embittered view of the international black masses as a perennially exploited people. His response to Harlem is thus more mixed than Jake’s, but still essentially affirmative: “Harlem! How terribly Ray could hate it sometimes. Its brutality, gang rowdyism, promiscuous thickness. Its hot desires. But, oh, the rich blood-red color of it!” (McKay: 267). Since Sister Carrie, Frank Norris’s The Pit (1903), and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Chicago had been central to the imaginations of literary naturalists; and, from the beginning of the Great Depression until the outbreak of World War II, subsequent naturalists turned to it as a favorite setting for their fiction. The naturalistic social protest novel is especially associated with Chicago, with naturalists often attacking the city’s devotion to an unapologetic capitalist “boosterism” as public justification for economic injustice and oppression. It is not insignificant that several of the principal Chicago naturalists of the 1930s and 1940s were connected with the Writers Project of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration and thus knew each other quite well. James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren were thus connected. As Carla Cappetti has shown in Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (1993), these three writers were much influenced by the focus on ethnographical studies coming out of the University of Chicago’s pioneering sociology department. While he is at times the very prototype of the social protest writer, James T. Farrell is primarily interested in broader and more abstract matters in his 1935 trilogy, Studs Lonigan. Farrell’s trilogy is finally a study of the failure of the American “melting pot” ideal, a favorite concept of the University of Chicago school of sociology. The three novels depict a Chicago Irish American working-class neighborhood from which any redemptive spirituality has been banished. The Catholic Church in Studs Lonigan is an institution of meaningless ritual and cruel judgment as signaled in the title of the third volume of the trilogy, “Judgment Day,” and a spirit of xenophobic exclusion and misogyny permeates the Irish American neighborhood in which the Lonigan family resides. In the conclusion of his trilogy, Farrell narrates the physical death of his protagonist, the inevitable consequence of his spiritual decay, in a deliberately cold, emotionless style: “and there was nothing in the mind of Studs Lonigan but this feeble streaking of light in an all-encompassing blackness, and then, nothing” (Farrell: 465). Social protest was most definitely a primary concern for the African American novelist Richard Wright in Native Son (1940). In his youthful protagonist, Bigger Thomas, the leader of a Chicago black street gang, Wright crafted a deliberately disturbing image of African American rage that is the product of the severe social, economic, and cultural limitations of urban black life. For much of the novel, Bigger seems to be an almost one-dimensional product of white racism, economic oppression,
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and a shallow American popular culture. Motivated primarily by fear of white power and its selective and unpredictable punishment of racial taboos, he kills a wealthy young white woman accidentally and then his black mistress quite deliberately. The reader’s impression of Bigger as lacking emotional or intellectual depth is intensified by a trial that dominates the last third of the novel. Wright, then an active member of the American Communist Party, has a Marxist defense lawyer deliver an extensive closing summary that defines Bigger as the historical product of American racism and an oppressive class structure. Abruptly, but still plausibly, Bigger gains dramatic depth and complexity at the end of the novel by rejecting Max’s definition of who he is. Native Son soon became identified as the prototypical example of African American fiction; and two adherents of what came to be known as “the Wright school,” William Attaway in Blood on the Forge (1941) and Ann Petry in The Street (1946), produced memorable black protest novels. The Street is set in New York City and Blood on the Forge in Pittsburgh. Wright borrowed his title, Native Son, from his friend and fellow Chicago novelist Nelson Algren. Of Swedish and Jewish descent, Algren, because of his novels Never Come Morning (1942) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1947), is associated with Chicago’s Polish American community. Never Come Morning is a graphic account of the claustrophobic nature of existence in an urban ethnic neighborhood. The novel documents the inevitable destruction of its protagonist, Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, like Bigger Thomas the leader of a street gang. The novel ends with Bicek’s arrest for a murder that he did not commit. His reaction to the arrest is concise and fatalistic: “knew I’d never get t’ be twenty-one anyhow” (Algren 1942: 284). Never Come Morning’s elements of proletarian protest are balanced by an existential vision. The culmination of Algren’s art came five years later with the publication of The Man with the Golden Arm, certainly one of the most essential of Chicago fictions. The novel achieves its unique richness because Algren realizes the proletarian stance and existentialist vision of the earlier novel through a lyricism undercut by a distinctly urban absurdist humor. Despite this humor, Chicago is depicted in the novel as a construct enabled by a complex and corrupt system of interpenetrating hegemonies. Ultimately, The Man with the Golden Arm is a lyrical tribute to the urban dispossessed who suffer from “the great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one” (Algren 1949: 17). Carlo Rotella views Algren as recording an historic transition in Chicago, its transformation into an “October city,” a city undergoing a “midcentury transformation from an industrial city of downtown and [ethnic] neighborhoods into a postindustrial metropolis of inner city and suburbs” (Rotella: 38). Writing somewhat later than Wright, Willard Motley, very much his disciple, adapted the essential plot of Native Son to a white setting in Knock on Any Door (1947). Motley’s hero is a young Italian American, Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano, who ultimately murders a policeman and in a last scene, like Bigger Thomas, is shown awaiting execution. Both protagonists are clearly victims of their oppressive environments.
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Chicago is one of the two cities most associated with Saul Bellow, the first of an important group of post-World War II Jewish American writers to achieve recognition. Bellow was actually born in Montreal, but his family moved to Chicago when he was nine years old and, in the Chicago setting of his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), he found his distinctive narrative voice. Augie March opens with the eponymous protagonist asserting his national and his Chicago identity: “I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way” (Bellow: 3); and, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the role of New York City in Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Chicago functions as a kind of second protagonist in the novel. A picaresque text, Augie March is commonly discussed as a twentieth-century urban counterpoint to Huckleberry Finn. Robert R. Dutton extends the view of Bellow’s novel as a merger of fiction and literary commentary even further, writing that Augie might be “seen as a paradigm of American literature” (Dutton: 58). Specifically, Dutton views the novel as dominated by a dichotomy personified by Augie as representative of Huckleberry Finn-like innocence and optimism and the secondary character Einhorn as emblematic of the modernist pessimism of Ernest Hemingway. In 1970, Bellow published a New York novel that is considerably more pessimistic than his earlier urban fiction, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Its protagonist, Artur Sammler, is a seventy-four-year-old Jew of Polish descent who miraculously escaped murder during the Holocaust and has, when the novel opens, been living in New York City for over twenty years. As a young man, Sammler was a leading light in Polish intellectual circles, believing profoundly in European humanism. The Holocaust, however, taught him the vulnerability of even the most apparently indestructible cultures; and, in New York City, he is dismayed by the sheer foreignness of the city and by what he perceives as signs of the imminent collapse of American culture. Despite winning the National Book Award, Mr. Sammler’s Planet is not so highly regarded as The Adventures of Augie March and other Bellow novels primarily because of evidence of the writer’s emerging hostility to cultural pluralism. For instance, he makes one of the central embodiments of impending New York cultural collapse an African American pickpocket who intimidates Sammler by exposing himself in a hotel lobby. Still, Mr. Sammler’s Planet concludes with perhaps the most lyrical and moving of Bellow’s evocations of the necessity of meeting the “contract” to “be human.” Another of the post-World War II Jewish American novelists, Bernard Malamud, also a brilliant short-story writer, published a unique kind of urban novel in The Assistant (1957). The central action of the novel takes place in a small grocery store, but, as one critic points out, “the actual location of the store is never stated; it exists in a poverty-striken [sic] area that has the feel of permanence and timelessness, and its actual location is irrelevant” (Abramson: 37). The Assistant is, in fact, a unique kind of city novel equally rooted in earlier Jewish American urban fiction and in the age-old tradition of the moral fable. As in the fiction of Cahan, Yezierska, and Gold, a conflict between traditional Judaism and secular modernity is central to the novel,
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but in The Assistant it is an older man who exemplifies ethical behavior, not primarily because of his Jewish faith, but simply because he is a good man. Published in 1961, Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker anticipates Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet in several ways. It, too, features a once-prominent Polish intellectual who lost his wife and family to the Nazis and has emigrated to New York City, where he runs a Harlem pawnshop that is actually a front for a petty criminal. The Holocaust has, in fact, exacted a heavier price from Wallant’s protagonist, Sol Nazerman, than from Artur Sammler. The victim of a pervasive evil, Nazerman has made a desperate bargain for survival at the expense of any potentially redemptive emotions and any sense of ethical meaning. Even though the setting of The Pawnbroker is specifically identified as New York City, the novel communicates a mood of ambiguous timelessness not unlike Malamud’s The Assistant. As David D. Galloway points out, Nazerman is ultimately redeemed by acceptance of the urban grotesques that habituate his pawnshop after a long period of staying aloof from them and thereby denying their humanity just as the Nazis had once denied his own (Galloway: 85–6). In the 1950s, the African American city novel began to go in directions quite different from those associated with Richard Wright and others of “the Wright school.” Two first novels published within a year of each other, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) were heralded as revolutionizing both African American and urban fiction. Baldwin’s first novel is focused on the role and legacy of the black church instead of the political dynamics of black– white relationships. In fact, except for a brief early segment, there is no black–white interaction in the novel. The principal setting is a most desperate and claustrophobic Harlem where the young protagonist, John Grimes, is virtually suffocated by his family’s poverty and his embittered stepfather’s rage. As the novel opens, John has just turned fourteen, and his mother has given him money for a trip to midtown Manhattan to see a movie. For him, white Manhattan comes to represent a secular paradise that sharply contrasts with, and offers some refuge from, his stepfather’s harsh, repressive vision of an afterlife. Most of Baldwin’s subsequent fiction is set in urban America or Europe or both, including his ambitious, but structurally flawed novel Another Country (1962) and the lyrical protest novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Ellison’s Invisible Man is a complex, innovative text that introduced a high modernist sensibility to African American urban fiction. Arriving in New York City and Harlem after a disastrous experience at a black Southern college, its unnamed narrator is energized by the rich diversity of experience that is Harlem culture. The novel’s prose combines the rhythms of jazz and the blues with a dense sophisticated pattern of allusions to classical mythology, American cultural and political history, and black rural and urban folklore. But the narrator is soon disillusioned by his exploitation by “The Brotherhood,” a thinly disguised reference to the American Communist Party, and by his encounters with a black nationalist figure clearly modeled on Marcus Garvey. Ultimately, after Harlem explodes in a race riot, the protagonist is once again disillusioned and forced to retreat underground. In his novel,
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Ellison advances the Harlem novel to a new level of maturity. In 1959, the immediate influence of Baldwin and Ellison was evident in Paule Marshall’s autobiographical Brown Girl, Brownstones, another rich mixture of naturalistic protest and modernist narration. Marshall’s emphasis is upon immigrants from Barbados living in a once upscale white neighborhood in New York City. In another of the best known novels of the 1950s, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), J. D. Salinger recounts the picaresque New York City experiences of Holden Caulfield, a highly intellectual, but disillusioned adolescent boy. Holden and Bellow’s Augie March are commonly described as twentieth-century urban counterparts to Huckleberry Finn. After being expelled from an exclusive prep school, Holden, the selfdescribed “madman,” runs away to New York City for the Christmas holidays. In constant retreat from the “phonies” who he believes surround him everywhere, Holden, after a painful arrival in Grand Central Station, visits Manhattan tourist attractions including Central Park, Radio City Music Hall, and the Empire Theatre. Salinger’s novel repeats the dual responses that have characterized the New York City novel from the first; in it, Manhattan exudes a surface glamour and excitement that hides a pervasive spiritual emptiness. In 1964, Hubert Selby, Jr. published Last Exit to Brooklyn, a New York novel that was dramatically, even shockingly, different from those that had preceded it. Selby’s novel, in fact, represented a new, revolutionary stage in the development of the urban novel. It rejects almost completely the positive side of the traditional novelistic vision of the city as a place of excitement and opportunity and envisions a Brooklyn seeped in unrelieved savage violence, which is rooted in a profound death of the spirit. In a relentlessly unmediated narration, Selby gives expression to the rage-filled voices of his characters, including a brutal street gang, a rapacious prostitute, a working-class outcast terrified by a growing awareness of his own homosexuality, and the bored and desperate inhabitants of a Brooklyn housing project. Precisely a decade after Last Exit to Brooklyn, Richard Price published The Wanderers, a novel featuring the violence-dominated adventures of an Italian American street gang centered in the Bronx. Three novelists publishing later envisioned New York through the perspectives of a more conventional kind of realism. In Billy Bathgate (1989) and The Waterworks (1994), E. L. Doctorow produced his own brand of historical fiction. The story of a devoted follower of gangster Dutch Schultz, Billy Bathgate is an especially impressive achievement. Caleb Carr’s detective novel The Alienist (1994) places major figures from turn-of-the-century New York, Theodore Roosevelt, Franz Boas, and J. P. Morgan, in such familiar settings as Delmonico’s restaurant as they solve the mystery of a serial killer who preys on homosexual prostitutes. The Victorian model of socially engaged realism was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). In sharp contrast, New York City is a common setting for a kind of urban fiction that is more revolutionary in form, if not in vision, than Last Exit to Brooklyn. Postmodernist novelists like Paul Auster and Don DeLillo brought their own duality of vision to urban fiction. Auster, in the New York Trilogy (1987), mixed creative and playful variations on such literary forms as
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the detective novel, the historical novel, and literary biography and autobiography to produce a fiction that diverged radically from all his traditional models. Auster also published a very different kind of urban novel, In the Country of Last Things (1987), which recalls Selby in the unrelieved grimness of its narration. One of the most ambitious twentieth-century American novels, DeLillo’s Underworld, which is set in part in New York City, appeared in 1997. DeLillo’s postmodernism is comparable to Auster’s in its creative echoing of other forms of literary and non-literary discourse, ranging from sports reporting to Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal short story “The Masque of the Red Death.” To DeLillo, the city, and American culture in general, are characterized by obsessions with popular culture, violence, celebrity, and trash of all kinds. Earlier, DeLillo had envisioned New York City in a comparable manner in Great Jones Street (1973). In a surrealist way, Great Jones Street describes the failed attempt of a rock star named Bucky Wonderlick to disappear into a run-down area of the city. Bucky is sickened by the filth and despair surrounding him: “pigeons and meningitis. Chocolate and mouse droppings. Licorice and roach hair. Vermin on the bus we took uptown … Transient population of thunderers and hags” (DeLillo: 263). In a novel that depicts brutally naturalistic events through a detached satiric perspective, Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho (1991) creates his own unique brand of urban modernism. Ellis’s focus is upon affluent young white males who work on Wall Street and are so obsessed with commodity culture that they have lost the ability to feel or perceive anything outside capitalist excess. The novel’s protagonist may or may not be a serial killer preying on women and homeless males. Especially as the century progressed, cities other than New York and Chicago inspired important urban fiction. Surface enchantment and underlying corruption are contrasted in the opening Kansas City section of Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy. While working in a major Kansas City hotel, Dreiser’s protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, becomes enchanted by a world of luxury and sensuality he has never previously known. Before coming to work in Dreiser’s fictional hotel, Clyde has felt humiliated by his parents’ practice of handing out religious pamphlets in distinctly shabby sections of the city, and thus determines to forever escape the economic and imaginative poverty of his parents’ existence. The price of his escape is a moral degeneration that will spiritually and physically destroy him. Carlo Rotella applies his concept of “October Cities” to a group of post-World War II Philadelphia writers, including William Gardner Smith, Pete Dexter, and Diane McKinney Whetstone. Philadelphia is also the setting of John Edgar Wideman’s innovative African American novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). Wideman’s novel recounts the 1985 bombing of a house on Philadelphia’s Osage Avenue inhabited by members of a black cult known as MOVE. In an attack ordered by African American mayor Wilson Goode, who seems to have been motivated at least in part by the promise of urban renewal, eleven people, including women and children, were killed. For Wideman, the creative potential of African American children in Philadelphia’s inner city is endangered by a potentially lethal mixture of white oppression and black despair. In his Homewood novels and stories, Wideman writes about Pittsburgh,
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which is also the setting of Michael Chabon’s story of an adolescent confronting his gay sexual identity, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1998). Albany, New York is the favored setting of novelist William Kennedy, the centerpiece of which is his “Albany trilogy”: Legs (1975), Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978), and Ironweed (1983). Kennedy’s Albany is described from the same kind of dual vision that has characterized the twentieth-century American city novel from the beginning. The historical interaction of its colorful gangsters and even more colorful Irish politicians is for Kennedy the inspiration for endlessly fascinating actual events. Writing from a predominantly realistic perspective, Kennedy sees the history of Albany as the origin of improbable, even magical, events. Yet he depicts Albany city politics as being from the first unapologetically corrupt and often decidedly dangerous. In Quinn’s Book (1988), Kennedy, in a text that abounds with humor and miraculous events, nevertheless traces Albany’s legacy of systemic oppression back to the beginnings of the city. Detroit is the setting for Joyce Carol Oates’s naturalistic classic, them (1969), in which she recounts the ongoing exploitation of three members of a seemingly doomed lower-class family. At the opening of the novel, Loretta Wendall dreams of escape from her impoverished existence, hoping to avoid “falling through the bottom of the world” (Oates: 19). Her dreams are shattered, however, by a violence that relentlessly haunts her life as well as the lives of her children, Jules and Maureen. The novel’s conclusion does imply that Jules, who responds to the excitement and promise of urban existence, at last discovers a redemptive dimension of violence. Two quite different urban novels, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961) and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) explore the uniqueness of New Orleans as a city of a distinctly bohemian Southern sensibility. Of the two, Percy’s novel is the more serious in tone, examining as it does the potential for Catholic salvation in a decidedly fallen secular world, while A Confederacy of Dunces is devoted to the absurdist experiences of a group of bohemian eccentrics. The two historically dominant urban centers of California, Los Angeles and San Francisco, have been inspirations for a rich and diverse body of urban fiction. In the 1930s and 1940s, both cities provided settings for hard-boiled detective novels, which envisioned a brutal and corrupt subculture underlying the surface promise of both cities. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), and James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (1941) are masterpieces of the genre. Hollywood as fact and concept is central to much Los Angeles fiction and especially to the novels of Nathanael West. West’s masterpiece, The Day of the Locust (1939), ironically published in the year that has often been heralded as the best in Hollywood history, depicts the embittered hangers-on of the film industry. The characters in the novel have been turned into grotesques by the sharp disparity between the image of Hollywood as America’s dream capital and the desperate anonymity of their lives. Alan Ross writes that “West’s Hollywood is made up of degeneracy and brothels, of failure and sexual desire, of cock-fighting and third-rate boarding houses. But more than anything it is made up of significant boredom, of an etiolated ennui” (Ross: xxi).
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No writer is more central to the California urban novel tradition than Thomas Pynchon, whose postmodernist classic The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) follows the quest undertaken by its female protagonist, Oedipa Maas, as she attempts to fulfill her obligations as executrix of the will of a former lover, one Pierce Inverarity. Oedipa’s peregrinations take her from southern California suburbia to Los Angeles and then, in a brilliant climactic section, to San Francisco. Increasingly, Oedipa is uncertain whether she has discovered a centuries-old mail conspiracy or is simply the victim of an elaborate practical joke planned by Inverarity, who may or may not be dead. Pynchon’s postmodern absurdism projects a suburban and urban California that exist simultaneously in the unreal and relentlessly real, an extended landscape where nothing is precisely what it seems, where paranoia and only paranoia functions as a center, as organizing principle. Odeipa, in fact, believes that she may have stumbled upon a subterranean America of drifters and drop-outs. John Rechy’s path-breaking novel City of Night (1963) recounts the odyssey of an unnamed homosexual hustler seeking release from the pain of his childhood through emotionless and anonymous gay encounters. Rechy’s “city of night” is gay urban America. The novel begins in El Paso, Texas, and includes sections set in New York, Chicago, New Orleans as well as Los Angeles and San Francisco. When Rechy published the novel in 1963, mainstream straight America was determined to deny the existence of the gay subculture except for occasional adventures in slumming, and his fictional world is plagued by guilt and secrecy. Recent San Francisco fiction is dominated by two kinds of marginalized voices, gay and Chinese American. Armistead Maupin, in a series of short novels beginning with Tales of the City (1978), recounts the colorful adventures of an interrelated group of gay and straight San Franciscans. Maupin’s use of interlocking plots and subplots recalls, most of all, the narrative strategy of Charles Dickens, and the tone is reminiscent of Dickens’s mingling of comedy and social protest. Later, with the spread of the AIDS epidemic, Maupin’s vision became more tragic. Frank Chin’s Donald Duk (1991) is a comic Chinese American novel dominated by a conflict between first-generation immigrant parents determined to hold on to the traditions of their homeland and their children who have embraced American culture. In this way, the novel, like much Chinese American fiction, recalls early twentieth-century Jewish American fiction. Finally, Seattle is the setting of Sherman Alexie’s militant Native American novel, Indian Killer (1996), which gives voice to the murderous rage felt by generations of exploited tribal people. Alexie describes the Native American homeless population of San Francisco as an “urban tribe” of “outcasts.” Inevitably, given their rapid growth and the centrality of their roles in the nation’s economic and cultural development, New York City and Chicago were initially the favored settings for the American urban novel. Continuing fascination with the New York of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth is evident in a number of recent historical novels about the city, including Carr’s The Alienist and Kevin Baker’s “city of fire trilogy”: Dreamland (1999), Paradise Alley (2002), and Striver’s Row (2006), each volume of which focuses upon a different ethnic group of
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New Yorkers. As more American urban centers came to cultural and economic prominence, writers turned to them as fictional locales. In particular, Los Angeles and San Francisco novels developed as a unique subgenre of the American city novel. From the beginning, the diverse body of American urban fiction has projected a dual response to the city as the embodiment of fascination and promise and as a corrupt, even brutal landscape.
References and Further Reading Abramson, Edward A. (1993). Bernard Malamud Revisited. Boston: Twayne. Algren, Nelson (1942). Never Come Morning. New York: Harper. Algren, Nelson (1949). The Man with the Golden Arm. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Bellow, Saul (1973). The Adventures of Augie March [1953]. New York: Viking. Cappetti, Carla (1993). Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. DeLillo, Don (1973). Great Jones Street. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Dutton, Robert R. (1982). Saul Bellow. Boston: Twayne. Farrell, James T. (1938). Studs Lonigan [1932, 1934, 1935]. New York: Modern Library. Folsum, Michael Brewster (1968). “The Education of Michael Gold,” in Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden, pp. 222–51. Carbondale, I.L.: Southern Illinois University Press. Galloway, David D. (1979). Edward Lewis Wallant. Boston: Twayne.
Johnson, James Weldon (1987). The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man [1912], in The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson, vol. II, pp. 273–362. New York: Oxford University Press. McKay, Claude (1987). Home to Harlem [1928]. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Oates, Joyce Carol (1969). them. New York: Vanguard. Rodgers, Lawrence R. (1997). Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ross, Alan, ed. (1957). The Complete Works of Nathanael West. New York: Farrar, Straus. Rotella, Carlo (1998). October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press. Wolfe, Thomas (1939). The Web and the Rock. New York: Harper and Row. Wrenn, John H. (1961). John Dos Passos. New Haven, C.T.: College and University Press.
3
The Western Neil Campbell
John Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique (1984) defines the Western as a “foundation ritual” representing the moment when the “frontier passed from the old way of life into social and cultural forms directly connected with the present,” but significantly goes on to argue that it has been popular and “effective” precisely “because within its basic structure of resolution and reaffirmation, it indirectly confronts those uncertainties and conflicts of values which have always existed in American culture” (Cawelti: 100). Recent criticism develops Cawelti’s point of view, questioning terms such as “frontier,” whilst placing greater emphasis on how the Western directly confronted “uncertainties and conflicts” around such issues as identity, gender, class, race, and land within American culture. The Western became a flexible vehicle for dramatizing conflicting desires, tensions, and struggles within a nation actively constructing identity, and for asking fundamental questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my history? What does community mean? How are stories to be told? Indeed, one of the most popular of all Western writers, Louis L’Amour, wrote that his work was about “building a nation, learning to live together … establishing towns, homes, and bridges to the future” (Aquila: 59). This juxtaposition of recurring structures alongside potentially complex cultural issues offering alternative perspectives on the smiling myths of American exceptionalism, despite its implication within them, is why the Western continues to thrive in different guises, from classics like The Virginian (1902) and Shane (1949) to contemporary revisions such as Lonesome Dove (1985), Blood Meridian (1986), and “Brokeback Mountain” (1997). As Stephen Tatum writes, “the history of popular western texts – if studied and accepted as an evolving rather than frozen one – is everywhere invested in dramatizing struggles for cultural dominance, complex issues of morality, and contests of property and propriety” and, therefore, even in the “most seemingly retrograde popular texts critical thinking about ideals, drives, contradictions, and prospects can and does occur,” producing within the narrative “a force field of conflict” (Robinson 1998: 164, 179). This chapter will examine some of these force fields within the Western novel.
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Western stories are central to the national narrative, becoming its epic creation story, from William Gilpin’s 1846 claim that it was “the untransacted destiny” of the American people to subdue the continent to Theodore Roosevelt’s belief that through the West’s “strenuous life” Anglo-Saxon “race-history” would find its ultimate expression in self-reliance, struggle, and bold restless freedom. Such visions signaled westward movement as a manifest mission of expansion, progress, possession, and conquest whose values (resilience, rugged individualism, entrepreneurialism) spoke of an authentic, white, masculinist, “American” identity defining itself after the Civil War in the wilderness landscapes west of the Mississippi. Popular narratives circulated and enhanced these beliefs over time, perpetuating frontier stories of explorers, pioneers, and mountain men, developing a powerful mythology of heroic actions, whilst contributing new plots and settings built on existing sources, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” novels (1823–41) which portray stark contrasts between wilderness and civilization, red and white, male and female, East and West. Dime novels told stories of historical figures like Buffalo Bill or invented characters like Deadwood Dick with formulas rarely fixed, but constantly expanded and reinvented in ways that generated what Christine Bold terms a productive “friction” (Bold: xvii). One example is Edward Ellis’s Seth Jones; or the Captives of the Frontier (1860) whose hero is a white hunter in the mold of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, reiterating tensions between East and West, savagery and civilization, but unlike Bumppo, who remains socially awkward and tied to the wilderness, Jones is ultimately revealed as an Eastern gentleman transcending class and regional divisions and reflecting a national coherence and unity increasingly demanded in the post-Civil War years and reinterpreted in The Virginian’s reconciliatory marriage of East and West between Molly Wood and its eponymous hero, a cowboy on his way to the boardroom. A good deal of this frontier idealism and myth-making was made popular in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows which traveled widely in the 1880s, blurring history and fiction into spectacular performances, spin-off dime novels, and stage plays in a bizarre process of “Codyfication.” When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show camped adjacent to the Columbian Exposition site in 1893, its juxtaposition to the official showground seemed strangely symbolic of its relationship to historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier” speech delivered there. At its heart is a similar myth of progress, rugged, masculine individualism, and democracy, of the American nation forged in the crucible of the frontier. Ironically, Turner delivered his speech about the closing of the frontier in the urban center of Chicago at the very moment the U.S.A. was becoming troubled by social and economic change, mass immigration, labor protest, rural poverty, and the increasing corporatization of land. Thus, overlapping histories, popular stories, and Wild West spectaculars served to reinforce the national narrative whilst constructing a nostalgic review of origins before the memory was diminished by the urbanized 1890s and beyond. With the transformation of the frontier, it seemed almost more important to maintain and embellish it imaginatively, simulated through popular discourse in the collective imagination of authors, performers, and their audiences.
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Such imaginative desire was exemplified in the works of Turner and his contemporaries, Roosevelt, Fredric Remington, and, most significantly for fiction, Owen Wister, developing tropes that circulated across disciplinary boundaries and reinforcing the nation’s creation story with patterns already active in dime novels and Fenimore Cooper, ready-made for countless future fictions: civilization versus savagery; an intermediate hero working between these opposites; regenerative violence involving capture, flight, and pursuit; inevitable progress; struggles over judicial law and “moral” law; the industrial and agricultural; past and future; and all taking place within spectacular landscapes with an all-pervasive masculinity at its center. In The Virginian (1902), Wister’s code of the West was embodied in his loyal and tough cowboy culture-hero, capable equally of violence, humor, and romance, qualities he felt a “civilized” society needed in order to establish itself in the region. As Wister wrote, Americans are “no type – no race – we’re transient … All the patriotism of the War doesn’t make us an institution yet. But this West is going to do it” (quoted in Bold: 40). Wister’s noble cowboy is associated with the chivalric traditions of the Old World, epitomized in his essay “The Evolution of the Cowpuncher” (1895), linking national identity and regeneration with a Saxon spirit transplanted to cattle country, and echoed later by L’Amour as a “time of exploration, of struggle, of titanic men walking a titanic land … an age akin to the Homeric or the Elizabethan” (L’Amour: 18). The Virginian’s eponymous hero moves with “the undulations of a tiger, smooth and easy, as if his muscles flowed beneath his skin,” representing the hope of true democracy since “a gentleman lies deep in the hearts of thousands that are without chance to master the outward graces of the type” (Wister: 1, 8). Yet, alongside this conventionalized heroic figure, the novel reveals certain anxieties about gender, immigration, and the corporatization of the land, such as Colonel Cyrus Jones’s eating palace with its passing “rainbows of men – Chinese, Indian chiefs, Africans … Austrian nobility, wide females in pink,” as if “Our continent drained prismatically through Omaha once” (Wister: 92). For Wister, such diverse identities must concede to the unified, national self embodied in the figure of the transformative Anglo-hero, combining frontier playfulness, violence, and romance with a characteristic willingness for self-transformation, signified by his marriage to Eastern schoolteacher Molly Stark Wood. In this symbolic union, Wister’s dream of reconciling East and West in the service of an American Anglo-Saxon empire is manifest, as is rootedness and clear gender roles. Predictably, the Western resorts to such resolutions, having introduced alternative possibilities en route. In establishing his “home,” the Virginian evolves from nomadic bachelor to “foreman,” husband, and entrepreneur, articulating Wister’s vision of masculinity and nation: at ease in all company, “equal to the situation,” ruthless, and yet always just and fair. However, as part of this process he must kill off Steve and Trampas, purging himself of his wandering, uncivilized self in order to take up his new stable role under Molly’s guidance. Mobility becomes social mobility with the Virginian on the side of big business, seeking status, a good woman, and wealth, with “a separate house of his own” and “a strong grip on many various enterprises” (Wister:
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145, 316). Typical of the Western’s contrariness though, The Virginian cannot sustain progressive themes, and so just as it quells diversity and corporatizes the cowboy, with gender it retreats to positions of inequality and masculine power. Hence Molly succumbs to the Virginian, for as her great-aunt puts it, “she is like us all. She wants a man that is a man,” accepting his violence to create the better life to come, and, as a consequence, is forever “veiled” from the full truth, since “good women were to know only a fragment of men’s lives” (Wister: 163, 284). The novel establishes one of the Western’s key tensions between mobility and settlement – routes and roots – dramatizing issues surrounding the development of stable community, settled practices, law and justice, families and business, always set in relief to its opposites – motion, transience, outlawry, and the nomadic, single life – suggesting a much closer dialogue between them. Indeed, borrowing a term from Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), and recalling Turner and Roosevelt, popular Westerns are always, to some degree, about “remaking” people (Grey: 260): transforming tenderfoots, hardened nomadic cowboys, independent women, and various lost characters through the experience and tests of the West. Thus, in Riders of the Purple Sage, the gunfighter Lassiter has “no home, no comfort, no rest, no place to lay [his] weary head” until he comes into contact with Mormon landowner Jane Withersteen, who, like Molly, challenges the masculine hero with different responsibilities and decisions (Grey: 21). More so than Molly in Wister’s novel, Jane has also to respond to change, taking on more “masculine” traits and having her own “blind” faith tested by the very violence that Lassiter represents. Arriving in the novel, he extends the description of the Virginian’s physical presence with images that would become staples of representation in both fiction and film: dressed in black leather with two “black-butted guns,” “silhouetted against the western sky, coming riding out of the sage … in the golden glare of the sun” (Grey: 8). The epitome of masculine power, Lassiter is associated immediately with “changelessness” and a sense of honor tied to family and tradition: “Where I was raised a woman’s word was law,” he says (Grey: 9, 10). Ventners, one of the book’s other central characters undergoing transformation, thinks he has “unlinked” Bess, his captive-lover, from her old life in order to save her, and the same idea is relevant to Jane’s efforts to “unlink” Lassiter from his guns, symbolic, as so often in the Western, of his violent masculinity and his “dark, blood-stained path” (Grey: 108, 122). Ultimately, she cannot achieve this fully, and, like Molly, accepts violence as a necessary means to an end – defeating the evil Mormon empire that has destroyed and divided Lassiter’s family, and simultaneously freeing her from the past. In a key moment in Riders, Jane watches Lassiter with the orphan Fay Larkin, making her “doubt her sense of the true relation of things,” and recognizing that the killer Lassiter could also be a gentle father, put down roots, and become a lover (Grey: 119). The “true relation of things” is, as I have suggested, constantly questioned, if only temporarily in the Western, allowing the reader to have the familiar framework of themes and tropes discussed earlier whilst interjecting more complex social and cultural questions and moral choices in a motion of “flux and reflux” (Grey: 126).
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Thus, the experience of reading a Western can often be dialogic and tension-filled, “unlinking” the reader from assumptions and generic expectations so as to “remake” our attitudes as much as those of the characters. In this way, the Western, though often ultimately conservative, offers within its multiple conflictive fabric ways to interrogate the “true relation of things.” In Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949), the narrator, Bob, looks back to 1889 at the effect of a Lassiter-like force entering the threatened settlement of the Starrett family “out of the heart of the great glowing West” (Schaefer: 159). Shane is a reluctant gunfighter whose violence is unleashed as a last resort to support the family against the tyrannical landowner Fletcher and his hired guns. Almost a perfect mythic structure, Shane examines once again the “relation of things” by testing the resolve of the Starretts with the gunfighter’s undoubted sexual and physical power and his instinctual, violent energy: “the easiness of a coiled spring, of a trap set,” his gun “an extension of the man himself ” (Schaefer: 7, 60). He is a man of routes, with the “dust of distance … beaten into him,” about to challenge the roots of the incipient community, “railed right … fenced tight … solid,” a new Western America forged, as Turner would say, on the frontier (Schaefer: 6, 7). Ultimately, the boy, his mother, and father, although drawn to Shane, remain to build the nation whilst the gunfighter passes back to the “dust” and the raw landscape beyond settlement. He has exercised his regenerative violence, enabling their lives to continue; he has “unlocked” their energies, making them “more alive, more vibrant”; but he cannot remain since his body, “as taut as stretched whipcord,” although always the focus of the book, is not meant for labor or communal life and so must return to nature (Schaefer: 42, 73). Schaefer’s examination of masculinity is complex and ambiguous, never quite allowing any single approved version to emerge, despite the attractions of the hero, settling instead for a plural vision that further complicates earlier texts such as The Virginian and Riders of the Purple Sage. Despite the complexities of Shane and other Westerns, the New Western History that emerged in the 1980s was surprisingly dismissive of the contribution fiction might play in its revisionist, nuanced readings of the West. Five years after Patricia Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest (1986) codified this “new” history, Jane Tompkins argued that the Western could teach us much about the region, claiming, for example, that it was “secular, materialist, and antifeminist; it focuses on conflict in the public space, is obsessed with death, and worships the phallus” (Tompkins: 28). Such a provocative, although limiting, definition of the genre had, in the end, a similar effect to New Western History’s suspicion of fiction, closing down its dialogic possibilities, reducing readers’ experiences to a particular set of assumptions and patterns. Taking on New Western History and Tompkins, recent literary and cultural critics, such as Forrest G. Robinson, Stephen Tatum, Krista Comer, and Susan Kollin, have argued that what Turner excluded Western fiction had always already engaged with in more complex dialogues than it was given credit for, dramatizing gender relations, cultural and racial multiplicity, religious difference, and debates over landownership, law, and justice in novels often dismissed as regressive, formulaic, or stereotyped. Thus, the
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surface, one-dimensional “promise” of the West apparent in many Western narratives is countered or conflicted by deeper lines of enquiry and questionings about identity, community, power, and gender. Robinson argues that the tensions and conflicts we have discussed are typical of Westerns “having it both ways,” of productively incorporating within themselves contested elements, dialogical structures, and frictions so that they both “reinforce our sense of the heroic” and “also challenge it,” “dramatize the triumph of American virtues” and “explore the dark side of a dominant self-image,” “dwell on the exploits of white men” and yet be “alive to the grave injustices of the social order they portray” (Robinson 1993: 1). Indeed, he claims that within the Western is an “impulse, a selfsubversive reflex, to undermine what it appears so clearly to approve,” creating a kind of “textual unconscious” that resists and subverts “conventional heroic perspectives,” actively engaging the audience in a process of negotiation over meaning and ideology (Robinson 1993: 2). He argues that there is something dialogical at the heart of most Westerns, a game of approach and retreat, address and withdrawal, requiring the reader, as I stated earlier, to move between perspectives, weighing one against another, in an “ongoing cultural conversation” over power, gender, race, nation, and authority. The nature of the popular novel is that these dialogues exist as a “persistent pattern of doubleness” (Robinson 1993: 3) offering powerful promises of resolution and closure, whilst simultaneously presenting the reader with ambiguity, uncertainty, and drift, the very things New Western History exhorted us to notice from the late 1980s. As we have seen in The Virginian, Riders, and Shane, such “doubleness” exists in the representation of independent, strong-willed women, who “might be led [but] … won’t be driven,” but are often drawn back into more conventional gender roles conforming to stereotypes of mother/lover/virgin/whore (Grey: 67). Many novels utilize this gender tension between independence and convention, “voice” and duty, civilization and wilderness, radiating from Molly in The Virginian and developing in Bertha Muzzy Bower’s novels (1906–41) which capitalized on Wister’s success. In 1912, the same year as Riders of the Purple Sage, Bower published Lonesome Land about Valeria Peyson, arriving like the tenderfoot in The Virginian, to the town of Hope in “great, lonely” Montana (Bower: 1). In almost a reversal of Wister’s novel, Valeria’s new life becomes a series of educative moments, drawing her away from the West she thought she “already knew” to a different, fuller sense of its landscape, people, and values. Her initial vision is that defined for her by Manley Fleetwood, her ironically named, soon-to-be rancher husband, a drunk who imitates in his letters to her the romanticized West of Roosevelt, Remington, and Turner, mixed appropriately with images from “current fiction and the stage” (Bower: 37). The reality of Manley’s West is as disappointing as he is, lacking “chivalrous and brave [cowboys] … fascinating in their picturesque dare-devilry” and promising “a veritable Eve’s garden” whilst delivering “a barren little habitation … inclosed in a meagre fence of … barbed wire” (Bower: 11, 64). The novel is once again about “remaking” and transformation, “stripping her mind of her illusions” of the romanticized West and the version of masculinity represented
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by her abusive, lazy, misogynist husband (Bower: 71). Bower’s “feminist” Western still meditates on masculinity, and it is the devotion of another, more “approved” example of manhood in the mold of the Virginian, Lassiter, or Shane, Kent Burnett, who “saves” her from fire whilst admiring her “wolf”-like qualities and her willingness to “talk back” (Bower: 94). Such a relationship enables Bower to maintain an ambiguous love story whilst portraying Valeria as capable and independent, traits marked interestingly by her becoming a writer of Western stories for money – authoring her own vision of the West (and no longer Manley’s) as a practical means to divorcing him. As so often in feminist literature (and later echoed in Lonesome Dove’s Clara), writing asserts Val’s authority in a world defined by patriarchal language and culture, and, in turn, educates Kent beyond “the limitations set by his purely masculine training” (Bower: 131). In Bower’s egalitarian vision, epitomized by the friendship between the sexes, Val’s writing is an active collaboration, “in cahoots” with Kent, joining his “realism” and experience with her enthusiasm for self-expression and freedom from convention (Bower: 234). A Western with a twist, Val’s transformation, according to Kent, is aligned to the “Lonesome Land … doing its work” on her, allowing her “to think as an individual – as a woman; not merely a member of conventional society” (Bower: 210). For another female writer, Dorothy M. Johnson, many of whose works were turned into successful films, the West is a space of legends, tall tales, and performance, where lives and identities are disrupted and transformed by circumstances and moral choice, like captivity in “A Man Called Horse” and “Lost Sister,” or violent attack in The Hanging Tree and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.” In The Hanging Tree (1958), Elizabeth Armistead, “the lost lady,” temporarily blinded and scarred as the result of a stagecoach robbery, is taken in by Dr. Joe Frail, the “king” of Skull Creek, who guards her from the rough mining camp to the extent that he imprisons her. In a complex tale of duplicity and performance, guilt and fragility, Johnson explores greed and ambition, moving her characters through cycles of doubt and change until they stand existentially under the deathly shadow of the hanging tree. Like Bower’s Valeria, Johnson allows Elizabeth a central role, tracing her from her “lost,” blind phase as a “kept woman” in the eyes of the townsfolk, to an independent, wealthy business woman whose riches “build a wall of safety between her … and everything she didn’t want,” transforming her from a “helpless prisoner” to an “imprisoned queen” (Johnson: 185). What resolution there is to the story involves both Elizabeth and Doc learning to relinquish power and overcome the past, him in the form of masculine authority and traditional gunplay, and her by giving away wealth and status to save him from the hanging tree. Johnson strips them of their acquired identities, leaving them vulnerable to the words of the preacher ringing in their ears: “He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; he that killeth with the sword must be killed by the sword” (Johnson: 192). Elizabeth saves Doc by “buying” him from the mob, throwing away her gold and grubstake contracts to free him from the noose. As the blood runs from his wrists, Doc is purged of his guilty past and his efforts to enslave both Elizabeth and Rune, and is able to join her “free of fear and treasure” (Johnson: 211).
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In Johnson’s “Lost Sister,” a boy’s racial assumptions are unsettled by the return of his Aunt Bessie after forty years of Indian captivity. In an ironic reversal of the classical captivity narrative, the staple of many dime novels, Johnson explores the differences between white and native cultures until the boy views Bessie differently, “a solid ghost in the house” haunting the family “narrative” with its own codes and values that she has unlearned as an “Indian,” finally disappearing leaving only a “legend” and a photograph in the family album (Johnson: 62, 52). Years later when her “weathered bones” are found in a canyon, it is suggested that she be buried in the “family plot,” but the boy, now grown, rejects this imprisoning gesture aimed at containing her once again in the narrative (“plot”) of the “family,” believing that she would be better left outside the restrictive myths of white culture and society (Johnson: 68, 69). This represents tensions in the Western itself: on one hand, the desire to contain (bury) its meanings within defined generic boundaries, whilst on the other giving freer rein to its suggestive, rhizomatic elements. As we have seen, there is always something ghostly in the Western, a shadow-world of uncertainties, conflicts, and reminders that erupt, like something repressed into the narrative through its patterns of “doubleness,” like Bessie’s “weathered bones” found in the earth (see Tatum). Indeed, these uncontained, haunting elements are often linked, as in Johnson’s story, with the land itself and the power of nature to challenge settled assumptions. Land and time are bound together dialogically in the Western, suggesting a yearning nostalgia for the idyllic, mythical purity of an untouched, open range, whilst simultaneously recognizing the inevitable consequences of change and encroaching human presence upon it. The desire to imagine, control, possess, and struggle over land drives the Western from the mountain men’s adventures west of the Mississippi, to the Johnson County War of 1890 in The Virginian and Shane, to the wagon trains and cattle trails of The Way West (1949) and Lonesome Dove. In fact, the very arrivals that punctuate the Western also signal destruction and ecological change. The transformations that characters undergo in the West are mirrored perversely in the changes that they wreak upon the land itself. At the beginning of The Virginian, for example, the narrator captures this, noting how Medicine Bow had already “the same shapeless pattern” of “houses, empty bottles, and garbage,” and “Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation’s first morning” (Wister: 8). In Riders, transformation is intrinsically linked to the charged, sexualized landscape of Ventners and Bess in their Edenic Surprise Valley with its “V-shaped cleft in the dark rim of the cliff” bringing them into contact with the remains of the Anasazi, encouraging them to confront the true nature of their love and seek redemptive freedom (Grey: 91). In A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky (1947), Boone Caudill, sounding like an American Adam, looks westward across Missouri with awe and wonder whilst simultaneously acknowledging his desire to conquer and transform it: “It was open country, bald and open, without an end … A man wouldn’t think the whole world was so much … It made a man little and still big, like a king looking out” (Guthrie: 107).
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“King” Caudill’s desire for control and authority is played out in the next two scenes where he kills both buffalo and Indian, demonstrating the terrible consequences of westward expansion. Zeb Calloway, in the same novel, explains that Caudill is already “Ten year too late” as the land has already been spoiled by “Forts all up and down the river, and folks everywhere … And greenhorns comin’ up … hornin’ in and sp’ilin the fun … Why’nt they leve to us as found it? … she was purty onc’t. Purty and new, an not a man track, savin’ Injuns, on the whole scoop of her” (Guthrie: 147). The disease that Caudill carries in his blood is emblematic of such destruction, infecting the land like the “man tracks” Calloway sees destroying the free, pure land, reminding the reader of the illusion of conquest. As the self-aware Summers comments, “the great empty spaces … made a man feel like he was alone and cosy in the unspoiled beginnings of things,” when in truth it was simply a fantasy of escape, power and control, the kind of blindness typical of Caudill’s waywardness (Guthrie: 192; emphasis added). Tellingly, Caudill says that he didn’t know how to “give and take and see things from different sides … All he knew was to drive ahead” (Guthrie: 214). In fact, many Westerns regard time, history, and the past as elements to be pushed aside in favor of progress, and yet ironically, as we have seen, they are simultaneously haunted by traces of the very past they seek to exclude, either through the return of the repressed past into their lives – like the inherited disease in The Big Sky, the gun-fighting past in Shane, or the remains of Aunt Bessie or the Anasazi in “Lost Sister” and Riders. Everywhere in the Western the specters of the past haunt the present as reminders of how complex identity, history, and place are, and that true change is never about forgetting, but always about understanding inheritance. The Western provides a record of time’s “man tracks” on the land, tracing the dreams and realities of environmental change, colonial, individual, and corporate desire inscribed on the evolving landscape of the West, and, unlike Caudill, demands of its readers that we do “give and take and see things from different sides,” if only to see these multifaceted relations of memory and forgetting. Larry McMurtry has tried to do just this in his work, writing of change in the West as the “music of departure,” the elegiac shift between myth and history, permitting him to be “critical of the past, yet apparently attracted to it” (McMurtry: xv, 141). In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove (1985) he perpetuates the “doubling” narrative described above, both honoring the myths of the West and selfconsciously reflecting upon them, drawing the reader into a critical and demythicizing perspective. Late in the novel, Woodrow Call, attending the imminent death of his partner Gus McCrae says, “This would make a story if there was anybody to tell it,” suggesting McMurtry’s awareness of the reflexive quality of his work (McMurtry: 784). This is a novel about the West and about the Western. Appropriately, elsewhere in the novel someone comments that “what he was seeing was a moment between” what the plains “had been” and “would be”; a moment in which the world of the West is strangely suspended between the old and the new, past and present, the mythic and the realist (McMurtry: 428). The novel’s rugged protagonists, Call and McCrae, his Western Sancho and Don Quixote, are remnants of the past reaching for a last
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chance to rekindle Caudill’s feeling of seeing the West anew: Montana, “the last place that ain’t settled” (McMurtry: 699). Like the dreams of mountain men and pioneers that echo through the novel, McMurtry’s characters reflect on the nature of the West and all the themes discussed in this chapter: on masculinity, landscape, and ethnicity, and all that is being lost as the region moves and changes. In doing this, its selfconsciousness provides a primer of Western stories reflecting on the themes that New Western History would itself reiterate: from lost causes, gender roles, and Indian wars to the perils of civilization or settlement, the desire to write, and the construction of the West itself. Writing about the nineteenth-century West from the twentieth, McMurtry allows his deliberative text to run contrary to Tompkins’s view of the genre and to dwell on issues, let characters talk, remember, and dream in ways that recreate a complex, multifaceted sense of what westward experience might mean. For example, the novel reflects on how the “heroic” lives of its central characters are part of a “scheme” of expansionism whereby they “Kilt the Indians so they wouldn’t bother the bankers,” ironically serving the culture they despise, making a West “safe for … Sunday-school teachers” where people are already imagining a mythic region from “pictures … in the papers” (McMurtry: 83, 124). The cattle trail at the heart of the book symbolizes the desire for motion and adventure associated with the mythic West and is clearly linked to dreams of newness (“a cattleman’s paradise,” 83), of recapturing the experience of the wilderness, figured as Montana, “before the bankers and lawyers get it” (McMurtry: 83). As Gus dies, one leg removed and another gangrenous, he comments “I’ve walked the earth in my pride all these years. If that’s lost, then let the rest be lost with it.” With his own phallic masculinity under threat, Gus would rather die than be accommodated into a world “ruint, like my legs” (McMurtry: 782, 786). Combining romance and realism, McMurtry’s sentimental, philosophizing epic knowingly creates what has always been present in the Western, a sense of yearning and dream for the mythic adventure and “spirit” of the West, alongside an often sharp commentary on the unreality of untrammeled masculinity and unchecked fantasies. Thus, the popular Western’s “doubling” narrative moves its audience between myth and critique, nostalgia and realization, roots and routes, performing vital cultural work, understanding the powerful pull of imagination and desire contained in the stories of the West, whilst simultaneously reminding us of the high price paid for conquest and expansion. In this sense, its duality is a form of literary critical regionalism, understanding the drama and scope of Western stories and the consequences of expansionist myth-making. One only has to examine the success of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1995), and Cities of the Plain (1998) to see this: through Blood Meridian’s terrifying and excessive imperialist Judge Holden, rewriting history through death and erasure set alongside the bildungsroman of the “kid” moving West in search of a new life; or in All the Pretty Horses’s reworking of the epic journeys of Westerns across borders, yearning for the old times, full of romance and horror. McCarthy traces a West “gone from the oil lamp and the horse and buggy to jet planes and the atomic bomb” (McCarthy 1998: 218), with
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characters endlessly searching for something to restructure lives torn between the dreamt-of past and the inevitable sense of disappointment and loss. Yet the desire to “fix” one’s history and identity in the West is continually frustrated in McCarthy’s novels as these coordinates are crossed and dislocated, reminding us, as the Western always has, that, like the landscape itself, identity changes and the stable romance of the past is only illusion: “The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in a pierglass twisted and righted” (McCarthy 1992: 3). His novels are hauntingly provocative invitations to think again about the West’s legacy dramatized through spectral landscapes where secret and forgotten histories are drawn out and laid bare. Indeed, as I have suggested throughout this chapter, the Western is full of ghosts, ideas that intrude and return from what Schaefer calls “the dark trail of the past” (Schaefer: 61), bringing to mind that which cannot be resolved or integrated into neat narrative closure, forcing us, as a consequence, to continually revise the “relation of things.” It is precisely because of the pleasure of the Western’s epic tales, romance, and violent heroism that we read them, but it is for the secret subversions and dynamic challenges to the status quo that we re-read them. As Robinson argues, Westerns open a window on many crucial cultural themes “no more than half way” so that we are “compelled to return to these subtly mingled narratives precisely because we never see them fully through” (Robinson 1993: 3). At the end of Shane we are told, “He’s not gone. He’s here, in this place, in this place he gave us. He’s all around us and in us, and he always will be,” a sense akin to the continued presence of the Western itself, a haunting presence in American culture – always resonant, contradictory, fascinating, and, finally, in the words of Bob Starrett, “beyond comprehension” (Schaefer: 157, 158).
References and Further Reading Aquila, Richard, ed. (1996). Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Bold, Christine (1987). Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction 1860–1960. Bloomington, I.N.: Indiana University Press. Bower, Bertha Muzzy (1997). Lonesome Land [1912]. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Campbell, Neil (2000). The Cultures of the American New West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cawelti, John (1984). The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, O.H.: Bowling Green State University Press. Comer, Krista (1999). Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s
Writing. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Grey, Zane (1990). Riders of the Purple Sage [1912]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Guthrie, A. B. Jr. (1974). The Big Sky [1947]. Alexandria: Time-Life Books. Johnson, Dorothy M. (2005). The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1949]. Helena: Riverbend. Kollin, Susan (2001). “Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the Contemporary Western,” Contemporary Literature, 42, 3 (Autumn), 557–88. L’Amour, Louis (1963). How the West Was Won. New York: Bantam. Limerick, Patricia Nelson (1986). The Legacy of Conquest. New York: Norton.
The Western McCarthy, Cormac (1986). Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. London: Picador. McCarthy, Cormac (1992). All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage. McCarthy, Cormac (1995). The Crossing. London: Picador. McCarthy, Cormac (1998). Cities of the Plain. London: Picador. McMurtry, Larry (1968). In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. New York: Touchstone. McMurtry, Larry (1985). Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon and Schuster. Robinson, Forrest G. (1993). Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
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Robinson, Forrest G., ed. (1998). The New Western History: The Territory Ahead. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Schaefer, Jack (1989). Shane [1949]. London: Heinemann. Tatum, Stephen (2006). “Spectral Beauty and Forensic Aesthetics in the West,” Western American Literature, 41, 2 (Summer), 123–45. Taylor, J. Gordon, ed. (1987). A Literary History of the American West. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. Tompkins, Jane (1992). West of Everything. New York: Oxford University Press. Wister, Owen (1979). The Virginian [1902]. New York: Signet.
4
Postmodern U.S. Fiction Hans Bertens
The precise meaning of the terms “postmodern” and “postmodernism” has remained the subject of intense and often highly politicized debate ever since they came into wider circulation in the course of the 1970s. Although a variety of respected philosophers (Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty), sociologists (Jean Baudrillard, Scott Lash, David Harvey), and philosophically inclined literary critics (Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, Fredric Jameson) have put their authority behind this or that descriptive or theoretical framework, no single definition has been generally accepted. While for some theorists, postmodernism refers primarily to certain developments in literature, the arts, or architecture, for others it denotes the advent of a new sociocultural formation that has fundamentally changed the western world. But even with regard to postmodern literature there is no consensus in sight. We may, however, with some simplification, distinguish two main camps among those literary theorists and critics who have attempted a taxonomy of recent American literature. In Postmodern American Fiction (1998), Geyh et al. bring together a wide-ranging collection of recent American writing. We find the often radically experimental fiction of the 1960s, 1970s, and after, represented here by Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Ishmael Reed, John Barth, Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, Kathy Acker, Paul Auster, and others. But Postmodern American Fiction also includes many writers who are far less experimental, and even writers who seem to work in a recognizably realist mode. This second, and larger, group includes representatives of the “New Journalism” of the 1960s and 1970s (Truman Capote, Norman Mailer) and of the so-called “cyberpunk” science fiction of the 1980s and 1990s (William Gibson, Neal Stephenson), but it mostly consists of prominent representatives of the post-1960s’ boom in African American writing and in other “ethnic” American literatures, such as Native American literature, “Chicano” (Mexican American) literature, Chinese American literature, among others. While some of these stories or excerpts from novels would qualify as experimental, others would certainly not and would seem to have been selected because they reflect particular political themes, usually connected with race
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or gender, or both. The thematization of gender would also seem to have been the deciding factor in the inclusion of an excerpt from Joanna Russ’s feminist science fiction novel The Female Man (1975). Again, other selections, such as Bobbie Ann Mason’s short story “Shiloh,” which according to the author imitates country speech, offer a minutely detailed realism rather than anything else. In Ian Gregson’s Postmodern Literature (2004), we find a similarly inclusive concept of postmodern literature. Next to experimental fiction – Walter Abish’s How German Is It (1980) – Gregson discusses the so-called confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath and her contemporaries, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the writings of Toni Morrison, the poetry and essays of Adrienne Rich, the short story writer Raymond Carver, and others whose inclusion in a discussion of postmodern literature a good many theorists would contest. For those theorists, Gregson’s “Postmodern Realism” – the title of the chapter that discusses Carver’s fiction – would be a contradiction in terms. For them, postmodernism and realism are literary strategies that are so fundamentally at odds that the two are wholly incompatible. It is not surprising that in Gerhard Hoffmann’s massive From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction (2005), which may be taken as representative of this position, Morrison does not merit more than one or two references and Carver is not mentioned at all. As Hoffmann’s theoretical exposé makes clear, his definition of postmodern writing excludes them from its ranks and admits only those writers whose work may be seen as formally experimental and innovative. What is more, in order to qualify as postmodern, they must be experimental within a certain intellectual framework. While practically all the writers of the first group that I distinguished in Postmodern American Fiction would meet Hoffmann’s requirements, most writers in the second group would not. What is at stake here is definitely not the relative aesthetic merits of the novels and short stories in question. For Hoffmann and like-minded theorists, postmodern literature is characterized by a set of loosely related literary practices – specific strategies and devices – that work together to express a certain, ultimately philosophical, position. For the editors of Postmodern American Fiction and for theorists like Ian Gregson, postmodern writing first of all reflects a new cultural condition, a condition to whose emergence postmodern literature as defined by the stricter theorists has certainly contributed, but that essentially is the result of massive sociocultural shifts whose beginnings we can trace back to the 1950s and early 1960s and that in the past thirty-odd years have transformed American society. This postmodern cultural condition is characterized by an openness, a fluidity, and a tolerance of indeterminacy wholly lacking in an earlier, modern condition that was dominated by a deep-seated fear of uncertainty and undecidability, and was therefore always on its guard against losing control and against the threat of contamination. That modern condition was characterized by the countless boundaries it had erected to protect itself from what it saw as anarchy: boundaries between the races, between a “male” and a “female” sphere, between social classes, between legitimate and unacceptable forms of sexual behavior, between the sacred and the profane, between high art and popular art. The result was,
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from our perspective, an absurdly class-, race-, sex-, and gender-conscious world, in which everyone and everything that could not be neatly classified was perceived as a threat to what was seen as the natural order. That order was strictly hierarchical, dominated by (heterosexual) white males whose paid and unpaid enforcers strictly patrolled the boundaries to prevent wayward or rebellious spirits from upsetting the status quo. In one way or another, the greater part of the population was effectively marginalized and kept away from the centers of power. Under the postmodern condition, according to this line of reasoning, modern differentiation and hierarchization has largely given way to de-differentiation and to de-legitimation, to a situation in which formerly important boundaries have been dissolved or are ignored and in which former centers of power have lost much of their once seemingly unassailable legitimacy. As a result, the stable hierarchies of the modern condition have given way to an ever-changing sociocultural landscape in which social and cultural hierarchies are provisional, temporary, and in any case always under attack. The socially imposed silence of the marginalized has been shattered by a plethora of voices from all sides: formerly unheard feminist, ethnic, same-sex, and other voices now vie for our attention from an equal (or at least more equal) position with the traditional ones. These voices come to us in a media-saturated and partly virtual, high-tech world which allows easy manipulation and, because of its volatility, would seem to lack the depth that characterized earlier eras. However, they are almost invariably politically involved and would, in fact, seem to constitute the major counterforce to the perceived superficiality of the contemporary scene, a role that is not unlike that of the literature of high modernism, with its rejection of early twentiethcentury consumerism, almost a century ago. For a number of theorists, including the editors of Postmodern American Fiction, writing that reflects these new conditions – from formerly marginalized groups, from writers critical of mainstream culture, from science fiction writers who extrapolate the more unsettling aspects of current technology to create future worlds in which humans routinely interface with advanced hardware – counts as postmodern writing, even if it is not formally experimental or innovative. There are good arguments for that position. After all, a novel like Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) – excerpted in Postmodern American Fiction – is, in spite of its rather traditional character, widely seen as postmodern because it is taken to accurately reflect the shallow, frantic, mediadominated postmodern world we supposedly inhabit. But there are also serious problems with a definition of postmodern literature that accepts all recent literature as postmodern if it reflects the new sociocultural dispensation under which we live. If we include all the numerous new voices that reflect the explosively increased ethnic diversity and self-empowerment of the past forty years, and if we also include texts that address our immediate, day-to-day environment – we also find Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) in Postmodern American Fiction – nothing much is left out. The traditional realism of writers like Richard Russo, Richard Ford, or E. Annie Proulx, the noir extravaganzas of Cormac McCarthy, much of Jewish American literature (with the possible exception of Philip Roth), and a few
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other modes of writing would not be represented, but apart from that, pretty much the full spectrum of recent American writing would have to be considered postmodern. From the perspective of a large-scale, sociocultural analysis, which would focus on the thematic priorities of the literature in question, such inclusiveness would not be problematic. From a more literary perspective, however, it is not very helpful. In this chapter, I shall therefore assume that it is not enough for postmodern literature merely to reflect the postmodern cultural condition, but that it must actively distinguish itself from earlier modes of writing – in particular, realist and modernist writing – through its formal innovations. Such a criterion does not a priori eliminate the new voices of American literature in recent times. A good many writers representing those new voices have put formal innovation to excellent use; witness, for instance, the fiction of Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, and Gerald Vizenor.
Making It New, Again By the 1950s, the great wave of modernist innovation that in the first decades of the twentieth century had drastically changed the character of modern literature had effectively subsided. Poems and novels like T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) had forever changed the face of American literature, but after World War II, Ezra Pound’s summons to “make it new” had lost much of its appeal, except in the field of poetry. A few exceptions apart, the literature of the 1950s, for all its undeniable merits, was not very exciting from a formal point of view. Around 1960 that picture begins to change with, for instance, William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), and Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963), all in their own way surreal explorations of, respectively, an addict’s life, World War II, and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history, with V. already pursuing a number of characteristically postmodern themes (and introducing one of Pynchon’s hallmarks: the propensity of his characters to burst into song at both appropriate and inappropriate moments). Also published in 1962 was Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a novel largely in the form of a line-by-line commentary on a long and intentionally mediocre poem (with which the novel more or less opens). That commentary is offered by the poet’s neighbor, who presents himself as a Northern Slavonic king in exile and imagines himself to be virtually the only subject of his neighbor’s poem, so that we get over 150 pages of hilarious misinterpretations and an equally pointless index. All this was relatively mild compared with what was to follow. In Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), an off-beat rewriting of the well-known fairytale, the reader is suddenly confronted with a questionnaire about his or her enjoyment and understanding of the story so far. In the first chapter of Walter Abish’s novel Alphabetical Africa (1974) all words begin with the letter “a” (“Africa again: Albert arrives, alive and arguing about African art, about African angst, and also, alas, attacking Ashanti architecture”: Abish: 1–2). In the second chapter, all words begin with either
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“a” or “b.” In every following chapter, another letter is added until in chapter 26 the full range of the alphabet is available, at which point the procedure is reversed until we are again left only with words beginning with an “a” in chapter 52. In Up (1968) by Ronald Sukenick, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969), Double or Nothing (1971) by Raymond Federman, LETTERS (1979) by John Barth, City of Glass (1985) by Paul Auster, and many other comparable works, the author himself makes an appearance in his fiction, violating the boundary between the real word and the fictional one and creating intractable ontological problems. In Out (1973) by Sukenick the direction is reversed and we see a character leaving the fictional world in order to congratulate the author with what he has so far produced (given the novel’s doubtful readability an even more ironic gesture than Sukenick probably intended). In Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew (1979), in which the author Tony Lamont is trying to write a novel, Lamont’s characters are “free” whenever he does not actually use them in a scene and bitterly criticize his incompetence. They live, moreover, in a world that is curiously incomplete because its creator has left so much undescribed: At the side of the living room, a staircase leads “nowhere.” Oh, I don’t mean to say that it disappears into empty space, it simply leads to a kind of … haziness, in which there is supposed to be a hallway and bedroom doors: but there is absolutely nothing. Neither Ned nor I dare to say what is uppermost in our minds, that is, that if we walked into this haziness, we would walk somehow into another dimension. (Ned thinks – wishful thinking! – that we might walk into another book!) (Sorrentino: 30)
In John Barth’s LETTERS we find, next to the author, characters lifted from his earlier novels, so that the earlier fictional worlds that Barth created coalesce to constitute a new fictional reality. But fictional worlds may also break up: in Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1969) and other stories, the reader is, without further explanation, offered rather different versions of one and the same story. Using one single starting-point, Coover develops various fictional possibilities. Vladimir Nabokov’s light-hearted perversion of that honorable academic pursuit, literary interpretation, is echoed by similarly satirical treatments of various literary genres. Donald Barthelme uses a fairytale for purposes that have nothing in common with those of Walt Disney in the eponymous film, and borrows a scene from the tale of Rapunzel when he has Snow White let her hair hang out of a window to upset our expectations further. “It made me terribly nervous,” her friend Paul tells us, “that hair … some innocent person might come along, and see it, and conceive it as his duty to climb up” (Barthelme: 13). The Western is thoroughly demythologized in E. L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times (1960) and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), and becomes virtually unrecognizable in Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974). The detective novel provides the structure for Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985), which also have in common that in the end, and wholly contrary to our expectations, nothing is revealed.
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For the new novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing is impossible and nothing is sacred. Fictional characters are lifted from respected classics and put to work in a new fictional environment. Disregarding another ontological boundary, Robert Coover, in his The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), lets characters created by his protagonist come to life in a world from which its creator has completely disappeared. In John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) we get what is presented as the true story of Pocahontas and John Smith, only to find out that that true story was not the final version either. In The Public Burning (1977) by Robert Coover, which centers on the execution for high treason of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953, then vice-president Richard Nixon declares Ethel his love, just before she and her husband are publicly executed in New York City’s Times Square, in what is presented as the high point of a spectacular show. Historical characters are brought back to life, as in Sherman Alexie’s story “Captivity” (1993) in which Mary Rowlandson, author of a famous Puritan captivity narrative in which she describes her capture by a band of Native Americans, is called to account for her unfeeling and starkly negative portrayal of her captors. And there is the option of stark outrageousness, as in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), where the American soldier Tyrone Slothrop calls baffled attention to himself because his erections in wartime London accurately predict direct hits by German V-2s.
Modern and Postmodern This brief inventory gives a first indication of the character of postmodern writing. Some of these antics seem at first sight merely playful. American postmodernism undeniably takes part of its inspiration from the more playful side of the experimental continental European avant-garde of the early twentieth century. It might even be argued that American postmodernism is in part a belated flowering of that avantgarde on American soil. But, like the European avant-garde, postmodernism has very serious undertones. Moreover, it also continues the tradition of the very serious high modernism of the early twentieth century that is perhaps best represented by James Joyce’s at times irreverent but highly serious novel Ulysses (1922). Postmodernism addresses many themes that we see emerging in high modernism, but in so doing its stance is at once more radical and more light-hearted. Inevitably, then, its strategies are different from those of modernism. Modernist literature is very much preoccupied with how its characters experience their world. It shows us how the outside world becomes part of their inner world through a process of highly individual perception and interpretation. The key fiction of Proust, Mann, Faulkner, and others all illustrate modernism’s focus on states of consciousness and how consciousness allows us to be in touch with the past, both individual and collective, and thereby establishes authentic personal continuity. Moreover, although there is no guarantee of such a breakthrough in awareness, in many modernist novels that state of consciousness is at some point enriched by a flash of
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sudden insight that either leads to increased self-knowledge or else to new significance, new meaning – or both. These moments of individual epiphany – to use James Joyce’s term – are of great importance in a modern world from which traditional, shared meaning has largely disappeared. High modernist fiction is well crafted, and although it portrays a world in which the continuities of an earlier era are seriously threatened and are already giving way to a more fundamental instability, it does not really reflect that new discontinuity in its forms. Coherence and continuity still provide the frame of reference, even if they can only be achieved with the help of a borrowed mythical framework, as in Ulysses. It is that – ultimately aesthetic – coherence that makes it possible for modernist texts to offer what is at least the illusion of overall significance. As T. S. Eliot famously said of Ulysses, in its underlying mythical structure Joyce had found “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Kermode: 177). Postmodern literature is far less concerned with formal or aesthetic continuity and coherence. In many postmodern novels the narrative movement is not invariably progressive, but may at any point go lateral, so that the narrative’s structure is not so much developed, but rather added to in the manner of early picaresque fiction. As a result, complete sections may seem irrelevant to what would appear to be the major narrative. In much postmodern literature, narrative energy and the sheer joy of invention take precedence over considerations of form. But, at a deeper level, postmodern writers have given up on what the French theorist of the postmodern, Jean-François Lyotard, has called “the solace of good forms” (Lyotard: 81). For postmodern writers, nothing has the power to impose form on the endless complexity of the contemporary world. They strongly doubt that the world is coherent and in any meaningful way continuous, and so refuse the suggestion that art, through its aesthetic harmony, or that the self, through the operations of individual consciousness, may create order where such order seems fundamentally lacking. The various sins against coherence and order that we find in postmodern texts may have their playful dimension, but they also point to an underlying view that differs sharply from that of the modernists. Postmodern writers are deeply skeptical of ideas of ultimate order and equally so of those luminous moments that bring understanding and significance. When Benny Profane, one of Thomas Pynchon’s protagonists in V., is asked, at the end of the novel, whether he has learned anything in the course of his seemingly pointless meanderings, he immediately confirms our intuition: “Profane didn’t have to think long. ‘No,’ he said, ‘offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing’ ” (Pynchon: 428). If epiphanies occur at all, they are framed in irony so that their status remains undecidable. It is because of postmodernism’s abandonment of the defenses put up against chaos and meaninglessness by the modernists that its representational strategies, its ways of representing the world, can be so easily distinguished from those of high modernism. In fact, sometimes there would seem to be no representational strategy at all. William Gass, celebrated as an exemplary postmodern author by the first generation of postmodern critics, explicitly tells us that his novel Omensetter’s Luck (1966), which is
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situated in a small town in late nineteenth-century Ohio, makes no representational claims at all and must be viewed as an autonomous work of art. According to Gass, the novel “really says nothing about the 1890s, nothing about Ohio river towns, of which I have no knowledge whatsoever. Fiction, goddamn it, is fiction. When will that simple truth be acknowledged?” (LeClair and McCaffery: 164). Such claims, however, should be viewed with due suspicion. Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), a novel that he started in the late 1960s and that is formally far more postmodern than Omensetter’s Luck, illustrates that we cannot take such a total dismissal of the referential potential of his fiction very seriously. A novel that presents as its protagonist an historian who specializes in Nazi Germany is at least in some ways rather firmly anchored in our world, no matter what his creator may say. Gass’s historian, Kohler, may have his personal struggles with reality – he wonders if there is “a real Real behind all this rigmarole” (Gass: 422) and tells himself that “here lies young anonymous kohler who died from a prolonged lack of reference” (Gass: 371) would be an appropriate text for his tombstone – but Kohler’s outrageous statements and behavior only have the power to affect us because he is so obviously embedded in a world we recognize. The large majority of postmodern writers would not follow Gass in his defense of the total autonomy and self-referentiality of literary art. But neither would they claim a fully representational status for their texts. Postmodern writing characteristically is both referential and non-referential. With only a few (and rather uninteresting) exceptions, it presents us with two incompatible sets of reading instructions: we encounter textual elements that strongly suggest referentiality and create the illusion of reality as we know it (or possibly might know it), and elements that expressly counteract such an illusion and that tell us that we are not dealing with any recognizable reality at all. To put this differently, we get textual elements that suggest depth and meaning and invite traditional interpretation, while simultaneously other textual elements will flaunt their distance from the world we know and ridicule interpretational initiatives. For readers unsympathetic to postmodernism, such proceedings can only result in aesthetic and interpretational white noise. From a more generous perspective, however, a postmodern text sets up a dialogue between referentiality and non- or antireferentiality, between realism and anti-realism, between historical verisimilitude and anti-history. It is both representational and anti-representational, and interpretation will depend on which side of that dialogue we prefer to hear (or find more interesting), and on our intellectual response to postmodernism’s peculiar way of sitting on the referential fence.
Metafiction We are all familiar with the narrative strategies that make us believe that we are dealing with reality. But many readers are less familiar – and comfortable – with fiction’s possibilities to counteract the illusion of reality. If we scroll back for a moment to the list of postmodern interventions presented above, we find that many
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of them are examples of what is called “metafiction,” a narrative strategy that explicitly or implicitly uses the ontological boundary between a fictional world and the real world of the reader as a source of narrative and thematic possibilities. In so doing, metafiction unmasks the fictionality of the world in which it appears and breaks, at least for the time being, the illusion of referentiality. Explicit metafictional strategies include introducing the author into his or her own text, but also parallel – and mutually exclusive – developments in a story or novel that because of their very presence betray the author’s hand. Examples of implicit metafictional strategies would be the appearance of one or more characters taken from an already existing literary text or even the complete reworking of a text. In E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), the first name of Doctorow’s character Coalhouse Walker will strike us as outlandish until we realize that both character and the subplot in which he appears are lifted from Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1881). Such so-called intertextual strategies depend for their effectiveness on the reader’s familiarity with, in this case, literary history. Other implicitly metafictional strategies involve “real” history. In a postmodern historical novel, characters from different historical periods may be brought together (as in the Sherman Alexei story mentioned above), historical characters from the same period may be brought together and may be made to go through scenes that in real life never took place (as in Ragtime or Robert Coover’s The Public Burning), or history may be rewritten altogether, as in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), in which aviator Charles Lindbergh is elected president of the United States on the strength of his sudden fame following his solo flight across the Atlantic. Here, too, recognition of the author’s hand, and the subsequent breaking of the illusion of reality, depends on extra-textual factors: our familiarity with history. These alternatives to official history always emerge from, or are embedded in, fictionalizations of history as we know it. Their effectiveness as anti-history, as what Linda Hutcheon has called “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon: 105–23) depends to a large degree on a realistic representation of the history we are familiar with. There are countless ways to confront the reader with the constructed character of a fictional world. Thomas Pynchon has a marked preference for sheer impossibility, as in his Against the Day (2006), where travel from one Pole to the other is greatly facilitated by a direct connection through a channel so spacious that it even accommodates inhabitation. More generally, a cavalier disregard for the laws of logic and cause and effect will effectively break the illusion of referentiality – but only if that disregard is incidental and not structural, in which case we would find ourselves in a different world altogether, and would be far less inclined to relate the fiction to the world we know. Why is postmodern fiction so intent on exposing its own constructedness, its artificiality? One reason is its deep awareness that fiction can never do justice to reality. For postmodern writers, language is simply not up to the task. Although they rarely go as far as some of the poststructuralist theorists who have been associated with postmodernism, such as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in their distrust of
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language, they certainly feel that their realist and modernist precursors had an unwarranted faith in language’s potential for giving us direct access to reality. Instead of offering us a window on the real, language has become an instrument of doubtful reliability and would, by its very nature, only seem capable of presenting a distorted picture. But even if language were capable of showing us the world as it truly is, the chaotic and unstructured nature of reality would effectively forestall that. It is not coincidental that the motif of the labyrinth keeps recurring in postmodern fiction or that a good many postmodern novels – from John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) – offer fictional labyrinths in which the reader may easily get lost. For postmodern writers, the great, overarching explanations of the world and its doings that were available to earlier generations – the explanations that Jean-François Lyotard has called “grand narratives” – are no longer believable. The comforts of Christianity, of all-encompassing philosophical systems such as Hegel’s, of a Marxist future with an ultimately victorious proletariat, of the Enlightenment idea of an inexorable march toward reason and harmony, or even, at a far more mundane level, of psychoanalytic explanations or of a belief in a free market that will ultimately benefit us all, must be viewed with the greatest suspicion. All such narratives simplify the world in unacceptable ways. From the postmodern perspective, it makes a good deal more sense to assume that there is no ultimate goal and that there is no underlying structure that determines the future or in unseen ways controls our lives. The modernist model, in which what appears on the surface is the manifestation of an invisible, underlying structure – as, for example, in the Marxist base-and-superstructure model, or in Freud’s layered model of mental operations (the conscious versus the unconscious) – has therefore lost its credibility. “If you mean doing psychological studies of some kind, no, I’m not so interested,” Donald Barthelme said to an interviewer. “ ‘Going beneath the surface’ has all sorts of positive-sounding associations, as if you were a Cousteau of the heart. I’m not sure there’s not just as much to be seen if you remain a student of the surface” (LeClair and McCaffery: 43). And Vladimir Nabokov, famous for his outspokenness (and unashamed aristocratic outlook), refers in one of his novels to Freud as “an Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella” (Nabokov: 116). The simplifications that a grand narrative offers have obvious advantages, as the dwarfs in Barthelme’s version of Snow White realize only too well: “Snow White had added a dimension of confusion and misery to our lives. Whereas once we were simple bourgeois who knew what to do, now we are complex bourgeois who are at a loss. We do not like this complexity. We circle it warily” (Barthelme: 87–8). But intellectual honesty demands the disposition toward disbelief that most of all characterizes postmodernism. To signal their suspicion of grand narratives and modernist “deep” structures, which all tell us that there is an invisible reality – religious, philosophical, socioeconomic, psychoanalytical – that is, in a sense, more “real” and “authentic” than the reality we see, postmodern writers deliberately create “flat” worlds or worlds that
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confusingly alternate “flatness” and “depth.” Although rarely simply caricatural, the characters of postmodern fiction are equally rarely the fully believable, seemingly authentic characters of modernist or realist fiction and usually oscillate between cartoon-like surface and humanist depth. Some postmodern writers choose to give their characters names that emphasize that status. In Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), an otherwise serious attack on the repressive character of American mainstream culture, we meet Biff Musclewhite, PaPa LaBas, and Hinckle Von Vampton (sole survivor of the Knights Templar in the modern world). Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 introduces Mike Fallopian, Manny DiPresso, and a psychoanalyst not accidentally called Hilarius. The effect, in a reversion of our general approach to fictional characters, is that we do not take them seriously until the narrative invites us to do so. But even then we are free to refuse the invitation. Since postmodern fiction is so ambivalent in its strategies, and shifts the responsibility for interpretation to the reader, we have a great leeway in responding to its worlds, greater than realism or modernism ever permitted.
Representation Metafiction calls our attention to the fictionality of the text in question. It reminds us that what we are reading is merely a representation of the world, no matter how convincing the illusion. Postmodern writing thematizes representation not only because it wants to question the possibility of true representation, but equally to ask how the representations that surround us are constructed, by whom they are controlled, for whom they are intended. Since with the demise of the “grand narratives” we must remain ignorant of the true nature of the world, all representations of the world that we encounter – such as ethical, political, religious, racial, sexual systems of value – must necessarily be social constructions. These representations are, in the final analysis, narratives we have developed over time and keep on repeating to ourselves. Postmodernism, then, suggests that all beliefs we hold are only narratives, a tissue of unfounded representations. As Robert Coover’s Richard Nixon tells Ethel Rosenberg, only minutes before her execution, “We’ve both been victims of the same lie, Ethel! There is no purpose, there are no causes, all that’s just stuff we make up to hold the goddam world together” (Coover: 436). It is postmodernism’s self-imposed mission to expose representations for what they are. Since we can only know history through its representations, historical accounts, too, must be exposed as narratives with an undecidable relation to the world they claim to represent (a view with which a good many historians would agree). And the same goes for literature, with its sometimes extremely persuasive representations of the world we think we know. Postmodernism suggests that all modes and forms of representation serve a purpose – a purpose that, as the French historian Michel Foucault has argued, always includes power. Reality, as we know it, is the provisional end product of representations, or discourses, to use a Foucauldian key term rather loosely, that have developed over time – representations offered by Islam, the Amish,
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Chinese socialism, American democracy – and that use us, so to speak, to perpetuate themselves and even to increase their power. Our narratives about the world – in which we merely act as a conductor – actually create that world. Postmodernism suggests that we are not much more than puppets in a play of interlocking or, as the case may be, conflicting discourses. This is not to say that postmodernism is merely nihilistic. After all, it prefers to sit on the fence, and so also holds out the possibility of true representation, the possibility of authentic being. Its pendular motion between representation and its denial warns us above all to be vigilant, to be suspicious of all discourses that pretend to know and represent reality. It asks who is in charge of a particular representation, a particular discourse, and asks that age-old question, cui bono – who benefits? In the final analysis, through its fictional strategies postmodernism unmasks power, a power that hides even in the most familiar and seemingly natural narratives, and enables us to counteract it. References and Further Reading Abish, Walter (1974). Alphabetical Africa. New York: New Directions. Barthelme, Donald (1967). Snow White. New York: Atheneum. Bertens, Hans (1995). The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge. Bertens, Hans and Fokkema, Douwe, eds. (1997). International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bukatman, Scott (1993). Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Butler, Christopher (2002). Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connor, Steven, ed. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coover, Robert (1977). The Public Burning. New York: Viking. Currie, Mark (1998). Postmodern Narrative Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gass, William (1995). The Tunnel. New York: Knopf. Geyh, Paula, Leebron, Fred G., and Levy, Andrew, eds. (1998). Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton. Gregson, Ian (2004). Postmodern Literature. London: Arnold. Hassan, Ihab (1982). The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. Madison, W.I.: University of Wisconsin Press.
Hoffmann, Gerhard (2005). From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hutcheon, Linda (1988). The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Kermode, Frank, ed. (1975). Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber. LeClair, Thomas and McCaffery, Larry, eds. (1983). Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Lucy, Niall (1997). Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. Nabokov, Vladimir (1959). The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. New York: New Directions. Perloff, Marjorie, ed. (1989). Postmodern Genres. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Pynchon, Thomas (1964). V. [1962]. New York: Bantam. Smyth, Edmund J., ed. (1991). Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction. London: Batsford. Sorrentino, Gilbert (1987). Mulligan Stew [1979]. New York: Grove.
5
Modern Gothic Marilyn Michaud
Midway into the twentieth century, Dwight D. Eisenhower began his presidency with a warning: “The world and we have passed the midway point of a century of continuing challenge. We sense with all our faculties that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. This fact defines the meaning of this day.” For Eisenhower, the 1950s were a “time of tempest,” a time that had seen thrones toppled and vast empires destroyed, a time infused by shadow and the fear of inevitable repetition: “How far have we come in man’s long pilgrimage from darkness toward light? Are we nearing the light – a day of freedom and peace for all mankind? Or are the shadows of another night closing in upon us?” (Eisenhower 1953). While a great believer in the beneficence of progress, Eisenhower also feared the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” (Eisenhower 1953), a power locked in the movement of time. Although his warning is symptomatic of Cold War anxieties regarding the spread of communism and the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the plot of impending peril and promise is not unique to his historical moment. From Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton, American presidents have articulated their vision of the national condition in similar binary terms. Employing a Gothic lexicon of corruption and degeneration, they have repeatedly punctuated the virtue of American progress with a deep suspicion of the perfectibility of man and of the progressive movement of history in time. The rhetorical structure of these presidential speeches is always the evocation of fear followed by the promise of renewal and return, to present a dialectics of good and evil, virtue and corruption, tradition and progress. Mid-century critics of the Gothic generally ignored the genre’s historical or political contours, focusing instead on symbolism and psychological interiority. Irving Malin’s New American Gothic (1962), for example, exemplifies this approach. Malin locates the distinction between contemporary Gothic writers and their nineteenthcentury predecessors in their lack of interest in political tensions and their engagement with the “disorder of the buried life” (Malin: 5). Organized around the theme of narcissism, for Malin the typical Gothic hero is crippled by self-love. Contrasted with
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those heroes found in Hawthorne and Melville, who are “great” and “Faustian” in their narcissism, the characters of New American Gothic cannot demonstrate their self-love in strong ways: “The typical hero is a weakling. The only way he can escape from that anxiety which constantly plagues him is through compulsion. He ‘loves’ others because he loves himself: he compels them to mirror his desires” (Malin: 6). Yet, however valuable Freudian psychology has been in explaining the persistence of the genre in a nation seemingly divorced from traditional Gothic impulses, it is useful to remember that this interpretive framework arises out of a political culture that eschewed social and ideological conflict in favor of an all-pervading liberal consensus. This chapter, therefore, focuses on long-standing fears of national dissolution that emerge from historical points of opposition. If images of innovation, expansion, and flourishing freedom are a recurring feature of twentieth-century political discourse, the narrative of America is also infused with a Gothic counter-narrative of stagnation, corruption, and degeneration. The repeated call for restoration and renewal highlights the persistent fear of decline that lurks beneath the liberal belief in self-determination and progress. As the exceptional violence and unparalleled scientific discoveries of the twentieth century suggested, history is not a linear, irreversible continuum ushering in the progressive notion of liberty; rather than a steady movement from savagery toward peace, civilization remains vulnerable to the cyclical movement of history and the corrosive effects of time. This fundamental paradox at the heart of the national narrative reveals what J. G. A. Pocock calls the “quarrel with modernity”: that dimension of historical pessimism in the nation’s utopian thought; the realization that the American vision of a “chosen people” is not guaranteed by nature; that for freedom to last, it requires an apocalyptic framework for its own affirmation. “Even in America,” Pocock writes, “the republic faces the problem of its own ultimate finitude, and that of its virtue, in space and time” (Pocock 1975: 540–1). Gothic literature’s imaginative response to this fear of an unknown future and to the disturbing possibility that progress is also a movement toward decline is rendered in narratives of uncanny return, and of moral and spiritual pollution. Despite a century of social and technological advancement, tales of past sins coming home to roost, of ancient worlds punching a hole in the present, of nature and culture engaged in timeless battles for supremacy persistently disturb and resist the plot of growth and linear time. As Eric Savoy notes, the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States is that “the past constantly inhabits the present, [and] progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its cost” (Hogle: 167). Twentieth-century Gothic not only charts the damage caused by the embrace of modernity, but, to borrow Pocock’s phrase, also functions to “furnish liberalism with one of its modes of self-criticism and self-doubt” (Pocock 1987: 341). The fear of modernity and the degenerative force of time are recurring themes in the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft was less interested in authorial intent or the mechanics of plot than in the “creation of a given sensation,” which, according to his definition of “cosmic fear,” elicits a “breathless and
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unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces” (Lovecraft 1985: 426). These forces emerge either from an undiscovered and long dormant world, or in a sudden moment of horrific realization that monstrosity emanates from within. Those fictional protagonists who seek to transcend time by entering or searching the “known universe’s utmost rim” (Lovecraft 1985: 427) ultimately face madness and dissolution. In “Dagon” (1919), one of Lovecraft’s first published stories, an escaped prisoner of war discovers an ancient world buried in a putrid swamp. A confrontation with the “stupendous monster of nightmares” (Lovecraft 1985: 16) leads to madness and to a vision of ultimate destruction: “I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind – of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium” (Lovecraft 1985: 17). In this and subsequent tales, the past is accessed through dreams, pseudo–memories, or acts of possession revealing, in nightmarish modes, the futility of the belief in progress and linear time. In Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” (1926), on the other hand, the protagonist exists outside time: trapped in the bowels of an ancient castle, he has no sense of a past or a future, only a desire to reach the unknown world beyond his dark and decayed prison. Yet what he confronts there is not an otherworldly being, but his own monstrous reflection: I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. (Lovecraft 1997: 5)
Whether Lovecraft’s fiction depicts a lurid, alien landscape or the nightmarish landscape of the mind, the organizing mode of much of his fiction is the “mocking and incredible shadow of time” (Lovecraft 1997: 328). For Lovecraft, time was the ultimate foe in which both present and future worlds foreshadowed doom and degeneration. Eschewing any continuity of time, his fiction deals primarily with that murky line between reality and hallucination and with the Gothic concerns of historical stagnation and repetition. As David Punter notes, “it is difficult to tell which is greater in Lovecraft’s fiction, his fear of the past, or his fear of the future” (Punter: 40). It is this ambivalent and often paradoxical view of history that characterizes much of his work. Tales of ruin and decay in the present world betray his distrust of progress and modernity as well as his nostalgia for the past where, as Lovecraft states, “the fixed laws of nature” are the only safeguard against “the assaults of chaos” (Lovecraft 1985: 426). In Lovecraft’s fictional world, these fixed laws are often imbued with racial overtones registering the fear of degeneration and miscegenation by the expanding working class and immigrant culture of urban, industrializing America. Tales such as “Dagon” (1919), “The Lurking Fear” (1922), and “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925) are generally regarded as thinly veiled expressions of Lovecraft’s fear of racial pollution and alien encroachment (Punter: 38). Equally, the thwarting of nature’s laws is also
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depicted in his prophetic tales of disaster. In “The Colour Out of Space” (1927), a meteorite lands in a rural idyll leaving behind an indescribable, toxic substance which infects the landscape, resulting in madness and decay. As in most of Lovecraft’s works, modern science proves useless in the face of a phenomenon which is “beyond all Nature as we know it” (Lovecraft 1997: 99). While Lovecraft invokes the fear of degeneracy through dream worlds of past ages and alien civilizations, other writers in the first half of the twentieth century located the fear of decay much closer to home. Reminiscent of nineteenth-century Gothic visions of decrepit family lines weighed down by past sins, or haunted by the legacy of slavery and the loss of past glory, Southern writers such as Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor depict degeneracy as a form of spiritual, physical, or emotional crippling. Termed “Southern Gothic”, this subgenre combines traditional conventions of the Gothic with macabre and grotesque depictions of the Southern experience. The pygmy figure, Jesus Fever, and Miss Wisteria in Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), and McCullers’ stunted hunchback, Cousin Lymon in “The Ballad of the Sad Café” (1951), for example, are each freakishly out of proportion. While physically damaged or grotesque bodies feature prominently, mentally disabled and morally corrupt characters trace alternate forms of degeneration. From Faulkner’s Benjy Compson, Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, and Flannery O’Connor’s misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955), the emphasis on deformity, disability, and despair in Southern writing registers (often ironically) either nostalgia for states of innocence and past gentility or the degenerative effects of familial dysfunction or racial hatred. Isolated and alienated in the modern world, the characters in Southern Gothic fiction often long to resurrect history or struggle to repudiate a burdensome past. In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930), time is rendered not in chronological order but in the communal memories of the townspeople. The narrative structure itself is cyclical; the story begins where it ends with the funeral of Emily Grierson, the elderly relic of a bygone era. Yet both Emily and the town’s elders are trapped in a state of historical stasis unable to move forward, to embrace the new generation and its “modern ideas” or to revive the rotting corpse of the past. The older generation, “to whom all the past is not a diminishing road” but a “huge meadow which no winter every quite touches” (Faulkner 1992: 329), are, like Emily, stuck in what Sartre called “the frozen moment” (Sartre: 180), neither living nor dead but sealed in a ghostly tableau: Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows – she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house – like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation. (Faulkner 1992: 329)
In Faulkner’s Gothic tale, history can never be fully resurrected nor forgotten, only made palpable in the Confederate uniforms of the funeral goers, or the desiccated body of Emily’s dead lover.
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Faulkner’s interest in historical stagnation and degeneration is also manifest in his Yoknapatawpha County novels, which feature a fictionalized world haunted by incest, suicide, and racial violence. The Sound and the Fury (1929) traces the downfall of the Compsons, a once noble Southern family from heroic stock. The story is told from the perspective of three family members and the Compson’s black servant, Dilsey, who each have their own unique concept of time. The youngest brother Benjy, simpleminded and innocent, is portrayed as existing outside time in a chaotic mix of past, present, and future. Yet, for the other members of the family, Benjy is also the constant and static reminder of their degeneration. Quentin Compson, on the other hand, is obsessed with time and with the hopelessness and loss it inevitably brings. Jason Compson seeks to possess time by attempting to defeat what he perceives as the family’s fallen destiny. Faulkner’s novel depicts a family in ruins in a world with no hope for a future. Only in Dilsey, who does not dwell on the past and who always knows the correct time, is there a possibility of redemption. In his analysis of the novel, Sartre comments on what he sees as the level of Faulkner’s despair, which, in his view, has more to do with the agony of the modern human condition than a Southern cri de coeur: For him, as for all of us, the future is closed. Everything we see and experience impels us to say, “This can’t last.” And yet change is not even conceivable, except in the form of a cataclysm. We are living in a time of impossible revolutions, and Faulkner uses his extraordinary art to describe our suffocation and a world dying of old age. (Sartre: 271)
While Faulkner later claimed that he did not believe in the end of man – instead trusting that when “the last ding-dong of doom” sounds, man will not only endure, but prevail – he nonetheless understood his generation’s fear which, in 1950, he linked to Cold War anxieties of military power: Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. (Nobel Prize acceptance speech)
Faulkner’s evocation of the terror of nuclear erasure accurately points to the nature of fear in the mid-twentieth century. In the popular cultural imagination, threats of technological overdevelopment and of a monolithic global power invading the United States became the central themes in fiction, film, and other modes of discourse. In science fiction, the story of Cold War America is most commonly represented in what Susan Sontag calls the “imagination of disaster” (Sontag: 222), a narrative form that repeatedly portrays the country in the grip of an emergency dramatizing the need for group consensus or the lone maverick sacrificing himself to save humanity. Popular Gothic narratives of invasion, infection, or degeneration, on the other hand, often
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begin in the fatalistic aftermath of disaster where no hero or group cohesion can emerge. Mid-century vampire tales, for example, while often engaging in science fiction themes of nuclear destruction, present a pessimistic view of civilization as locked in a cyclical movement of history. By their very nature, vampires challenge the idea of time as progressive and ordered, and of man moving ever forward to a state of perfection. Functioning metonymically for everything that is perceived as corrupt, degenerate, or “Other” in culture, the vampire’s persistent return, usually at a moment of national vulnerability, functions as a horrific reminder that history is inevitable and repetitive. In the early postwar years, this moment of vulnerability is connected to the fear of nuclear destruction and fallout. Charles Beaumont’s short story, “Place of Meeting” (1953), imagines a world in which “gas bombs,” “disease,” and “flying pestilences” cover the earth in “three days and three nights” eliminating all forms of life. Like other narratives of decline, Beaumont’s tale begins where it ends: the narrative, like history, is cyclical; only after total destruction can the process of regeneration or renewal begin. In this destroyed world, national degeneration is the result of man’s scientific hubris and quest for power; the only survivors are a collection of vampires who, after scouring the earth for signs of life, return to their graves until humanity rebuilds: “It ain’t the first time. It ain’t the last … it’ll start all over again and folks’ll build their cities – new folks with new blood – and then we’ll wake up (Beaumont: 374–5). The Gothic figure of the vampire resists America’s optimistic narrative of renewal, revealing instead the steady movement from birth and growth toward corruption and degeneration. Richard Matheson’s popular novella I Am Legend (1954) is constructed around a similar theme. Employing the popular metaphor of infection in its depiction of a world overrun by vampires, Matheson’s text engages with the contemporary fear of communist takeover, while also presenting a theory of civilization as perpetually under threat by corruption and the cyclical movement of history. In Matheson’s dystopian narrative, the vision of progress as sequential time and a dominated future is undercut from the onset by the return of the vampire and the trope of “the last man.” Just why the vampire has returned to the modern world of track housing and supermarkets is unfathomable. The solution, Robert Neville decides, is to revisit his own history: “Maybe if he went back. Maybe the answer lay in the past, in some obscure crevice of memory. Go back then, he told his mind, go back” (Matheson: 51). As the narrative switches from the present to the past, Neville considers the events leading up to the epidemic. Clues lie in his time as a soldier in Panama, in the bombings that followed, and in the war that “nobody won” (Matheson: 56) but which unleashed dust storms, plagues of insects, and disease. The vampire’s return, he surmises, coincides with the execution of military power which, over the course of time, destroyed the world, leaving only Neville inexplicably immune to infection. However, while the germ within is revealed to be the cause of the vampire infection, the disease does not originate in the modern world but erupts out of “deep history.” In I Am Legend, history is shown to be deterministic, a series of cycles periodically purged by the
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flames of war, followed by rebirth and growth. For the new society to rebuild, all forms of corruption must be eliminated, including Neville who, in the eyes of the new breed of vampires, is the true enemy, “the last of the old race” (Matheson: 167). As Neville realizes in the last moments of his life, history does indeed repeat itself: “Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever” (Matheson: 170). The fear of science and technology has been the staple of science fiction and Gothic horror since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, disrupting notions of the human and the virtue of scientific progress. As Patrick McGrath and Bradford Morrow observed in 1992, “We stand at the end of a century whose history has been stained perhaps like no other by blacker urges of human nature. The prospect of apocalypse – through human science rather than divine intervention – has redefined the contemporary psyche” (McGrath and Morrow: xiv). Stephen King understands this fear of apocalypse well, and his fiction updates the national sense of fragility and vulnerability for a post-Vietnam era. Like his predecessors, King’s novels are organized around a view of small-town or rural America under threat by corruption and the movement of time which he links to technological advancement. Acknowledging the influence of writers such as Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Richard Matheson on his own work, King traces the modern “seeds of terror” to Cold War America: War babies were raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium-90 in our milk from nuclear testing. (King 1982: 23)
King’s fiction is haunted by this past, by the collision of the American dream with the Cold War nightmares of invasion, scientific overdevelopment, and nuclear apocalypse. There is a sense of déjà vu when reading King’s fiction, a strange feeling that this has all happened before, that his contemporary narratives of America burdened by the past are appropriations of familiar fears reworked for a new generation. Like American presidential speeches, King’s popular horror novels possess a mimetic quality, a re-articulation of themes that persistently haunt the American imagination. King’s horrors take place in small communities where past crimes lurk beneath a flimsy tissue of decency and where technology not only disturbs the bucolic landscape, but destroys it. In Christine (1983) the automobile, that quintessential emblem of progress and social mobility, morphs into an instrument of damage and ruin. Possessed by the corrupt soul of its previous owner and bent on enacting revenge, the 1957 Plymouth Fury gains strength in a re-occurring cycle of destruction and renewal. From The Shining (1977) to Desperation (1996), ghosts from the past (or from another dimension as in the Lovecraft-inspired possession of Collie Entragian) repeatedly return to disrupt the certainty and complacency of the modern world.
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King’s vampire novel, Salem’s Lot (1975), deals directly with the movement of time and fear of degeneration. When King’s protagonist, Ben Mears, contemplates the history of Jerusalem’s Lot, he decides “This town has the wrong name. It ought to be Time” (King: 170). Before the vampire infestation, time was seen to operate on a predictable timetable in which everything stayed the same and where nothing terrible happened. But the Lot’s veneer of virtue and historical stasis masks an inner corruption; beneath the bucolic surface of the old-fashioned republic lurks a community in the throes of decay. Commercial progress has slowly “eaten up the last of the independents” (King: 64), consuming the town’s industry, while behind closed doors, infidelity, domestic violence, infanticide, and religious doubt fester and burst. Initially, the signs of rot are only palpable in the air, in the smell of “something bad, like spoiled meat” (King: 50); in the odor of “old corruption” (King: 137), and in the ghost of Hubert Martsen. But with the arrival of Kurt Barlow and Richard Straker, the town’s final trajectory toward degeneration is complete. As the prologue to Salem’s Lot suggests, history is not static or progressive but cyclical: It is not the first town in American history to just dry up and blow away, and will probably not be the last, but it is one of the strangest. Ghost towns are common in the American Southwest, where communities grew up almost overnight around rich gold and silver lodes and then disappeared almost as rapidly when the veins of ore played out, leaving empty stores and hotels and saloons to rot emptily in desert silence. (King 1999: 6)
Because Jerusalem’s Lot remained inattentive to the outside world and to the insidious infiltration of power and corruption, it is exploited by an old world terror. Infected and drained, it ends as a ghost town. And, like Matheson’s lone survivor, Ben Mears’ task is to return to the past, to search history for the cause of the town’s degeneration and the return of the vampire. What postwar writers such as Matheson and King infused into the national psyche was the realization that Gothic monsters were no longer hideous others, or lonely misfits. Instead, monstrosity had, as Judith Halberstam observes, “moved inside the house, the body, the head, the skin, the nation” (Halberstam: 162). The cycle of child possession tales of the 1960s and 1970s, which locate evil not only inside the home but inside the womb, typify this new perspective. Novels such as Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan (1962), Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), and David Seltzer’s The Omen (1976), while organized around the traditional Gothic binary of rationality versus superstition, uncover a nation in a state of spiritual and moral exhaustion. Atrophied by the effects of consumer capitalism and mass media, the marks of degeneration occur not on the palpable body of the Antichrist, but on his victims. Scarred by acquisitiveness or lost faith, the characters in these novels are proven ripe for permeation and conquest. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby embodies this modern condition. While ostensibly the victim of a diabolical conspiracy, in Levin’s tale, Rosemary is revealed as the primary
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agent of cultural decline. Despite her positioning in a decade that included the civil rights and women’s movements, the beat generation, and the Vietnam War, Rosemary embraces the traditional role of wife and mother. Easily seduced by consumer culture, she lives in a fantasy world in which media images market happiness as a purchasable commodity, a theme magnified by the novel’s frequent references to brand names, designer labels, and celebrities. Rendered pliant and inattentive by television, shopping, and other distractions of postwar prosperity, she is blind not only to the national turmoil of 1960s’ America, but also to the misuse of power enacted against her by her husband. Rosemary, like Chris MacNeil in Blatty’s The Exorcist, inhabits the world of the theater, a world of performance and imposture where characters don masks and where no one is exactly who they seem. Underlying the novel’s theme of Cold War conspiracy is the persistent tension between the real world and the world of make-believe, between Rosemary’s awareness and willful blindness. Ultimately, it is not the presence of a demon child that proves horrifying; rather, it is self-deception and the repudiation of reality that is the essence of evil in the modern world. Rosemary’s demonic child is merely the corrupt embodiment of national inertia and stagnation. The loss of faith and the consumptive habits depicted in postwar Gothic texts reveal what Veronica Hollinger calls “the legitimation crisis,” a questioning of human values and behaviors once felt to be natural and absolute. As a consequence of this “postmodern perspective,” monstrous voices, once relegated to the margins, begin to assume greater narrative authority (Gordon and Hollinger: 199–200). Women writers of the genre, in particular, revitalized worn out conventions by posing intriguing questions about the role of history and the nature of identity and desire in contemporary culture. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), for example, appropriates and reworks Gothic tropes in order to resurrect and resist America’s racial history by bringing the horrors of slavery out from the margins of discourse and representation. In Morrison’s tale, the spirit of the murdered child Beloved becomes the spectral embodiment of the conflicted desire to forget and the need to remember past horrors (Goddu: 154). The task of including alternative voices and modes of representation in Gothic fiction is also found in contemporary vampire fiction. No longer marginalized as “Other,” this traditional Gothic figure occupies center stage, revealing, often in firstperson narratives, the tragic reality or libidinal delights of vampire existence. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain cycle, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (1992) mark the shift away from Matheson and King’s fetid vampires, introducing instead tantalizingly erotic figures; beautiful, decadent, and often androgynous, these vampires challenge mainstream gender identity and fixed categories of good and evil. In Yarbro’s historical novels, the heroic and gentle Count SaintGermain obscures the boundary between monster and human through an emphasis on partnerships rather than prey. In Yarbro’s fiction, there are no victims; rather, the vampire seeks to become part of humanity by forging loving relationships and engaging in consensual sex with strong and willing female lovers.
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In contrast, Anne Rice’s vampire fiction combines the Southern Gothic’s preoccupation with the past with an overt interest in male–male desire. Set in the languid and timeless landscape of New Orleans, the homoerotic bonds that surface throughout the Chronicles represent a more topical and subversive critique of conservative culture than Yarbro’s depictions of normative masculinity. Rice’s Lestat is at once an Old World aristocrat, modern rock star, and “culture’s prototypical gay predator, roving in the darkness” and violating “every cultural taboo” (Haggerty: 5). Glamorous and perfumed, his seductions register contemporary culture’s greatest fears and hidden desires. While an interest in androgyny and alternative sexualities in Rice’s novels foregrounds an engagement with gay politics, her fiction also reflects a new found sympathy and identification with contemporary monstrosity. Like Poppy Z. Brite’s community of alienated and anarchic teen vampires, Rice’s creatures are much more human than their predecessors, thereby eroding traditional Gothic distinctions between good and evil, monster and human. As Fred Botting observes, in recent Gothic fiction monsters “are less often terrifying objects of animosity expelled in the return to social and symbolic equilibrium”; rather, they are “sites of identification, sympathy, and self-recognition” (Punter and Byron: 286). We find traces of sympathy and humanity in earlier characters, such as Faulkner’s Joe Christmas (Light in August, 1932), whose central tragedy is his inability to know who he is; however, Rice’s supernatural figures are obsessed with questions of good and evil, often lamenting the loss of these fixed oppositions, while Brite’s vampires revel in the freedom from moral absolutes by undermining conventional kinship bonds and gender roles. Evil in these texts “is not simple, not unproblematic, not outside the characters – whether human or vampire – not clearly marked off as something that can be expelled” (Gordon and Hollinger: 203). The cult of glamour, celebrity, and self-recognition featured in contemporary female Gothic, by the late twentieth century, gives way to more frightening depictions of emptiness and ambivalence. As Fred Botting notes, “exaggeration and exhaustion chart the predictable trajectory of romance” (Spooner and McEvoy: 207). By the late 1980s, Rice’s Lestat ends up a parody, a popular culture icon bereft of meaning. In his place emerges the inevitable product of modernity. Novels such as Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs (1989), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), and Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1995) introduced a new figure of horror for the coming millennium: the unpredictable, unrepentant, self-determined serial killer; the ultimate rule-breaker and exemplar of individualism and excess that characterized the Reagan years. Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, a wealthy, attractive, Wall Street executive spends most of his time obsessing over his appearance and engaging in acts of horrific violence and murder. Vapid, vain, superficial, and envious, Bateman reprises the alienated and dissatisfied Organization Man of the 1950s, updated as the modern byproduct of conformity and rampant consumer capitalism. Told from Bateman’s point of view, the narrative resists attempts at justification and self-examination; instead, ironically positioning him as the celebrated model of entrepreneurial freedom and instinctual feeling run amok.
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Characters such as Bateman and Harris’s Hannibal Lecter disclose the new ambivalence toward monstrosity. When Lecter asks, “Can you stand to say I’m evil? … Am I evil Officer Starling?” (Harris: 20), he poses the questions that the modern culture of horror forces us to ask: what is monstrosity? Where do we locate evil? While earlier tales of supernatural intrusions into the mundane, modern world functioned to interrogate the legitimacy and unity of modern identity, Gothic novels in the late twentieth century reveal that categories of self and other, good and evil, are often not clearly distinguishable but also potentially redundant. Gone is the putrid, decaying reflection of Lovecraft’s Outsider or Levin’s yellow-eyed newborn; in their place is the urbane professional in a Brooks Brothers suit. Sympathy and identification are no longer critical watchwords in these texts; rather, questions of tragic influence, of whether individuals are victims of themselves, their own nature, or their environment are rendered irrelevant. “Nothing happened to me,” claims Lecter. “I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences” (Harris: 20). The inability to name, categorize, and repudiate modern monstrosity results in new Gothic anxieties whereby the stability of the self is no longer a matter of individual morality and free will. Instead, modern monsters are potentially everywhere, diffused throughout culture, where they roam unseen and unhampered by time, distance, and legality. American Gothic explores the disturbing knowledge that liberal individualism and the idea of progress that supports it are highly questionable concepts in light of the events of the twentieth century. Narratives of spiritual, familial, and national degeneration, of haunting, infection, and murder perpetually clash with the historical view of an American republic founded on the virtues of equality and freedom. The Gothic underbelly of the national narrative not only disrupts and undermines the legitimacy and universality of modernity, it depicts an alternative mode of historical time, one premised on the pessimistic view of human existence as predetermined and doomed to fall.
References and Further Reading Beam, George, ed. (1989). The Stephen King Companion. London: Macdonald. Beaumont, Charles (1987). “Place of Meeting” [1953], in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, ed. Alan Ryan, pp. 371–5. London: Penguin. Clark, J. Michael (1991). Southern Gothic. Irving, T.X.: Scholars Books. Docherty, Brian, ed. (1990). American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King. London: Macmillan. Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1953). “First Inaugural Address,” 20 January, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library website (http://www.eisenhower. archives.gov/1stinaug.htm).
Faulkner, William (1950). “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech,” Nobel Prize website (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html). Faulkner, William (1992). “A Rose for Emily” [1930], in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. Chris Baldick, pp. 322–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddu, Teresa (1997). Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Gordon, Joan and Hollinger, Veronica, eds. (1997). Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia, P.A.: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Modern Gothic Haggerty, E. George (1998). “Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 32 (1): 5–18. Halberstam, Judith (1995). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Harris, Thomas (1989). The Silence of the Lambs. London: Heinemann. Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jancovitch, Mark (1996). Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. King, Stephen (1982). Danse Macabre. New York: Signet. King, Stephen (1999). Salem’s Lot [1975]. New York: Simon & Schuster. Levin, Ira (1968). Rosemary’s Baby [1967]. London: Pan. Lovecraft, H. P. (1985). H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. London: Grafton. Lovecraft, H. P. (1997). Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco. McGrath, Patrick and Morrow, Bradford, eds. (1992). The Picador Book of New Gothic. London: Picador. Malin, Irving (1962). New American Gothic. Carbondale, I.L.: Southern Illinois University Press. Matheson, Richard (1995). I Am Legend [1954]. New York: Orb. Michaud, Marilyn (2009). Republicanism and American Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
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Oakes, David A. (2000). Science and Destabilization in the Modern American Gothic: Lovecraft, Matheson, King. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1975). The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Republican Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1987). “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (2): 325–46. Punter, David (1996). The Literature of Terror, vol. 2: The Modern Gothic. New York: Longman. Punter, David and Byron, Glennis (2004). The Gothic. Malden, M.A.: Blackwell. Sage, Victor and Lloyd-Smith, Allan, eds. (1996). Modern Gothic: A Reader. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1994). “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner” [1951], in The Sound and the Fury, ed. David Minter, 2nd edn., pp. 265–71. New York: Norton. Savoy, Eric (2002). “The Rise of American Gothic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, pp. 167–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sontag, Susan (1967). Against Interpretation. New York: Dell. Spooner, Catherine and McEvoy, Emma, eds. (2007). The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London: Routledge.
6
The Short Story Mark Whalan
In his much-referenced volume of criticism, The Lonely Voice (1963), the Irish shortstory writer Frank O’Connor remarked that Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully it could be referred to as a national art form. O’Connor’s famous thesis that the short-story form was perfect for representing “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society” still seems applicable to the catalogue of loners, violence, grotesques, strangers, and solipsists that inhabit much of the most memorable U.S. short fiction of the twentieth century (Frank O’Connor: 19). We may be warier now of O’Connor’s explanation that this is the result of some inherent and exceptional national character, but his judgment of the centrality of the form to the canon of American literature – as well as his assessment of its thematic preoccupations – has lost little of its validity. The U.S. short-story writers of the twentieth century inherited a rich tradition of short fictional prose from their nineteenth-century forebears. The term “short story” did not, in fact, become current until the 1880s, and its development in the early twentieth century was marked by obvious debts, on the one hand, to the psychological and metaphysical intensities of the tale, as perfected by Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, and, on the other, to the ear for dialogue and attention to social milieu of the local colorists working in the tradition of the sketch. As ever, changes in markets affected the nature of short fiction as much as changes in nomenclature and aesthetics. For most of the twentieth century, short fiction found its most visible presence in largecirculation, “slick” family magazines which had risen to prominence in the early century, typified by the 1920s by the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s; even as late as the 1950s, the combined readership of the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and This Week topped 50 million. These magazines were often a byword for the safe and sentimental, and were frequently criticized for their taste in stories that were morally conservative and narratively formulaic. Consequently, throughout the twentieth century, American short fiction often resided in an uneasy place: troubled by the competing presence of well-rewarded, formulaic, popular short fiction; critically
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neglected by academics more drawn to the broader social canvas of the novel; and often unsupported by publishers unwilling to try to buck the generally poor sales of short-story collections. Although many of the century’s most important writers of short fiction published in the “slicks” – F. Scott Fitzgerald published seventy stories in the Saturday Evening Post and received $3,600 each for them in his heyday, and William Faulkner was one of the most popular Post authors in the 1930s – it is in the rejection of commercialized, formulaic fiction that the main line of canonical American short fiction is found. The author who built his public persona most effectively around that rejection was Sherwood Anderson, whose key collection Winesburg, Ohio appeared in 1919. Chastising his immediate forebears – O. Henry, in particular, served as Anderson’s straw man – he remarked that “our writers, our storytellers, in wrapping life up into neat little packages were only betraying life.” In contrast, his Winesburg stories attempted “simple little tales of happenings, things observed and felt” (Anderson: 14). The twenty-five interlinked stories were described as “plotless” at the time, as they did not build to the melodramatic, coincidental, wryly humorous or conclusive endings which had typified O. Henry’s work (and which he had dubbed “snapper” endings). Offering few neat resolutions or answers to the manifold problems that assailed the inhabitants of his fictional small town, Anderson shifted the burden of meaning instead to the Joycean technique of the epiphany, often choosing a repeated image or an event as the vehicle for the “showing forth” of a character’s desires, frustrations, obsessions, or limitations. Anderson also relished the oral tradition of storytelling that he admired in the work of Mark Twain, and his characters narrate their stories of failure, ambition, nostalgia, desire, and loneliness to the town journalist, George Willard. His role as Winesburg’s interlocutor attests to Anderson’s faith in the artist’s ability to replenish and invigorate a community by his power to represent it – very much as Walter Benjamin would nostalgically explain the role of the storyteller several years later. At the same time, the social atomization caused by Fordism and the Great War in Europe makes that creative function always incomplete and always tenuous. This tension between cohesion and fragmentation is evident in the form of the short-story cycle, a collection of stories which have thematic, personal, and geographic links, yet wherein individual stories retain an autonomy of meaning which often sits uneasily with other pieces in the collection. In this form, connections – in every sense – sometimes seem strong and inevitable, sometimes fleeting, fragile, or strained. Anderson’s innovative use of the cycle would be an important model for writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, John Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver. Moreover, Anderson’s thematic interest in the lonely and the “grotesque,” and his reliance on the epiphany, would also recur in the twentieth-century American short story. Elsewhere at the time, Anderson’s interest in the vernacular tradition was shared by Ring Lardner, whose comic stories of life in professional baseball were hugely popular, as were his tales of country folk encountering the slick and exploitative big
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city (see, respectively, You Know Me Al, 1916, and The Big Town, 1920). Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved similar success with their stories of urbane wit and sophistication, keen to immortalize a metropolitan world of glamour, romance, superficiality, and – to use one of Fitzgerald’s favored words – dissipation. Anzia Yezierska’s stories in Hungry Hearts (1920) of the Jewish immigrants of New York’s Hester Street finding their place in the American mainstream, and often battling with the patriarchal and theological traditions of a previous generation, were also widely read; and there was a growing market for crime and Western short fiction. Writers who had come to prominence in a previous generation, such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, continued to produce notable work. In addition, the blossoming of African American literary productivity, dubbed the Harlem Renaissance, included several talented writers of short fiction. Combining an interest in the vernacular traditions of black life in the South with a wish to describe the often challenging process of mass migration to the Northern cities were writers such as Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. In the sectional literature that characterized modernism’s rediscovery of regionality, Katharine Anne Porter’s lyrical and psychologically evocative stories of the American Southwest and Ruth Suckow’s Midwestern terrain were highly significant. Yet arguably the most important writers of short fiction to emerge from the 1920s, in terms of their enduring influence and stylistic recognizability, were Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Ernest Hemingway’s first story collection, In Our Time, appeared in 1925. This collection took the form of the short-story cycle forward by interpolating short vignettes about the Great War (which he entitled chapters) between the more substantial stories. Several of these are about the growth to maturity of Hemingway’s alter ego, Nick Adams, who serves in the war before returning to his native Michigan; others deal with strained relationships between American men and women in postwar Europe. Hemingway worked extensively at revising his stories, often paring away incident or detail with the intention of generating meaning more by implication, nuance, and tone than by denotation; he would famously suggest that “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (Hemingway 1994: 64). This technique is particularly evident in Hemingway’s dialogue between men and women, in which repetition – and what is left palpably unsaid – works to emphasize the subtleties and the conflicts of their relationships. However, perhaps the best-known example of Hemingway’s linguistic economy is the final story of In Our Time, “Big Two Hearted River,” which describes Nick Adams returning to Michigan after the Great War to find solace in the routine and the calm practicalities of trout fishing. The story presents a memorable vignette of the counterbalancing forces of order and chaos, pleasure and duty, calmness and disruption, and the unspoiled and the devastated. Yet Hemingway would later boast that he had not once mentioned the war in the story. Perhaps more than any other writer in the century, Hemingway fused a style with a public persona, and the image he crafted for himself so assiduously was founded in part on his journalistic background on the
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Toronto Star – he later claimed that cabling stories across the Atlantic helped develop his terse, economical prose – and on his desire to write what he called “one true sentence.” (In a phrase that Raymond Carver liked to repeat, Hemingway had said that prose was architecture – and the Baroque age was over.) How much that persona corresponded to reality has unsurprisingly interested his critics, who have often pointed out his embellishment of his war experiences, or the remarkably frothy, ebullient style of many of his newspaper pieces which do not read much like “cablese.” Yet his stories have an unmistakable antipathy toward ornamentation or melodrama, and rarely seek to direct the reader toward a particular response to a character, moral situation, or event. The simplest adjectives (such as “nice,” “good”) seem at once banal, and yet also loaded with a range of complex significations which the reader must work hard to extrapolate. Hemingway has been often criticized for his (posturing) nihilism (it was he who popularized the term “Lost Generation”), his misogyny, machismo, selfpromotion, and for a style which some have seen as the perfect device for masking a lack of substance. Yet his importance to the stylistic development of American prose, and American short fiction, is unquestioned; and his The First Forty-Nine Stories, which appeared in 1938, remains indispensable. Hemingway, like Anderson, had spent much of his early life in Chicago, but from the middle of the 1920s the center of gravity of American letters shifted south. The Southern Renaissance was arguably more pronounced in short fiction than in any other form, and writers such as Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Peter Taylor, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, and Truman Capote all produced memorable stories. Foremost amongst those writers was William Faulkner. Faulkner used his short fiction as a financial lifeline in the early 1930s; indeed, he earned more from four stories sold to the Saturday Evening Post than he did for his first four novels. Yet they were far from hackwork; as well as some of his most powerful writing, they served as a space to try out ideas or characters for his longer fiction. Thematically, his short fiction exhibits the same preoccupations as his longer work: the force of what the narrator in “Barn Burning” (1938) calls the “old fierce pull of blood”; the life of youth in an environment saturated with a past that is both proudly affirmed and yet beset by decay; and the complex interplay between race, sexuality, secrets, and property that Faulkner felt shaped Southern identity (Faulkner: 3). He was also fascinated in the partiality of any account, and how interlocking views fabricate a sense of community. These elements are all present in perhaps his most anthologized story, “A Rose for Emily” (1930) which shows the response of the town of Jefferson – the county seat of Faulkner’s fictional county, Yoknapatawpha – to Miss Emily, the woman who is a “tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (Faulkner: 119). How Emily’s secret becomes a part of the “hereditary obligation” of the town, and thereby a part of the town itself, presents in condensed form some of Faulkner’s most important ideas about community. The shuttling of the narrative voice between “they” and “we” demonstrates how first-hand experience slips in and out of communal experience, and eventually forms the consciousness of a town, county, or region.
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Moreover, this kind of concentric life of experience reflects Faulkner’s interest in connection, interrelation, and layering of character and incident, and, indeed, how that process both produces and is controlled by the act of making narratives. The balance between myth, anecdote, and history in “A Rose for Emily” also suggests why so little of Faulkner’s work seems self-contained or closed; his characters, events, and places occur in stories which crop up again in other stories, novels, and collections. Unsurprisingly, he also built longer fictions from stories that had been separately published, and, like Anderson, he was interested in the possibilities of the short-story cycle. He wrote three of them – The Unvanquished (1938), Go Down, Moses (1942), and Knight’s Gambit (1949). Like Anderson, he used the potential of the form to represent the life of a community, using its capacity for representing social division as well as the links that stretch across social divides; in Faulkner, these are particularly the divisions across generations, and across the color line. Yet more so than Anderson he showed how the form can be used to mediate temporal disjunction, the often competing actions of memory and history, or the force of tradition as well as its refutation. Ultimately, his sensitivity to various phenomena – the extremes as well as the nuances of human behavior, the shifting social forces that go toward the constitution of identity, the endless repetition and necessity (but also unreliability) of the process of telling stories, and the way in which all these combine to create what we might rather loosely specify as a location – made him one of the most influential writers of short fiction in the century. Faulkner had needed the income from short fiction to sustain him through the Depression, and the economic severities and revolutionary mood of the 1930s had a large impact on the American short story. Magazine readership increased as Americans balked at the cost of books, and a new generation of writers was encouraged to fill these periodicals. Several magazines – with titles like Anvil, The Left, Blast, Partisan Review, and The New Masses – supported and encouraged a proletarian short fiction. The first-person form became popular as writers gave voice to the harsh realities of working-class life in work which was often directly engaged in the politics of class struggle. Notable writers included Tillie Olsen, whose career began in the 1930s but whose best stories appeared in the 1960s. Her best-known story – “Tell me a Riddle” (1961) – is about a Jewish American couple struggling not merely with cancer and impending death, but with reconciling their love for one another with their shared history of political radicalism, poverty, and the patriarchal traditions that so often curbed the wife Eva’s ambitions to write. Olsen’s story, with its experimental technique and blend of oral narrative, memory, and political literature, serves to skillfully construct a tapestry using what Olsen elsewhere called the “larger tradition of social concern” woven through the lives of two tenderly realized individuals. Meridel LeSueur was another notable writer of radical fiction, and her story “Annunciation” (1935) – like the stories later collated into her novel The Girl (1978) – addresses the joys and the hardships of love and pregnancy in the Depression in a lyrical style that avoids some of the dogmatic, political heavy-handedness that typified much of the short fiction of the thirties. James T. Farrell, William Saroyan, John
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Fante, and John Steinbeck all achieved fame for their interest in working-class subject matter, which informed much of their short fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. They all evinced a particular interest in migrant experience (Farrell with depictions of Irish Americans in Chicago; Saroyan with portrayals of Armenian Americans migrating West; Fante with depictions of Italian Americans, particularly in Colorado; and Steinbeck with portrayals of migrants to California). Richard Wright began his career as arguably the most significant African American fiction writer of the mid-century with his collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1940), a story cycle which dwelt on the cruelties and indignities of life in the Jim Crow South. Particularly affecting is the opening story, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” in which a group of four young friends, joking, joshing, and swimming their way through an idyllic summer day, suddenly become involved in a terrifying cycle of retribution for their supposed insult to a white woman. The story is focalized through the character of Big Boy, who watches helplessly from a hiding-place as his friend is burned alive. The two closing stories, “Fire and Cloud” and “Long Black Song,” suggest that the only way out of this horrific system is for cross-racial, working-class solidarity. Although Wright later had serious reservations about the American Communist Party, his collection remains the most important attempt in short fiction to wed traditional Marxism to the politics of race and gender in the segregated South. The South continued to produce notable writers of short fiction following the war, and none more notable than Flannery O’Connor. Clearly indebted to Faulkner – and unabashed in admitting so – O’Connor in particular borrowed from the more grotesque and bizarre elements of Faulkner’s comic characterizations. Yet in discussing her predilection for the grotesque in fiction, she refused to accept that this was a mode she had adopted primarily because of her Southern background, or because of the Southern setting of her fiction. Instead, she suggested, it was “writers who see by the light of their Christian faith [who] will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable” (Flannery O’Connor 1972: 33). O’Connor’s first collection of short fiction, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955), is full of characters who seem grotesque, or perverse; it is also full of the darkly comic, often at the expense of the vain, stupid, or the small-minded. The collection introduced such memorable characters as Hulga in “Good Country People,” a 32-year-old virgin spinster with a doctorate in philosophy who had changed her name from Joy to irritate her mother (she had “arrived at [Hulga] first purely on the basis of its ugly sound,” before “the full genius of its fitness had struck her”), and who has her artificial leg stolen by a Bible salesman (Flannery O’Connor 1993: 174). Such grotesques were in part a result of O’Connor’s commitment to theological orthodoxy; she argued that, in an increasingly secular world, the writer “with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural” (Flannery O’Connor 1972: 33). Accordingly, her landscape is one of moral and physical “distortion,” comic, macabre, bizarre, and troubling at the same time as it is marked by grace, redemption, and salvation. It is also a landscape
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that is recognizably the South, but a South seen through a visual register somewhere between chiaroscuro and Chaplin – a location O’Connor preferred because, although she regarded the South as “hardly Christ-centred, it is most certainly Christ-haunted” (Flannery O’Connor 1972: 44). She once referred to A Good Man is Hard to Find as “nine stories about original sin,” and several of the stories dramatize the reaction of a relatively closed community to the arrival of a mysterious outsider who clarifies or exploits the sins of those he meets. Her posthumous collection, Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965), returns to these themes, and also to the issue of intergenerational conflict in a South undergoing rapid transformation. Her tapestry of violence, comedy, and grace, her vivid and fresh prose style, and her commitment to the presence of mystery – wherein “the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted” – make her work as distinctive as it is powerful (Flannery O’Connor 1972: 42). O’Connor’s faith in the ability of a theological order to counteract the “distortions” of a secular world, or Wright’s faith in the ability of a communist order to counteract the inequities of American capitalism, were not moods typical of most postwar fiction. Instead, writers of stories of manners and mores came to the fore, nuanced and often unspectacular fictions of the relationships between families, husbands and wives, the inhabitants of a city apartment block, or of a suburban neighborhood. This was arguably nourished and shaped by the primary years of The New Yorker, which had been founded in 1925 by Harold Ross with the aim that it would not be “for the little old lady in Dubuque.” Arguably, his periodical had a greater influence on the shape of the American short story than any other in the twentieth century. Its postwar fiction was produced by writers like John Updike, John O’ Hara, Peter Taylor, Hortense Calisher, Richard Yates, and Louis Auchincloss. The most prominent of these writers was John Cheever; 141 of his 180 stories appeared first in The New Yorker, and his first major collection, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, appeared in 1953 (he would publish six collections throughout his lifetime). Cheever’s characters hail mostly from the WASP middle and lower-middle classes of the Northeast, and his stories dwell on the routine hardships, trials, and small joys of postwar life: marital unhappiness and reconciliation, resentment amongst families, the variety of needs and idiosyncrasies people bring to love affairs, the stresses and rewards of work and vacations, and the workings of a moral sense through dayto-day situations. Cheever details these lives with a sophisticated and compassionate combination of irony and lyricism, a graceful and decorous prose that refuses either to perpetually celebrate or to perpetually condemn. As he said in his introduction to his collected stories, “decorum is a mode of speech, as profound and connotative as any other, differing not in content but in syntax and imagery” (Cheever: viii). Typical of his stylistic and thematic interest is “The Enormous Radio,” wherein Jim and Irene Westcott, who “were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins,” purchase a huge, garish, and powerful new radio (Cheever:
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49). In a freakish occurrence, the radio allows Irene to listen to the private conversations of the other inhabitants of their apartment block, and to overhear the wife beating, infidelities, obscenities, swindles, passions, and worries over money that dominate their private lives. Upset over the turmoil that lies beneath the veneer of politeness that has characterized their dealings with their neighbors, and worried about the money which the radio has cost, the couple end the story with Jim viciously cataloguing examples of Irene’s own immoralities, failures, and meanness – faults which are, of course, all part of the “satisfactory average” of life. Often, however, Cheever’s stories are not so bleak, and reveal moments that – as he said elsewhere – “celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream,” moments of love, faith, kindness, or beauty (Cheever: 606). If the sensibility of his neo-Puritan characters occasionally seems a little fastidious, nonetheless his stylistic accomplishment, his finely crafted epiphanies of celebration, and his attunement to the nuances of intimate relationships mean his stories retain their power to move and to astonish. If Cheever’s work had a certain ethnic and class circumscription, many other authors were emerging in the postwar scene with different stories to tell. Particularly notable was a group of Jewish American writers, often concerned with the lives of Jews in the Northeastern states and especially New York City. Bernard Malamud published five collections of short fiction between 1958 and 1983; particularly well received was his first collection, The Magic Barrel. Several of the stories deal with expatriates in Italy, a recurrent theme in Malamud’s fiction, but most deal with the lives of working-class Jews in New York. Often partway between story and fable, they tell of the trials of the lives of artists and artisans frequently beset by a sadness, loneliness, or melancholy often linked to the long history of Jewish persecution. Yet these tragic individuals are often redeemed or restored by acts of love, kindness, or quasi-divine intervention which reinstall the characters into the world of love, marriage, and family. Also notable was the short fiction of Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and the translations from the Yiddish of the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, which often focused on the lives of his Jewish forebears in nineteenth-century Poland. In African American writing, James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man (1965) was a powerful collection. It dealt with subjects ranging from the struggles of young black boys and men growing up in Harlem to retain the hope, creativity, and freedom necessary for art, to the psychosexuality of the white authorities in the South that were so brutally attempting to suppress the civil rights movement. Also notable was the short fiction of Ernest Gaines, Paule Marshall, Toni Cade Bambara, James Alan McPherson, Alice Walker, and Henry Dumas. In 1974, Kenneth Rosen edited The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians, an anthology that launched writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Simon Ortiz onto the national scene and heralded a new flourishing of Native American short fiction. In Chicano–Latina short fiction, Tomás Rivera’s And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971) presented an important intervention, as he produced a narratively complex sequence of stories
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which serve to memorialize and reconstruct the lives of mid-century migrant farm workers struggling against dislocation and exploitation. If Rivera had chosen narrative experimentation as an explicitly political mode, other writers by the mid-1960s were beginning to break away from the broad commitment to realism, and the depiction of recognizable situations that characterized the fiction of “manners and mores,” for quite different reasons. Inspired by the interest in innovative narrative strategies, self-reflexivity, and the immersion in myth, fable, and the fantastic that characterized writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and the French authors of the Nouveau Roman, several writers began producing short fiction characterized by a sense of uproarious, extravagant, and sometimes bizarre innovation which sought to counteract what John Barth called the “exhaustion” of realist fictional forms. As Richard Ford has noted, these were stories which “goaded conventional plausibility, and in which words were imagined not first as windows to meaning or even to the factual world … but as narrative objets with arbitrary, sometimes ironically-assigned references, palpable shapes, audible sounds, rhythms – all of whose intricacies and ironies produced aesthetic as well as ordinary cognitive pleasures” (Ford: viii). John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968) and Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1969) are good examples of this kind of fiction, but its most prominent American exponent was Donald Barthelme. His first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, appeared in 1964, followed by Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), and Sixty Stories (1981). Barthelme’s stories are often typified by a collage of linguistic registers and images drawn from a range of sources, including advertising, newspapers, television, scientific discourses, and theological texts. They utilize a language that veers between the flamboyant and the deadpan, an often wild alternation that makes his stories seem very insecure and unstable in how – or where – they seek to establish their referential terrain. He also often reduces characters to startling and comic combinations of clichés, which through their unexpected juxtaposition ask penetrating questions about how narrative, characterization, and the very processes of fiction operate. Characters are also frequently embedded in ludicrous situations, which serve to invigorate and renew older fictional forms such as the romance, the bildungsroman, or the historical story. Typically bizarre is “The Balloon” (1968), which tells the tale of an enormous balloon which expands and contracts seemingly at random over Manhattan, and which the unnamed narrator has created as a “spontaneous autobiographical disclosure” (Barthelme: 51). Notably, discussion of the meaning of the balloon amongst New Yorkers is quite subdued, as “we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena” (Barthelme: 47). Barthelme’s often arch sense of playfulness, and his magpie-like incorporation of a plurality of fictional and commercial languages, forms, and styles into his prose, would be an important influence on writers such as Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and other exponents of “postmodern” fiction. Other writers, however, were less convinced that
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such fiction could deal adequately with one of the long-standing strengths of the short story: namely, its ability to have “not only a strong narrative drive, with characters we could respond to as human beings, but … where the effects of language, situation and insight were intense and total – short stories which on occasion had the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and the world” (Carver and Jenks: xiii). These are the words of Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks, and also the criteria governing the selection of stories for their influential American Short Story Masterpieces anthology of 1987, an anthology robustly asserting the vitality of the realist tradition in American short fiction. One of the principal figures producing that vitality was Carver himself, whose four collections of short fiction – Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (1976), What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Elephant (1988) – placed him as the most celebrated late-century inheritor of the realist tradition of Anderson, Hemingway, and Cheever. In general, Carver’s work focuses on the lives of the American working class, and what he later called “those forces which … could cripple or bring down a man if the luck went bad”: their struggles with employment, stressful and troubled marriages, alcoholism, money, and the strains these situations place on children (Carver 1997: 58). As Carver admitted, much of this was drawn from his own experiences, and he claimed that his stories allowed him to act as a “witness” for “a submerged population, people who don’t always have someone to speak for them” (Carver 1987). Moments of conflict, failure, indifference, and disillusionment characterize his early fiction in particular, moments rendered stark and sometimes brutal by his terse, clipped style. He has sometimes been labeled “minimalist,” a phrase Carver himself disliked, but which nonetheless conveys his extraordinary ability to render the material texture of the domestic, or the way the emotional lives of his characters are expressed through their reaction to the routine and mundane, in the sparest and most evocative of prose. His third-person narrators (unlike Hemingway’s) do vocalize the inner lives of his characters, but often in a way that renders the turbulence or force – rather than the clarity – of their feelings. His last completed work, Cathedral, is one of the most notable short-story cycles of recent times. More so than in his earlier collections, the characters are connected by moments of hope, or human companionship and communion, even as they battle against their own inabilities to communicate with their loved ones, and the indifference and vagaries of a post-industrial labor market. Just as Carver utilizes the form of the short-story cycle to comment on the ways in which contemporary American urban planning, media, and economic structures have drastically altered the experience of community, so other key contemporary writers have turned to what Sandra A. Zagarell has dubbed the “narrative of community” as a way of considering how tradition, ritual, and family can resist or adapt to the pressures of the (post)modern. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) both use the form to establish a dialogue across the century between different generations, focusing on the experience of Chinese Americans and Native Americans, respectively. Tan’s collection deftly explores how the
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experiences of migration, cultural assimilation, struggles over social status, marriage, and motherhood both connect and divide a set of four Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters, and moves between China in the tumultuous years surrounding World War II and 1980s’ San Francisco. Erdrich’s Love Medicine is part of her larger sequence of works dealing with the lives of the Anishinabe people of North Dakota, and explores their complex relation to the changes in their community across the twentieth century. These relations across and within families demonstrate the nuances and multiplicities of cultural exchange with European America: its inevitable interrelation with loss, power, sexuality, religion, language, family, and land. A sequence of narratives, often told in the first person by women from two families, the stories balance the erosion of Native American cultural traditions against their resilient adaptability, and the strength of family and historical bonds against the disintegrative forces of contemporary America. In often employing an oral pattern of storytelling, Erdrich utilizes its capacity for movement across memory, rich linguistic figuration, and anecdote, as well as what she describes as the “gift” of the colonial capacities of English – its nature as a “conglomerate language” which has “gobbled up so many cultures” (Rolo). These resources are employed to generate a powerful multivocal picture of a community whose mutable modes of expression and narration present both vivid individual characters and the way social change is embedded in language. Like Anderson, in his cycle at the beginning of the century, both Erdrich and Tan see the act of narration as essential in the maintenance and the experience of community, even though many of those narratives inevitably go unheard or disregarded. Moreover, their transcultural and transnational cycles complicate Frank O’Connor’s notion of the short story as a “national art form,” even as they participate in the long tradition of U.S. short fiction. Their work – as with the best work of that tradition – presents the emotional force and the focus that comes with brevity, the curiousness and brilliance of language which concentration at its best forces through, and the pull between the strange and the familiar.
References and Further Reading Anderson, Sherwood (1966). Winesburg, Ohio [1919], ed. John H. Ferres. New York: Viking. Baldwin, James (1991). Going to Meet the Man [1965]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barthelme, Donald (2003). Sixty Stories [1981]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carver, Raymond (1987). “Stories Don’t Come out of Thin Air,” interview with Claude Grimal, trans. William L. Stull (available at http://titan. iwu.edu/∼jplath/carver.html).
Carver, Raymond (1997). Cathedral [1984]. London: Harvill. Carver, Raymond and Jenks, Tom (1987). American Short Story Masterpieces. New York: Dell– Random House. Cheever, John (1990). The Stories of John Cheever. London: Vintage. Erdrich, Louise (1993). Love Medicine [1984]. London: Flamingo. Faulkner, William (1995). Collected Stories. London: Vintage.
The Short Story Ford, Richard, ed. (1993). The Granta Book of the American Short Story. London: Granta–Penguin. Gelfant, Blanche, ed. (2000). The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press. Harrington, Evans and Abadie, Ann J., eds. (1990). Faulkner and the Short Story: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 1990. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hemingway, Ernest (1993). The First Forty-Nine Stories [1939]. London: Arrow. Hemingway, Ernest (1994). A Moveable Feast [1964]. London: Arrow. Kennedy, J. Gerald, ed. (1995). Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lardner, Ring (1997). Selected Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. LeSueur, Meridel (1982). The Girl [1978]. London: Women’s Press. Malamud, Bernard (1980). The Magic Barrel and Other Stories [1958]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. O’Connor, Flannery (1972). Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. London: Faber and Faber. O’Connor, Flannery (1980). Everything that Rises Must Converge [1965]. London: Faber and Faber. O’Connor, Flannery (1993). A Good Man is Hard to Find [1955]. London: Women’s Press.
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O’Connor, Frank (1963). The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Cleveland: World. Parker, Dorothy (1989). The Collected Dorothy Parker. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rivera, Tomás (1995). And the Earth Did Not Devour Him [Y no se lo trago la tierra, 1971], trans. Evangelina Vigil-Pinon. Houston: Arte Publico. Rolo, Mark Anthony (2002). “Louise Erdrich: The Progressive Interview,” The Progressive (April) (available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m1295/is_4_66; accessed 13/10/2006). Rosen, Kenneth Mark, ed. (1974). The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians. New York: Viking. Scofield, Martin P. (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevick, Phillip, ed. (1984). The American Short Story 1900–1945: A Critical History. New York: G. K. Hall–Twayne. Tan, Amy (1998). The Joy Luck Club [1989]. London: Vintage. Wright, Richard (1993). Uncle Tom’s Children [1940]. New York: HarperPerennial. Yezierska, Anzia (1997). Hungry Hearts [1920]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Zagarell, Sandra A. (1988). “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 13: 498–528.
7
Southern Fiction Sharon Monteith
The regional, ex-centric model of literary endeavor, set against the metropolitan model of literary and cultural geography, has traditionally rested on auxiliary modes of writing that have been designated “local color” and characterized by a narrowness of perspective and a propensity for inward-looking contemplation of the local. In the U.S. South, however, the model is infused with cultural obsessions about the region as the site of the most visible and dramatic of domestic crises: slavery, the Civil War, and massive resistance to the initiatives of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The South has been both demonized and mythologized. This, in turn, has led to a preoccupation with regional distinctiveness epitomized in the titles of such studies as The Lasting South (Kilpatrick and Rubin 1957), The Enduring South (Reed 1974), Why the South Will Survive (Lytle et al. 1981), and The Prevailing South (Clendinen 1988), each signifying regional solidarity defensively, “in reaction to” the metropolitan North. Images of the South circulating through literary texts have derived their resonance from the idea that the regional paradigm is supposedly approaching its “end,” as if what twentieth-century writers revealed as distinctive was always already precarious. In this regard, Southern fiction is investigated in books that problematize assumptions inherent in Southern exceptionalism, while locating the ideology that underpins it in literary as well as cultural history: Inventing Southern Literature (Kreyling 1996), The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Romine 1999), Remapping Southern Literature (Brinkmeyer 2000), and South to A New Place ( Jones and Monteith 2002). Such studies show that the regional may also be read as a radical site of narrative engagement, in the way that the cultural margins are seen to operate as an emergent rather than residual site of influence and exchange. By the end of the twentieth century, a critical shift from the American South to the “global” U.S. South began to extricate the literature of the (sectional) region from a national model and north–south binary. The idea of a post-regional South in comparative perspective with other “Souths” – notably Latin America and the Caribbean – has invigorated discussions of transnational literary connections. This is not to imply
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that the idea of a “global” South is a new paradigm but, rather, to state that down the twentieth century it was a national model that operated to render Southern fiction distinct. The major preoccupations were the region’s symbolic estrangement from the nation, and its heightened consciousness of a “sense of place” and that place’s haunted history, with memory the structuring principle of Southern fiction. In short, “the South” was a perpetually rewritten story, a myth-making as much as a place-making narrative, as summarized in Richard Gray’s assessment of Southern writing in which “the interaction between event and dream, or history and myth” is accepted as characteristic (Gray 1979: 79).
History and Myth-Making Narratives William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) epitomizes many of the key qualities of Southern storytelling: the obsession to pick over the past, notably the Civil War, slavery, Reconstruction, and its white supremacist backlash; the use of circular and ornate interior monologues and first-person narrations in which repetitions and revisions of past events occur; the depiction of an (interracial) Southern family haunted by history and legend. The story of Thomas Sutpen’s rise from poor white to planter is returned to in Absalom, Absalom! to show that family lineage and communal guilt about the “Old South” transcend time. The book was originally written with the working title “The Dark House,” and the plantation known as Sutpen’s Hundred is the site of forced labor, forbidden desires, murder, and the secrets of a family in decline to the point of free fall. The plantation is both the heart of Faulkner’s Gothic darkness – it becomes a prison, it decays, and it is burned down – and the fulcrum through which economic factors determining a changing Southern culture are explored. In the opening decades, Southern fiction depicted a rapidly changing society. Thomas Sutpen in 1830s’ Mississippi and Ellen Glasgow’s Ben Starr in The Romance of a Plain Man (1909), trying to find a foothold in commercial industry in 1870s’ Virginia, are incredibly different characters but both novels explore the ineluctable sense of the nineteenth-century past in the twentieth-century present – and they mark the disappearance of the romantic, aristocratic, and picturesque as the dominant expectations of Southern stories. Nostalgic fictions by Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, for example, typically lost sway to ambivalent stories. Nostalgia runs up hard against modernity, violence erupts, and characters are overcome by anxiety and anguish in stories written by Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner, Jean Toomer and Richard Wright, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. The pastoral remained a key feature of Southern writing but the idea of a bucolic if decadent Arcadia, and the myth of a racially harmonious South, lost cultural currency when set against the shock of violence in the post-Reconstruction period – even though writers such as Stark Young also attempted to rekindle images of a plantation idyll, as in his novel So Red the Rose (1934).
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A theme that took hold in even the most lyrical of fictions was the fatalistic notion that Southern history was “a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs,” as Mr. Compson states in Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner 1986: 80). In 1923, for example, Jean Toomer, a “son of the South” of mixed racial heritage, published Cane, a modernist collection of stories, poems, and sketches with the overarching novelistic consciousness of a narrator, that depicted “one artist’s vision during a single year.” In the first section of the book, the poetic fragment “Song of the Son” is beautifully evocative of the dream of moving up from slavery; Southern motifs such as the plantation are intertwined with images of the Georgia dusk, of red earth and the burnished color of the skins of sons and daughters of the region. But as Cane progresses, the segregated design of white privilege and black service corrupts even the myth of the pastoral. In the final section, Toomer settles on a single “son of the South,” Ralph Kabnis, whose dreams run aground as he flails against the racial power structure and deteriorates into a “scarecrow replica” of himself (Toomer: 93). In Toomer’s “swansong,” as he called the novel that symbolized his own relationship to the South, his characters’ dreams are harnessed to history and fail to transcend it. Robert Penn Warren posited that history is “the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake” (Warren: xiii), and Faulkner describes the individual Southerner as a family vault, “a barracks filled with stubborn backward-looking ghosts” (Faulkner 1986: 12). Slavery and the Civil War remain potent and mobile images in fiction. Writers as different as Ellen Glasgow and Margaret Mitchell grapple with the plantation myth as bequeathed to planter and sharecropper in pride and penury. Gayl Jones’s neo-slave narrative Corregidora (1975) tells the past in ways that former slaves could never have told it, reeling out a tale of sexual and racial violence in angry, barbed, and abusive language. Rape and sexual coercion had been glossed over in the literature of slavery, with ex-slave narrators forced to mask their suffering in survivor tales that would rally white readers to the Abolitionist cause. Racial anger continued to be muted in fictions that preceded the “watershed” moment signaled by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. In the year preceding the nation’s bicentennial, Gayl Jones distilled Ralph Ellison’s distinction between timeless archetypes and “time-haunted” novels (Ellison 1994: 57) by articulating in rural black Southern speech the experiences of despair and survival in slavery’s wake. In narrative tone, Corregidora recalls another novel in which black anger is livid. Sarah E. Wright’s This Child’s Gonna Live (1969) borrows from black nationalist discourse in its bold exploration of the loss of social ground gained in the Reconstruction South. Wright’s is a “neo-abolitionist” novel, following Jack Temple Kirby’s recognition that in the 1960s a “neo-abolitionist professional and popular history probably tarnished the sentimentalist images of plantation and slavery beyond recovery” (Kirby: 165). While the 1960s were the decade in which civil rights and Black Power would underpin multiple fictional critiques of what Faulkner called “the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color” (Faulkner 1986: 112), the most vocal critic of the region began to castigate it in the 1910s and 1920s and his criticism had an unexpected effect on the region’s fiction. H. L. Mencken routinely pronounced the South culturally sterile in
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the early twentieth century and, as Fred Hobson argued in Serpent in Eden (1974), condemnation such as his shaped the creative and intellectual endeavors of Fugitive poets, Vanderbilt Agrarians, and novelists alike. A regional self-scrutiny marked those fictions published between the 1920s and the mid-1940s that in 1945 Allen Tate designated representative of a “Southern Renascence,” in which the South was defined as internally cohesive, a traditional antidote to a supposedly inauthentic industrializing North. In this way, the Southern canon was first constructed. Novels by Faulkner, the Agrarians in their roles as writers as well as critics, Katherine Ann Porter, Ellen Glasgow, Caroline Gordon, and others were underpinned by the New Criticism that Tate championed. As a literary-critical approach, New Critical formalism would dominate responses to Southern fiction and poetry for ensuing decades – on the left and the right – and, indeed, it would determine the critical analysis of American fiction. Deriving first from Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom’s Fugitive–Agrarian movement both to celebrate and to preserve a Southern literary sensibility, it emphasized the individual talent of the writer and the aesthetics of the individual text: Faulkner’s style and subject matter were exemplary, with Southern codes and “structures of feeling” considered a creative resource. Nevertheless, the best-selling fictions of the twentieth-century South were by writers who were deemed, in the first instance at least, to stand outside the canon of Southern Renascence writing: Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell, the former publishing some twenty-five novels and the latter only one. The images they created of Tobacco Road and Tara represent opposite poles in the (white) class structure that the nation sought to cast off, and they determined the wider popular consumption of the “two-class” South. Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), set in rural Georgia during the Depression, introduced the Lesters, poor, white, tenant farmers for an absentee landlord, whose dire conditions and grotesque behavior would both fascinate and appall. In 1936, for example, Ralph Ellison left his studies in Tuskegee, Alabama, intending to “enjoy a summer free of the South and its problems.” In New York City, he was alarmed to discover his sensation of racial freedom blocked by his loss of “the sense of certainty which the South imposed in the form of signs and symbols that marked the dividing lines of segregation” (Ellison 1995: 147–8). Invited to see the Broadway play of Tobacco Road, however, Ellison found himself not only “snatched back” into the rural South, but also pulled up short by one of the most unruly and irreverent of Southern fictions that left him hysterical with laughter. It becomes startlingly clear that, in an outrageous reversal of racial stereotypes, Caldwell succeeded in exposing not only the degradation that could arise from unremitting poverty, but the ludicrous desperation of even the poorest white to preside over the black. In 1945, Southern newspaper publisher Ralph McGill also found himself discussing Tobacco Road with a bookseller in Rome because it had become the archetypal exported image of the region and because it prompted him to express something of the mystique that informs the South as regional abstraction: “Now fluid as quicksilver, now rigid and cruel in its adamant injustice and wrongs, now soft and merry, it was difficult to put into words” (McGill: 6).
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Gone with the Wind (1936) would provide an even more tenacious image of the South, so iconic in the popular imagination that the publication of Alice Randall’s sequel, The Wind Done Gone (2001), was initially blocked by Mitchell’s Estate. The African American writer’s re-visioning of the novel from the point of view of the slaves at Tara was published only after an Atlanta court’s ban, citing copyright infringement on the original, was overturned. While Randall’s publisher was vocal in support of the novel, Randall’s parody was also supported by critics and writers of Southern fiction who rallied to her defense on the grounds of free speech, with Tony Earley’s endorsement on the book cover seeking to enfold Randall in Southern literary history by asserting the novel’s significance as the “connective tissue” binding “the fairytale of Gone with the Wind to the gothic nightmare of Absalom, Absalom!” If the South’s best-selling author was Caldwell, and Mitchell its most cherished internationally, as Helen Taylor proves in Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and its Female Fans (1989), its literary-critical center of gravity has remained William Faulkner from the point that his work was enfolded into the Southern Renascence, championed by Malcolm Cowley in The Portable Faulkner (1949), and recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize of 1950, which finally assured his status as an “American” icon. Faulkner’s fictions would act as a standard against which subsequent works and typically “Southern” characters would be measured. That his novels map the primary themes of modern Southern literature is an axiom that contemporary novelist Doris Betts returns to with irony: “In the K-Mart checkout line, Dilsey’s descendants and those from the Compson and Sartoris clans are all wearing jeans” (Betts: 267), and that Harry Crews satirizes to imaginative effect in Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971) where his protagonist sports a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner’s face as a shroudof-Turin image. Flannery O’Connor warned that Faulkner’s mythical status could be sobering, even stultifying for other writers: “The presence of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down” (O’Connor 1962: 45). While O’Connor’s comment is typically tongue-in-cheek and she suffered no such creative inhibition, the sentiment became prevalent in twentieth-century literary criticism where writers are too often measured against Faulkner and found wanting, so much so that Michael Kreyling in his 1996 examination of the ways in which Southern literature was invented over the twentieth century unpacks the “Quentin thesis” that has stood at the crux of definitions of Southern fiction: “If ‘the South’ is a cultural entity, then ‘Faulkner’ is its official language” (Kreyling: 127). While Faulkner’s iconic status as a “limited” fictional company, about whom the anxiety of influence has circulated, may be read – like his representations of Southern community – as stifling as well as inspiring, Faulkner’s philosophy of writing, expressed in the modernist tones of Bergson and Proust, has been creatively enabling, opening up as it does a syntactical vision of the image of the South on the page that both New Critical and more overtly historicized materialist approaches to reading explore continually.
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Faulkner’s ambition, he told Malcolm Cowley, was “to put everything into one sentence – not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present, second by second” (Cowley: 595). This Faulknerian chronotope is expressed in various ways through his fiction: in Benjy’s narration in The Sound and the Fury (1929), which is limited to a continuous present tense and which Faulkner upheld really contained the whole of the story that is merely clarified in the sections that follow; and in Quentin’s vision of the past that proves to be so burdensome that it overwhelms him and presages his suicide at twenty in The Sound and the Fury (1929), feeling “older than a lot of people who have died” (Faulkner 1979b: 301). As novels contain the seeds of other novels in their shifts in consciousness and time, so subsequent novelists as different as Cormac McCarthy and Randall Kenan return to Faulkner’s ornate syntax and to his idea of “the South” existing in a diurnal round or perpetual present. This idea is distilled by Mary Lee Settle, who in the metafictional The Killing Ground (1982), one of a quintet of novels begun in the 1950s, has narrator Hannah observe: “There is a time when all we have done, or thought, or dreamed meets in a moment that no matter how deeply buried in us is always in the present tense” (Settle: 311). Hannah’s statement answers the question that Quentin Compson’s Canadian roommate poses and with which he struggles until his death: “Why do you hate the South?” (Faulkner 1986: 303).
The Southern Gothic and a Sense of Place Southern fiction is increasingly noteworthy for its moral toughness about precisely those facets of society that have traditionally rendered “the South” the nation’s backward cousin, with Southern whites huddled together according to an enduring “protoDorian bond,” as W. J. Cash described in The Mind of the South (1941). The slave South, the segregated South, the Gothic South, in fact multiple “Souths,” have been closely and consistently associated with excess or sublimity; the so-called “Southern Grotesque” being in form and style closely bound into a moral vision of the region. Place is mapped as imagined community and the small town that is celebrated in much American fiction is revealed as a paradox in its Southern incarnation: as beloved but benighted, close but repressive, coercive and resistant, a complex constellation of class and racial clashes and collaborations. Writers explored small-town communities as vital to their conception of a Southern sensibility: Faulkner’s fictional town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County; Eudora Welty’s provincial Morgana in stories that coalesce in The Golden Apples (1949); fabulist Randall Kenan’s Tims Creek, North Carolina; Lewis Nordan’s Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, and Cormac McCarthy’s east Tennessee – each death-haunted as a result of the casual quotidian horrors depicted. While Ellen Glasgow professed to despair in 1935 that writers including Caldwell, Faulkner, and T. S. Stribling had founded a “Southern Gothic School” according to which Southern literature had become “one vast disordered sensibility” (Glasgow: 34), it was only the manner of approach to the South’s traumas and pathologies that had
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changed. Southern fiction has always exhibited something of a Gothic sensibility from Poe and Twain through Kate Chopin, and, although the New Critics by valuing modernist aesthetics endeavored to staunch the leaking of the prevailing Southern story into populist melodrama and sentimentalism, a troubled cultural consciousness and mass cultural appeal infiltrated novels via subjects such as cross-racial sex and incest, as in T. S. Stribling’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Store (1932) and The Unfinished Cathedral (1934), and Absalom, Absalom! Nevertheless, a certain cultural realism was expected to undergird even the most grotesque or fantastic stories that took the South as their setting. It would be difficult to find more fantastical and surreal scenes than those that characterize Lewis Nordan’s postmodernist fictions: in Wolf Whistle (1993), for example, a flock of buzzards a century old, each named for a governor of Mississippi or a Confederate general, presides over the town; the local congregation worships in a meat locker; and a school trip comprises walking across town to visit a boy with 80 percent burns because he tried to incinerate his father. However, the novel explores one of the most notorious and tragic racist murders of the century: the death of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Nordan has explained that the murder occurred in his own community when he was only a year or so older than Till: “My father was a friend of one of the guys who killed Emmett Till … We were so shocked we couldn’t deal with it at all, couldn’t even talk about it …” Eventually, Nordan realized that part of the Till murder story was his to tell: “I had the story of the people on the periphery of this terrible thing, who … didn’t quite understand their own culpability in the situation. That was the story I had to write” (Ingram and Ledbetter: 84). Nordan cleaves open the minds of the killers and their community. Faulkner had described the murder as the act of a “desperate culture,” and forty years later Nordan reveals the source of desperation in the post-Brown moment and cleverly mocks the reader’s desire for whole truths couched in realist codes in the form of the historical novel. One telling characteristic of Southern fiction is the proliferation of characters who are unable or unwilling to think historically from Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling, who derives his life’s meanings from the movies in The Moviegoer (1961), through the cast of Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh (1982); characters who are unmoved by or uninterested in the past are unable to find a foothold in the present. In Larry Brown’s Joe (1991), for example, the characters are so disconnected from the landscape they inhabit that they poison a forest. In Josephine Humphreys’ Dreams of Sleep (1984), a character is made to bemoan the postmodern process of disengagement: “We can’t sustain the things we used to sustain: dynasties, clans, big families; we can’t even maintain their monuments. Statues are losing their noses, tombstones their letters” (Humphreys: 112). Fixating on the gratification of the moment and on consumer culture leaves characters unfixed and unfocused so that even in fiction published in the final decades of the century, the importance of historicizing Southern places is still conveyed as one of the most enduring preoccupations of Southern fiction. It is interesting, then, that in “Place in Fiction” (1955) Eudora Welty begins quite apologetically by positing place as “one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction,” as
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compared to character, plot, and symbolism. But “place” roots her writing and in the end “heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum” (Welty: 125). Place also serves as the lens through which hurt and outrage may be explored as Gothic propensities in the Southern narrative, as with murder at the hands of a mob in Faulkner’s “Dry September” (1931) and Caldwell’s Trouble in July (1940), or as symbolized in Percy Grimm’s castration of Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932). The lynch mob is also one of the most disturbing of Southern tropes for African American writers born outside the South for whom it coheres in the most grotesque of stories, such as Ralph Ellison’s “A Party on the Square” (n.d.) and James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” (1965). Indeed, the British writer Rebecca West in “Opera in Greenville” (1947) intertwines a journalist’s facts with a novelist’s moral vision when reporting a lynching in South Carolina. Southern writers are especially practiced at making visible the ideology according to which lynching crimes could be ritualized as the white community’s defense against a mythologized racial enemy within and allowed to go unpunished – though not forgotten. In Byron Herbert Reece’s lyrical The Hawk and the Sun (1955), for example, the sole remaining black resident of a sleepy, small town becomes the scapegoat for fears that pulse below the community’s calm surface. Once his murder has been carried out, the white mob “dispersed suddenly with common consent … each man dropped his eyes, for it was a witness each saw when he looked in the face of his fellow” (Reece: 177). Such fictions are morality plays that express the region’s most deep-seated fears of the racial “Other.” In this way, fiction historicizes such Gothic concepts as mob violence and racial fear. For example, while Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1938) emphasizes the symbolic centrality of the white Southern lady as the pretext for defense of the “Southern way of life,” by mid-century the Supreme Court decisions Brown I and II ensured that the fear of “race mixing” took on the specific texture of those civil rights initiatives that characterized the 1950s and 1960s. In Carson McCullers’ Clock without Hands (1961), Sherman Pew is murdered for having dared to rent a house in a white neighborhood, and Eudora Welty’s “Where is the Voice Coming From?” (1963) imagines the mind of the racist murderer of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, shot in the back as he entered his home in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty’s home town.
Race, the South, and the Nation Whether viewed as “narcissistically bucolic” or “pathologically racist,” each image of the South has been “equally reliant on the image of an urban, liberal North” (Monteith 2007a: 66). In 1964, Howard Zinn would argue that in the South could be found “the essence of the nation”; national characteristics were apparent in their most concentrated form in the region which acted as “a mirror in which the nation can see its blemishes magnified” (Zinn: 218, 263). This idea turns away from the age-old adage that Flannery O’Connor makes manifest in The Violent Bear It Away (1960) in the words of a Northern truck driver to his Southern passenger: “ ‘You belong in the
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booby hatch,’ the driver muttered. ‘You ride through these states and you see they all belong in it. I won’t see nobody sane again until I get back to Detroit’ ” (O’Connor 1980: 213). Zinn’s thesis also recalls Richard Wright’s statement that “The Negro is America’s metaphor” (Wright: 109). As I have argued elsewhere, the metaphor of the Southern black man, and the fear of “race mixing” at the heart of America’s pathological racial fantasy, was a trope that had international currency. It coincided, for example, with the psychologically inflected, dark, and desperate sensibility of the roman noir. “The South” mutated into an example of Americana; the French adaptation of Richard Wright’s stories was “an excursion into a fantasy South, that was less related to the U.S. than it was reflective of Europe’s condemnation of American race relations” (Monteith 2007b: 162). Castigating the South for its insularity, racial violence, and religious fundamentalism, exploring such charges – or defending the region against them – was a twentieth-century literary preoccupation in which characters were made to echo writers. The implications of O’Connor’s telling observation that “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic” (O’Connor 1962: 40) are made manifest time and again in Faulkner’s fiction, as when lawyer Gavin Stevens decries the “eagerness to believe anything about the South not even provided it be derogatory but merely bizarre and strange enough” (Faulkner 1979a: 153). It is unsurprising that the region that founded a system of segregation at the end of the nineteenth century, buttressing it with laws while all the time expounding its rightness as natural, should produce the most emotive as well as the most demotic novels about race relations. Nor is it unexpected that potent metaphors of African American cultural experience – the “sorrow song” and the feeling of “double consciousness” deriving from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Richard Wright’s trope of the “native son” – should be threaded through Southern fiction. By mid-century, however, anthologies of Southern fiction still failed to include black authors. It would be the 1960s before the supposedly organic sense of Southern literature as white-authored would be broken open. At the beginning of the twentieth century, “white” was the modifier of the South, often silent but always understood in descriptions of Southern culture as well as Southern fiction. In 1944, the “American dilemma” had been summarized by Gunnar Myrdal as the division between American ideals of equality, freedom, individual dignity, and inalienable rights and “the practices of discrimination, humiliation, insult, denial of opportunity to Negroes and others in a racist society” (Myrdal: lxxi). The “savage” South acted as a synonym for these larger social concerns, notably the region’s fear of “race mixing” as informed by a national obsession with the fiction of racial purity. Paranoia over the exposure of “invisible blackness” is a traditional subject in the literature of Mark Twain, Frances W. Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin through William Faulkner and on down the decades. “Race” is made to betray the Southern family’s whiteness, in the same way that the white family has betrayed its black members. At the very beginning of the century, stories such as Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s
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Baby” (1893) and Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) explored how quickly divisions congeal when racial “integrity” is placed in doubt. Racial intimacy is explored to best effect in the “Southern family romance,” the form which more than any other intimates what Will Barrett in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman (1966) describes as the key difference between “the cool Yankee style of going your own way” and Southern folkways: “Here for God’s sake the air fairly crackled with kinship radiations” (Percy: 195). The fears and suspicions at the heart of Southern folkways are explored in endlessly illuminating ways in, for example, Faulkner’s Light in August in which Joe Christmas, unaware of his parents’ racial origins, is hounded by doubt into self-hatred and murder, and, much more quietly, John Gregory Brown’s Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994) in which the daughter in an ostensibly “white” family discovers her mixed racial heritage has been hidden from her. Brown’s novel recalls another Louisiana-set fiction, Shirley Ann Grau’s Keepers of the House, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964, perhaps because this story of entangled racial relationships was testament to a wider cultural fascination with the lives of black and white Southerners at the height of the civil rights movement. Race has always been a crucial political platform in the U.S. even when its importance is underplayed. The reciprocal haunting of black and white is indissoluble and indelible in Southern fiction (even when barely present, as in Tobacco Road or The Violent Bear It Away) in the way that James Baldwin summarized: “In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are to become a nation – if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women” (Baldwin: 83). This mutuality has been recognized by each of the nation’s serious cultural commentators but has its apotheosis in Southern culture. In The Mind of the South (1941), W. J. Cash was adamant that the “Negro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered Negro – subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude” (Cash: 49–50). The internal contradictions, according to which Southern storytelling is at once a totalizing and a nationally subversive process, have informed American literary history and criticism, and, in the 1960s, Leslie Fiedler went so far as to argue that “without the Negro … there is no southern fiction” (Fiedler: 17). The second half of the twentieth century saw writing by black and white Southerners topping best-seller lists. Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Ellen Gilchrist, William Styron, Tom Wolfe, Cormac McCarthy, Larry Brown, Richard Ford, Lewis Nordan, Donna Tartt, and Harry Crews are at once integral to the region’s writing and central to an understanding of twentieth-century U.S. fiction. Reading Southern writing illustrates that to be associated with a region is not to be delimited by it: many of the most renowned of “regional” writers are the most internationally acclaimed, and some of the most “Southern” of fictions were written outside the South; indeed, outside the U.S., Elizabeth Spencer wrote one of the most penetrating novels about Mississippi, The Voice at the Back Door (1955), while living in Italy, and Cormac McCarthy wrote his Gothic Appalachian parable Outer Dark (1968) while in Spain. Many more Southern writers examine the ambiguous edges of regional formation. The fictions of Katherine Ann Porter, a Texan brought up in
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Louisiana, combine the Southeast with its plantation history and the Southwest with its border relations with Mexico, and she also pushed further away in her novel Ship of Fools (1962) with its American, German, Spanish, and Mexican passengers. Twentieth-century Southern fiction is seen to be most revealing about the relationship between nation and region, past and present, and white and black Americans. The region’s biracial yet supposedly monocultural literary tradition functioned for much of the twentieth century to set it apart from a more ethnically diverse “American” fiction, but, as collections such as Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn’s Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004), and articles by Martyn Bone and others begin to explore, the region has a multicultural history and future. Jack Butler’s reminder that Southern writers are the coastline that maps the region’s shifting borders is exciting when that coastline is continually showing “finer and crazier variation” (Butler: 34). However, when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 the devastation of the Gulf Coast was a reminder that the U.S. South remained symbolically estranged from the nation but inextricably bound into ideas of nationhood. In confronting the U.S. government with issues of poverty and racism that could no longer be hidden, this “local” and “regional” disaster exposed a larger national crisis in political, fiscal, and racial terms. Even if Southern fiction’s narrative glue has been place and family, the simultaneous vilification and reification of the South has underpinned the regional narrative. It has always rested on the nation’s history and the region’s relationship to that history. Southern fiction is instrumental in depicting those issues that have been central to the national narrative, especially race and rights. The fictions that have begun to explore the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will contribute to that same creative body of knowledge.
References and Further Reading Baldwin, James (1964). The Fire Next Time [1963]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Betts, Doris (1993). “Daughters, Southerners, and Daisy,” in The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, ed. Carol Manning, pp. 259–76. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Bone, Martyn (2005). The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Brinkmeyer, Robert (2000). Remapping Southern Literature. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. Butler, Jack (1996). “Still Southern After All These Years,” in The Future of Southern Letters, eds. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe, pp. 33–40. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cash, W. J. (1971). The Mind of the South [1941]. London: Thames and Hudson. Clendinen, Dudley (1988). The Prevailing South. Atlanta: Longstreet. Cowley, Malcolm, ed. (2003). The Portable Faulkner [1949]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Crews, Harry (1971). Karate is a Thing of the Spirit. New York: Morrow. Ellison, Ralph (1994). “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” [1958], in Shadow and Act, pp. 61– 73. New York: Quality. Ellison, Ralph (1995). “An Extravagance of Laugher” [1986], in Going to the Territory, pp. 145–97. New York: Vintage. Faulkner, William (1979a). Intruder in the Dust [1948]. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Southern Fiction Faulkner, William (1979b). The Sound and the Fury [1929]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Faulkner, William (1986). Absalom, Absalom! [1936]. New York: Vintage. Fiedler, Leslie (1972). The Return of the Vanishing American [1968]. London: Paladin. Glasgow, Ellen (1935). “Heroes and Monsters,” Saturday Review of Literature, 12 (4 May): 34. Gray, Richard (1979). The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South. London: Arnold. Gray, Richard (2000). Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Hobson, Fred (1974). Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Humphreys, Josephine (1984). Dreams of Sleep. New York: Penguin. Ingram, Russell and Ledbetter, Mark (1997). “An Interview with Lewis Nordan,” Mississippi Review, 20: 75–89. Jones, Suzanne W. and Monteith, Sharon, eds. (2002). South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press. Kilpatrick, James Jackson and Rubin, Louis D., Jr., eds. (1957). The Lasting South: Fourteen Southerners Look at their House. Chicago: Henry Regnery. King, Richard H. (1980). A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the South, 1930–1955. New York: Oxford University Press. Kirby, Jack Temple (1986). Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. Kreyling, Michael (1996). Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lytle, Andrew, et al. (1981). Why the South Will Survive. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. McGill, Ralph (1959). The South and the Southerner. Boston: Little Brown. Monteith, Sharon (2007a). “Southern Like US,” The Global South, 1 (1): 66–74. Monteith, Sharon (2007b). “How Bigger Mutated: Richard Wright, Boris Vian and ‘The bloody
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paths through which we push logic into dread,’ ” in Transatlantic Encounters: The American South in Europe – Europe in the American South, eds. Richard Gray and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, pp. 149–66. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Myrdal, Gunnar (1944). An American Dilemma. New York: Harper Row. O’Connor, Flannery (1962). Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. O’Connor, Flannery (1980). The Violent Bear It Away [1960]. London: Faber and Faber. Percy, Walker (1966). The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Reece, Byron Herbert (1994). The Hawk and the Sun [1955]. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. Reed, John Skelton (1974). The Enduring South. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Romine, Scott (1999). The Narrative Forms of Southern Community. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Settle, Mary Lee (1996). The Killing Ground [1982]. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Smith, Jon and Cohn, Deborah (2004). Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Tate, Allen (1968). Essays in Four Decades. Chicago: Swallow Press. Taylor, Helen (1989). Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and its Female Fans. London: Virago. Toomer, Jean (1988). Cane [1923]. New York: W. W. Norton. Warren, Robert Penn (1979). Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices [1953]. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Welty, Eudora (1979). The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Vintage. Wright, Richard (1978). White Man, Listen! [1957]. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Zinn, Howard (1972). The Southern Mystique [1964]. New York: Touchstone.
8
Jewish American Fiction David Brauner
In a B.B.C.2 interview on November 25, 1993, Martin Amis declared that “the twentieth-century novel belongs to … Jewish Americans.” Hyperbolic it may be, but Amis’s claim is certainly not without some foundation. Between its inception in 1950 and the end of the century, America’s most prestigious prize for fiction, the National Book Award, was awarded on ten occasions to Jewish American authors: to Saul Bellow three times (The Adventures of Augie March, 1954; Herzog, 1965; and Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 1971), twice each to Bernard Malamud (The Magic Barrel, 1959; The Fixer, 1967) and Philip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus, 1960; Sabbath’s Theater, 1995), and once to Jerzy Kosinski (Steps, 1969), Isaac Bashevis Singer (A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, 1974), and E. L. Doctorow (World’s Fair, 1986). In the postwar period, Bellow, Malamud, and Roth also all won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for Humboldt’s Gift, 1976; The Fixer, 1967; and American Pastoral, 1998, respectively), as did Herman Wouk (The “Caine” Mutiny, 1952) and Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song, 1980). Finally, Bellow, in 1976, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, two years later, were both awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. These achievements are considerable, but the preeminence of Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, and of their contemporary male novelists, should not obscure the fact that some of the finest work in the field of twentiethcentury Jewish American fiction has been by less feted female authors in the less prestigious genre of the short story. If the diversity of twentieth-century Jewish American fiction has often been overlooked because of the long shadow cast by a small number of famous male novelists, it is equally true that its history has often been somewhat simplified. During the twentieth century, Jewish American writing tended conventionally to be divided into three main phases: the “first generation,” whose fiction grew out of, and was preoccupied with, the immigrant experience; the “second generation,” who managed to “break through” in the 1950s and 1960s into the mainstream of American letters; and the “third generation,” who defied the gloomy predictions of critics such as Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler by demonstrating a renewed interest in, and commitment
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to, Jewish identity as a rich source of fictional material. In this conventional account, certain qualities are said to characterize Jewish American writing, distinguishing it from the modernist and postmodernist: notably an abiding humanist morality, encapsulated by the Yiddish term Menschlichkeit, meaning the nobility, dignity, and virtue of a righteous Mensch, i.e. man (see Lyons in Fried et al.: 61–89; Hilfer: 74–5). However, from the perspective of the early part of the twenty-first century, this teleological version of literary history appears increasingly reductive and misleading. First, the neatness of the lines drawn between the three generations obscures overlaps and anomalies. Anzia Yezierska, for example, while best known for the fiction she produced in the 1920s, carried on publishing well into the postwar period. Philip Roth, often bracketed with Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, was actually born nearly twenty years later and was still publishing in 2008, some twenty years after the death of Malamud and eight years after the appearance of Bellow’s final book. Conversely, Tova Reich, who published her first novel in 1978 and only began receiving critical attention in the 1990s, was born in 1932, a year before Roth. And where does Henry Roth – who published his brilliant first novel, Call It Sleep, in 1934, and then nothing else until an autobiographical tetralogy of novels in the 1990s – fit into this scheme? Roth’s example demonstrates the shortcomings of the approach to Jewish American fiction outlined above, not just by virtue of the extraordinary interval between his first and second novels, but because all his fiction is unashamedly modernist, shaped more by Freud, Joyce, and Proust than by any of his Jewish American contemporaries. Then there are the gaps and omissions that reflect the (unspoken) values of most of the critics who produced this apparently consensual canon of twentieth-century Jewish American fiction. These values may be broadly described as masculinist (as exemplified by the emphasis on Menschlichkeit) and conservative: hence the marginalization of many women (for example, Jo Sinclair, Lore Segal, and Francine Prose), gay writers (Leslie Feinberg, David Leavitt, Lev Raphael), experimental authors (Gertrude Stein, Jerzy Kosinski, Paul Auster), and figures whose mixed parentage (J. D. Salinger, Tillie Olsen, Emily Prager) or apparent lack of interest in Jewishness (Dorothy Parker, Norman Mailer, Harold Brodkey) means that they are not readily assimilated into the rubric of Jewish American writing. The key events of twentieth-century Jewish history – namely, the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel – provide more meaningful lines of demarcation with which to divide Jewish American writing than the slippery notion of “generations,” and the richness of twentieth-century Jewish American writing would be better served by a more inclusive, heterogeneous account, reflecting the role of women, the prominence of the short-story form, the presence of relatively neglected authors, and the importance of issues such as self-hatred, interracial tensions, and sexuality, that at least complicate and perhaps fatally compromise the idea of a unifying, life-affirming Menschlichkeit. I will concentrate here on self-hatred because it is both a constant presence in Jewish American fiction and one that is interrogated with varying degrees of subtlety and self-reflexivity over the course of the twentieth century. The term selfhatred is itself problematic (see Brauner: 32–3; Gilman) but serves as a convenient
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umbrella category, covering a continuum of responses by Jews toward their own and others’ Jewishness, ranging from self-conscious anti-Semitism to unwittingly internalized racism and ambivalent self-satire. The rest of this chapter will trace some of these permutations as they manifest themselves in two canonical works, Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers (1925) and Cynthia Ozick’s story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” (1969); two relatively neglected stories, Hortense Calisher’s “Old Stock” (1950) and Grace Paley’s “The Contest” (1959); and one largely forgotten novel, Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold (1979). In this way, a reasonably representative range of material will be covered in terms of period and genre, while at the same time this chapter will go some way toward establishing an alternative, more feminocentric framework for the study of twentieth-century Jewish American fiction than the Menschlichkeit model. With the exception of Call It Sleep, arguably the three greatest prewar Jewish American novels are Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch Paunch and Jowl (1923), and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers. All three describe a journey of assimilation from the Jewish immigrant ghetto to the wider American society; in this sense, they are success stories. Yet all three – in very different ways – emphasize the high moral and psychological price that their protagonists pay for their material success. On the face of it, Cahan and Ornitz seem to take diametrically opposed positions. The eponymous hero of Cahan’s novel, David Levinsky, a Russian-born religious scholar who becomes an American millionaire clothes manufacturer, is haunted by his past and by guilt at the betrayal of his youthful ideals; Meyer Hirsch, Ornitz’s anti-hero, who is born on the voyage to America and escapes the poverty of the ghetto by becoming a corrupt lawyer, is entirely unapologetic about his ascent to the role of senior judge in New York’s Superior Criminal Court. The mood of Cahan’s novel is meditative and melancholy; Ornitz’s is a comic picaresque. Yet beneath both Levinsky’s self-recriminations and Hirsch’s self-justifications there runs a current of self-hatred that flows through virtually all prewar Jewish American fiction. In the writing of this period, the process of assimilation is invariably driven not only by the ambition to make it in America but by distaste for the culture of the Jewish ghetto. This is apparent even in the more optimistic trajectory of Bread Givers. Whereas Cahan’s and Ornitz’s protagonists are both self-made men, who jettison their humble Jewish origins in order to become American machers (men of power and influence), and who remain alienated from their communities at the close of the novels, the heroine of Yezierska’s novel breaks free of the stifling patriarchal grip of her father, Reb Smolinsky, to pursue a career as a teacher, but is finally reconciled with him. In the 1999 Persea edition of Bread Givers, above the title of the novel is the legend, “A struggle between a father of the Old World and a daughter of the New,” and, indeed, the crisis of the novel is figured very much in these terms. When Yezierska’s protagonist, Sara Smolinsky, declares her independence, telling her tyrannical father, “I’m going to live my own life … I’m not from the old country. I’m American!,” he slaps her and she “dash[es] for the door,” reflecting that “The Old World had struck its last on me” (Yezierska: 138). However, Sara is, in fact, very much her father’s
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daughter, not least in her infatuation with his utopian idea of America as the “new golden country.” By the time she leaves home, Sara is well aware of the absurdity of her father’s Edenic vision, but she mythologizes her journey to college with similar euphoria: “I felt like Columbus starting out … in search of the New World” (Yezierska: 209). If Sara’s vision of herself as a pioneer emphasizes the sacrifices and hardships involved in discovering the New World, as opposed to the extravagant riches envisioned by her father, it relies no less on a romantic ideal. Sara is constantly concerned that her immigrant appearance, demeanor, and manners will expose her to derision: “I cast side glances like a guilty thing; nobody should see the way I ate.” When she first sets eyes on the college town, she immediately describes its tranquil beauty in terms of the absence of all that defines her old neighborhood of Hester Street: “No crowds, no tenements. No hurrying noise to beat the race of the hours” (Yezierska: 210). Sara continues to deploy the trope of the negative catalogue so beloved of the early settlers of America when she turns her attention to the town’s inhabitants: “So these are the real Americans, I thought, thrilled by the lean, straight bearing of the passers-by. They had none of that terrible fight for bread and rent that I always saw in New York people’s eyes” (Yezierska: 211). We can see that it is a short step from idolizing the other to despising oneself: it is not just that Sara compares the appearance and demeanor of the “New York people” (for whom read “Jews”) unfavorably with that of the “real Americans” (for whom read “Gentiles”), it is that her admiration of the “lean, straight bearing” of these Americans implicitly invokes the anti-Semitic stereotype of the hunched, crooked Jew with which it contrasts. It would be misleading to suggest that Bread Givers represents the ghetto and its inhabitants in unequivocally negative terms. The opening chapter of the novel ends, in fact, with a lyrical celebration of its teeming life, the “music of Hester Street.” Yet this epiphany is prompted by Sara’s girlish elation at having earned a “greasy fifty pennies” selling herring in the marketplace. As she grows up, Sara’s desire to leave her “hell house” and “make myself for a person and come among people” intensifies. Allowing for her idiomatic, Yiddish-inflected language, this resolution nonetheless seems to imply that she does not regard the Jews (including herself) as full-fledged “people,” in the same way as she does not regard them as “real Americans.” With distance, her stance softens somewhat and she even begins to feel some nostalgia for her old life, but when she arrives at college, she is dismayed at the “sight [she] was in [her] gray pushcart clothes against the beautiful gay colors … those [i.e. the “real American”] young girls wore.” Once again, the way in which she marvels at the “spick-and-span cleanliness of these people” (Yezierska: 212) seems to give this “fresh, clean beauty” a metaphorical significance: it is an uncomfortable reminder not just of the physical dirt of her family home in Hester Street but also of the common pejorative use of the term in anti-Semitic discourse (as in “dirty Jew”). Bread Givers is in many ways a progressive, even a proto-feminist, novel, and despite – or perhaps because of – Sara’s ambivalence about her Jewish ties, she ends up with a Jewish man (albeit a thoroughly assimilated one), in contrast to the heroines of most of Yezierska’s other autobiographical fiction, who tend to marry their Gentile mentors.
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For all Sara’s feistiness and independence of spirit, however, she never quite shakes off the sense of inferiority that she associates with her Jewishness. At the end of the novel, she agrees to take in her father, now a destitute widower whose second marriage has ended in acrimony, acknowledging that she feels the “weight” of not “just [her] father but the generations who made [her] father … still upon me” (Yezierska: 297). Sara’s burden is not simply that of Jewish history but of the internalized prejudice accreted through centuries of oppression and persecution. This legacy is explored more explicitly in a number of novels and stories in the two decades following the end of World War II, a context that leant it additional resonance: Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945), Saul Bellow’s The Victim (1947), Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant (1957), and Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic” and “Defender of the Faith” (both collected in Goodbye, Columbus, 1959). Paradoxically, even while these authors were representing the defensiveness and paranoia of the Jewish American community in their fiction, their success ensured that Jewish American literature became, during the 1950s and 1960s, almost synonymous with American literature: Miller and Allen Ginsburg established themselves among the leading playwrights and poets, respectively, of their generation; Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Norman Mailer, and Isaac Bashevis Singer (who, though he continued to write in Yiddish, found fame in the U.S. through the English translations of his work) all won prestigious literary awards and featured on the best-sellers lists; and the first novels of J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951) and Joseph Heller (Catch-22, 1961) ensured that these authors became not just literary celebrities but cult figures throughout the Western world. At the same time, as these male authors were attracting critical and popular acclaim, three of their less celebrated female contemporaries – Hortense Calisher, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick – were in the vanguard of a revival of the short-story form in America. Their first collections of stories – In the Absence of Angels (1951), The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), and The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), respectively – each contain stories that also deal, in very different ways, with the theme of self-hatred. Hortense Calisher’s “Old Stock” tells the story of a summer holiday to the Catskills (a resort greatly favored by Jewish families in the postwar era) undertaken by a fifteenyear-old girl, Hester Elkin (a character who recurs in a number of Calisher’s stories and who may be regarded as a portrait of the artist as a young girl), and her mother. It is clear from the outset that Mrs. Elkin endures, rather than enjoys, such excursions. Her reluctance to holiday at the farm is not simply a matter of snobbery: it stems from a peculiar terror of being identified as a Jew. On the train journey out of the city, Hester recognizes, superimposed on the “shuttered, conscious look” her mother adopts in public, a “prim display of extra restraint her mother always wore in the presence of other Jews whose grosser features, voices, manners offended her sense of gentility all the more out of her resentful fear that she might be identified with them” (Antler: 142). Like Sara Smolinsky, Mrs. Elkin instinctively associates gentility with Gentiles, and, by implication, vulgarity with Jews. Determined to distance herself as much as possible from the other Jewish holidaymakers (particularly Mrs. Garfunkel),
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Mrs. Elkin nonetheless feels compelled to own her ethnicity to the elderly, partly deaf, owner of Old Corner Farm, Miss Onderdonk: “I told Elizabeth Smith … she’d rue the day she ever started taking in Jews” … “I thought you knew, Miss Onderdonk … that we were – Hebrews” … “Eh?” said Miss Onderdonk … “But we are Jewish … Mr. Elkin and I are Jewish.” (Antler: 151)
Ironically, neither Mrs. Elkin’s initial euphemism nor her subsequent, franker confession convinces Miss Onderdonk, who insists that Mrs. Elkin does not have “the look” and that “Good blood shows, any day.” Far from being offended by the spinster’s remarks, Mrs. Elkin is clearly flattered, “smiling, as if she had been caught out in a fault” and becoming “pinker, not with anger, but, somehow, as if she had been cajoled” (Antler: 152). In a further irony, her conversation with Miss Onderdonk emboldens Mrs. Elkin so that she no longer feels the need to remain so aloof from Mrs. Garfunkel. The story ends with Hester, indignant at Miss Onderdonk’s racism and ashamed of her mother’s complicity in it, imagining how her late entry for dinner will be received: When she walked into the dining room, they would all lift their heads for a moment … regarding her for just a minute with their equivocal adult eyes. Something would rise from them all like a warning odor, confusing and corrupt, and she knew now what it was. Miss Onderdonk sat at their table, too. Wherever any of them sat publicly at table, Miss Onderdonk sat by his side. Only, some of them set a place for her and some of them did not. (Antler: 153–4)
This final paragraph is full of ambiguities: does the pronoun “they” refer to adults in general, to Jews particularly, or only to self-hating Jews like Mrs. Elkin? What distinction is being made between those who “set a place for” Miss Onderdonk and those who do not? Are the former those (Jews) who collude with the racism that Miss Onderdonk symbolizes? If so, then the latter would be those who resist, yet Hester foresees the “odor” of corruption arising from them all. And what exactly is this “warning odor” that they give off? Does it signify the hypocrisy of these “equivocal” adults? Is it somehow related to another staple of anti-Semitic discourse, the foetor Judaicus, the pseudo-scientific term for a distinctive unpleasant aroma that was commonly identified in anti-Semitic writing of the nineteenth century as a racial marker of Jewish identity? Is the final irony of the story then that Hester herself, in spite of her embarrassment at her mother’s fastidious evasions, might be implicated in her anti-Semitism? Grace Paley’s “The Contest” also features a young Jewish protagonist whose identity is defined in antagonistic relation to other Jew’s versions of Jewishness. The contest alluded to in the title is a competition run by a Yiddish newspaper,
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Morgenlicht, called “Jews in the News,” in which readers are invited to identify three eminent Jewish Americans by reading brief biographies or perusing photographs of them. Freddy, Paley’s laconic, cynical, feckless narrator, is persuaded by his acquisitive girlfriend, Dorothy, to use his prodigious memory to help her win first prize: “five thousand dollars and a trip to Israel. Also on return two days each in the three largest European capitals in the Free West.” Freddy’s initial response – “What’s the idea, though? To uncover the ones that’ve been passing?” (Paley: 45) – is typically flippant. Nonetheless, it highlights a pertinent fact: namely, that many American Jews still felt insecure about their ethnicity in 1950s’ America, preferring to keep their identity discreet, attempting to “pass” (the term borrowed from the phenomenon of lightskinned African Americans passing themselves off as white) as part of the W.A.S.P. majority who still dominated the cultural and political institutions of the U.S. Freddy is anything but proud of his Jewishness. Indeed, when he begins the story by informing us that “[m]y last girl was Jewish … They don’t like you to work too hard, I understand, until you’re hooked and then, you bastard, sweat!” (Paley: 42), the natural assumption might be that he is a (mildly anti-Semitic) Gentile. Only at the end of the story, when he is writing to Dorothy to reproach her for having refused to share her prize with him (she tells him that he can only accompany her on the trip if they get married, and he refuses), does he use the first-person pronoun when referring to Jews: “In all earnestness, I helped you, combing my memory for those of our faith who have touched the press-happy nerves of this country” (Paley: 50). Ten years before the publication of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), which precipitated a storm of protest and brought heated accusations of self-hatred on the head of its author (not least for the portrait of Sophie Portnoy, the stifling mother of the protagonist), Paley’s protagonist observes that his mother “should’ve stayed in Freud” and also makes a very risqué joke about the Holocaust, commenting each time he successfully identifies another of the “Jews in the News”: “Well, we’ve uncovered another one. Put him on the list for Van 2” (Paley: 46). Like Alexander Portnoy, however, Freddy’s caustic humor is aimed as much at the wider (non-Jewish) culture as it is at the parochialism of the Jewish American community. When Dorothy first explains the rules of the contest to him, Freddy exclaims sarcastically: “A hundred Jews in the news? … What a tolerant country!” (Paley: 45), and it is clear throughout that he attributes the absurdity of the contest to the celebrity-obsessed “press-happy nerves” of American culture, as much as to the peculiar insecurity (masquerading as pride) of Jewish Americans. Freddy also shares with Portnoy a self-satirical tendency that ironizes his discourse throughout the story, making him a highly ambiguous figure: at once naïve and worldly, misogynistic and sentimental, irreverent and sententious. As well as anticipating many of the themes of Portnoy’s Complaint, “The Contest” marks a shift in Jewish American fiction that was also evident in the publication of Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus: namely, a move away from focusing on the negotiations between Jews and (Gentile) Americans toward exploring the tensions within the Jewish American community. Nowhere is this new focus better
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exemplified than in the story that made Cynthia Ozick’s name: “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” “Envy” tells the story of the unsuccessful struggle of Edelshtein, a Yiddish poet, to reach a wider audience in his adopted homeland of America. Edelshtein’s predicament is more poignant because of the worldwide renown of his contemporary, the Yiddish novelist Ostrover, as well as the cachet enjoyed by Jewish American novelists. Ozick’s story, in fact, begins with a description of Edelshtein’s views on these Anglophone Jewish authors: Edelshtein, an American for forty years, was a ravenous reader of novels by writers “of ” – he said this with a snarl – “Jewish extraction.” He found them puerile, vicious, pitiable, ignorant, contemptible, above all stupid. In judging them he dug for his deepest vituperation – they were, he said, “Amerikaner-geboren.” … He was certain he did not envy them, but he read them like a sickness. (Ozick: 41)
What this passage makes clear, however, is that Edelshtein’s hatred of these “Amerikaner-geboren” (American-born) is also self-hatred, since he himself has been “an American for forty years.” He may have a lofty disdain for their ignorance of Jewish culture, but he shares with them the guilt of having escaped the fate of the European Jews. Moreover, his fascination with them is fuelled not by masochism but rather by a repressed recognition of his kinship with them, as well as by his envy of their success (against which he protests too much). This ambivalence is developed in two letters that Edelshtein writes later in the story. In the first of these – addressed to the publishers of Ostrover – he tries to demonstrate his “extreme familiarness” with contemporary American literature, particularly “so-called Amer.-Jewish writers”: “If you would give time I could willingly explain to you many clear opinions I have concerning these Jewish-Amer. boys and girls such as (not alphabetical) Roth Philip/Rosen Norma/Melammed Bernie/Friedman B.J./Paley Grace/Bellow Saul/Mailer Norman” (Ozick: 52). As well as the usual suspects (Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, the last misspelled), Edelshtein includes in his illustrative list two women – Paley and Norma Rosen (best known at the time for her Holocaust novel, Touching Evil, 1966), as well as two men – Bruce Jay Friedman and Norman Mailer – who tend not to be included in the Jewish American canon, in Friedman’s case because his reputation rests on two novels (Stern, 1962; and A Mother’s Kisses, 1964) that have fallen out of fashion, and in Mailer’s case because of his apparent indifference to all things Jewish. Edelshtein’s low opinion of these writers is implicit in his patronizing reference to them as “boys and girls” and in his sardonic qualification – and abbreviation – of their status, but once again his apparent contempt is complicated, if not subverted, by his specialist knowledge of their work. Later in the story, Edelshtein writes to Ostrover’s translator, a young Jewish American woman named Hannah, in a vain attempt to persuade her to offer him the same service. Having been told by her uncle, one of his friends from the Old Country, that Hannah herself is a writer, he warns her against joining “the gang of so-called Jewish
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novelists,” telling her “I’ve sniffed them all, I’m intimate with their smell” (Ozick: 79). Again, the language here is ambiguous. The metaphor is sexually suggestive, implying the kind of prurient, pathological obsession with their work that is, as the opening paragraph of the story puts it, “like a sickness.” The olfactory imagery, however, is reminiscent of the foetor Judaicus that is invoked at the close of “Old Stock,” and the implication of self-hatred is reinforced by the narrator’s observation that Edelshtein “wished he had been born a Gentile” (Ozick: 68). Edelshtein is, of course, guilty of hypocrisy – condemning Jewish American novelists for not being Jewish enough, while harboring the hidden desire to erase his own Jewishness – yet the ethics of Ozick’s story are complicated, since both his antagonists (Ostrover and Hannah) also occupy morally tenuous positions. At one point, Hannah expresses her disgust at what she perceives as the masochism and self-pity of Edelshtein’s generation of Jews: “All you people want to suffer.” … “ ‘You people?’ ” “You Jews.” (Ozick: 92)
Hannah’s use of the euphemistic phrase “you people” (which Edelshtein forces her to clarify) implicates her in a long history of anti-Semitic discourse. Indeed, when Edelshtein tries to remind her of this tradition, she dismisses him with the curt, absurdly reductive assertion that “History’s a waste” – a remark that recalls the infamously anti-Semitic Henry Ford’s comment that “History is bunk.” Ostrover attributes his own success more to opportunism than talent. He compares himself to a dancing bear, telling Edelshtein that “I play at being a Jew to satisfy them [the Gentiles],” while admonishing the poet for his indecorum in terms that suggest that he is as prone as Edelshtein to self-loathing: “You scream out loud like a Jew” (Ozick: 68). “Envy” ends with Edelshtein trading insults over the telephone with a Southern American anti-Semite (who repeatedly uses the phrase “you people”), but in the preceding pages it is internalized anti-Semitism, rather than the prejudices of Gentile America, that poses the greatest threat to the Jewish American community. This emphasis on the internal politics of, and tensions between, Jewish American communities continued to distinguish much of the Jewish American fiction of the 1970s and was both exemplified and subverted by a novel published at the end of that decade: Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold. If one of the surest signs that a literary genre has become well established is that it begins to parody itself, then Good as Gold represents something of a watershed in twentieth-century Jewish American fiction. Joseph Heller does not feature in the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature (Chametzky et al. 2001); nor, apart from one brief mention, in the Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Kramer and Wirth-Nesher 2003). Partly this is because he is best known for his first novel, Catch-22, whose protagonist is an American Assyrian rather than an American Jew; partly because he has fallen out of fashion, along with a number of other Jewish
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American writers (such as Bruce Jay Friedman and Stanley Elkin) who came to prominence in the 1960s and were labeled as “black humorists”; but probably also because of the irreverence with which he treats the whole notion of Jewish American literature in Good as Gold. The novel begins with its protagonist, Bruce Gold, “a professor who hates teaching, a writer of unread books,” deciding to cash in on the fashion for Jewish American literature (“Jews were a cinch. It was good as gold”) by writing a memoir “about what it has been like for people … like me to be born and grow up here” (Heller: 9, 5). Attempting to sell the idea to his agent (and fellow American Jew), Lieberman, Gold vows to produce a “sober, responsible, intelligent piece” which would “go at least a little bit into the cross-cultural conflicts between the traditions of our European-born parents and those in the prevailing American environment.” However, Lieberman has something “racier” and “spicier” in mind: “What was it like the first time you saw an uncircumcised cock? How does it feel to be screwing gentile girls?” (Heller: 5). Here Heller manages to satirize the two dominant strands of Jewish American literature at this moment in the twentieth century. Gold’s earnest description of his intentions slyly alludes to the series of postwar books exploring their own immigrant origins published by eminent Jewish American literary critics such as Irving Howe, whose World of Our Fathers (1976) offered both an elegiac tribute to the immigrant values of the European-born parents whom Gold refers to and a patriarchal model for the transmission and transformation of those values to the “second generation” of American-born Jews, and Alfred Kazin, whose autobiographical trilogy (A Walker in the City, 1951; Starting Out in the Thirties, 1965; and New York Jew, 1978) is parodied in Good as Gold by Lieberman’s own epic memoir. Lieberman’s agenda for Gold’s book, on the other hand, invokes the two scandalous, sexually explicit novels – Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – that made their Jewish American authors infamous and wealthy in equal measure. What this exchange between Lieberman and Gold implicitly exposes is the way in which these publishing phenomena tended to reinforce two contradictory, yet equally tenacious, popular stereotypes of the Jew: in the case of Howe and Kazin, that of the studious, morally scrupulous, “model minority” immigrant who successfully assimilates by dint of his own industry and ambition; in the case of Roth and Jong, the sexually rapacious, morally dissolute, opportunistic Jew whose exploits demonstrate both the dangers and limits of assimilation. Good as Gold also parodies the anguished treatment of the relationship between immigrant father and American son in many (male-authored) Jewish American fictions of the twentieth century (and which was at the heart of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, 1979, in which the father of Roth’s protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, is dismayed at his son’s use of family history in his fiction, which he fears will perpetuate American anti-Semitism). In Heller’s novel, Bruce Gold’s father is a grotesque, overbearing patriarch whose hostility toward his son’s literary pretensions springs not from any concern with the public image of Jews in America but rather from the conviction that he could do a better job himself. When he hears about his son’s projected book
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about “the Jewish American experience,” Julius Gold is dismissive: “What does he know about being Jewish? … He wasn’t even born in Europe.” When Gold’s wife points out that Bruce’s subject is “being Jewish in America,” Julius is unabashed, observing: “He don’t know so much about that either. I been Jewish in America longer than him too” (Heller: 25). Characteristically unconcerned by his own inconsistencies, Julius Gold both expresses the stereotypical view of the older immigrant generation that American-born Jews are not really Jews at all and claims that his own credentials as an American Jew are superior to his son’s. Similarly, when Irv, one of Gold’s brothers, asks anxiously whether Gold intends “to write about any of us,” and Gold reassures him that he does not, Julius initially acquiesces in the general “wave of relief,” before deciding to take offence: “Why not? … Ain’t we good enough?” (Heller: 27) Good as Gold engages in a very funny deconstruction of the conventions that had, by the late 1970s, become sufficiently entrenched for the Jewish American novel to risk the contempt bred by (over-)familiarity. There is a moment in Heller’s novel, when Gold is confronted by an anti-Semitic Texan Governor who chairs the Congressional committee to which Gold has been appointed, that recalls the crisis in Hortense Calisher’s “Old Stock”: “Gold, you a Jew ain’t you?” No hell could be worse … than the instants Gold needed to reply to that deafening question … He prayed with passion for the voice of some Arthurian champion to supervene … “I’m Jewish, sir … if that’s what you mean.” (Heller: 211)
As in Calisher’s story, when Mrs. Elkin does her utmost to avoid pronouncing the word “Jew,” Gold equivocates, announcing his Jewish identity in such a way as to imply a subtle distinction between being “Jewish” and being “a Jew.” Whereas in “Old Stock,” Hester silently implores her mother to come clean, in Good as Gold Gold prays for the intervention of a (Gentile) hero to rescue him from his ignominious position, so that he will not have to. However, Gold’s embarrassment derives more from the Governor’s shameless exposure of the tokenistic identity politics of Washington than from any threat posed by his bigotry. Gold’s place on the Congressional committee is guaranteed precisely by virtue of his being a Jew: his role on the committee is simply to be “the Jew” whose presence supposedly testifies to the inclusiveness of the administration. Similarly, when Gold’s sister, Joannie (who has changed her name to Toni as part of her project to “pass” as a Gentile), explains that her Jewish experience has been “trying not to be. We … get drunk … have divorces, just like normal Christian Americans … We screw around, commit adultery, and talk out loud a lot about fucking” (Heller: 88), her self-hatred ironically reveals itself to be predicated on contempt for the W.A.S.P. others whom she emulates. Although Joannie/Toni aspires to lead a “normal” American life, her list of the attributes that embody this Christian existence implies that it is Jewish Americans whose values ought to be normative,
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since they are apparently not subject to the same vice and vulgarity that characterize their Gentile counterparts. Again, Heller manages here to mock both the modish decadence on display in the fiction of some of his Jewish American contemporaries and the sentimental nostalgia for Menschlichkeit that many Jewish critics of that fiction espoused. “Envy” and Good as Gold were by no means the final word in twentieth-century Jewish American fiction, but their self-reflexivity (as Jewish American fictions about Jewish American fiction), conspicuous also in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Bound series (comprising The Ghost Writer; Zuckerman Unbound, 1981; The Anatomy Lesson, 1983; and The Prague Orgy, 1985), arguably signified an exhaustion with the conventional subject-matter of the genre. Certainly, the final two decades of the twentieth century, and the first of the twenty-first, have seen a diversification in terms both of the authors and of the themes of Jewish American fiction. While Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick are still going strong, this period has seen the deaths of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, Grace Paley, Harold Brodkey and Norman Mailer and the emergence of Paul Auster, Amy Bloom, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Deborah Eisenberg, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, Marcie Hershman, and Thane Rosenbaum, among many others. The fiction of some of these younger writers has been characterized by a stronger interest in Judaism, the Holocaust, Old World history (real and imagined), and Israel than was evident in their predecessors. For others, however, their Jewishness seems as incidental as it was for Norman Mailer. Many of them are clearly influenced by postmodernist, experimental modes of writing; others are closer in spirit to the realism that has proved more tenacious in twentieth-century American fiction than the enthusiasts of modernism or postmodernism would have us believe. In other words, it is very difficult to generalize about the state of contemporary Jewish American fiction, and this heterogeneity is both its strength and its weakness. In an arena increasingly dominated by identity politics, the more fashionable, and more readily identifiable, ethnic literatures (African American, Asian American, Latino/a American, Native American) have tended to displace Jewish American literature on college courses and in academic discourses. On the other hand, Jewish American authors, whether elder statesmen/ women such as Roth and Ozick, or young pretenders such as Chabon and Foer, are now free, in a way that was arguably never quite the case during the twentieth century, to publish fiction that is judged on its own merits rather than as the product of a putative school of Jewish American fiction. References and Further Reading Antler, Joyce, ed. (1990). America and I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women Writers. Boston: Beacon. Bellow, Saul (1965). Herzog. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Brauner, David (2001). Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections. London: Palgrave/Macmillan. Chametzky, Jules, Felstiner, John, Flanzbaum, Hilene, et al., eds. (2001). Jewish American
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Literature: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton. Fiedler, Leslie (1991). Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity. Boston: Godine. Fried, Lewis, Brown, Gene, Chametzky, Jules, et al., eds. (1988). Handbook of American-Jewish Literature. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Gilman, Sander (1986). Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore, M.D.: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Heller, Joseph (1980). Good as Gold [1979]. New York: Pocket. Hilfer, Tony (1992). American Fiction since 1940. London: Longman. Howe, Irving, ed. (1977). Jewish-American Stories. New York: New American Library. Kramer, Michael P. and Wirth-Nesher, Hana, eds. (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Amer-
ican Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ozick, Cynthia (1995). The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories [1971]. New York: Syracuse University Press. Paley, Grace (1998). The Collected Stories. London: Virago. Shapiro, Gerald, ed. (1998). American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Solotaroff, Ted and Rappoport, Nessa, eds. (1992). The Schocken Book of Contemporary American Jewish Fiction. New York: Schocken. Yezierska, Anzia (1999). Bread Givers [1925]. New York: Persea. Zakrzewski, Paul, ed. (2003). Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge. New York: Perennial.
9
“Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me”: Modern African American Fiction A. Robert Lee
Black Moderns “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me,” the 1940s’ jazz classic by Duke Ellington with words by Bob Russell, might almost have been composed to accompany a century or more of modern and contemporary African American storytelling. Its musical virtuosity – the play of cadence, the wry bluesy feel – offers a perfect pathway into the African American literary roster. For in the hundred years spanning the creation of the N.A.A.C.P. by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and others in 1909, through the civil rights and Black Power era of the 1960s, to the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, and across each novel, novella, and short story, along with poetry, drama, autobiography, discursive writing, and oral tradition from sermon to rap, the achievement could not be more of a literary flourish, singular overall and yet huge, often dazzling, in its diversity. It was in 1925 with the publication of Alain Locke’s manifesto anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, that modern – modernist – African American cultural consciousness found its perhaps best-known expression. It offered a ministry of all, or nearly all, the talents: fiction by Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rudolf Fisher; poetry by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay; essay work by James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Arthur A. Schomburg (the bibliophile raised in Puerto Rico who gives his name to the New York Public Library’s African American collection); and graphics by Aaron Douglass. Notice, emphatically, had been served of the call for a change of racial auspices and a rebirth of black creative word and imagination. Locke himself, with a strong backward glance to Reconstruction’s failure to desegregate the South after the formal abolition of slavery, as ratified in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment, and the emergence of Harlem as what he calls “a race capital” (p. 7) in the wake of black migration North, spoke optimistically of “a spiritual Coming of Age” (p. 16). His generation of black activists and intellectuals would
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serve as “the advance-guard of the African people in their contact with Twentieth Century Civilization.” A young Langston Hughes echoed the call in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a eulogy to black popular as much as high culture: “the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith.” Pride, but also defiance, was again to be heard: “We younger Negro authors who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without shame” (The Nation, June 23, 1926).
Prelude A number of turn-of-the-century novels give pointers to this coming resurgence. Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), set in post-Civil War South Carolina, takes up Dixie as color-line barrier, with “passing” and so-called miscegenation in the beauteous person of Rena Walden. If Chesnutt just about keeps to the right side of melodrama with the “tragic mulatto” theme, he exhibits a clear understanding of slave-bequeathed genetics and color-hierarchy. Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), centered in another no doubt idealized Creole heroine, Sappho Clark, explores black–white American dynasty through a near Dickensian plotline of crime and hidden identity. Her span extends through slave Bermuda, brothel New Orleans, plantation North Carolina, and reformist and high-etiquette Boston. Both novels, whatever their limitations, take on an America, for all the abolition of slaveholding, still obsessively entangled in its own race-line phobias. Where Hopkins strikes an eventual upbeat note, Paul Laurence Dunbar, in The Sport of the Gods (1902), offers a more somber perspective. Berry Hamilton, longtime black butler on the Oakley plantation, is wrongly accused and imprisoned for theft. His wife Fanny falsely imagines herself divorced and gets caught in a vexed second marriage to a racetrack gambler. In the wake of moving North to New York, the son, Joe, falls into gambling and drink at the Banner Club, and in due course is sentenced for murder, and Berry’s daughter, Kitty, becomes a chorus girl and easy prey to clubland and sexual exploitation. The novel envisages America as racial double-jeopardy, South and North as mirror worlds and both of them inimical to black interests. W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), its settings backcountry Alabama and Washington, D.C., does panoramic service as a race-and-class layered economic novel, as he once called it, keyed to the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. In the lives of Zora and Bles, and in the several-layered and iconographic contrasts of swamp and plantation as black and white domains, Du Bois folds a wide range of interests into the one encompassing narrative. These embrace the slave legacy, plantation ownership, and labor economics with cotton as central, the failure of Talented Tenth leadership, black female strength (with Zora as community leader), and the necessity not only to de-enslave the black body but the black psyche. The novel at times risks didacticism, with thesis at the expense of narrative, but, as befits so consequential an intellect as Du Bois, the historical acuity compels.
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James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912, revised 1927) can lay claim to special imaginative honors, its chronicle of the narrator’s black-for-white impersonation reflexively taken up in the text’s own autobiographyfor-novel impersonation. Born white-skinned of mixed racial parentage in Georgia (and so in more than one sense illegitimate), schooled in Connecticut and in part at Atlanta University, and successively cigar-maker in Florida, dare-devil gambler in New York, and Europe-touring musical protégé (he plays ragtime) of a rich white patron, the narrator literally embodies two-for-one identity. This harlequinry of white as black, black as white, however, whether in Dixie or Manhattan, goes well beyond “passing.” The implications are nothing if not existential – the participant at the same time is ever and intimately his own observer. From the vantage-point of his eventual marriage to a white woman, and with white children of his own, he comes to look upon himself as having been race’s ultimate insider, its secret sharer, and in the process both winner and loser. Johnson’s novel amounts to a stirring achievement: portraiture which destabilizes not only essentialist race definitions of identity but literary genre itself.
New Negro Make it New. Few New Negro (or, as it is often called, Harlem Renaissance) novels better fulfill Ezra Pound’s credo than Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923). The book’s collagist form acts to frame memorial scenes of division by race, whether the Georgia South or Northern city, yet in imagist riffs which recall Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein. The upshot is a three-part compendium of verse, drama, and story-sketch given over, respectively, to folk-Georgia as personified in a gallery of women figures (white, mixed, Jewish, slave-descended) like Esther, Karintha, Carma, and Boma; Washington, D.C. as Seventh Street black life and Howard Theater; and the obsessive mixed-race figure of Kabnis, who returns as a teacher to Georgia yet in despair of ever exorcizing the violent, sexual demons of American race. Its metaphors invoke American history as cauchemar, slave-haunted, the dangerous, race-inflected sexual ebb and flow of flesh. Nature, even at its most sensuous, dusk and pine, seed and earth, also gives a backdrop to remembered scenes of lynching and child-murder. This is the South as heat, fever, and the metropolis as both art and pit. For all that parts of Cane appeared in The New Negro, Toomer, in fact, shared little of Locke’s belief in some new day (and also resented having his work parceled into extracts). The influence of his text, in its own turn, has been considerable, whether on a novel like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) with its folk prose-poetry or, subsequently, Leon Forrest’s fugue-like memory of the South brought into the black Chicago upbringing of Nathaniel Turner Witherspoon in There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden (1973). Toomer had no shortage of company both in the interwar years and after. The Jamaican-born Claude McKay weighed in with Home to Harlem (1928), New York’s
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black city-within-a-city refracted in the life of blue-collar Jake Brown, longshoreman, army deserter, and Pullman worker. His version of Harlem is one of “ragtime and blues,” the “sugared laughter” of ragtime, women, eateries and soul-food, and the intimacies of the street. But McKay also sets this fond Harlem, 125th Street, and the brownstones and stoops, against that of Ray, the better-educated Haitian waiter Jake meets when working as a cook on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Where Jake’s Harlem is the (assuredly male) pleasure-palace, Ray sees dispossession, the tough, daily workstint, crime, and easy violence. In Rudolph Fisher’s two novels, The Walls of Jericho (1928) and The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932), the note turns laconic, given to dark laughter. The former work, full of the author’s longtime interest in jazz, takes a shy at both black and white rules of caste, with Shine and Linda as a working-class pair and Agatha Cramp as society doyenne. The latter offers an update of conjure replete with mis-identified corpse, con-man “African,” Harlem street talk and dozens, and a detective pair, Perry Dart and Dr. John Fisher, to anticipate Chester Himes’s Grave Digger and Coffin Ed. Genial, and fine-tuned as to black community ways and etiquette, yet not shy about crime, death, or gun-play, it invites due note as the first-ever black detective novel. In Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800 (1936), slave revolt has one of its best retellings: Gabriel Prosser’s actual Richmond, Virginia uprising made over into meticulous but at times intensely lyric fiction of fact. Female authorship anything but went missing. Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928), the most enduring of her four novels, updates “passing,” the rite of passage of Angela Murray, in the guise of Angèle Mori, as “New Woman,” one of Du Bois’ celebrated Talented Tenth. From her light-skinned birth and Philadelphia upbringing, then the zigzag of her white and black life in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Paris, she becomes the very sounding-board for the time’s workings in race and gender. Jewish friendship, a love-affair with a moneyed white race-bigot, exposure to the blacknessis-all race leader Van Meir – the story could not more reflect middle-class life both black and white. Fauset, however, manages not a few hits, with her own shrewd alertness to the workings of both bourgeois and lower-class American racial boundary. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) both speak to more interior psychological terrain, color for their respective near-white heroines being both opportunistic self-theater and yet trauma. Short-lived as was their initial success, they both have deservedly re-won attention. In Quicksand, Helga Crane, born like her progenitor of a black father and Danish mother, finds her bi-racialism tested at two extremes: the Scandinavian whiteness of her Daal relatives in Copenhagen and the Dixie blackness of her eventual spouse, the Rev. Pleasant Green, to whom she becomes the selfpunishing breed-horse. Her “bruised spirit” and “suffocation” bespeak trauma, a color system that has been the making of her, yet haunts and destroys her. Passing extends the terrain into gender-confusion, the alter-ego drama of Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, rival yet twin selves as much given to hiding their true gender as race. Both can “pass,” both complicate the realms of public and private female sexuality. Larsen
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writes a novel of doubles – desire as much as color – and to include Irene’s possible murder of Clare, itself doubly told. If the New Negro caravan had promoters and doubters, some ironically both at the same time, one outcome was a number of retrospective novels that took aim at the grandstanding and spats involved. Sexual inclinations and peccadilloes especially feature. In The Blacker the Berry (1929), Wallace Thurman, poet, dramatist, and founder of the avant-garde magazine Fire!!, uses the portrait of Emma Lou to take ironic aim at light-over-dark hierarchy. With Infants of the Spring (1932), however, his satire borders on the savage, with Harlem as artist’s colony whose rooming-house main writer-players work the changes on interracial love, bi- and other sexuality, and the rankling issue of what it is, and what it is not, to be a black artist. Countee Cullen, who made his bow as the Keatsian poet of Color (1925) and Copper Sun (1927) and who was once classroom teacher to James Baldwin, contributes One Way to Heaven (1932). The doomed love story it tells of Sam Lucas and Mattie Johnson, full of energetic visual image, plays against the none-too-flattering panorama of Harlem’s religiosity. George Schuyler, whose essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” in the Nation for 1925 was early to put the cat among the pigeons, in Black No More (1931) engages in Menckenite satire with a vengeance. His plot of the rogue geneticist who comes up with a chemical formula to change skin color mischievously plays off slavery’s cry of “Free at Last.” If the text can labor at times, it also reads with genuine wit (the Klan and the N.A.A.C.P. caught up in unholy alliance, the ruination of the hair industry); it is a novel exquisite, even scabrous, in pillorying American race obsession and contradiction.
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston Of all the emergent names of the 1920s’ efflorescence, no two have been more enduring than Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Hughes gives every grounds to be thought the all-rounder, the poet of The Weary Blues (1926) with a centerpiece in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” through to Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), the dramatist of Tambourines to Glory (1956), and the autobiographer of The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956). There was always the easeful style, the ready invitation of manner with its wellsprings in jazz, blues, storefront churches, and street talk. Hughes’s fiction, no less than his other writing, possesses just these trademarks, that of Harlem’s longtime insider-bard whose life from his Missouri and Kansas origins had been one not only of literary activity but also seamanship and extensive international travel. Various kinds of prose narrative give emphasis to Hughes’s versatility, not to say dexterity of touch. His one novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), pitches 1920s’ rural Kansas boyhood as lyric – tempered by due recognition of odds, whether for the protagonist, Sandy, or his launderer-grandmother, Aunt Hagar, or his mother as cook
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to a white family, or his itinerant father, Jimboy. Hughes’s stories rarely do better than “Who’s Passing for Who” (1945), the literary bohemia of Harlem spoofed as though a lesson in race-semiotics, a social evening-out of one ironic color impersonation for another. Hughes’s Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, stories, first collected in Simple Speaks his Mind (1950), understandably won him the warmest following: the figure of Simple in all his quirk and foible is the everyman black voice of street-corner or bar, and the narrator plays the liberal fall-guy. Each story offers a light-of-touch, but greatly savvy, take on America’s racial ironies; as typical as any is “A Toast to Harlem” with its celebration of the A train, Duke Ellington and Lena Horne, and a world beyond Jim Crow. Much as she was to find early tenure among the New Negro literati – her folkloric story “Spunk” was published in Locke’s anthology – Hurston’s career found its larger expression in Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), the novel she based largely on the life of her parents in all-black Eatonville, Florida, and Mules and Men (1935), her Deep South and Caribbean island folklore stories. To follow would be Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), her “down-home” autobiography with its runs of contrary opinion and spoken-intowritten vernacular and aphorism (“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots”). No novel of Hurston’s, however, has more deservingly won plaudits than Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a black Dixie of girlhood and womanhood, marriage and community, told as though throaty blues, the very life-poem of its heroine Janie. In the one circuit, Janie’s history is one of liaisons, first with her grandmother and her belief that “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world,” subsequently with the dour older sharecropper Logan Killicks, then with Joe Starks, the patriarchal mayor of a fictionalized Eatonville, and finally with the liberative gambler-companion Vergible Woods or Tea Cake. In this she serves as the creature of each Georgia–Florida locale, backcountry offspring and wife, township first lady, and companion to Tea Cake in their bean-picking and the final tempest at Lake Okeechobee. But the novel also shows her increasing rise to autonomy of self (“She pulled in her horizon like a fish-net”) and power of word (“She got so she could tell big stories herself”). Views have differed. For Ralph Ellison there was the risk of “burlesque.” For Alice Walker, however, who would give the name “womanism” to this kind of black female autonomy, Their Eyes Were Watching God bequeaths the exemplary text, a tour de force. Either way, there can be no denying how Hurston implicates Janie’s tale in the novel’s performative feats of style, a unique intimacy of black voice.
Richard Wright The year 1929, the Wall Street Crash, with the Depression to follow, changed all or most of the rules. Harlem and other citied black communities – Chicago also among them – went out of vogue. The citied un-affluence that had, in fact, always existed alongside the Jazz Age gaiety increasingly gave rise to ghetto, dire slum
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poverty, criminality. As to literature, the rallying cry went up for a return to realismnaturalism, so-called “Negro protest.” In this respect, no novel was more of the moment than Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) with its unyielding portrait of a harried, brute Bigger Thomas and Chicago’s black tenement South Side. In “How Bigger Was Born” (1940), his Preface, Wright links Bigger’s descent into murder and flight to the larger African American emblematic history: We … have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him. (Wright: xxxiv)
The implications for Native Son are not to be missed. The novel may well offer the insistently eventful portrait of Bigger’s boy-gang upbringing, half-witting murder of his white patron’s daughter, Mary Dalton, and burning of her body, with in consequence his flight, murder of his girl Bessie, and final capture, trial, and sentence. But this trajectory is also Dostoevskian, a portrait of the black psyche under duress (“the whole dark inner landscape of Bigger’s mind”). To this end, Wright deploys images of sightlessness (Mrs. Dalton), a blanched cat as the inversion, perhaps, of Poe’s black cat, and a pattern of rodent metaphor from the opening spectacle of the rat in the Thomas home to the figuration of Bigger as himself both hunter and prey. Bigger is made to negotiate enclosures of tenement, basement, hideout, and “steel against steel” prison cell, each the outward site of his own inward incarceration. The novel, in other words, however literal-seeming, and actual, carries any amount of canny symbolist freight. Wright, in fact, wrote so throughout his fiction. Lawd Today (his first novel but published posthumously in 1963) turns the Chicago Lincoln Day holiday of Jake Jackson, postal worker, with its revelries and drink, into the psychological graph of a man close to split and eruption. The Outsider (1953), drawing on Wright’s reading of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, is the existential drama of Cross Damon as murderer, while Savage Holiday (1954), using Freud as touchstone, presents the accidental killing of a neighbor’s son by Erskine Fowler, and the stabbing of the boy’s voluptuous mother, in terms of a sexual pathology of repression which turns murderous. With The Long Dream (1958), Wright returned to the world of his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), one of the South’s black belt and segregation. The passage of Fishbelly Tucker, son of the town’s embalmer, updates an old Dixie ritual – black survival against white power-spiral – as he witnesses his father’s wiles, betrayals, and the trumped-up sex charge contrived by the police chief Cantley and others in the white township hierarchy. For Wright, it was to re-envisage the Deep South as memory, racial shadow, which Fishbelly carries with him in “the locked regions” of his heart as, like Wright himself, he heads for expatriation in Europe.
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The two story-collections, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Eight Men (post. 1961), equally confirm the inadequacy of pinning Wright to the one realist-only banner. A story, in the former, like “Big Boy Leaves Home,” with its Dixie-set account of four black boys whose swim at a water-hole leads on to death and flight, echoes little short of slave-escape. The landscape in which Bigger finds himself alternates between briarpatch “hot summer days” and a hellish South of screaming white woman, lynch-mob, old kilns, snake, Cerberean dog, and would-be lynching. His fugitive run for the North in a truck owned by the Magnolia Express Company works to yet further emblematic purpose. In “The Man who Lived Underground,” Wright shows quite his best hand in the tense, honed story of Fred Daniels’s sewer manhunt in seeking to flee the police. Daniels’s sightings of the dead white baby, the ice-cold embalming chamber, the coal-bin, the busy cinema reel, the painterly fruit and vegetables, the glistening jewels, the banknotes with which he decorates his own Aladdin’s Cave, and even the writing of his name as freddaniels, build into a mosaic as irreal as real. Wright’s underground vision of America in black and white suggests fact turned near-fantastical, race as not one but competing and upside-down worlds, each resistant to final deciphering. Custom has spoken of a “School of Wright,” an actually unhelpful category given the variety of authorship usually invoked. Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), for instance, uses its depiction of Bob Jones as California shipyard worker to explore the irony, the bitter psychological cost, of working to defeat tyranny abroad while at risk from Jim Crow at home. A spurious race-and-sex episode gives him the court-ordered choice of prison or army. Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) situates Depression Harlem in the figure of Lutie Johnson, her glittery club and bar work no safety-wall for herself or son Bub against the city’s boxed-in tenement threats in and around 116th Street. Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door (1947) takes the supposedly “raceless” route, a self-avowed proletarian and Chicago Italian portrait of Nick Romano’s life from altar boy through killer, drugs, and crime to execution in the electric chair. Wright’s passed-on lineage, if the term is to be allowed (Ellison, for his part, said he “stepped round” Wright), has been extensive. In The Man who Cried I Am (1965), John A. Williams writes a political-existential thriller, the conspiracy of the Alliance Blanc spanning Europe and the U.S.A., whose protagonist, Harry Ames, in silhouette might be Wright himself. Herbert Simmons’s Corner Boy (1957), its locale the ghetto nether-world of St. Louis, Missouri, tells the story of race-based wrongful conviction and flawed justice. The Harlem of Robert Deane Pharr’s S.R.O. (1971) is one of vortex, a site of rooming-house drugs and needles, flesh bartered and sold, and as recorded (in the novel’s title-phrase) from the Single Room Occupancy of the writer-protagonist, Sid Bailey. A conspectus of the history reflected in black neo-realist fiction might be found in Rosa Guy’s A Measure of Time (1983), the chronicle of Dorine Davis as feisty, Southern-born Depression hustler, store-thief, jailbird, and survivor into the 1960s, and its aftermath, of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
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Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin With Invisible Man (1952), Ralph Ellison contributes one of the great presiding texts of African American writing. A model of virtuoso fashioning, it re-casts Dixie-toHarlem black migration as modernist and interior fable. Both story and storytelling equally act as jazz-like interplay, rare, and always allusive, orchestration. “So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down?” (Ellison: 501), the un-named narrator asks, reflexively conscious of how his own black on white of the page challenges, even as it re-inscribes, an America itself ambiguously, and nothing if not iconographically, also written in black and white. Ellison’s only novel until the long-awaited and posthumous Juneteenth (1999), with its ambitious reversals and arenas of identity in the person of the white–black Bliss and his mentor the Rev. A. Z. Hickman, Invisible Man continues to hold pride of place, a triumph of imagining and necessary benchmark. For the novel offers history as, at the same time, myth, the narrator’s participantobserver experiences from the Dixie Battle Royal opening – in which small black boys fight blindfolded for a college scholarship – through to his ironic writer-in-residence hideaway in the Harlem basement “shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century” (Ellison: 9) and illuminated by electricity stolen from Monopolated Light and Power. Sight, visibility, optics come into play at every turn. A. Herbert Bledsoe, president of the Fisk-like Magnolia College and who the narrator initially sees as benign, turns out to be a false Booker T. Washington. Wide-eyed, he witnesses the Boston banker-patron, Mr. Norton, in his dementia seeing the clocks run down on whiteness at the Golden Day brothel. In the Trueblood episode, he gets sight of sexual confusion, black father–daughter incest. Once North, and employed at a factory to make Optic White paint under the slogan “keep america pure with liberty paints” (Ellison: 172), he emerges after an explosion and E.C.T. treatment with increasingly better insight – first as Brotherhood activist, then in the wake of the Harlem riot, as writer-visionary. To these ends, Ellison deploys any number of black cultural markers, among them Louis Armstrong’s “What did I do to be so black and blue,” along with an array of canonical echoes from Melville to H. G. Wells. Invisible Man rightly, and in several interacting senses, has been called Ellison’s Book of Revelation. James Baldwin will likely always to be best celebrated for the echoing, Bibleintense essays of Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963). But, despite the cavils, he was, and remains, a fiction writer of importance, and in no novel more resonantly than Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). Told as the competing memories of remembered Dixie and 1940s’ Harlem by the Grimes family, the boy-preacher John especially, it uses the Old Testament drama of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael as frame. In Baldwin’s scenario, the stepfather’s Pentecostal Temple of the Fire Baptized offers one domain, the allure of the lithesome acolyte Elisha another. The novel’s dialectics thus come into play in a number of ways at once, flesh and spirit, paternity and heirship, racial and sexual identity.
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In all his subsequent fiction – Giovanni’s Room (1956), set in France as a fated sexual triangle, Another Country (1962), with its Greenwich Village and European alternativeculture canvas, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), which turns to a Malcolm X-style politics of regeneration, and Just Above My Head (1979) as the life of the gospel singer Arthur Montana – Baldwin was felt, somehow, never quite to match the virtuosity of the essays. His verve, however, is unmistakable, not just in Go Tell It on the Mountain but in storytelling like “Sonny’s Blues” in his collection Going to Meet the Man (1965), the portrait of two siblings, teacher and heroin-driven pianist, with its re-creation of black music as memorial yet always live pulse.
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker In Playing in the Dark, her Massey lectures at Harvard published in 1992, Toni Morrison makes a helpful distinction between racial and racist language. Certainly, her own novels show how well she knows the difference, as well as the profound existential histories both entail, beginning with her portrait of the psychologically fissured Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye (1970) through to her mother–daughter slavery novel Mercy (2008). While allowing for recognition of texts like Song of Solomon (1977), with its tracing of African diaspora into black Michigan, or Jazz (1992), in which Harlem is told as the early-century ballad of love gained and lost, Morrison has won no better admiration than for her best-known work, Beloved (1987). “Ohio 1873” and “124 Bluestone Road.” Date and place give the working coordinates for Beloved, the final mise-en-scène in the life of its principal figure, Sethe Suggs, who carries in memory the traumatic yet loving handsaw murder of her own child – Beloved – done to save her from the likely ravage of the antebellum slave-web. In returning from physical death, however, Beloved becomes “ghost company” (Morrison 1987: 37) a hungry succubus, both Sethe’s own conscience turned ectoplasm and the emissary spirit of slavery’s “Sixty Million and more” invoked in the novel’s dedication. Morrison strikingly interweaves seeming real-time lives, those of Sethe’s slaveryunhinged husband Halle, her mother Holy Baby Suggs, the returnee former prisoner Paul D., and the daughter Denver, with each act of haunting and its exorcism. Beloved as spirit, insatiable, willful, spiraling, serves as nothing short of the un-resting anima of history’s stain, the novel’s ghosted presence of black enslavement. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), long her centerpiece, marks one of many high points in a writing career inaugurated with her generational black family-conflict novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), the collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973), and her motherhood-centered civil rights fiction, Meridian (1976). Epistolary in form and womanist in vision, with its life of Celie as she suffers rape by her stepfather, the loss of her children, separation from her sister Nettie, and her loveless marriage with Albert, The Color Purple yields formidable narrative. That Celie finds love, healing, in Shug Avery, blues queen and Albert’s Queen Honeybee, a same-sex and transformative female bonding, caused controversy, as did the portrait of Albert as black misogynist.
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The thirty-year separation from Nettie, Albert’s hiding of Nettie’s letters, the return of her children Adam and Olivia from missionary West Africa, and the final establishment, first of a unisex pants business in Memphis (Celie as weaver-woman), and then of a nurturing family community back in Georgia, bespeaks more than only Celie’s own redemption. As Walker clearly underlines in how she ends The Color Purple, it gives the pointer to equal and sustaining black sisterhood. It also joins her to the earlier circuit of African American women’s fiction, Zora Neale Hurston foremost, but typically also the Gwendolyn Brooks of Maud Martha (1953), with its vignette-sequence of South Side Chicago life, and the Margaret Walker of Jubilee (1966), the neo-slave chronicle of the Georgia-born Vivry from servitude to the post-bellum South.
Contemporaries Mark Twain’s description of New England weather as a sumptuous variety might readily apply to all postwar African American fiction. In one direction, new stylings of verisimilitude abound. World War II as experienced by black soldiery, and located in Georgia boot-camp, Ford Ord, and Australia, is given pacy, naturalistic measure focus in John O. Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963). Julian Mayfield takes up numbers, his Harlem-based Cooley family, and their classic dream of a Harlem lottery fortune in The Hit (1957). Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), eye-witness history by the novel’s centenarian narrator, is ostensibly told as the tape-recorded narrative of a slave past carried down into the civil rights present. Albert Murray engagingly summons the blues in his close-woven novel of black Dixie, Train Whistle Guitar (1973). Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) links New Jersey to the Caribbean, with Avey Johnson’s awakening from her suburban cocoon to her African heritage as she becomes involved in the word and ceremonies of the out-island of Carriacou. For Gayl Jones in Corregidora (1975), its title-heroine a Kentucky blues singer, history is given as a generational line of women descended from their Brazilian-slaver progenitor – a novel as sexually frank as it is historical in its awareness of black women’s experience. In his early novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Ishmael Reed points to the line of innovation with the observation that the novel “can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons” (Reed 1969: 40) Certainly, his own feats of postmodern fantasia are not to be doubted, whether in Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the mythichistorical portrait of Jazz Age black culture within Warren Harding’s white America, or in Flight to Canada (1976), the wittily reflexive contemporary rewrite of slave narrative. Another kind of literary groundbreaking is to be met with in the fierce 1960s’ Black Power nationalist, and then neo-Marxist, eloquence of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, poet, dramatist, but also the author of The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), the Divine Comedy daringly and intertexually adapted to a novel of ghettoed black Newark.
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William Demby has steered between naturalism and what he calls “cubist narrative” in Beetlecreek (1950), the story of West Virginia hill town become literal racial dead-end which stymies its black adolescent hero and eccentric but kindly white mentor, and The Catacombs (1965), a postmodern, interfolding take on actual and media reality whose cues lies in Marshall MacLuhan and the theology of Teilhard de Chardin. John Edgar Wideman has worked the other way round, from early self-aware fiction like A Glance Away (1967), with its rhetorical footfalls of Eliot and Joyce, through to vernacularly told later work like his Pittsburgh-based “Homewood” trilogy of Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981), and Sent for You Yesterday (1983). Leon Forrest’s Divine Days (1992), the longest of all African American novels, offers a huge, Joycean, even apocalyptic, biblical canvas. Black Chicago becomes a confluence of jazz lounge, Afro-Zionism, the South brought to the city, and all as filtered through the consciousness of the writer Joubert Antoine Jones. Other texts have veered toward the serious-absurd, like William Melvin Kelley’s dem (1967), meaning white folks, Harlem and white suburbia as counter-zones, or toward magic realism, like Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), with its transfer of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to an offshore Carolina island and a black gynocracy, or toward jazz not only as story but also organizing form in the manner of Carlene Hatcher Polite’s Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play (1975). Latterly, there has been talk of New Black Aesthetic fiction, savvy, cross-racial, contemporary writing which puts veteran black themes – slavery to civil rights – under the self-acknowledging, conscious scrutiny of authorship operating in the age of cable and the internet. Texts frequently invoked include Trey Ellis’s ingenious Platitudes (1988) and Home Repairs (1993), Darryl Pinkney’s subtly irreverent High Cotton (1992), and Charles R. Johnson’s philosophy-driven Oxherding Tale (1982). A gay dispensation, often with Giovanni’s Room as touchstone, and in the wake of Stonewall and AIDS, invites due recognition. This looks to latter-day fiction like Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989), with its North Carolina portrait of Horace Creek and the costs of a different sexual orientation, or Melvin Dixon’s Trouble the Water (1989), in which Jordan Henry is obliged to confront his own sexuality even as he seeks oedipal revenge on his father. Alongside have been the popular best-sellers, Alex Haley’s Roots: A Family Saga (1976), his back-to-Africa dynastic excavation with the stupendous TV follow-up series, or Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992), an easy-to-read airing of the careers of four professional black women and their girl-talk and man-troubles. Crimewriting looks to Chester Himes’s Coffin Ed/Grave Digger Harlem novels begun with Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), his near hyper-realist and yet often wildly funny and labyrinthine tales of killers and con-men, prophets and wheel-thieves. A successor series has emerged in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels from Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) onward, black sleuthing California-style. Science fiction can be invoked for both its racial and gender referencing in the speculative space-opera novels of Samuel R. Delany, notably The Fall of the Towers trilogy (1963–7) and The Return to the Neveryon sequence (1979–87), and of Octavia Butler in her Patternmaster saga (1975–84).
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No account could be complete without full recognition of the black short story, rarely bettered in recent times than by James Allen McPherson. His Hue and Cry (1969) yields a gem like “A Solo Song: For Doc,” a story-portrait of legendary black Pullman porters, while a piece such as “Why I Like Country Music” in Elbow Room (1977) remembers intimate, youth-time black Dixie through the lens of its Yorkbased narrator. Chesnutt to McPherson, longer and shorter fiction, the modern to the contemporary, the span of African American fiction gives every grounds for being thought nothing less than a major treasury.
References and Further Reading Bell, Bernard W. (1987). The Afro-American Novel and its Tradition. Amherst, M.A.: University of Massachusetts Press. Ellison, Ralph (1982). Invisible Man [1952], 30th edn. New York: Random House. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1987). Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Langston (2001–3). The Collected Works, 16 vols. Columbia, M.O.: University of Missouri Press. Lee, Robert A. (1998). Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America. London: Pluto. Lee, Robert A. (2003). Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and
Asian American Fictions. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Locke, Alain, ed. (1925). The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni. Morrison, Toni (1987). Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morrison, Toni (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. Pryse, Marjorie and Spillers, Hortense, eds. (1995). Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Reed, Ishmael (1969). Yellow Back Radio BrokeDown. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Wright, Richard (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper.
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U.S. Detective Fiction Cynthia S. Hamilton
U.S. detective fiction came of age in the twentieth century, but its roots lie in the nineteenth. It was Edgar Allan Poe’s ratiocinative tales that are often seen as the starting-point of the modern “whodunit.” In “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” (1841), Poe presented a locked room mystery solved by a brilliant, eccentric detective and narrated by an awed, less clever friend. Later in the nineteenth century, Mark Twain began playing with the conventions of detective fiction, offering a parody of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1845) in “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882) and turning Sherlock Holmes into a buffoon in “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902). Meanwhile, a more active, less intellectual detective was taking nascent form in the popular story papers and dime novels of the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the existence of this alternative tradition of adventurous detective fiction that encouraged Allan Pinkerton to promote himself and his detective agency within novels such as The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives (1877). The term “private eye” derives both from P.I., as in “private investigator,” and from the Pinkerton logo with its unblinking eye. Anyone familiar with the genre might conclude that the plots are indebted to the Pinkerton motto as well: “we never sleep.” In the twentieth century, the hard-boiled detective formula coalesced in the pages of the Black Mask (launched 1920), its conventions firmly established by the work of Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. This hard-boiled literature, with its tough-talking, punishment-absorbing private eye, has often been seen as a reaction to the effete classical mysteries associated with the “Golden Age” of British detective fiction, a tradition exemplified by writers like Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and produced in the United States by their American counterparts, S. S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen. As Raymond Chandler so eloquently put it in his famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), it was Dashiell Hammett who “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare,
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and tropical fish” (Chandler: 234). Chandler not only credited Hammett with adding realism, but also with developing a colloquial, hard-boiled style evocative enough to produce a flexible, nuanced narrative with lean power. The origins of modern, hard-boiled detective fiction are more complex than Chandler’s astute essay would indicate, and the boundaries between the classical mystery and its hard-boiled counterpart are less absolute, as Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series and Rudolph Fisher’s stunning novel, The Conjure Man Dies (1932), demonstrate. Nor was the classical mystery as rigid as Chandler’s invective suggested. Isaac Asimov would offer a case in point, mixing the genre with science fiction. In The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957), Asimov gives his detective, Elijah Bailey, a humanoid robot for a partner. Setting his locked room mysteries within unfamiliar, futuristic societies, Asimov, like Poe, uses the genre to weigh the benefits of pure logic against a more imaginative approach to problem-solving. The conventions of the hard-boiled formula, which Chandler helped to define in his essay and to explore in his fiction, proved to be even more supple. In Hammett’s hands, in works like Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The Maltese Falcon (1930), these conventions were used to explore the moral ambiguity and existential angst at the heart of the formula’s wary contemplation of a lawless world. Chandler, on the other hand, extended the vocal range of the narrative voice. In his novels, beginning with The Big Sleep (1939), he redefined the hero’s quest for order as well, making it more socially committed and setting his detective’s romantic idealism against the questionable political ethics, meretricious social values, and unwelcome desertion of traditional gender roles within contemporary society. Chandler’s hero accepted social responsibility, and defended an idealized version of middle-class values and male prerogatives. The flexibility tested at the formula’s very inception would continue to be exploited, its conventions clearly recognizable despite variable treatment. This common framework allowed writers to play with the expectations associated with the formula. As a result, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward could use the hard-boiled detective novel to shape their telling of the Watergate story in All the President’s Men (1974), with Richard Nixon at the center of a criminal conspiracy usually associated with corrupt politicians. Richard Brautigan could parody the private-eye novel in Dreaming of Babylon (1977), making his dreamy private eye inept and totally ineffectual. And in Gun with Occasional Music (1994), Jonathan Lethem could pit his “shamus,” Conrad Metcalf, against a tough talking Kangaroo in a world where being out of credit with the authorities led to getting frozen, literally, for a predetermined period. In the 1970s and early 1980s, a second renaissance in detective fiction began with the work of Michael Lewin, Marcia Muller, and Sara Paretsky. In their work, a more introspective and less self-assured private eye emerged. Their detectives were not isolated individuals who championed the value of muscular, competitive individualism, but spokespersons for a set of values implicit in their social networks. The private eye became more thoughtful, and was transformed into a social eye. The marginal existence of these detectives became more socially significant and pointedly political,
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speaking not of lost middle-class prerogatives but of the social exclusion suffered by minority communities. It was this new variation of hard-boiled literature that was taken up by a host of writers attracted to its potential as a form capable of exploring issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. These writers used the formula to critique the values and institutional practices that had marginalized their political constituency. The result was an explosion of detective writing characterized by liberal sensibilities, artistic richness, and social diversity. This politically self-conscious literature raised a larger question, however: is the formula truly capable of a radical critique of the status quo given the detective’s ostensible role in the restoration of law and order? It is exactly the paradox of a literature that both upholds and critiques the status quo that prompted Peter Messent to suggest that the detective is “finally caught in a kind of in-between world” where institutional injustice is noted and disliked, but ultimately re-established with the restoration of order (Messent: 9).
Gender and Detective Fiction As developed by Hammett and Chandler, the hard-boiled detective formula reflected a very masculine perspective. In this context, the paradox identified by Messent had deterministic implications for the gender politics of the genre. Thus Gill Plain asks, “can the heterosexual female detective, however oppositional her stance, ever really threaten to destabilize a patriarchal system in which she is also profoundly implicated through structures of desire?” (Plain: 144). Whatever one concludes about the fate of patriarchal values in the feminist detective fiction of the 1980s, the centrality of the masculine perspective of hard-boiled literature is clearly visible in the presentation of women as victims and villains within the literature of earlier decades. Brigid O’Shaughnessy, in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, became the model for a succession of women who compete with men in the world beyond the home while acting as sexual predators, using their sexuality to manipulate men. Because such women reveal men as needful and vulnerable, potentially emasculating them, they are vilified and must ultimately be destroyed. In novels like The Big Sleep (1939) and The Little Sister (1949), Raymond Chandler’s evident disgust of female sexuality produced a distrust that looked much the same, though it sprang from a different source. The vilification of women in hard-boiled detective fiction not only became a standard part of the formula – it intensified. Mickey Spillane blends brutality with sexual gratification, producing a disturbing pornography of violence in works such as I, the Jury (1947). Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels are less flagrantly exploitative of female sexuality, though Galley Lawrence, in The Way Some People Die (1951), can stand beside Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Charlotte Manning, from I, the Jury, in any line-up of temptress villains. More typically, Macdonald implicates monstrous mothers, such as Mrs. Snow in Underground Man (1971), whose ostentatious maternal concern masks her true motives. Or he castigates ambitious, selfish, self-deluded
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mothers, such as those depicted in The Instant Enemy (1968). Macdonald’s maternal villains are the lineal descendents of Mrs. Murdock, the moral monster of Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1942). James Ellroy reprises both types of female villain in The Black Dahlia (1987), as well as presenting an extreme version of the objectified female victim. This novel offers the maternal monster, Mrs. Sprague, her deadly daughter Madeline, and the violated and eviscerated torso of the murder victim, Elizabeth Short, whose repeatedly displayed remains vividly mark her as the victim of pornographic violence. Patricia Cornwell clearly recognized the exploitative nature of such displays. In Post Mortem (1990), Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner and pathologist, examines the horribly brutalized body of Lori Petersen and comments: “The dead are defenseless, and the violation of this woman, like the others, had only begun. I knew that it would not end until Lori Petersen was turned inside out, every inch of her photographed, and all of it on display for experts, the police, attorneys, judges and members of the jury to see” (Cornwell: 6). Like other brutalized women in detective fiction, this victim’s body is displayed repeatedly, demonstrating that it is not only male writers who exploit the sexist politics inherent in the formula. Nor is it only women who comment on the nature of these sexual politics. Ross Macdonald’s The Instant Enemy and Black Money (1966) measure the depth of the emptiness behind the feminine mystique, while John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964) exposes the way attractive women are treated as disposable commodities, and The Lonely Silver Rain (1985) critiques the essential emptiness of the playboy lifestyle. Such critiques remain in tension with a set of conventional attitudes, character types, and plot patterns that uphold sexist attitudes, leaving the gender politics of the form unchanged. The same is true of early efforts to present positive images of strong, competent women as detectives. Published in the same year as Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Erle Stanley Gardner, writing as A. A. Fair, introduced the oversized and overblown Bertha Cool in The Bigger They Come (1939), along with her diminutive employee, Donald Lam. This pairing of fat, cynical, old lady with small, hungry, young man had considerable comic potential which Gardner exploited throughout the series, often at the woman’s expense. By the time Give ‘Em the Ax (1944) was published, Cool had become the grandmother from hell, firmly defined by traditional gender roles. Younger, more attractive, and considerably more capable was Mike Hammer’s secretary, Velda, who reprised Effie Perine’s role as desexualized helpmate in Spillane’s reworking, in I, the Jury, of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Unlike Effie, Velda was a private eye in her own right, and, as the series continued, she took a much more active role in the investigations. In Vengeance is Mine (1950) and Kiss Me, Deadly (1955), she was a quasi-partner, though Mike was clearly still the boss. Her character was developed further in The Girl Hunters (1962), where she was given an impressive war background in the O.S.I., one similar to male private eyes of the period. Velda suggested a growing acceptance of women as intelligent, capable, and strong, but she was constructed through a male gaze, a male perspective. Mike remained the
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focus of the narrative, with Velda frozen in a celibacy uncharacteristic of the male private eye. For a truly revolutionary reworking of the sexual politics of the hard-boiled formula, one must look to the “soft-boiled” detective novels of Michael Z. Lewin with their rather wimpish hero. Albert Samson, who made his first appearance in Ask the Right Question (1971) was the antithesis of Spillane’s violent, macho hero. His life holds no glamour, he only works sporadically, and he operates in the nondescript city of Indianapolis. Much of his time is spent waiting for clients to turn up. When employed, he works for clients who are themselves marginal figures: children, deadbeats, or shattered individuals. Perpetually on the verge of eviction and bankruptcy, Samson regularly contemplates quitting his profession. He is arguably one of the most marginal private eyes invented; more marginal, in fact, than any of the female investigators who emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Unlike the women, he is unarmed and at a distinct disadvantage when faced with a succession of gun-wielding adversaries, a number of whom are women. Samson freely acknowledges his vulnerability, confessing his fears and admitting his sense of inadequacy. Despite the fact that he solves cases, nobody takes him seriously. His mother, his “woman,” and his daughter are strong figures who connect him to society and provide him with places of refuge. Lewin’s books demonstrated that the masculinity that had seemed so much a part of hard-boiled crime fiction was capable of being toned down, and that the private-eye hero could become an advocate for a marginalized constituency. In The Way We Die Now (1973), Lewin evokes the wrecked lives and damaged personalities left by the war in Vietnam as Samson demonstrates that a mentally unstable veteran is not responsible for the murder he has committed. Samson is unable to secure justice for the former soldier, leaving a deliberately unsatisfying ending that gives Lewin’s social criticism added impact. In moving beyond the gender stereotypes of the conventional hard-boiled formula, Lewin paved the way for a triad of women writers: Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky. Collectively, their work helped to cement Lewin’s realignment of the political landscape of the hard-boiled tradition. These women redefined conventional elements, shifted expectations, and filled in the gaps in the formula’s narrative. This process had its modest beginnings in the publication of Marcia Muller’s Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977), the first novel featuring Sharon McCone, an investigator attached to the All Souls Legal Co-operative in San Francisco. McCone was first presented as a quiet, modest woman whose determination gave her the requisite steeliness. As the series developed, McCone became physically tougher and more independent. She was placed within a large family and a wide circle of friends. Although she is involved in a number of heterosexual relationships, it would be hard to argue that patriarchal values are covertly re-established, for these are conducted on McCone’s own terms. At the end of The Dangerous Hour (2004), she marries, but continues to safeguard her independence. Sue Grafton’s popular alphabet series, featuring Kinsey Millhone, began with A is for Alibi (1982), the novel that set the pattern for the series. The Millhone who introduces herself in Q is for Quarry (2002) as “leading a stripped-down
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existence untroubled by bairn, pets, or living household plants” (Grafton: 2) has changed little over the intervening decades, but her appearance in the role of an unfussy, competent female private investigator had, by this time, helped to change reader expectations with regard to the gender politics of detective fiction. Of the three, it was Sara Paretsky’s fiction that shifted the formula most dramatically as she continually pushed into new, unexplored territory. First introduced in Indemnity Only (1982), V. I. Warshawski seems, at first glance, to be very like her sister detectives, but with a more developed dress sense. As the series developed, however, Paretsky used her detective to address important women’s concerns very directly. In Bitter Medicine (1987), she raised the issue of reproductive rights, and in Tunnel Vision (1994), she tackled middle-class domestic violence. One could argue that at the end of Tunnel Vision, in particular, a status quo detrimental to women’s rights has been restored with the complicity, if not the support, of the detective. Warshawski’s opposition is clearly articulated, however, and the oppressive cost and dangers of the status quo are clearly demonstrated. In such a context, as was the case with Lewin’s The Way We Die Now, the restoration of order takes on a distinctly radical valence. By the time Paretsky wrote Hard Time (1999), she had transformed the genre and reshaped audience expectations, creating a social detective fiction that emphasized the importance of support networks, mutual respect, individual integrity and agency; a detective fiction that presented disempowerment as violence against the marginalized individual; a detective fiction that explored the interpersonal dynamics and psychology of coercive power; and a detective fiction that focused attention on the very social problems that society chose to ignore. She was no longer writing within a framework that implicitly celebrated a masculine perspective, or one that accepted the polarized gender roles that forced women to choose between agency and alliances, competence and compassion, femininity and freedom.
Detective Fiction and Social Commentary Even when not directly espousing a particular political agenda, detective fiction comments on social expectations, issues, and identities. It does this obliquely if not directly. In the nineteenth century, Mark Twain used Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) to examine the social construction of racial identity in conjunction with the question of whether criminal behavior is best explained by nature or nurture. Pudd’nhead Wilson boasts the first detective to use fingerprints to solve a mystery. More noteworthy is its treatment of slavery as the central, but un-investigated crime. In his 1953 essay “A Cosmic View of the Private Eye,” John Paterson commented that, while detective fiction is often dismissed as merely escapist, it actually mirrors changing social attitudes very closely. Patterson saw Hammett’s detectives as typifying the disappointed idealism and retreat into self of the 1920s, while Chandler’s Philip Marlowe articulated the crusading zeal of the Depression years.
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Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series reflects the social dynamics of the 1950s and 1960s. Archer operated within the distinctive world of the suburbs which had mushroomed after World War II. With its country clubs, inconspicuous consumption, rootlessness, tentative alliances, and sensitivity to class divisions in a nominally classless environment, this was the world that William H. Whyte described and analyzed with such nuanced precision in The Organization Man (1956). Spillane shifted the politics of the hard-boiled detective novel firmly to the right, reflecting a Cold War mentality. His virulent anti-communism is particularly visible in The Girl Hunters, while the paranoid fears of the time are reflected in Survival Zero (1970). The apocalyptic anger of the 1960s found expression in the anarchic irony and black humor of expatriate writer Chester Himes. Himes’s angry, apocalyptic violence was an extreme reflection of a more general sense of alienation. John D. MacDonald’s detective fiction, featuring Travis McGee, with his sybaritic, drop-out lifestyle, reflects 1960s’ attitudes and lifestyle choices in a different way. Toward the end of the 1980s, Sara Paretsky began using double plotlines that related the social injustices borne by an individual to particular institutional failings, raising larger political issues while making the human cost of the injustice palpably apparent. In Bitter Medicine, Toxic Shock (UK title Blood Shot, 1988) and Burn Marks (1990), she based her novels on contemporary newspaper accounts that brought important social problems into high relief. In Bitter Medicine, Paretsky tackled the issue of commercial medicine as well as reproductive rights at a time when both were firmly on the political agenda. She used Toxic Shock to denounce the deliberate exposure of workers to a known and certain health risk after reading Paul Brodeur’s Outrageous Misconduct (1985) with its shocking revelations about the Johns-Manville Company and asbestosis. At the same time, she was following newspaper accounts of the effects of toxic waste dumped in the Chicago area. Burn Marks was written to expose the links between the corrupt politics of urban renewal and the growing problem of homelessness in Chicago and elsewhere. Paretsky’s work demonstrated that detective fiction could be used as a potent vehicle for critiquing the status quo from the margins.
Detective Fiction, Race, and Ethnicity The explosion of detective fiction in the closing decades of the twentieth century featured detectives from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds, with African American writers dominating the field. Their early contributions to the development of the genre have often been downplayed or ignored, but the roots of African American detective fiction lie deep within the tradition. Paula L. Woods’s Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes (1995) sought to recuperate this contribution, pointing to the early work of Pauline Hopkins, Rudolph Fisher, and George Schuyler. African Americans produced work that stretched the boundaries of the formula, reinterpreting conventions in a way that celebrated the African American cultural heritage, critiqued social
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inequalities, and explored racial “double-consciousness.” So strong and distinctive is this tradition that Stephen Soitos argued that African American detective fiction should be treated as a distinct genre. While much can be said in support of Soitos’s position, a broader perspective is needed that allows an examination of the interplay of different generic traditions. Fisher’s The Conjure Man Dies, for example, incorporates Gothic elements into a blend of the classical mystery with the hard-boiled tradition. Fisher uses this generic mix to explore the frictions inherent in “double-consciousness” and between the African and African American worldview. Chester Himes’s work, though more firmly located within the hard-boiled tradition, also breaks with convention in interesting ways. Himes uses humor to comment on the shocking absurdity of violence that erupts with incomprehensible suddenness from the everyday. His comedy also brings the distance between social expectations and lived experience into sharp relief. In Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), the senseless violence builds toward an apocalyptic race riot, while the detectives investigate the causes of racial unrest at the behest of officers who cannot comprehend the scope or nature of the problem. In the posthumous Plan B (1993), Himes reaches the point of no return when both Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones are killed in the midst of the civil unrest. Barbara Neely, like Himes, uses caricature and parody to expose racism, but creates a much more positive self-image for her detective, reflecting the expanded opportunities available to African Americans in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The plump, middle-aged Blanche would seem an unlikely hard-boiled heroine, but Neely uses her to expose the unrealistic toughness of more conventional hard-boiled detectives. The ungainly Blanche makes her more athletic sisters look obsessively concerned with their fitness, even narcissistic in novels such as Blanche among the Talented Tenth (1994) and Blanche Cleans Up (1998). Neely’s detective is not a middle-class professional, but a day worker who exploits the invisibility of those in the service industries. Using a conventional premise of detective fiction – that the detective’s marginality and relative anonymity allow him to sink into the shadows while pursuing his quarry – Neely endows the idea with new political potency as she invokes an invisibility that comes from race and class. Neely also counters the presumptiveness of those who would judge her detective; she rejects any social standards that find her physical appearance unattractive, her occupation servile, her religion primitive and heathen, and her assertions of integrity and agency insubordinate. The resulting double-consciousness is also supported by a conventional premise in the formula: that the private eye accommodates to the values around him while living by an individual code. In selecting her detective’s occupation, Barbara Neely is following in the footsteps of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, who works as a janitor despite owning the building. Like Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle, her background is clearly defined as working class. All three writers are working with a more social, and sociable eye, refocused on community values, on the human cost of injustice, and on the wider social context within which violence occurs.
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Mosley’s novels reflect the shifting expectations associated with the late twentiethcentury transition from private eye to social detective fiction. By Cinnamon Kiss (2005), Rawlins has acquired a full surrogate family. The detective’s tough stance in the world at large is presented as a counterpoint to his nurturing presence within the home. Mosley’s concern with the importance of parenting is also visible in Valerie Wilson Wesley’s work. Tamara Hayle, introduced in When Death Comes Stealing (1994), is as concerned with protecting her adolescent son from the violent inner-city environment as she is with apprehending the criminal; indeed, in this first book, the two are inextricably connected. Not all African American detectives are working class or single parents, of course. Pamela Thomas-Graham’s Ivy League mysteries feature Nikki Chase, assistant professor and sole black faculty member of Harvard’s Economics Department. A Darker Shade of Crimson (1998), together with Blue Blood (1999), the latter set at Yale, are within the tradition of the classical mystery, and owe a considerable debt to Amanda Cross’s academic detective novels, set at Columbia. Nikki Chase does not display the annoyingly self-conscious erudition that Kate Fansler exhibits in Poetic Justice (1970), however. Karen Grigsby Bates’s Alex Powell is another very middle-class sleuth. Introduced in Plain Brown Wrapper (2001), Powell is a journalist who exhibits an awareness of consumer culture as fine-tuned as that on display in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). Paula L. Woods captures a complex world in which the interaction of class, race, gender, and occupation produce a range of tensions. When introduced in Inner City Blues (1999), L.A.P.D. detective Charlotte Justice is sitting in the back of a police van patrolling a tense neighborhood during the Rodney King riots; she listens to the sexist and racist comments of her colleagues, both insider and outsider within the department. Her status within the riot-torn black community is just as problematic. Justice is a proud African American, but she is sometimes mistakenly identified as white because of her light skin color. Her wealthy family background, her sense of her own privileged status, and her educational attainment separate her from the people in the burning neighborhood. At the same time, her sense of a shared cultural heritage and racial identity makes her feel a deep kinship with the people she is required to police. The pride in her community and cultural heritage displayed by Charlotte Justice, and clearly visible in the work of other African American detective writers, is typical of minority detectives. One sees it in Lucha Corpi’s mysteries featuring Chicana detective Gloria Damasco. Damasco’s extrasensory powers are both a marker of that pride and an acknowledgment of the acute self-awareness that characterizes those marginalized and persecuted. Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992) is set against the background of the Chicano civil rights movement in California. Crimson Moon (2004) deals with the Denver Crusade for Justice. Tony Hillerman describes Navajo culture and belief systems in his popular series featuring Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police. Hillerman skillfully deals with the nuances of cultural conflict, clashing belief systems, and bungling efforts at
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political correctness. In Talking God (1989), the politics of cultural interaction between Native American pressure groups and Euro-American institutions trying to exhibit a degree of cultural sensitivity come into sharp comic relief when the Smithsonian receives the exhumed skeletons of two whites together with a demand that the skeletal remains of Native Americans be returned for proper burial. Hillerman might have posed this as a simple pair of questions: Whose dead ancestors are to remain respectfully buried? Whose are suitable objects for anthropological study and display? Instead, Leaphorn’s colleague, Chee, explains that Navajos “aren’t into this corpse fetish business” (Hillerman: 293). But, as Leaphorn acknowledges, the Navajo Tribal Council has requested, through proper legal channels, the return of any skeletons held by the museum. This, he wryly admits, is more as an exercise in political point-scoring than an expression of wounded sensibilities. Like Hillerman, Paula Woods deals with the complex social and cultural negotiations that take place within and between different ethnic communities. In Dirty Laundry (2003), Justice’s murder investigation takes her into Koreatown and introduces her to several mayoral hopefuls trying to mobilize the electoral power of various ethnic and racial groups. Woods portrays the various neighborhoods and ethnic communities of Los Angeles in the early 1990s, a city of shifting margins and marginal communities.
Rewriting History The proliferation in the late twentieth century of historical detective fiction is related to the increasingly sophisticated examination of the dynamics of social injustice within the genre. At its most complex, this fiction is used to explore the politics behind the construction of history, and the exclusion of marginal groups from the historical record. Like other innovations, the narrative trajectory of historical detective fiction is accommodated by a core premise of the genre. Detective fiction is, by definition, concerned with determining what has happened, and why certain events have transpired. The detective works to solve a crime by recovering a past that has been hidden; reconstructing events, interpreting their significance, and presenting a notionally definitive narrative that orders and explains what has been seen as a collection of isolated facts and unrelated events. Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842–3) offers a starting-point for this tradition insofar as Poe offered a reconstruction of the actual murder of Mary Rogers. In the twentieth century, detective fiction has engaged with history on a number of different levels. At its simplest, we have the appropriation of historical settings to produce costume dramas of detection, such as Miriam Grace Monfredo’s Seneca Falls mysteries, Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January novels, and Elizabeth Peters’s series featuring Amelia Peabody. Barbara Mertz, writing as Elizabeth Peters, drew on her own doctoral training as an Egyptologist when creating the indomitable Victorian, Amelia Peabody. This playful series, set in the late nineteenth century, derives
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considerable humor from the courtship of Amelia, obsessive Egyptologist and spinster, in Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975), and from her family life thereafter; her precocious son, “Ramses” Walter Peabody Emerson, is introduced in The Curse of the Pharaohs (1981). Such romances of detection, even light-hearted ones, strive for historical accuracy, or at least verisimilitude. Even factual accuracy does not preclude anachronistic treatment, however. Monfredo superimposes twentieth-century feminist sensibilities and attitudes to race on the complex social movements of the antebellum period, but provides detailed historical notes in an appendix. References to the famous women’s rights convention of 1848 are woven through the first novel in the series, Seneca Falls Inheritance (1992). Through a Golden Eagle (1996) even contains an outline map of New York, with the inland waterways and principal towns and cities marked, and an inset diagram of the layout of Seneca Falls. In this novel, set in 1859 just before the raid on Harper’s Ferry, librarian Glynis Tryon meets Frederick Douglass and hears John Brown speak. Barbara Hambly’s detective is a free man of color living in antebellum New Orleans, and Hambly tries to depict the complex racial politics of the city. Indeed, Fever Season (1998) begins with a note on the terminology of race in the 1830s. Benjamin January, Hambly’s detective, is a dark-skinned man in a city where social status and opportunity are conferred by light skin. The son of a mulatto placee, he has received formal medical training in Paris, his expenses met by his mother’s powerful protector, St. Denis Janvier. Color prejudice prevents January from supporting himself as a physician, and he is forced to eke out a living as a musician and piano teacher. Better educated than those who scorn him and better trained than the local doctors, he does what he can in a charity hospital in Fever Season, a novel set during a cholera outbreak in 1834. The shocking ending is the subject of an historical note validating the accuracy of the horrors found in the attic of the Lalaurie mansion. Within the hard-boiled tradition, we have James Ellroy’s quasi-historical detective novels. Set in 1947, The Black Dahlia connects the murder under investigation with the “Sleepy Lagoon murder” of 1942 and the subsequent Zoot Suit riots. The climactic discovery of the grizzly murder site in Hollywoodland is timed to coincide with the removal of the letters from the hillside in 1949. The Big Nowhere (1988), set at the beginning of the 1950s, portrays the political opportunism of the red-baiting years. Ellroy exposes the virulent homophobia of the time and emphasizes the brutal dynamics of anti-communist bullying: its ritual humiliation, demand for the naming of names, deliberate creation of a climate of fear, and disregard for the legal niceties within the system it was ostensibly protecting. By far the most complex use of history within the detective novel is to be found in Sara Paretsky’s Total Recall and in Paula L. Woods’s Stormy Weather (both 2001), both of which deal with political agendas behind the construction of history. Stormy Weather explores the theme of “hidden history” as Charlotte Justice’s investigations into the death of a black film producer reveal a neglected history of African American contributions so extensive that the impoverishment of traditional narratives of Hollywood stands exposed. Although a fictional character, the murdered Maynard
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Duncan is loosely based on Oscar Micheaux, the director of over two dozen independent films, but little known outside the black community. Murder, it would seem, takes many forms, making the detective’s job a multi-layered one. In Total Recall, Paretsky examines the process through which justification and denial shape the way traumatic historical events, such as American slavery and the Holocaust, are contextualized and interpreted. She displays the Gordian complexities involved in tracing the difficult, deliberately obscured memories of individuals, corporate institutions, and other repositories of public memory. And she deals with the recovery, use, abuse, and exploitation of personal trauma while pinpointing the essential cruelty of sentimental appeals. In the end, Paretsky’s detective solves the crime and reconstructs pertinent events, but in a wider sense, history proves less amenable to definitive reconstruction, and the past is left to haunt the novel in more allusive and elusive ways. By the time Paretsky wrote Total Recall at the turn of the millennium, she was working with a detective formula that had undergone radical transformation, but the links between her historically self-conscious, social detective fiction and the hardboiled literature of the interwar years are clearly visible. The growing sophistication and diversity of detective fiction after the renaissance of the 1980s demanded more serious critical regard, while the growing academic interest in popular culture ensured a more critical examination of the genre. John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976) became an important milestone, for Cawelti attempted to delineate the structural dynamics of the classical and hard-boiled detective genres in ways that transcended the usual mock-serious efforts to list the “rules of the game.” Since Cawelti’s groundbreaking work, the components and dynamics of the formula have been dissected, the relationship between different subgenres of detective fiction have been explored, the representation of race, ethnicity, and gender has been analyzed, and comparative studies have been done of the depiction of crime and detection within different media. Such studies demonstrate that the critical reception of American detective fiction has itself evolved, keeping pace with the rapidly evolving critical practices of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
References and Further Reading Cawelti, John G. (1976). Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chandler, Raymond (1946). “The Simple Art of Murder” [1944], in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Cornwell, Patricia (1990). Postmortem. New York: Scribner’s.
Grafton, Sue (2002). Q is for Quarry. London: Macmillan. Hamilton, Cynthia S. (1987). Western and HardBoiled Detective Fiction in America. London: Macmillan. Haut, Woody (1995). Pulp Culture: Hard-Boiled Fiction and the Cold War. London: Serpent’s Tail. Hillerman, Tony (1991). Talking God [1989]. New York: Harper.
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McCann, Sean (2001). Gumshoe America: HardBoiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Macdonald, Gina and Macdonald, Andrew (2001). Shaman or Sherlock? The Native American Detective. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press. Messent, Peter, ed. (1997). Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. London: Pluto. Mizejewski, Linda (2004). Hard-Boiled and HighHeeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. O’Brien, Geoffrey (1997). Hard-Boiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. New York: Da Capo. Paterson, John (1953). “A Cosmic View of the Private Eye,” Saturday Review of Literature, 36 (August 2): 7–8. Pepper, Andrew (2000). The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Plain, Gill (2001). Twentieth Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Porter, Dennis (1981). The Pursuit of Crime. New Haven, C.T.: Yale University Press. Smith, Erin A. (2000). Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Soitos, Stephen F. (1996). The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Sotelo, Susan Baker (2005). Chicano Detective Fiction. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. Walton, Priscilla L. and Jones, Manina (1999). Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press. Woods, Paula L. (1995). Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction of the Twentieth Century. New York: Doubleday.
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Hard-Boiled/Noir Fiction Lee Horsley
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. (Hemingway, The Sun also Rises, 1926)
Hardboiled = tough. Noir = screwed. (Jack Bludis, rara-avis, May 16, 2004)
For anyone writing, marketing, or buying American crime fiction, “hard-boiled” and “noir” have come to be evocative labels, though their precise definitions are not always easily agreed upon. There are characteristic narrative patterns, but other determinants are equally important and harder to pin down: mood, atmosphere, style, recurrent themes, and character types. Definitions are further complicated by the overlapping relationship between the two terms. The majority of the texts included here could be classified as “hard-boiled noir,” but the categories often diverge. Being “hardboiled,” as Hemingway’s Jake Barnes implies, is a performance that is not, perhaps, all it seems, and one that is not necessarily sustainable. The offhand toughness of the hard-boiled attitude might be “awfully easy” to maintain during the day, but holding the pose can be altogether “another thing” at night. It is a stance, a manner of speaking and behaving that can conceal impaired masculinity; it is no adequate hedge against the loss, disillusionment, fear, and despair that are constants in the world of noir. Within the crime and detective genres, hard-boiled fiction is conventionally traced to the founding of Black Mask magazine in 1920. Under the editorship of Captain Joseph T. Shaw (from 1926 on), Black Mask set a high standard of colloquial, economical, racy prose and encouraged writers to aim for tough, realistic action. Dashiell Hammett started writing for the magazine in 1922. Chandler emphasized Hammett’s
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importance in defining the hard-boiled style in “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), arguing that what had been created in Black Mask was an identifiably American variety of crime fiction, very unlike traditional detective fiction in being written “for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life [who] were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street” (Chandler 1988: 14–15). Chandler’s essay set out most of the traits that have subsequently been seen as the main identifying features of hard-boiled crime writing: the pragmatic, hard-nosed protagonist and his urban milieu, a spare, colloquial style, a ready resort to violence, and, at the core of hard-boiled fiction, a commitment to representing contemporary reality – “not a fragrant world, but … the world you live in” (Chandler 1988: 17). The traditional British detective (Sherlock Holmes, for example) is a detached figure, immune from danger; the hard-boiled investigator, on the other hand, is a man who is very directly involved in this violent, dishonest, unfragrant world of urban corruption and criminality. Although the hard-boiled protagonist does sometimes show up in small towns or rural backwaters, his habitual haunts are the dark alleyways of big cities, sites of confusion and chronic disorder. The importance of scene is in itself a distinguishing feature of the American tradition, with the uncontainable urban milieu defeating all efforts to impose tidy solutions, forestalling the narrative closure associated with classic detective fiction. The private eye or other investigative figure who struggles to function in this turbulent environment is defined by the nature of his masculine resourcefulness. The characteristic hard-boiled plot is punctuated by his violent encounters; the hardboiled style is vitalized by his verbal combativeness. Streetwise slang, terse wit, and sardonic wisecracks are the trademark elements in his protective armory, an assured voice that enables him to establish at least an illusion of control. The private eye’s physical prowess and verbal competence are often linked with the qualities of American individualism: he can be viewed as a descendant of the Western hero, the frontiersman, or lawman transplanted to the urban wilderness. In his more masterful incarnations, this is a protagonist who exacts revenge and dispenses rough justice. From Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams in the earliest Black Mask stories (1923–34) through to late twentieth-century cinematic tough guys like Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1970) or Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, such figures can be found powering their way through quintessentially hard-boiled narratives, routing villains, reaching the end bloody but still able to pull the trigger and summon up the callous cynicism of Spillane’s Mike Hammer: “It was easy” (Spillane: 188). In popular usage, “hard-boiled” is often wholly defined with reference to this brutally effective masculine agency. The tradition also evolved, however, in ways that carried it in very different directions, toward the skewed and “screwed” narratives of the noir thriller, in which the style, protagonist, and setting combine to produce what Christopher Breu calls “a resolutely negative cultural fantasy” (Breu: 23). In many cases, the confident physical superiority of the hard-boiled investigator is gravely threatened: he is “slugged, shot at, choked, doped” (Ruhm: xiv), beaten down until
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his tough performance seems more a manifestation of fear than a strategy for righting wrongs. This vulnerability is there from the earliest days of hard-boiled writing, and, in addition, the investigator’s claims to moral superiority are not infrequently undermined by displays of utter unscrupulousness. The notion of re-establishing order can seem a very questionable proposition when the protagonist himself is so morally disreputable that he is scarcely distinguishable from the criminals. It is commonplace for the tough guy to occupy a liminal position between the cops and the crooks, and to win his victory over villainy without any kind of formal legal sanction. These morally dubious, damaged men are key figures in the evolution of literary noir, which, as it developed in the late 1920s and the 1930s, created out of the hardboiled idiom a much more unsettling kind of crime fiction. In addition to battered, alcoholic private eyes, the central characters of the emerging noir tradition included clueless victims, unsuccessful crooks, outlaws, psychopaths, and a varied cast of other transgressors, men (and sometimes women) who are obsessed, pursued, paranoid, and, more often than not, doomed. Definitions of literary noir have to go beyond the visual and other specifically cinematic qualities on which discussions of classic film noir tend to be based, taking in, for example, subjectivity of viewpoint, the shifting and unstable roles of the protagonist, and the ill-fated relationship between the protagonist and society. The noir narrative is typically mediated by the unreliable perceptions of a character who is confused, self-deceived, or dishonest. The roles occupied by this character are not fixed: victim can turn aggressor or perpetrator; the hunted man can become the hunter. In contrast to the kind of mystery story that is based on a stable triangle of characters (detective, victim, murderer), noir narratives do not move toward a tidy assignation of guilt. Instead of terminating in satisfying narrative closure, they demonstrate the folly of thinking there could be any easy solution. Noir’s cynical, existentially bitter flavor is imparted by its representation of characters who are isolated, alienated, powerless, and trapped in a hopelessly crooked society in which neither agency not community offers redemptive possibilities. The forces acting on the noir protagonist can be manifestations of life’s randomness and absurdity, but there also tends to be a strong sense that his fate is driven by the injustices and failures of his own society. Both literary and cinematic noir can be seen as having been forged in response to a more critical mood in American society, and, more generally, the noir sensibility may be said to come to the fore at times of discontent, tension, fearfulness, and disillusionment.
Black Mask and Early Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction Hard-boiled detective fiction and the noir thriller both had their origins in a period of profound political and economic change: Black Mask was founded in 1920, one year after the introduction of Prohibition, which was generating crime on an alarming scale; large cities were beset by corruption and sleaze. In fiction representing such
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disruptions and inequities, the consolatory resolutions of classic detective fiction would have seemed false and irrelevant. The writer whose work more than any other confronts the upheavals of the interwar years is Dashiell Hammett. A former Pinkerton operative, Hammett brought a harsh realism to the genre in narratives that were fragmented, darkly pessimistic, and morally ambivalent. During his brief period as a crime writer (1922–34), he made an indelible impression on the genre and, for Depression-era readers, spoke forcefully to their sense of the damage and dislocation caused by the anarchic appetites of capitalism. Hammett’s novels recurrently turn on the ruinous craving for wealth and power. The Montana mining town of Red Harvest (1929) has two names, both metaphoric: as “Personville,” it suggests one man’s presumption in taking over the whole town, making it in every respect his personal property; and the insidious nature of this corruption is captured by the town’s other name, “Poisonville,” with its suggestions of vice and violence spreading like a toxin through the body politic, not just in one small town but (given the representative nature of the name) through the whole of American society. In The Glass Key (1931), Hammett’s investigator, Ned Beaumont, lacks even the partial legitimation of the private eye, being an unscrupulous gambler who is the henchman of a prominent racketeer and politician. The senator at the center of the narrative shows himself capable of betraying his daughter, accidentally kills his son, and is willing to murder a friend and ally so that he can be framed for the earlier crime. The Glass Key has a title suggestive of a passage into darker experience through a door which, once opened, cannot be locked again. There is a sense throughout of deep-seated moral disorder as bonds of trust disintegrate, with deceit undermining the possibility of sustaining social relationships and rendering unlikely any lasting restoration of order. Chandler, who started writing for Black Mask a decade after Hammett’s debut, similarly represented American cities – specifically Los Angeles – as being taken over by the corrupt and rapacious. Like Hammett, Chandler interweaves public and personal crimes. Marlowe’s investigation of private transgressions takes place within the context of larger-scale financial and political misconduct: fraudulent, greedy politicians are hand in glove with gangsters, abetted by unscrupulous businessmen and dishonest cops. Chandler depicts in detail the corruption that had come with the precipitate growth of California, and these forms of public crime give a larger resonance to his narratives, framing the disordered individual lives of families like the Sternwoods in The Big Sleep (1939) or the Grayles in Farewell, My Lovely (1940). As Marlowe says in The Big Sleep, “it all ties together” (Chandler 1993: 158–9). The style of Marlowe’s cynical commentary on keeping up decent appearances in Bay City, however, places Chandler at some distance from the excoriating vision of Hammett. There are somber undertones, but Marlowe’s performance of hard-boiled masculinity is more assured – witty, teasing, and self-reflexive – and Chandler’s narratives are correspondingly less dark. We are presented with an image of unassailable corruption, but most readers will attend more closely to Marlowe’s own qualities, his
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discernment, his fastidious, elegant phrasing and ironic detachment. Chandler softens the corrupt and brutal scenes we witness by filtering them through a narrator whose self-mocking manner never falters, even under extreme duress. In Farewell, My Lovely, having been hit on the head, “shot full of dope and locked in a barred room,” Marlowe’s wry, beautifully modulated voice simultaneously concedes that he is under pressure and rises above all threats to his selfhood: “ ‘Don’t make me get tough,’ I whined. ‘Don’t make me lose my beautiful manners and my flawless English’ ” (Chandler 1993: 289). The strength of Chandler’s reputation is such that his chivalric private eye is often taken to epitomize the hard-boiled protagonist of the interwar years. It was a period, however, during which both the pulp magazines and hard-cover crime novels saw the creation of a wide range of other protagonists: W. R. Burnett, Armitage Trail, Paul Cain, James M. Cain, John D. MacDonald, Edward Anderson, Kenneth Fearing, Raoul Whitfield, and Horace McCoy all contributed to a hugely varied tradition of hardboiled noir crime writing. In terms of the subsequent history of tough crime writing, the most influential of these writers were unquestionably W. R. Burnett and Armitage Trail (Maurice Coons). Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929) and Trail’s Scarface (1930), translated into film in 1931–2, defined the rebellious figure of the American gangster, dark double of the capitalist. Like the private eye, the gangster is a romanticized figure, tough and purposeful, a performer who makes a dramatic show of masculine competence and vitality. What sets him apart are his upwardly mobile ambitions, the means by which he pursues them, and the (fictionally) inescapable consequences of his overweening ambition – a career trajectory driven by a determination to scale the heights, an ending in which he plummets to his inevitable downfall. Burnett prided himself on being the writer who, more than anyone, had encouraged the fictional representation of the criminal’s own point of view. He was undoubtedly a seminal figure for other twentieth-century crime writers, and Little Caesar marks the start of the genre’s fascination with the perspective of the transgressor – gangsters and small-time outlaws, ineffectual schemers and hapless murderers. In the novels of writers like Horace McCoy, Edward Anderson, and James M. Cain, we see the establishment of some of the most recurrent patterns of noir narratives, bringing to the fore characters so damaged and un-heroic that they stand small chance of emerging with their lives, let alone of achieving any of their ambitions. Anderson’s Bowie, the protagonist of Thieves Like Us (1937), is “just a big old country boy” who has picked up a gun because it seems necessary “to make a piece of money” (Anderson: 233). Inept bank robbers, Bowie and his girlfriend Keechie are intensely sympathetic figures (particularly given the popular view of the role banks played during the Depression), and Anderson uses their story both to attack the economic disparities that produce crime and to make his readers see the irony of punishing small-time crooks in a system that never calls to account “the great criminals” responsible for the state of the nation. Another of the most politically committed of the 1930s’ proletariat crime writers, Horace McCoy, similarly allows no comfortable evasion of the socioeconomic factors
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producing the world he describes. On one level, the dance marathon of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) is an absurdist parable of futile repetition interrupted only by random violence; on another, it is one of the period’s most powerful protests against the casual viciousness of a system that deceives people into pursuing illusory goals (such as being “discovered” in Hollywood) and casts them aside when they are overcome by weariness and defeat. The domestic dramas of James M. Cain are less explicitly political, but Double Indemnity (1936), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), and Mildred Pierce (1941) all “really belong to the Depression” (as Cain said of Double Indemnity in his Author’s Preface). Cain’s characters are self-deceived, self-serving, and self-destructive, but they are also presented as victims of a society in which the myth of boundless opportunity persists in spite of economic disaster on an unprecedented scale. His protagonists pursue the American dream of success, and, as the prospect seems to glimmer seductively closer, they reach out to discover that they have secured nothing but defeat and entrapment.
Postwar America and the Paperback Revolution In the prosperous years of postwar America, the Depression came to seem like an historical aberration. Unprecedented affluence and military-industrial expansion, however, took their toll, producing materialism and conformity and generating a national mood of self-righteous aggressiveness, directed against suspected communists, of course, but more generally against anyone regarded as subversive or otherwise troublesome. Cold War apprehensions and McCarthyite witch-hunts bred the atmosphere of fear and paranoia that is the dominant mood of both cinematic and literary noir from the 1950s on. The label “noir” originated in the 1940s with the French response to the postwar release in Europe of a large backlog of pessimistic, downbeat American crime films and with the publication in France of a new series, Gallimard’s translations of British and American crime novels in the Série Noire. Films released in America just before the end of the war, such as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (both 1944), were taken as evidence, when they appeared in France, that “the Americans are making dark films too” (Palmer: 25); and the immediate postwar years saw the release of some of the best-known films noirs. At the same time, American publishing was being transformed by the paperback revolution, the potential of which became apparent when Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury (1947) was brought out as a Signet paperback that sold over two million copies in two years. It was a new kind of market for crime writers, much of whose work had begun, by the early 1950s, to go directly into cheap soft-cover editions, a phenomenon that initiated an immensely vigorous and “gloriously subversive” (Server: jacket copy) era of American publishing. “Subversive” was not, of course, a tag that all 1950s’ writers would have chosen as cover copy. For those on the political right, the “Age of Anxiety” was inextricably bound up with Cold War paranoia. Spillane himself, the most steadfastly hard-boiled
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of the mid-century writers, created the apotheosis of right-wing vigilantism in Mike Hammer, who is used not only to scourge the vices of the evil metropolis (narcotics, prostitution, blackmail) but to express the antagonisms of the American heartland, particularly in One Lonely Night (1953), in which “Commie bastards” secretly infiltrate and, while pretending conformity, threaten the whole fabric of American society. There are noir elements in the work of Spillane, but they are not predominant, nor were they the source of his commercial success. He was, in part, quite cynically appealing to the widest possible Cold War audience, and his sales were indeed extraordinary, with over fifteen million copies of his books sold in Signet editions by 1953. The Spillane phenomenon is a testimony to the popular staying power of crudely vigorous hard-boiled investigative fiction. But alongside Spillane’s vintage toughness some very different writers flourished, and their work abundantly illustrates the diversity of the tradition. In place of the tough masculinity of the more uncompromising form of private-eye fiction, readers are offered – with or without the stylistic attributes of hard-boiled fiction – the insecurities of marginalization and maladjustment. Amongst the most important of these writers were David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Charles Williams, and Gil Brewer, all of whom joined Spillane in the 1950s’ racks of 25-cent paperback originals. Their work defined the nature of postwar noir, with morally ambivalent victims and criminals acting out the anxieties of mid-century American society. In comparison to the novels of the interwar years, one of the defining features of postwar noir lies in its preoccupation with “difference” as a determining factor. As in the Depression years, characters suffer more than their fair share of weary disillusionment and economic hardship, but the most striking themes of postwar noir are less to do with economic determinism than with the exclusion and displacement of characters who are too deviant to make themselves at home in a normative society. Spillane’s exact contemporary, David Goodis constructs downbeat narratives that are, in mood and structure, the antithesis of Spillane’s fantasies of vigilante violence. In his breakthrough novel, Dark Passage (1946), Goodis repeatedly represented displaced characters, in full flight or in hiding, frightened, isolated, losing control of their lives, unable to return home. Walking the mean streets was, for the Goodis protagonist, a far more unnerving experience than it was for the heroes of hard-boiled pulp fiction: repetitive motion is combined with inherent immobility or paralysis. To take an early example, Nightfall (1947, filmed by Jacques Tourneur in 1957) is remarkable for its surreal and disorienting atmosphere and for the intensity with which it conveys the terror and paranoia of a man on the run. The theme, characteristically, is wounded masculinity: his protagonist, suffering from “regressive amnesia,” struggles to recover the past in hopes of defying what strikes him as an ill fate so arbitrary and accidental that it is “almost comical” (Goodis: 69). For French readers, Goodis was an existential near-relation of Horace McCoy and James M. Cain, and, like them, he creates disaster-prone protagonists lacking the conventional defenses of masculine competence and self-assertion. In spite of this, as David Schmid argues, Goodis, no less than Chandler, sees his damaged, vulnerable protagonists as heroes; they may be “unmanly” failures in the eyes of the world, but Goodis invariably finds
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something admirable and paradoxically indomitable in their human neediness and their persistence in trying to escape their isolation. The period also saw the emergence of some of the most compelling and disturbing of criminal protagonists, the serial killers created in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, starting in 1955 with The Talented Mr. Ripley, and in more than half a dozen novels by Jim Thompson, most famously The Killer Inside Me (1952) and Pop. 1280 (1964). In novels of this kind, we encounter the conscienceless killer in a form quite unlike that of the 1930s’ gangster. Whereas Rico or Scarface are very public figures (signaling their roles in their dress, gesture, and language), the murderous maladjustment of the serial killer goes unrecognized: he is “abnormally normal” (Seltzer: 9–15). The multiple murderers of these narratives (created two decades before the term “serial killer” entered the vocabulary) have no less agency than the gangster or the private eye, but the goals they are secretly pursuing are much more convoluted. They may act to change things through retribution or “cleansing,” but if we, as readers, feel drawn in by the accounts of their actions it engenders in us a far deeper sense of discomposure than does our response to the gangster’s material ambitions or the tough detective’s extra-legal punishment of offenders. Much more than other noir narratives, these are novels that play on our unease, leading us to reflect back on the nature of our own complicity, and simultaneously prompting us to view “normal” society through the eyes of a radically alienated transgressor – in the case of Thompson’s Lou Ford (The Killer Inside Me), a sadistic, folksy, small-town sheriff in whose actions we see the “threat to idyllic American domestic existence posed by the vengeful return of the repressed” (Simpson: 91). Whereas Patricia Highsmith’s novels are noir without being hard-boiled, Thompson follows in the line of the tough-guy writers of pulp fiction, achieving his effects in part by his twisted use of the tradition’s laconic style and deadpan wit, though in his case with more complicated effects. He addresses the reader directly, teasing and unreliable, inviting us to survey small-town society from the alienated position of a psychopath who is also a scathing observer, confiding to us his interchangeable methods – murder and satire – of punishing the depravity and hypocrisy of his townsfolk. Short of murder, Lou’s habitual method of attack is apparently congenial and wholly ironic: his weapons are clichés, delivered in so straight-faced a manner that his conversations cumulatively create a savage critique of the small town as a form of living death. The effects are surreal and blackly comic, and much of the novel’s power comes from juxtaposing Lou’s verbal forays and savage scenes of killing in “the real way.”
Some Contemporary Transformations The durability of the traditions of American hard-boiled and noir crime writing has been abundantly apparent in the second half of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. Numerous writers who had emerged in earlier decades were still publishing in the 1970s (for example, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Patricia
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Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Charles Willeford) and during the past two or three decades there has been a succession of notable heirs: Joseph Hansen, Robert B. Parker, James Crumley, Lawrence Block, Edward Bunker, George V. Higgins, Craig Holden, Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Elmore Leonard, Robert Ferrigno, George Pelecanos, James Ellroy, Loren Estleman, Sam Reaves, James Sallis, James Lee Burke, Daniel Woodrell, and many others. The influence of Chandler’s Marlowe is often to be felt, drawing to the fore the nobler possibilities within the hard-boiled tradition – the moral integrity, the tough-sentimental view of the world, and the lingering sense of a redemptive potential that make the fiction less darkly pessimistic. Other writers, however, have transformed the tradition in ways that either accentuate the mood and themes of noir or that play subversively with the identity and ethos of the lone white male. Following on from the transgressor-centered novels of earlier periods, there has been an increasing number of crime novels that throw the emphasis onto the commission of the crime rather than its solution, even within the structure of an investigative narrative. This trajectory has been particularly marked since the 1980s in the structuring of the police procedural – most notably, Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series (1981–2006), James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet (1987–92), and Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta novels (1990–2008). These are series that create what Martin Priestman calls “split-level” narratives, drawing in criminal pathologies, entering the mind of the transgressor, and, with the vogue for forensic crime fiction in recent years, exposing the traumatized body of the victim. Modifying the tradition can also be a more highly politicized way of challenging its underlying assumptions and ethos, as in the work of a growing number of black and female crime writers. For both groups of writers, hard-boiled fiction has proved to be the most compelling model and, for the purposes of self-definition, the key point of reference. This is in part to do with reversing the binaries of the earlier traditions: an important reason for the subgenre’s appeal to the black or female writer is the clichéd image of hard-boiled fiction as narrow, deeply conservative, and therefore ripe for inversion, with white male detectives dealing aggressively with deviants and misfits in narratives that move toward re-establishment of the conventional sociopolitical order. At the same time, the attraction of hard-boiled fiction for the purposes of counter-cultural protest is very much to do with the advantages of appropriating the hard-boiled detective’s confident agency – his tough, gritty style, independence of mind and self-reliance. The subject-position in such narratives is a marginal one, located outside entrenched power structures, but it is nonetheless one that is enabling and one with which readers can identify. Combined with the tradition’s use of contemporary material, this helps to make hard-boiled detective fiction a natural site for protest. Just as in earlier hard-boiled fiction, of course, the performance of tough masculinity often turns out to conceal actual impotence in the face of overwhelming odds. One of the earliest and most significant appropriations of the tradition – and amongst the most pessimistic – was Chester Himes’s Harlem cycle (1957–69). Himes said that he just “made the faces black” (Williams: 48), but in fact he reshaped the genre in a powerful and distinctive way, drawing into his grotesque, surreal world
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the violence of the civil rights struggle and the desperate condition of Harlem itself. His detectives, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, though manifestly tough, are incapable of resolving the distress and conflict amongst people who are victims of American capitalism and racism. The last completed novel of the cycle, Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), represents the breakdown of any possible “detective story” closure under pressure of the irresolvable effects that white racism has produced. In this final novel, the eruption of violence was based on an actual incident, but becomes symbolic of the repressed rage and ultimate helplessness of Harlem inhabitants, detectives included. The eponymous blind man is unwilling to admit that he cannot see or that he does not know what he is doing, but feels compelled to take some action against those who are tormenting him. Having seized a gun as a means of masculine empowerment, he brings destruction on himself, though he arguably also, in the moment of his action, overcomes the impotence of the oppressed and victimized. Many other black crime novelists have made their reputations in recent decades: over thirty new writers since the end of the 1980s, by far the best known being Walter Mosley, whose Easy Rawlins series was introduced with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. Engaging in a restrained, consciously crafted way with earlier traditions of hard-boiled crime writing, Mosley reaches back into L.A. history, to the mid-1940s, reclaiming what he sees as forgotten dimensions of the city’s past. Starting with the immediate post-World War II period in Devil in a Blue Dress, the novels move forward to the present, taking in, for example, the McCarthy era (Red Death, 1991) and the militant black politics of the 1960s (Bad Boy Brawly Brown, 2002) and tracing, throughout the series, the power relationships involved in creating the “Other” L.A. Devil in a Blue Dress opens with a reminder of how embedded a white racializing perspective is in the L.A. crime fiction of earlier days. Strongly echoing Farewell, My Lovely, Mosley reverses the binary: where Chandler treats whiteness as invisible and inserts a caricatured black presence, Mosley uses Easy’s perspective to draw attention to whiteness as such, locating the source of Easy’s traumas in his experiences of racial oppression and in confusions over racial identity. Dismantling the masculine identity of the hard-boiled private eye has also been a crucial strategy for women crime writers, whose use of the form has had particular political resonance since the 1980s, when feminist agendas were threatened by the general turn toward political conservatism, a law-and-order agenda, and the resurgence of the “moral majority.” The year 1982, for example, saw the publication of Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only, Sue Grafton’s “A” is for Alibi, and Marcia Muller’s Ask the Cards a Question, and by the mid-1990s the number of fictional female investigators had risen to over 360. The “maleness” of the form is often seen as a defining characteristic of crime fiction as a genre, and there has been much debate amongst feminist critics about whether oppressive masculinity is too ingrained a trait to be resisted, threatening to cancel out any feminist political agenda inserted into it. But whatever the contradictions, it is precisely the “male” attributes – assumptions of mastery, individualistic modes of thought and action – that make it so effective a site of feminist agency (Walton and Jones: 84–94).
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There have been many different kinds of feminist appropriation, but the most common underlying strategy is to imbue the stereotype with qualities that differentiate the new, female version from the old-fashioned, culpable, male model. The qualities retained tend to be instrumental, with the tough performance of the female private eye demonstrating tenacity and self-reliance. What is transformed is her relationship to the social and moral contexts within which she operates. Whilst continuing to foreground the “masculine” quality of agency, such narratives also stress the “female” quality of community. The combination can readily be seen, for example, in the work of Paretsky, who signals her resistance to a masculine value system by giving V. I. Warshawski such attributes as compassion, communal solidarity, and reluctance to act violently unless it is a matter of life and death. Warshawski is involved rather than isolated, adhering to an ethic of responsibility rather than the personal code of a Marlowe or a Sam Spade. Like many other female investigators, she has surrounded herself with a kind of non-patriarchal surrogate family, a counter-image to the selfish, materialistic, larger society that is the ultimate villain in Paretsky’s novels. This larger society is in most respects beyond redemption, and the female investigator, although she may achieve partial success, is finally no match for an entrenched masculine establishment. As in the male hard-boiled tradition, a central element in plotting is the discovery that what seems at first to be personal is actually only a small effect of routine, large-scale official wrongdoing, in the face of which the investigator can only resolve things within the most narrow limits. In Bitter Medicine (1987), for example, “murder” itself (a dead baby and mother) is no more than a by-product of corruptions within a commercial society bent on profit. This sense of ultimate helplessness is accentuated in feminist crime fiction, but, again, it is closely allied to one of the most characteristic of hard-boiled narrative constructions: as in Hammett and Chandler, what we see is a pattern that simultaneously valorizes individual agency and demonstrates the limitations of that agency. The performance of the investigative figure seems to offer the prospect of confident mastery, but “at night it is another thing.” As Paretsky has said in interview (quoted in Walton and Jones: 210–11), she has “no expectation that life is going to be made better” by Warshawki’s actions because, “after the curtain falls,” the men wielding the real power will just continue as before and “nothing at all” will be done about it.
References and Further Reading Abbott, Megan E. (2002). The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, Edward (1997) Thieves Like Us [1937], in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 30s and 40s. New York: Library of America.
Bailey, Frankie Y. (1991). Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press. Breu, Christopher (2005). Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press.
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Cain, James M. (1985). The Five Great Novels. London: Picador. Chandler, Raymond (1988). The Simple Art of Murder [1944]. New York: Vintage. Chandler, Raymond (1993). Three Novels. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cobley, Paul (2000). The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cochran, David (2000). American Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Post-War Era. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books. Forter, Greg (2000). Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel. New York: New York University Press. Goodis, David (1987). Nightfall [1947]. Berkeley, C.A.: Black Lizard. Hammett, Dashiell (1982). The Four Great Novels. London: Picador. Haut, Woody (1999). Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail. Hilfer, Tony (1990). The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre. Austin: University of Texas Press. Himes, Chester (1996). Blind Man with a Pistol [1969], in The Harlem Cycle, vol. 3. Edinburgh: Payback Press. Horsley, Lee (2001). The Noir Thriller. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Horsley, Lee (2005). Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irons, Glenwood, ed. (1995). Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Klein, Kathleen Gregory (1988). The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Klein, Kathleen Gregory (1995). Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers. Bowling Green, O.H.: Popular Press. Knight, Stephen (2004). Crime Fiction, 1800– 2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McCoy, Horace (1965). They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? [1935]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marling, William (1995). The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Chandler, Cain. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. Mosley, Walter (1992). Devil in a Blue Dress [1990]. London: Pan.
Munt, Sally R. (1994). Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London: Routledge. Naremore, James (1998). More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press. Palmer, R. B. (1994). Hollywood’s Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir. New York: Twayne. Paretsky, Sara (2004). Bitter Medicine [1987]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Plain, Gill (2001). Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Priestman, Martin, ed. (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reddy, Maureen T. (1988). Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York: Continuum. Reddy, Maureen T. (2003). Traces, Codes and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Ruhm, Herbert, ed. (1977). The Hard-Boiled Detective: Stories from “Black Mask” Magazine, 1920–1951. New York: Random House. Schmid, David (2001). “A Different Shade of Noir: Masculinity in the Novels of David Goodis,” ParaDoxa, 16: 153–76. Seltzer, Mark (1998). Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge. Server, Lee (1994). Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945–1955. San Francisco: Chronicle. Simpson, Philip L. (2000). Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale, I.L.: Southern Illinois University Press. Spillane, Mickey (1960). I, the Jury [1947]. London: Corgi. Thompson, Jim (1991). The Killer Inside Me [1952]. New York: Vintage. Walton, Priscilla L. and Jones, Manina (1999). Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press. Williams, Charles A., and Williams, Lori, eds. (2008). Dear Chester, Dear John: Letters between Chester Himes and John A. Williams. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
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Chicano Fiction Helen Oakley
Chicano fiction has emerged as a result of the establishment of a Mexican American population which has experienced a sense of double colonization. The invasion of Mexico by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century was followed by conflict with the U.S. which resulted in the loss of huge amounts of Mexican territory. The Mexican American community which became established within the United States struggled with the desire to retain strong ties with their homeland of Mexico as well as realizing the need to be assimilated into American society. Chicano fiction has developed as a means of exploring a conflicted sense of cultural identity. A wide range of poetry, drama, and prose fiction has been produced which illustrates key themes in Mexican American culture, such as racial discrimination, anxiety over gender roles, the relationship to the land, and religion. Through exploring these diverse areas, using a variety of hybrid literary forms, Chicano writers have expressed the psychological trauma experienced through their legacy of colonization, as well as affirming the need to establish a positive cultural identity that looks forward to the future. Two problems are immediately presented when trying to map out the trajectory of Chicano fiction. First, there has been much critical debate regarding the labeling of this literature, and, secondly, there has been controversy over how it should be periodized. The term Mexican American is a very broad category which encompasses people living in the United States of Mexican descent. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, the term “Chicano” began to be used to define the Mexican American population, and, in particular, their cultural forms of expression, such as music, art, and literature. Deborah Madsen provides a succinct definition of the etymology of the word: “The most persuasive explanation of the term ‘Chicano’ claims that the word derives from ‘Mexicano’ (pronounced ‘me-chi-cano’) and describes someone of mixed Spanish, Indian, and Anglo descent’ ” (Madsen: 6). The term Chicano does not then merely indicate the concept of Mexican ancestry, but rather it embodies the concept of racial mixing (denoted by the Spanish term mestizaje). To define oneself as Chicano signifies a certain pride in one’s cultural roots which may be
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linked to the hyphenated use of “Mexican-American” in the post-World War II era. It was in the 1960s and 1970s that a Chicano civil rights movement emerged which took a militant stance, demanding fairer pay and an end to racial discrimination. However, as Candida Hepworth notes, critics have disagreed about how the label Chicano should be applied, particularly when attempting to periodize the literature. Luis Leal has defined the evolution of Chicano literature as comprising five stages: “Hispanic, the sixteenth century to 1821; Mexican, 1821 to 1848; Transition, 1849 to 1910; Interaction, 1910 to 1942; Chicano, 1943 to the present” (Hepworth: 197–8). In his view, the journals, religious poetry, and drama of the early Spanish explorers should be counted as the first phase of Chicano literature. An example of a work in the Hispanic phase is the epic poem, Historia de la Nueva México (1610) by the Spanish poet Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá. This is a dramatization of the crossing of the Río Grande by the Spanish explorer Juan de Oñate. During the Mexican phase, Spanish works were actually published in America itself, as the first printing press in the Southwest region appeared in 1834, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The kind of poetry published during this phase tended to be religious and didactic in tone. A prime example of this is the first book of anonymous religious poetry to be published in Spanish in the Southwest, entitled Cuaderno de ortografía, in 1834 (Bruce-Novoa: 162). However, critics such as Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar maintain that the author of the kind of cultural production that dominates the first two of Leal’s phases “is not a Chicano but a Spaniard” (Calderón and Saldívar: 2). As Bruce-Novoa notes, these early works “are not yet products of synthesizing cultures, as Chicano expression is, though they are the record of cultures coping with the geographical space now considered the home ground of Chicanos” (Bruce-Novoa: 162). There is a general consensus among most critics that Chicano literature does not really start “until the third of Leal’s phases, namely after the signing of the Treaty Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848” (Hepworth: 198). This was the treaty that ratified the redrawing of borders between Mexico and the U.S., therefore giving rise to the development of a clearly defined Mexican American community who lived within the boundaries of the United States. There has not been so much critical attention devoted to Chicano literature of the Transition and Interaction periods. Although songs and stories were passed down through generations, generally in Spanish, not all of this material has survived in written form. In the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, Mexican Americans tended to get their work published in Spanish language magazines which had a limited circulation. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace the origin of certain literary forms which were to have an influence on the development of later Chicano literature. In the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans published a fair amount of poetry, some of which was influenced by English Romantic poets such as Byron and Shelley. An example of the tradition of lyrical love poetry is contained in Vicente Bernal’s Las Primicias (1916). Much of the poetry published during this era was also religious in nature. The most well-known Mexican American poet of the first half of the century was Fray Angélico Chávez, a priest who wrote a number of fictional
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and non-fictional works which explored his relationship to his faith. For example, his Eleven Lady-Lyrics and Other Poems (1945) offers a homage to the Mother Mary. As Bruce-Novoa points out, although Chávez does show a preoccupation with his Hispanic roots in some of his writing, his poetry addresses universal themes in “standard English,” and so he might be regarded as “the epitome of the assimilated writer” (Bruce-Novoa: 163). Another key form which continued to develop was the corrido (song) which embodied an oral storytelling tradition that had been passed down through generations and which was more culturally specific in the sense that it documented key struggles on the part of Mexican Americans to retain a sense of cultural identity in a rapidly changing environment. Elizabeth Jacobs notes that the corrido emerged “as an expression of the deep schism between Mexicans and Americans following the U.S.–Mexico war and the creation of the U.S.–Mexico border” (Jacobs: 66). The corrido typically featured a hero who had to fight to assert his cultural identity in the face of Anglo-American aggression. Two key themes to emerge from an analysis of the corrido form are resistance to racial oppression and the importance of a unifying masculine figure who presents a strong symbol of cultural identity. These elements which emerged in Chicano oral traditions can be viewed as highly influential on the work of later writers. In his groundbreaking study, With his Pistol in his Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero (1958), Américo Paredes documents the story of the folk hero Gregorio Cortes. Paredes explores the myth of the making of the hero and the cultural dilemmas faced by his dual Mexican American identity. Nicolás Kanellos outlines how drama also flourished in the Mexican American community of the Southwest in the late nineteenth century, when plays were staged in both Spanish and English to provide entertainment for the masses (Martinez and Lomelí: 173–83). With the development of the railroad, professional theater companies were able to tour throughout America. Los Angeles emerged as a key center for the development of Mexican American theater which was also linked to the emergence of the Hollywood film industry in the twentieth century. The public was interested in plays which reflected their own cultural dilemmas as Mexican American citizens. Plays were produced which featured the character of the pelado (underdog) whose satirical wit offered an influential critique of American culture. Other, more serious forms of drama emerged in the work of playwrights such as Eduardo Carillo, who wrote about the “unjust trial” of a Mexican immigrant (Martinez and Lomelí: 177). With the advent of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the mass deportation of many Mexicans back to Mexico, the theaters lost some of their audience. However, Mexican American theater continued to fulfill a cultural need which paved the way for the more radical experimentation of the 1960s. As the foregoing analysis has demonstrated, Mexican American poetry, oral folktales, and theater did exist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the post-World War II period is usually cited by critics as heralding the beginning of the modern era of Chicano literature. As Hepworth notes, “In the postWorld War II decades there emerged a clear discrepancy between the antecedents of
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Chicano/a literature and Chicano/a literature itself. Along with this came a new determination of who and what the Chicano/a was” (Hepworth: 200). World War II acted as a catalyst which precipitated a new political consciousness within the Mexican American community which was defined by the use of the term Chicano. Many Mexican Americans had served in the war but returned home only to find they were being discriminated against. Also, the bracero program for temporary contract labor, which was initiated by the U.S. government in 1942, brought a large influx of agricultural laborers into the U.S. who worked long hours in exploitative conditions. A new spirit of militancy developed in the 1940s and 1950s as labor unions were formed in order to address problems of social inequality. The dawning of the era of the 1960s ushered in a period of dramatic change within American culture in which civil rights movements headed by minority groups such as women and African Americans gathered momentum. Out of this turmoil there developed a Chicano civil rights movement (often referred to as el movimiento) which comprised various groups aiming to improve the pay and conditions of ordinary working people. The Chicano civil rights movement originated in the fields of California and it was headed by César Chávez, who founded the National Farm Workers Association. In 1965, they voted to join the Filipino grape workers who were on strike. Subsequently, Chávez led a march to Sacramento, the capital of the state of California, which the protestors used to demand an end to the harsh conditions suffered by the immigrant laborers in the fields. Out of this sense of cultural flux, a new generation of poets, playwrights, and prose fiction writers emerged, who were committed to experimenting with new artistic forms which could provide a cultural voice in order to effect political change and educate Chicano citizens to feel a sense of pride in their cultural identity. One key literary figure who is inextricably linked with the Chicano civil rights movement is Luis Valdez, a college graduate who had a socialist outlook and a strong commitment to promote the Chicano cause through his work. Valdez was the author of The Plan of Delano (1966), the cultural manifesto that was used as a mantra on the march to Sacramento. He is also regarded as the pioneer of modern Chicano theater. In 1965, Valdez founded the Teatro Campesino, a theater group which experimented with dramatic forms such as dance, music, and mime, and which aimed to bring its cultural productions to the ordinary people. This style of theater tended to be improvised through satirical actos (sketches) which were performed to an audience of workers in the fields. Ortego y Gasca notes that “The distinctive character of Chicano theatre lies in its seeming ‘artlessness.’ There is no attempt to create setting or atmosphere or character” (Ortego y Gasca: 142). Valdez often used masks which produced “a kind of stylized theatre resembling the Japanese Kabuki theatre or the Greek mask plays” (Ortego y Gasca: 142). One of Valdez’s key theatrical works is his play Zoot Suit, which was performed on Broadway in 1979 and converted into a film in 1981. This is based on the so-called “Sleepy Lagoon” trial of 1942 when members of the 18th Street gang in Los Angeles were wrongly convicted of killing a man named José Díaz, an event that culminated in their incarceration in San Quentin. This event was the precursor to the Zoot Suit
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riots of 1943 when a group of American sailors went on the rampage on the streets of Los Angeles, attacking Mexican-looking men who wore the distinctive zoot suits. Valdez uses the device of the pachuco, a commentator on the action whose function resembles that of the Greek chorus. The pachuco embodies a masculine cultural identity which links the protagonist of the play, Henry Reyna, to a mythic past which helps him to regain a sense of cultural identity. The search for cultural origins is a key theme in the work of many writers who emerged from the era of the Chicano civil rights movement. Another key literary figure associated with the Chicano civil rights movement was Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales, who headed the so-called “Crusade for Justice” in Denver. Gonzales is the author of the hugely influential civil rights poem, Yo soy Joaquín (I am Joaquín, 1967). This poem embodies a militant sense of cultural identity in which the protagonist, the mythologized bandit Joaquín Murrieta, asserts himself in the face of cultural oppression. Multiple layers of cultural history are inscribed upon this figure who aligns himself with Aztec princes and heroes of the Mexican Revolution in order to forge a separatist identity. Gonzales offers a radical reworking of the corrido form which yokes together violent images of conquest. Subsequently, Gonzales attended the Denver Liberation Youth Conference in 1969, where he produced the important manifesto, El Plan espritual de Aztlán which can also be viewed as another expression of separatist nationalism. This manifesto signals two important themes in Chicano literature: first, the concept of religion, and, secondly, the relationship to the land (Aztlán). The Chicano civil rights movement appealed to the Catholic Church for support. Writers such as Gonzales viewed the struggle for equal rights as a kind of pilgrimage, and this strong religious dimension was to be hugely influential on many subsequent generations of Chicano writers. The idea of returning to “Aztlán,” or the homeland, is another important theme in Chicano literature. Jacobs defines “Aztlán” as originating from two sources: “first, it drew heavily on the legendary symbolic homeland of the Aztecs, situated to the north of the Aztec empire in preconquest times, and, second, it represented the lands lost to the U.S.A. after the U.S.–Mexico war of 1846–8” (Jacobs: 69–70). The relationship between the individual and the natural world is very important to the work of many Chicano writers. Inspired by the writings of figures such as Gonzales, a group of Chicano activists centered in the University of California, Berkeley, created a new journal entitled El Grito (1967) which provided a forum for the dissemination of political Chicano poetry. A key poet was Alurista who explored the concept of Aztlán through an innovative method which drew on American folk music, English pop, Mexican music, and preColumbian philosophy. Alurista might be described as a “third world pluralist” who had an egalitarian attitude toward racial mixing (Bruce-Novoa: 167). Another key political poet associated with this journal was José Montoya, whose poem “El Louie” is comparable with Gonzales’s I am Joaquín. The subject of Montoya’s poem is Louie, a pachuco leader who has died, but whose presence is manifested in a haunting way to his friends and family. Both poems portray Chicano identity in terms of a central masculine figure who provides a synthesis of various layers of cultural history.
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Prose fiction has also been particularly important to the evolution of Chicano culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. The antecedents to modern Chicano prose fiction can be found in Mexican American cuentos (short stories) which developed out of the Hispanic oral storytelling tradition. However, it is not really until the first decade after World War II that the modern Chicano novel and short-story forms fully developed. Most critics concur that José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959) is the first Chicano novel. This is described by Ortego y Gasca as “an American novel founded on a Hispanic theme” (Ortego y Gasca: 144). Set in the interwar period, Pocho tells the story of Juan Rubio, a soldier in the Mexican Revolution who crosses the border into Texas and then moves on to California. The motif of the journey across the border is a recurring theme in Chicano literature, and it can also be linked with the spiritual quest to obtain an inner sense of cultural identity which defined much of the writing of the Chicano civil rights period. A comparable work is Richard Vásquez’s Chicano (1970) which dramatizes the journey of its protagonist, Héctor Sandoval, from Mexico to the U.S. in the era of the Mexican Revolution. In both novels, the authors explore the relationship between the central male protagonists and their families, and the problems they experience as immigrants caught between Spanish and English and differing American and Mexican cultural norms. Conflict within the family structure is another important theme in much Chicano fiction, as it allows writers an opportunity to explore generational tensions and problems of assimilation into American culture. A major pioneer of the Chicano short-story form was Tomás Rivera, who came from a poor agricultural background and subsequently achieved success as a writer and academic. Rivera’s fiction tells of the struggles of the laboring immigrant classes. His most famous work, Y no se lo tragó la tierra, was first published in 1971. It comprises twelve short stories which are unified by the perspective of a child who blasphemes against God for not helping his suffering father. His astonishment that the earth does not swallow him is followed by the dawning of his belief that there is no God. Rivera often makes use of anonymous child narrators, as this device allows him to explore the collective consciousness of an exploited group. In Y no se lo tragó la tierra, Rivera provides a Spanish and an English text for his stories, thus using interlingualism as a method of exposing the alienation of a child who loses a sense of innocence. The decision to write in English or Spanish, or whether to use Chicano slang, known as caló, has become a contentious issue. Some critics have discounted Pocho as not being properly Chicano because it is written in English, while heralding Rivera’s work as initiating the beginnings of Chicano prose fiction. Another key Chicano writer who uses a child’s perspective to explore his cultural heritage is Rudolfo Anaya. His well-known novel, Bless Me Ultima (1972), is set in New Mexico during the World War II era. The story is told through the perspective of a young boy, Antonio Márez, whose encounter with a curandera (healer) called Ultima causes him to re-evaluate his Roman Catholic heritage, which he becomes disillusioned with. Through his relationship with Ultima, Antonio gains access to a Native Indian culture which helps him to connect his inner cultural identity to the natural world.
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A unifying factor in all the Chicano works discussed up to this point is that they are written from a male perspective. Over a period of several centuries, the traditional patriarchal values of Mexican culture became absorbed into Chicano society in the United States. This meant that Chicana women faced a double sense of discrimination. Not only did they have to contend with the same kinds of racial prejudice as their male counterparts, but they also had to suffer abuse within the domestic familial structure. It was not really until the end of the 1960s that Chicana women began to assert their rights as equal citizens, and even then they faced opposition from men within the Chicano civil rights movement itself. The sexism inherent within the movement was made apparent at the 1969 Denver conference when a group of Chicana women organized a spontaneous workshop in order to express their concerns. When the men heard what was going on they suppressed the findings of the group and issued a statement to the effect that the Chicana woman does not wish to be liberated. However, during the 1970s, a new generation of Chicana writers emerged who were determined to express the ignored female voice through a variety of innovative forms. Many of these Chicana writers were self-published, as they were not seen as marketable by the bigger publishing houses. However, their success in using poetry, drama, and prose fiction to express their concerns paved the way for a stronger interest in Chicana fiction in the publishing world in subsequent decades. A groundbreaking collection of poetry by Bernice Zamora, entitled Restless Serpents (1976), helped to reorient the direction of Chicano poetry. Zamora displays an interest in reaching back to past traditions, but she also emphasizes “the insistence on women’s right to share equally in the exercise of any and all cultural rituals” (Bruce-Novoa: 170). In her culminating poem of the collection, “Restless Serpents,” Zamora uses the religious symbol of the serpent as a symbol of artistic creativity. Here the serpent becomes a way of fusing masculine and feminine elements. An interest in myth is also revealed in Isabella Ríos’ novel Victuum (1976) which is often cited by critics as the first bildungsroman to be written by a Chicana woman. This tells the story of Valentina Ballesteros, a woman who struggles to find her direction in a male-dominated world. The novel is given an interesting dimension through Valentina’s psychic gift which enables her to connect with mythic figures such as Ulysses, for example. The use of myth in the works of these writers becomes a way of rewriting cultural history and challenging the male-authored mythic stories and symbolism which had been foisted upon them. From the 1970s to the present day, Chicana writers have displayed an unflagging interest in reconnecting with an ancient past in order to illuminate the present. In particular, there are three mythologized women who have had an important influence on the evolution of Chicana fiction. The first of these is the figure of La Malinche, otherwise known as La Chingada (the fucked one). When Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico it is said that he took an Indian mistress, La Malinche, and it is their mythologized union that has given rise to the mestizo (mixed race) culture of Mexico. Deborah Madsen notes the negative impact that this legendary figure has had on the construction of gender roles in Mexican culture: “La Malinche in this interpretation is seen as
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the origin of macho violence and Chicana passivity; her original betrayal of her people and her abandonment by Cortés have left them fatherless and motherless” (Madsen: 8). The influence of this stereotype of the bad woman, or whore, can be seen in Chicano texts in which women are punished for betraying their families by trying to assert a sense of individualism. It also explains the preoccupation on the part of contemporary Chicana writers with domestic violence. The Chicana poet Carmen Tafolla wrote a poem entitled “La Malinche” (1978) in which La Malinche tells the story of her union with Cortés in her own voice. This poem made a big impact as it challenged the official version of events in which La Malinche is the betrayer of her people. In contrast, Tafolla reveals how La Malinche is the victim of a brutal rape which causes her to betray herself. In contrast to the figure of La Malinche, the second main archetype is that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an idealized female who appeared to Juan Diego, an Indian, as a vision in the sixteenth century. Subsequently, the Virgin has been appropriated as a symbol of Mexican nationalism; for example, during the Mexican Revolution, and later during the Chicano civil rights movement. The problem with this stereotype is that it sets up an idealized conception of female purity that is just as confining as the archetype of La Malinche. It promotes a vision of the ideal woman as a kind of domestic goddess who should be pure and chaste and live to serve her husband. This figure of the submissive woman has been an equally important motif in Chicano literature. Thus, the La Malinche/Virgen, or whore/virgin, binary opposition has been a restrictive way of categorizing women which subsequent Chicana writers and feminists have tried to break down. The third archetype is that of La Llorona (the weeping woman). The story of La Llorona is that of a woman who supposedly drowned her little children in order to seek revenge on her husband who had been unfaithful to her. Unfortunately, she forgot where she concealed the bodies, so that when she tried to take them to their burial she was unable to find them. Subsequently, this poor woman is condemned to roam endlessly through rivers and water, lamenting the loss of her children. Clearly, this myth encodes a sexist belief that the woman who challenges her husband’s authority is condemned to sacrifice herself. As Madsen notes: “La Llorona offers a powerful image that speaks to all the dispossessed people of the Americas as well as the Chicanas who find that the lives they lead cost them their children” (Madsen: 34). An interesting reworking of this myth is contained in the short story by Alma Luz Villanueva, entitled “La Llorona” (1994) which tells the story of a woman who kills her children to protect them from a worse fate. Other contemporary works which have been inspired by this mythology include Sandra Cisneros’ short story “Woman Hollering Creek” (1991) in which La Llorona’s wailing becomes a triumphant cry of liberation as the female protagonist escapes from her destructive relationship, and Helena María Viramontes’ “The Cariboo Café” (1985) where “La Llorona becomes associated with all the undocumented women and children from Central and South America who attempted to cross the U.S.–Mexico border throughout the 1980s” (Jacobs: 62). In the poetry collection Santa Agua/Holy Water (2002) by Pat Mora, all of the key female
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archetypes are featured in the series of poems with the subheading “Talk Show interviews with Coatlicue the Aztec Goddess, Malinche the Maligned, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and La Llorona: the Wailer.” Despite the comic title, the poems offer a serious insight into the relevance of these ancient figures to contemporary Chicana culture. One of the most well-known and radical reworkings of these mythic archetypes is contained in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). This is a hybrid text which crosses over between English and Spanish, and between academic essay and poetry/autobiography. As a lesbian Chicana, Anzaldúa is one of a group of writers who had previously been overlooked by a traditional, male-authored Chicano establishment. In this work Anzaldúa defines a mestiza subjectivity in which she breaks down linguistic, gendered, and racial binary oppositions which she sees as constricting. She also offers a revisionist analysis of mythologized stereotypes of women which deconstructs the virgin/whore opposition. Anzaldúa re-contextualizes the figure of the Virgin within a tradition of powerful female figures associated with pre-Columbian Aztec culture. In this interpretation, the figure of Guadalupe derives from the serpent goddess Coatlicue, who appears in another incarnation as Tonantsi, the good mother. By linking the figure of Guadalupe to an indigenous Indian culture, Anzaldúa offers an alternative female-centered version of cultural history. Another key theme in Anzaldúa’s work is the symbol of the female body as representing cultural identity. This is a metaphorical body which she sees as violated and wounded, and which needs to be healed. Thus, in order to heal the wounds created by centuries of racial and sexual discrimination and violent conquest, Anzaldúa invokes another legendary figure, that of the curandera. Anzaldúa implies that by seeking contact with their cultural roots, contemporary Chicana women can gain in strength and power. Contemporary homosexual Chicano writers have also offered interesting insights into constructions of gender, religion, and myth. Arturo Islas’s The Rain God (1984) tells the story of the Angel family who escape from the hardship of the Mexican Revolution to start a new life in the U.S. The novel encompasses different generations and narrative viewpoints in order to reveal the conflicts within the family structure and the struggles of individuals to assert themselves in American society. As in previous Chicano fiction, the connection to the land is an important structuring motif, but here the landscape is that of the desert which can be a hostile environment. A preoccupation with the body and sexuality also links Islas’s novel to Anzaldúa’s work to some extent. Islas dramatizes how one of the male characters, Felix, is brutally beaten to death by an American soldier whom he attempts to seduce in a car. Islas offers a far more open treatment of homosexuality than had been the case in a lot of earlier Chicano fiction. John Rechy’s novel, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez (1991) also provides an interesting insight into contemporary attitudes toward sexuality and religion. The female protagonist, Amalia Gómez, suffers a string of abusive relationships with men which stem from her experience of being raped as a young girl. Rechy goes even further than Islas in exploring the issues of incest and domestic violence. All the masculine figures in the book subvert traditional conceptions of Chicano masculinity.
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While the older male characters are abusive or limited in outlook, Amalia’s sons threaten the patriarchal order in other ways: through crime and homosexuality. Throughout her turmoil, Amalia struggles to hold on to her religious faith as a means of survival. Some of the most innovative contemporary Chicano writing has been produced by authors who have drawn on the popular genre of crime fiction as a means of dramatizing cultural conflicts and dilemmas concerning Chicano identity. A pioneer of the genre is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, author of the Klail City Death Trip series. The first of the series is entitled Estampas del valle (1972) which Hinojosa-Smith subsequently rewrote as The Valley in 1983. The series is set in Belken County, a fictional border area which is outlined by a map at the front of the book. The creation of a fictional region has prompted critics to compare Hinojosa-Smith’s work with major American writers such as William Faulkner. The books within the series are interwoven into a large detective novel in which the narrator adopts the role of the detective, piecing together information about crimes committed by the villains, who are often portrayed as invaders of the border territory. Hinojosa-Smith therefore reveals tensions between Mexican American traditions, which are sustained through oral culture, and the official Anglo-American discourse, which seeks to suppress this cultural identity. Chicano crime writers have reinvented the classic hard-boiled detective hero in interesting ways. The private investigator in the U.S. form of the crime genre tends to be an alienated character who lives on the margins of society and who seeks to bring justice to a corrupt world. Contemporary Chicano crime writers have used the archetype of the detective to explore the concept of cultural marginalization. For example, Michael Nava is the author of a series of books starring a gay Chicano detective called Henry Rios, who is doubly marginalized from his society, both because of his race and because of his sexuality. In Nava’s novel The Hidden Law (1992), Rios has to prove that a young Chicano man did not kill a politician, while he tries to find out the real culprit. At the same time, Rios has to cope with finding out the news that his ex-partner has HIV. Thus, through a dramatization of the story of the crime and through an investigation into the psychology of the detective, Nava is able to explore the interrelated themes of racial and sexual discrimination in contemporary America. Another key contemporary Chicano crime writer is Manuel Ramos who is the author of a series of crime novels starring the Chicano detective-lawyer Luis Montez. In the first of the series, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz (1993), Montez is called upon to investigate mysterious attacks on former student activists who had been assaulted twenty years previously, resulting in the death of their leader Rocky Ruiz. In order to solve the mystery, the detective has to delve into the past in ways that show how the legacy of the Chicano civil rights movement still has a strong influence on contemporary American society. While crime fiction has historically been dominated by men, a new genre of Latina crime writers has emerged in recent years who have challenged both the masculine and white-authored dominance of the genre. The most high profile of these
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contemporary Chicana crime writers is Lucha Corpi, a Mexican immigrant who became involved in student activism in the 1970s. Her Gloria Damasco series features a Chicana detective who has to contend with both racism and sexism in her battles to win her cases. In one of her most provocative novels, Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999) Damasco investigates a case in which Licia Lecuona (the black widow), who has recently been released from prison following the murder of her violent husband, then becomes the target of crime herself. Corpi uses the figure of Licia to rewrite the story of La Malinche in a thought-provoking way. The productivity of Chicano writers in recent years provides a positive affirmation that publishers and readers alike are receptive to new works which push generic boundaries in challenging ways. Chicano writers have found innovative methods of exploring the issues of gender, race, and religion. The increased globalization of the book market has also opened up a wider audience for Chicano fiction, as certain linguistic and cultural barriers are being broken down. However, the key issues of racial and sexual discrimination, which were identified by activists of the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, are still very relevant today, therefore fueling the need for the production of more contemporary texts which will continue to address the concept of Chicano identity in diverse ways in the future.
References and Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan (1985). “Chicano Poetry,” in Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide, eds. Julio A. Martinez and Francisco A. Lomelí, pp. 161–73. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Calderón, Héctor and Saldívar, José David (1991). Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Gonzalez, Marcial (2008). Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. González, María C. (1996). Contemporary MexicanAmerican Women Novelists: Toward a Feminist Identity. New York: Peter Lang. Hepworth, Candida (2001). “Chicano Fiction,” in Beginning Ethnic American Literatures, eds. Helena Grice, Candida Hepworth, and Maria Lauret, pp. 191–210. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jacobs, Elizabeth (2006). Mexican American Literature: The Politics of Identity. London: Routledge. Lattin, Vernon E. (1985). “Contemporary Chicano Novel, 1959–1979,” in Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide, eds. Julio A. Martinez and
Francisco A. Lomelí, pp. 184–97. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Lattin, Vernon E. (1993). Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A Critical Survey. Tempe, A.Z.: Bilingual Review. Leal, Luis (1979). “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective,” in Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds. Joseph Sommers and Fausto T. Ybarra, pp. 18–30. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Lopez, Sam (2006). Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature. London: Routledge. Madsen, Deborah L. (2000). Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Martinez, Julio A. and Lomelí, Francisco A., eds. (1985). Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Neate, Wilson (1998). Tolerating Ambiguity: Ethnicity and Community in Chicano/a Writing. New York: Peter Lang. Ortego y Gasca, Felipe D. (1985). “Chicano Literature: From 1942 to the Present,” in Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide, eds. Julio A.
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Martinez and Francisco A. Lomelí, pp. 137–48. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Paredes, Américo (1958). With his Pistol in his Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rosales, Francisco A. (1997). Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público.
Saldivar, Ramon (1990). Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sotelo, Susan Baker (2005). Chicano Detective Fiction. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.
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“Black humor,” sometimes used to denote African American humor, was a phrase applied to certain kinds of American literature and film from the late 1950s onward, although its American roots have been variously traced back to Melville, Twain, and Nathanael West. The label derives ultimately from the classical notion of elemental humors, the black humor being melancholy, and was used to identify a provocative comedy which was deployed to convey a sense of the absurdity and disorder of the contemporary world. An important precursor to American black humor fiction was Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952), which engaged with contemporary fears of nuclear war through a grotesque comedy on the persistence of human aggression; its title is a bad pun (limb-o) on attempts to stifle aggression by amputation. Typical subjects of black humor narratives were war, disease, and above all death, but these subjects were treated in styles that thwarted the reader’s expectations of solemnity. For that reason, black humor writers were constantly being accused of bad taste, when in fact their methods were often being used to question conventions of expression. In one of the best survey articles on this topic, Max Schulz lists the features of black humor as follows: “comic and grotesque treatment of intrinsically tragic material, onedimensional characters, wasteland settings, disjunctive and atemporal narrative structures, and mocking irreverent tone” (Schulz 1975: 272). Commentators on black humor have by and large agreed with Schulz’s prioritization of a ludicrous misfit between treatment and subject. Black-humor writing possesses a transgressive energy which shows itself in violating literary and legal norms of decorum, reflecting writers’ sense of the inadequacy of conventional realism to express the contemporary world. The postmodern novelist Raymond Federman has identified 1960s’ black humor fiction as the first wave of a change that would lead to self-reflexive fiction, taking Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) as a pivotal work, and, by the same token, during the 1960s John Sladek employed surreal imagery and bizarre perspectives to break through the generic conventions of science fiction.
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A general quality of transgression has been identified in this writing by Morris Dickstein, who declares: “all black humour involves the unseemly, the forbidden, the exotic, or the bizarre” (Pratt: 130). Terry Southern devoted his fiction to exactly such violations. Despite the praise he has received from Joseph Heller, Bruce Jay Friedman, Kurt Vonnegut, and other writers, he has never received the critical recognition he deserves. Southern’s first novel, Candy (1958, in collaboration with Mason Hoffenberg), describes an innocent nubile student, who is constantly expressing incredulity at events. Candy automatically and unconsciously triggers desire in every male, even her father. Like Voltaire in Candide, Southern plays on a set of meanings associated with “candid”: frankness, since Candy is another innocent used to dramatize the sexual hypocrisy of society; whiteness, the color of Candy’s clothes; and radiance, as relating to her blond hair. Added to these is the fact that Candy’s sexuality is represented as a sweetmeat through the symbolism of her clitoris, the ultimate “candy” or “pink pearl” as it is called. Southern’s narratives tend to be loosely episodic, and each episode progresses from apparent normality to anarchic climaxes, comically applying Freud’s view of society as a system of repression by organizing the episodes on a pattern of decorum collapsing into farce. The Magic Christian (1960) follows this pattern of reductive satirical exposure in describing the activities of Guy Grand, a fabulously rich practical joker who delights in setting up stunts which reveal that everyone has their price. Just as Alan Harrington satirized personality development as a sales technique in The Confessions of Dr. Modesto (1955), Southern shows Grand to be a cynical booster. His personal slogan is: “Grand’s the name, easy-green’s the game” (Southern 1985: 13); and, of course, his surname also signifies a slang term for a thousand dollars. Each episode of the novel presents a new joke at the American public’s expense, starting with his scheme of building a huge vat in the center of Chicago, which he fills first with excrement, urine, and blood; and then with hundred-dollar bills. Guy Grand’s activities demonstrate commercial enterprise turned on its head so that the projects lose money instead of making a profit: and Grand himself can best be imagined as a mischievous entrepreneur mimicking the national rhetoric of enterprise. Like the human subjects of behaviorist experiments, Grand’s victims are presented as reactive, responding in predictable mass patterns and displaying no sign of an inner or subjective life. Guy Grand plays the role of an ironic destiny in The Magic Christian, temporarily manipulating his victims into revealing their worst sides. Peter Sellers read The Magic Christian and became so enthusiastic that he distributed copies among friends. On the strength of this connection, Southern was brought into the making of Dr. Strangelove (1963) because Stanley Kubrick decided to change that film from melodrama to black comedy. Apart from other scripts, Southern shared the script credits for The Loved One (1965), another black comedy, and in 1970 he published his last novel in this mode. Blue Movie describes the making of an erotic film by an artistic director (Boris) loosely modeled on Stanley Kubrick, the novel’s dedicatee. The phrase “black humor” has been used loosely to refer to irony, the absurd, and other related topics. Kurt Vonnegut has declared that the “black humorists are gallows
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humorists” and relates this kind of joke to “middle European humor, a response to hopeless situations” (Allen: 56). He finds a continuity in Jewish humor which fed into mainstream American comedy during the 1960s. Similarly, the novelist Stanley Elkin has found a central theme in the mode: the “joke of powerlessness” (LeClair and McCaffery: 115). The characteristic protagonist of black humor fiction finds himself (he is usually male) trapped or threatened by circumstances. Although the term “antihero” was an eighteenth-century coinage to describe a figure who reversed those qualities traditionally associated with the hero (courage, independence, pursuit of cultural ideals), it really entered critical currency in the postwar period. The concept is helpful for explaining the protagonists of black humor fiction who are, as often as not, the victim of circumstances trapped in situations beyond their control. A formative work here was J. P. Donleavy’s first novel, The Ginger Man (1955), an account of an American in Dublin on the G.I. Bill to study law at Trinity College. Alienated by publishers’ rejections of his manuscript, Donleavy turned away from America and subsequently made Eire his permanent home. Sebastian Dangerfield is named after the Roman martyr who supplies Donleavy’s protagonist with his favorite role: that of victim. His surname denotes his compulsion to take risks. Donleavy chose the title The Ginger Man, by his own account, to describe his “mettle and spirit” (Donleavy: 410); and certainly it admirably conveys Dangerfield’s provocative energy. His three interlocking desires – for sex, food, and money – set the terms for the comic action. The fact that Dangerfield is an outsider unfamiliar with Irish culture enables Donleavy to use him to satirize the Catholic puritanism of Eire. The term “anti-hero” from the 1950s onward took on the specific meaning of describing a character who would apparently display cowardice, cynicism, and hypocrisy. The irreverent style of black humor protagonists is, however, used to challenge the more high-minded ideals being put forward in each novel. The oscillation in The Ginger Man between first and third persons suggests a doubleness in Dangerfield. His ironic consciousness enables him to be at once agent and spectator, a quality that we find in Lolita. Sebastian Dangerfield sets a pattern of behavior for novels like Catch-22 (1961), Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), or Elliott Baker’s A Fine Madness (1964) where anarchic horseplay is used by the protagonists to avoid the constricting codes of the authority figures in those novels. In all these cases, the protagonist is an ambiguous figure, inducing uncertainty in the other characters and reader alike. Kesey’s narrator, Chief Bromden, reflects on McMurphy: “Nobody’s sure if this barrelchested man with the scar and the wild grin is play-acting or if he’s crazy enough to be just like he talks” (Kesey: 18). The repeated ironic use of a mental asylum as a metaphor for society inverts the norms that are imposed on these protagonists, and in Baker’s novel, Samson Shillitoe, a would-be poet, actually undergoes a lobotomy without suffering any mental or physical damage. Billed as a second Catch-22, A Fine Madness presents Shillitoe as a figure using the notion of a poet being defined by temperament to abuse and humiliate all those in his path. The recurrence of antiheroes suggests that through black humor these novels were collectively questioning
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social norms; typically there is no reconciliation between the protagonists and the societies in which they operate. Bruce Jay Friedman was a leading practitioner, especially in his early fiction, of an ironic comedy focusing on the “random social violence of our times” (Schulz 1974: 145). Unlike Donleavy, who displaces his American protagonist into an alien culture, or Heller, who estranges us from American society by refracting it through the structures and practices of the U.S. Army, Friedman dramatizes the grotesque horror within the commonplace. In Stern (1962), the dream of leaving the city for the good life of the suburbs is ridiculed; the protagonist of A Mother’s Kisses (1964) yearns to enroll at a status college, and in The Dick (1970) of leaving the Midwest for the excitement of life in the East. Stern establishes a comedy of misfortune where the expected associations of suburban life with domestic tranquility are constantly and grotesquely reversed into a battleground for racial antagonism. Friedman’s second novel, A Mother’s Kisses, describes the Oedipal comedy of a Jewish teenager trying to distance himself from his overwhelming mother who refers to him as “lover.” The Dick describes the trials endured by Ken LePeters, a “clippings expert” for a police homicide bureau, who has been attempting to suppress his Jewish identity, only to have a colleague ridicule him constantly as “Izzie.” LePeters is defined through contradictions, symbolized physically by the scar that divides his face. By profession an expert on images, he shows a chronic inability to manage his own, and becomes, like Stern, the victim of endless assaults on his self-esteem. The novel’s title plays on three meanings to “dick”: penis, detective, and fool. All three meanings converge on the figure of LePeters whose precarious identity is whittled away, confirming his predicament as outsider. At its best, Friedman’s early fiction describes a series of failed attempts at realizing the promises of American society told in an understated deadpan style which deliberately muffles climaxes and which presents grotesque violence as if it were a norm. Role-playing is central to black humor. In Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert is a master of guises (even his name is an alias). Throughout his narrative, he adopts a dizzying variety of guises all calculated to prevent the reader from condemning him easily. The frame situation of the novel, that of a court, motivates Humbert’s rhetorically flamboyant strategy of self-defense, which is aimed at catching the reader out in approving of legal abuse or by showing how relative sexual taboos are. Humbert theatricalizes himself so that he comes across simultaneously as agent and commentator. Again and again, he becomes the spectator of himself, fragmenting his identity into a shifting series of poses. Humbert’s wordplay, variation of tone and voice, and his self-conscious manipulation of the reader all anticipate Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, whose performatory dimension has been recognized by many critics. Roth was capitalizing on a new ethnic emphasis in American stand-up comedy, particularly what critics were calling its “Yiddishization.” By 1965, the novelist Wallace Markfield could claim: “the Jewish style, with its heavy reliance upon Yiddish and Yiddishisms has emerged not only as a comic style, but as the prevailing comic style” (Markfield: 114).
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Roth’s novel profits from comparisons with the comedian Lenny Bruce, who used night-club routines as a vehicle for social criticism, trying to shock his audiences into awareness and being labeled a “sicknick” by Time magazine as a result. Bruce attempted to confront hypocrisy about race, sex, and politics by violating the unwritten code of expression. Portnoy’s Complaint, whose title could signify an illness or an extended protest, is, like J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), a monologue delivered as if to a listening psychiatrist. Even more than Salinger, Roth avoids any clear linear sequence to events, showing instead how, for Alex Portnoy, the past and present are inextricably woven together. The sections of the novel thus resemble different clinical sessions. A further difference lies in Portnoy’s running obsession with the guilt induced by his parents. He turns ethnic humor into a kind of captivity: “Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke – only it ain’t no joke!” (Roth 1969: 36–7). The novel converts an Oedipal drama into a comic mind-theater revolving around the subject of guilt. Portnoy plays audience to himself and seeks fulfillment through breaking taboos, although, as Roth later explained, “The joke on Portnoy is that for him breaking the taboo turns out to be as unmanning in the end as honoring it. Some joke” (Roth 1985: 19). One of the means used to promote this new fiction was the anthology. Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters (1962) was subtitled 13 Masterpieces of Black Humor. Algren, in his introduction, identifies this volume as a thematic collection of stories (there are no excerpts from novels), which revolve around the grotesque isolation, the “monstrous” dimension to modern life. The second black humor anthology was published under the editorship of Bruce Jay Friedman in 1965. He had planned to include Kurt Vonnegut, Elliot Baker, and Alan Harrington, but had to bow to space limitations. In his foreword, Friedman insists that black humor will survive “as long as there are disguises to be peeled back, as long as there are thoughts no one else cares to think.” He locates a changed tempo in American public life: a “new, Jack Rubyesque [Jack Ruby shot the supposed assassin of J. F. Kennedy] chord of absurdity has been struck in the land … there is a new mutative style of behavior afoot, one that can only be dealt with by a new, one-foot-in-the-asylum style of fiction” (Friedman: xi, ix). The recurrence of asylums as settings, and madness as motif, is central to black humor fiction and is strikingly exemplified in Catch-22, which has every claim to be the true classic of black humor. The novel exemplifies the break-up of realism in conflating a narrative of the closing years of World War II with events in American society during the 1950s. Features of McCarthyism like Truman’s loyalty oath legislation are transposed onto a war situation with the result that the Germans emerge paradoxically as wartime enemies and postwar allies at the same time. Heller has stated in interview that the comedy of Catch-22 was a “means to an end” (Sorkin: 87) and the novel was composed on a mosaic principle which breaks the relation of cause to effect. The lack of continuity and logic to events is further compounded by the novel’s exploitation of contradiction and circularity in a world in which documents
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are repeatedly given priority over actuality. One of the main functions of the protagonist Yossarian is thus to insist how many things are “crazy” – a key term in the novel. In contrast, Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H (1969) and its sequels reduced Heller’s absurdism to a cozy insider/outsider humor. Heller extends the most predictable emotional state of wartime – fear – into a condition of being by defining many characters through paranoia. Institutions are demonized into conspiracies, and within military bureaucracy words and documents are constantly privileged over observable reality. The most complex humor in the novel, however, grows out of its treatment of death. Yossarian finds himself at one point playing out the role of a dying soldier and Snowden’s death finally presents a grotesque revelation that man is matter. The very absence of narrative comment can heighten the grotesque comedy by feigning a “flippant approach to situations which were filled with anguish and grief and tragedy” (Sorkin: 4). Paranoia can arise from a sense of information overload, of there being too much data for the individual to process except as conspiracy. This is what happens in the bizarre historical tracking from the nineteenth century up to the 1950s in Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) and in the protagonist’s increasing bewilderment in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) in the face of multiple media messages. Black humor was seen by Algren, Friedman, and other writers in the 1960s as continuing the literary tradition of social criticism, but through new means. The novelist Jerome Charyn introduced his 1969 anthology The Single Voice by asserting that “the black humorists, in refusing to buy the sentimental, supermarket humanism and homogenized morality of modern America, in forcing irrationality and illogic upon us, in reminding us that we are all part monkey and part fool … have shown themselves to be our most profound moralists” (Charyn: xi). Charyn singled out for special praise such figures as Heller, Pynchon, and Barth. In his own fiction, Charyn achieved a free-flowing fantastic picaresque in Going to Jerusalem (1967) where the epileptic narrator describes his travels across America with a turtle and a six-year-old chess prodigy. Under the impact of anti-Vietnam demonstrations, he described a group of gypsies in Eisenhower, My Eisenhower (1971), giving a hallucinatory outsider’s view of America. Then there was the shadow of the Bomb. By the late 1950s, Jules Feiffer’s “sick” cartoons and sketches attempted to defuse fears of nuclear war through a nervy humor. Gina Berriault’s 1961 novel The Descent satirized the promotion of nuclear shelters as a competition for urban status, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) burlesqued fears of apocalypse. The classic expression of the nuclear fear in that decade came with Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 movie Dr. Strangelove and the novel of the same year, which was published under the name of Peter George (author of the original novel used by Kubrick) but which had a large input from Terry Southern. Through cross-cutting, both works established a rapid tempo of scenes to depict the American military establishment as sexually obsessed with atomic weaponry. The public issue which united many groups and many writers in opposition to the government was the Vietnam War, which was satirized in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Philip Roth has
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explained how Lyndon Johnson became a target for contempt, and opposition to his presidency produced a “fantastical style of obscene satire that began to challenge virtually every hallowed rule of social propriety” (Roth 1989: 137). Black humor strategies were frequently deployed to burlesque the ubiquitous intrusion of the mass media in everyday life, the subject of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and a concern throughout William Burroughs’ career. The invasion of the television into individuals’ private lives was dramatized in Richard G. Stern’s Golk (1960). Golk turns out to be the pioneer of an addictive kind of reality television, which lures participants into believing that they are stars rather than victims. In effect, Golk’s programs occupy a middle ground between fiction and actuality “by concentrating on small situations rigged as dramatically as possible, allowing for maximum spontaneity yet putting people, amateur human beings, under pressures which will bring out more or less foreseen responses, responses which will reveal those people dramatically, the artificial calling on the real to produce drama” (Stern: 99). The televised episodes are subsequently categorized (reversals, double-takes, and so on) partly through theme music and special camera effects; in other words, whatever the original pretext, the media packaging of the episodes is blatant. Although some critics were already announcing the death of black humor by the 1970s, its ironic self-consciousness had been incorporated into their novels by figures like Philip Roth and Robert Coover. In the former’s Kafkaesque fantasy The Breast (1972), David Kepesh responds to his misfortune of being transformed into a mammary gland with the defense mechanism of jokes which attempt to control the oddity of his situation. “In these, my preposterous times,” he reflects, “we must keep to what is ordinary and familiar” (Roth 1972: 32). Coover’s own evocation of the preposterous comes in The Public Burning (1977), which depicts the execution of the Rosenbergs as an entertainment, a “Theater of Death,” where bizarre discontinuities draw the reader’s attention to the pernicious role of the media. Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) creates a grotesque, deadpan comedy out of an “airborne toxic event” in a small college town when a railroad tanker releases poisonous smoke, and DeLillo uses Lenny Bruce as a defining figure of the early 1960s in Underworld (1997), where he goes through a series of routines reminding his audiences “We’re all gonna die!” against the background of the Cuban missile crisis. Vonnegut and the other black humor writers demonstrate a heightened skeptical awareness of how historical narratives are constructed. The preamble to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, narrates the difficulties of approaching a war subject, and jumps to and fro between genres (science fiction, war story) to prevent the reader from assembling a linear narrative. This issue has remained a central concern of Thomas Pynchon throughout his writings. V. appears to break down into contemporary sections set mainly in mid-1950s’ New York and a series of historical chapters starting in the 1890s and converging on the novel’s present, which is the impending crisis in Suez. As the latter draws near, “people read what they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rat house of history’s rags and straws”; the politicians are no better: “Doubtless their private versions of history showed up in action”
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(Pynchon 1975a: 225). This same fragmentation emerges from Herbert Stencil’s obsessive attempts at tracing out the existence of the being named – or rather, half-named – in the novel’s title. V. remains a “scattered concept” at the end of the novel. No single version of history seems more plausible than any other. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) foregrounds death much more prominently than V., by setting its action in the months immediately preceding and following the end of World War II. Countering characters’ melodramatic obsessions with technology and death, Pynchon uses a kind of comedy which Roger Henkle explains as the “metaphorical reduction of the fearful in to the playful” (Henkle: 274), bombs into candy, V-rockets into bananas, and so on. Pynchon does this through a pun on the phrase “theater of war” which under his paranoid analysis suggests that war is a huge diversionary tactic from the real business of buying and selling, but which also intermittently evokes a collective performance countering most characters’ isolation. The narrative is therefore constantly interrupted while characters slip into comic routines and this process “from cloak-and-dagger to croak-and-stagger“ (Pynchon: 1975b: 551) reaches its culmination in the novel’s final location, the Orpheus Theater in Los Angeles where the reader is drawn into a fictional audience chanting “start the show.” In contrast, few African American writers were named as black humorists, but those who were add an important ethnic dimension to changes in fictional representation. Ralph Ellison was a formative figure in this context since he has expressed the belief that “the greater the stress within society the stronger the comic antidote required” (Ellison: 651). Invisible Man (1952) anticipates black humor in a surreal narrative where the protagonist keeps discovering that surfaces are totally untrustworthy. He assumes that by modeling himself on the images promoted by movies and advertisements he will make his way into the mainstream of American life. However, the novel deploys a number of metaphors to suggest transformatory processes undergone by the narrator (whose self is constantly being reshaped by circumstances). Where Invisible Man makes complex references to visibility as an index of the African American’s presence in U.S. culture, Warren Miller’s Siege of Harlem (1964) describes the secession of Harlem from the U.S.A. Treating separatism as an ironic reprise of America’s withdrawal from empire, the novel presents a reversal of the national ideology which reaches its most ironic in the analogies between Harlem and West Berlin: Harlem, too, has its airlift and its wall; and within the analogy the U.S.A. is presented as its hated communist opposite. The novel is defined and limited by its central trope of inversion; Harlem is run from the Black House, for instance. For a more complex use of comedy in exploring African American identity, we need to consider Charles Wright’s The Wig (1966). The Wig narrates the experiences of Lester Jefferson who describes himself as a “true believer in ‘The Great Society’,” using a phrase popularized in Kennedy’s inaugural address. Naïvely seeing it as a simple commodity, Lester attempts social progress by donning a golden wig, but Wright shows that the wig not only forms part of an
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extended masquerade but it also blanks out Lester’s selfhood. His blind faith in the clichés of progress is constantly being undermined by the novel’s dystopian elements. African American music is banned “except for propaganda purposes”; the police (“our protectors, knights of the Manhattan world”) are superficially polite but wear “sharpbrimmed Fascist helmets”; and for those who find life unbearable, there are street outlets of suicide gas. Even comedy has become a packaged commodity: “Good Humor men” carry transistorized laughing machines. The comedy of The Wig grows out of its constant alternation between masking and unmasking. At one point, Lester is accosted by a beggar who reveals himself to be a slave and so the personification of a hated racial past Lester is trying to put behind him. His response is denial: “ ‘No,’ I screamed and started running” (Wright: 101). What can he run toward? Only fresh masquerades, it seems. Lester’s dream of selfliberation places him in the cultural position of the dominant group; he is mistaken for a white foreigner by a black prostitute and finds himself acting out the power play of an imperial power: “I understood the lust of the conquistadors” (Wright: 108). The comedy of The Wig emerges from a rapid sequence of opposing constructs for Lester’s self where it becomes evident that “progress” for him involves the erasure of his African American origins. The most extreme point in this sequence is reached when Lester paradoxically liberates himself as an American by successfully masquerading as a white foreigner. In Ellison and Wright the protagonist’s desire to identify with the mainstream of American life becomes thwarted by his misunderstanding of cultural codes, and Robert Gover has extended this theme of comic incomprehension in a trilogy that polarizes black and white perceptions. The first volume, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding (1961), which was compared with Donleavy and Nabokov on publication, achieves its comic effect by an interplay between narrative voices, not between contrasting aspects of its central character. Gover describes the weekend experiences of a college boy, J.C., who visits a negro “cathouse” and, on the strength of a hundreddollar bill given by his grandmother, forms a brief liaison with a prostitute called Kitten, eventually being robbed and sent back to his fraternity house with his suit turned inside out. So far, the novel might sound like a more sexually conscious Catcher in the Rye, but Gover exploits the comic potential of alternating chapters narrated by J.C. and Kitten, respectively, so that each event is given a double expression. The main irony running through the novel is the enormous gap between figures from opposite poles of society. J.C. represents the ruling white elite of America. The chapters narrated by him make a total contrast with those told by Kitten, who uses streetwise slang in the most matter-of-fact way against which J.C. recoils in prim horror: “Such language! From a girl! I mean! Even if she was non-white such profanity!” (Gover: 26). Again and again, J.C. refuses to repeat the words he has heard in the name of literary decorum, but since Kitten’s account of any given event usually precedes his, J.C.’s preservation of decorum emerges as a kind of verbal evasion and ultimately as a refusal by J.C. to admit the contradictions within American society. His body acts out a desire that his words cannot articulate.
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The pivotal scene where Kitten and J.C. come into open conflict occurs in her apartment where both are watching a television program about the arms race. Kitten is limited by her personal experience of violence and relates everything she hears to white shootings. She gets so agitated that she takes a Rabelaisian revenge of nature against technology by farting at the television screen. Kitten has been regularly using the metaphor of the penis as weapon firing its orgasmic salvos and this episode extends the metaphor into the domain of Cold War politics. As in Dr. Strangelove, Gover presents the arms race as a political extension of white male sexual aggression and J.C.’s response to Kitten conflates racial othering (she is patronized as a “little dark brown buffoon”) with the catchphrases of the political alien. The ultimate irony is that neither character is aware of the implications of their actions. The dovetailing of political and ethno-sexual containment becomes more evident in the concluding volume of Gover’s trilogy J.C. Saves (1968) where J.C. has become a town leader trying to control a race riot by drawing analogies with the Vietnam War. The collision between different speech registers, which reflect social distance between the narrators of Gover’s first novel, creates comedy out of the grim theme of social collapse. J.C. performs an anti-hero function in these novels by personifying the racism and paranoia screened by the façade of the U.S. establishment. The works of Wright and Gover have been actively promoted by Ishmael Reed, whose own fiction has incorporated black humor strategies. William Keough has stated that “women have served as foils or butts for male humorists” (Keough: 197), and the vast majority of black humor novels are written by male writers about male protagonists with female characters playing various subsidiary roles like those of sexual prize or family companion. In 1973, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying was hailed by the reviewers as a female revision of the sexual comedy represented by Candy, Lolita, and Portnoy’s Complaint. Isadora Wing, journalist and poet, delivers an extended monologue comparable to Roth’s narrative. Isadora is constantly being told to go to an analyst by her partners (like Erica Jong, her second husband is a psychoanalyst) when, in fact, the latter all turn out to have their own obsessions and sexual quirks. The narrative presents a series of episodes linked by a commentary which refuses the Freudian notion of penis envy. Isadora fantasizes over what she calls the “zipless fuck,” the ultimate sexual experience without ulterior motives, but which constantly eludes her. Her humor functions like a survival tool, as she admits in the 1977 continuation, How to Save Your Own Life, for coping with loneliness. The latter novel renames the earlier narrator Candida Wong to glance back at Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy, and in her second sequel, Parachutes and Kisses (1984), Jong gives Fear of Flying the fictional title Candida Confesses. Fear of Flying represents a re-gendered version of the monologue narrative characteristic of some black humor. Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks (1975), which was enthusiastically endorsed by Jong, pursues a different comic method. Kinflicks (the title puns on family and pornographic movies) describes the attempts by Ginny Babcock to return to her Virginia home town and re-establish lost connections with figures from her youth. Her family is defined through its obsession with death: “My father, the Major, used
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to insist on having an ice pick next to his placemat at meals so that he could perform an emergency tracheotomy when one of us strangled on a piece of meat” (Alther: 1). The novel alternates chapters narrated by Ginny with ones in the anonymous third person, which skillfully dramatizes Ginny’s capacity to stand back in detachment from her own experience and view it as a grotesque spectacle, where others are ridiculed. Debate persists over the precursors of black humor, who have been variously identified as Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Nathanael West. The label continues to be applied to John Irving, Howard Stern, and other contemporary novelists.
References and Further Reading Algren, Nelson, ed. (1962). Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters: 13 Masterpieces of Black Humor. New York: Lancer. Allen, William Rodney, ed. (1988). Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Alther, Lisa (1977). Kinflicks [1975]. New York: Signet. Charyn, Jerome, ed. (1969). The Single Voice: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. New York: Collier-Macmillan. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (1975). Special Issue on Black Humor, 17(1). Davis, Douglas M., ed. (1967). The World of Black Humor. New York: E. P. Dutton. Dickstein, Morris (1977). Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties. New York: Basic. Donleavy, J. P. (1999) The History of the Ginger Man. New York: Viking. Ellison, Ralph (1995). The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library. Federman, Raymond (1993). Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Friedman, Bruce Jay, ed. (1965). Black Humor. New York: Bantam. Gale, Stephen H., ed. (1988). Encyclopedia of American Humorists. New York: Garland. Gehring, Wes D. (1996). American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Gover, Robert (1982). The J.C. / Kitten Trilogy. Berkeley, C.A.: I. Reed. Henkle, Roger B. (1983). “The Morning and Evening Funnies: Comedy in Gravity’s Rainbow,”
in Approaches to “Gravity’s Rainbow,” ed. Charles Clerc, pp. 273–90. Columbus, O.H.: Ohio State University Press. Hill, Hamlin (1977). “Black Humor and the Mass Audience,” in American Humor: Essays Presented to John C. Gerber, ed. O. M. Brack, Jr., pp. 1–11. Scottsdale, A.Z.: Arete. Kaufman, Will (1997). The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Keough, William (1990). Punchlines: The Violence of American Humor. New York: Paragon House. Kesey, Ken (1973). One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1962]. New York: Viking. LeClair, Tom and McCaffery, Larry, eds. (1983). Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Lindberg, Gary (1982). The Confidence Man in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Markfield, Wallace (1965). “The Yiddishization of American Humour,” Esquire, October: 114–15, 136. O’Neill, Patrick (1990). The Comedy of Entropy: Humour, Narrative, Reading. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pinsker, Sanford (1980). Between Two Worlds: The American Novel in the 1960s. Albany, N.Y.: Whitston. Pratt, Alan R., ed. (1993). Black Humor: Critical Essays. New York: Garland. Purdie, Susan (1993). Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Pynchon, Thomas (1975a). V. London: Picador.
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Pynchon, Thomas (1975b). Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Picador. Roth, Philip (1969). Portnoy’s Complaint. London: Jonathan Cape. Roth, Philip (1972). The Breast. New York: Bantam. Roth, Philip (1985). Reading Myself and Others. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Roth, Philip (1989). The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape. Schaeffer, Neil (1981). The Art of Laughter. New York: Columbia University Press. Schulz, Max F. (1973). Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition of Man and his World. Athens, O.H.: Ohio University Press. Schulz, Max F. (1974). Bruce Jay Friedman. New York: Twayne. Schulz, Max F. (1975). “Black Humor,” in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, eds. Frederick Ungar and Lina Mainiero, vol. 4, pp. 271–3. New York: Ungar. Sorkin, Adam J., ed. (1993). Conversations with Joseph Heller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Southern, Terry (1985). The Magic Christian [1960]. New York: Viking Penguin. Southern, Terry (2001). Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950– 1995. New York: Grove.
Stern, Richard G. (1961). Golk [1960]. Cleveland: World. Vonnegut, Kurt (1974). Wampeters, Foma and Granafalloons (Opinions). New York: Delacorte/ Seymour Lawrence. Vonnegut, Kurt (1981). Palm Sunday. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, Kurt (1982). Fates Worth than Death: An Autobiographical Collage. New York: Berkley. Wallace, Ronald (1979). The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel. Columbia, M.O.: University of Missouri Press. Weber, Brom (1973). “The Mode of ‘Black Humor,’ ” in The Comic Imagination in American Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 361–71. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Winston, Matthew (1972). “Humor noir and Black Humor,” in Veins of Humor, ed. Harry Levin, pp. 269–84. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. Wright, Charles (1966). The Wig. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
14
Fiction on the Vietnam War Philip Melling and Subarno Chattarji
There has always been a strong temptation in literary and cultural criticism to regard the war in Vietnam as a postmodern conflict and to interrogate the American experience of it as a “retreat from meaning,” a condition of “reality wholly other” than the soldiers “had known or were prepared to meet” (Lewis: 71, 72, 78). In such criticism, the temptation to seek coherence has to be resisted and “anyone who claims to have an inside track on the truth about the Vietnam War” is guilty of demonstrating “biased myopia” (Pratt: 152–3). Since the Vietnam experience was an insurgent one – fragmented, inconclusive, sporadic – our primary obligation, we are told, is to select those writers who are best able to incorporate into the fabric of their work that sense of Vietnam as a place of unreliable partnership and unexpected encounter. For Herman Rapaport, our reading must locate and then articulate the disarticulated experience of the war. In Rapaport’s reasoning, the lack of linkage between events in Vietnam rendered the experience of combat “somewhat obsolete,” denying the possibility of “an active fighting with or against someone.” The lack of sequential narrative emphasized the soldier’s separateness from an opponent whose world he was supposed to “engage” and could not. The text, therefore, should do the same. The lack of orderliness and shifts in causal structure in the novel ought to reflect a lack of coherent sequence in the field, a fracturing of sensible narrative pattern which an episodic conflict brought about (Rapaport: 139, 140). In The Tainted War (1985), Lloyd Lewis suggests that Vietnam broke down or “de-objectified,” as he puts it, many of those meanings we tend to associate with conventional warfare. Vietnam, he argues, was a war without shape or purpose, one in which the soldier found it impossible to decipher a coherent logic in the encounter. “The soldiers’ reliance on the term ‘senseless’ points specifically to their thwarted expectations,” says Lewis. In this “fundamentally different kind of war,” where there were no frontlines, no desire for territory or for pieces of land to be won and held, “the war was perceived as formless, without order and purpose.” This military experience is commonly referred to as “absurd” and “the word absurdity figures prominently,” we are told, “in the soldier’s lexicon” (Lewis: 98, 76).
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The early fictional accounts of the Vietnam War undoubtedly bear out this thesis. In his novel The Lionheads (1972), says Jerome Klinkowitz, Josiah Bunting confirms the idea of “an absurd war” and is able to create “an absurdist structure” that allows him to make “an informative statement on the style of Vietnam.” The antiwar novels of the 1960s, in other words, provide us with an original and “formative” mode for understanding Vietnam. Unable to take the world’s pretensions seriously, the absurd novel lapses into farce and the streetwise theater of underground play. In William Eastlake’s The Bamboo Bed (1969), William Crawford Woods’s The Killing Zone (1970), and William Pelfrey’s The Big V (1972), we are given a history “from the wars’ hot phase,” “innovative fiction” in which characters form themselves into two-dimensional caricatures and pop-art gestures are assigned to every act (Klinkowitz: 88, 78, 79, 82). In those novels, the dissenting activism of Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) lives on, and the American army and, by implication, the United States is seen as a colossal ship of fools, made operational by its vast and ridiculous sense of mission. In acknowledging the importance of an absurdist tradition, early critics of the Vietnam War were inclined to trace the roots of fiction writing to books written in the 1960s, like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the latter being “innovately accurate” because it offers a mirror image of the war’s incoherence and eccentricity. What is not “accurate,” in the words of the critic Gordon Taylor, are those traditional accounts that look to Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American, as “an established point of reference” on the war. Greene’s novel of manners could no longer serve as a model since what Vietnam offered us, said Taylor, was “a subject resisting definition by literary precedent.” As such, the experience of war benefited from the “revised angles of literary approach” and the “literary experimentation already underway in the 1960s.” American writers, at their best, found “their own ways of differentiating themselves from Greene’s example” (Taylor: 121–2). The Vietnam that Greene knew did not exist any more and any discussion of its social fabric no longer made sense. The “quest for alternative form” and the presence of “alternative literary strategies” reduced the need to observe the world through civilian life. By way of comparison, Michael Herr, in his 1977 book Dispatches, had written a “very different” novel “from a centre Greene [seemed] at once still to occupy and no longer usefully to provide.” The decision that Herr had taken under the imprint of postmodernism to fuse and combine “the resources of several genres rather than settle into established prose patterns” allowed us to “reflect internally on problems of literary procedure presented by new social and psychic ‘information’ generated by the war” (Taylor: 123). Where “traditional rules” no longer applied, the postmodern text was an act of liberation, an expression of cultural democracy which freed the reader from the limitations of history and the procedural constraints of those who equated Vietnam with recognizable territory. As Philip Beidler confirmed, the task of the Vietnam writer was “to create a landscape that never was, one might say – a landscape of consciousness where it might be possible to accommodate experience remembered within a new kind of imaginative cartography” (Beidler: 16).
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Whatever the merits of these particular arguments, the weakness of them is their ethnocentric emphasis and the way in which they were heavily biased in favor of a pre-existing literary theory. They also condescended toward a large body of Vietnam literature, much of it written by Vietnam veterans, which eschewed the idea of an ahistorical theater of war. In the combat narratives of the 1980s, American writers, for example, purposely avoided the nihilistic approach that served as a template in the 1960s. They also appeared far less willing to express themselves through an absurd testimony. Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk (1983) – an account of a helicopter pilot in the Air Cavalry – is a case in point. Toward the end of the book, Mason is told that he will not, after all, serve out his remaining few days flying safe administrative missions (in spite of what he has been promised), but will continue with combat missions. The jauntiness and nonchalance of Mason’s narrative gives way to a mood of defiance. Mason loses interest in his helicopter unit, “The Prospectors,” who relieve the tension by throwing absurd parties in which the guest of honor is a Vietcong skull. As a character in Mark Baker’s Nam (1982) puts it, “There are things and there are things, but your life is your life and you try to save it. It ain’t a laughing matter” (Baker: 378). Postwar writers in the 1970s and 1980s saw themselves as the first generation of a new condition of modernity in American life. As soldiers, they had come from the world of the past and entered the world of the future, an experimental landscape on the other side of some essential line drawn across human experience. Those who had survived that experience and come to maturity because of it were the bearers of a special kind of knowledge that an older generation – and a civilian readership – did not possess. The novels and autobiographies of Vietnam veterans that began to appear were statements of revelation, supported by a formal glossary of terms – a soldier’s dictionary. With this dictionary, a soldier may explain to his reader that in order to make “history” come alive, the principal qualification for writing is not talent, necessarily, but, as Hamlin Garland once said, the knowledge that comes from a direct contact with life. John Carlos Rowe talks about the “special privilege” that is “claimed” by those writers whose “credentials” are rooted in the world of “direct experience” (Rowe: 135). Feelings of reduction, the sense of individual powerlessness, the loss of personal authority – all these are offset by declarations of knowledge from those who have lived “in country.” At its worst, what we encounter is a masculine vérité school of conviction, something which can lead to an appalling emphasis on credentialism. Elsewhere, there is a genuine sense of social undertaking, as in the emphasis that Vietnam veterans, like Robert Muller or Ron Kovic or Al Santoli, have placed on public debate and testimony. In A Rumor of War (1977), Philip Caputo takes us on a tour of the war’s underworld; he is the “honest” proletarian who shows us the fraud and deceit of the military, the moral detective who cleans up the mess in Vietnam, the “gulf that divides the facts from the truth” (Caputo: 329). In the purgatorial hell of the jungle, Caputo is the evangelical private eye who has been tried and tested and born again. The epigraph to his text is from Matthew 24: 6–13, a passage that describes the affliction of war
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as the death of self and the salvation of those whose souls endure. Caputo claims to have “saved” himself by the honesty of his vision, the refusal to compromise with his own sinfulness and the sinfulness that exists in all men. Court-martialed for the killing of two innocent Vietnamese, Caputo regards his crime as endemic to Vietnam: “If the charges were proved it would prove no one was guaranteed immunity against the moral bacteria spawned by the war” (Caputo: 331). Caputo, who is “a moral casualty” of the war, is prepared to face the devil within, to confess his crime in an intimate way. “Something evil had been in me that night” of the killing, he says. “I had wanted them dead. There was murder in my heart, and … I had transmitted my inner violence to the men” (Caputo: 326). Caputo is the vulnerable sinner who endures the war in order to testify publicly against it. Like the condemned man at the Puritan gallows, he delivers a “passionate and eloquent” sermon in which he calls on “the criminal,” the American government, “to repent” while there is yet time, and then begs “the congregation,” his readers, “to profit by this example.” It is important, therefore, that we accept his testimony not as “a work of the imagination” but as “true.” The authenticity of the information is determined by the nature of the involvement; in spite of the absence of “rules and ethics,” the experience has put him at a crucial advantage in providing a credible testimony. A Rumor of War is a text of reckoning that makes Vietnam the responsibility of those who invented it. Although the veteran cannot be absolved from guilt, the burden of what he shouldered on behalf of the American public – and the dreams and “illusions” that the public projected onto him – should now be recognized. A Rumor of War is neither “a grand gesture of personal protest” nor an attempt to reinstate, as he sees it, the “futile” critique of the 1960s. The text demonstrates the veteran’s need to set things down in some kind of order, to provide a purposeful chronology, a need which undercuts the claim that the dramatic focus of the narrative has been damaged beyond “recall” (Caputo: 24). Another important novel which appeared at the same time as A Rumor of War was James Webb’s Fields of Fire (1978). Webb served as Platoon Commander Delta Company, 1st Battalion 5th Marines, earning a Navy Cross, a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. His novel is reportedly drawn from personal experience of combat and this is an important qualification within a genre that seems to privilege writings by veterans as representing the authentic reality of war. This narrative privilege implies that only those who experienced combat are in a position to write about it and that such writers have unique access and insights which a non-combatant does not. The circle of experience and knowledge creates a hierarchy of truth and storytelling with the Vietnam veteran at its apex, a point dwelt on by Tim O’Brien as well. The “Prologue” to Fields of Fire constructs a popular stereotype of the Vietnam veteran as a victim rather than a perpetrator of war. Soldiers and veterans are seen as cannon fodder for elite policy-makers – a construction available in earlier wars, such as World War I – and there is truth in the ways in which elites evaded the draft while their less wealthy brethren fought and died in Vietnam. The generic construction of the veteran as victim, however, omits the soldiers’ victims, such as Vietnamese soldiers
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and civilians, and tends to absolve the American soldier of responsibility. Webb as veteran-writer simultaneously positions the veteran as authentic storyteller, with authority to tell the tale à la Ishmael, and victim of larger political processes. Authority and victimhood seem unlikely partners but they coexist uneasily in this and other Vietnam War fiction. Fields of Fire sketches different positions on the war in morality play fashion through the voices of its characters. Robert E. Lee Hodges, Jr. is the military man who believes that “man’s noblest moment is the one spent on the fields of fire” (Webb: 36). His family history “was a continuum, a litany. Pride. Courage. Fear. An inherited right to violence.” For Hodges, “If John Wayne wasn’t God then he was at least a prophet” (Webb: 43, 45). Hodges is emblematic of the soldier from a martial background who believes in God and Country, and in invoking the John Wayne myth Webb indicates how powerful the ideas of Western machismo were even in the face of the less than heroic realities of Vietnam. War is also seen in many accounts by soldiers as a site for male bonding, a brotherhood that transcends atomized civilian existences. Despite its alternating moments of boredom and terror, the war environment is reconstructed nostalgically as an ideal space: “He [Hodges] missed the people in the bush, more than he had ever missed any group of people in his life. There was a purity in those relationships that could not be matched anywhere else” (Webb: 318). That Vietnam should provide such an ideal community is ironic, but it is not so much Vietnam per se as an idea of being brothers in arms that is celebrated, and this idea clashed sharply with the hostility and indifference that most veterans faced on return to the U.S. The veteran–civilian disjunction was based on combat experiences of the former and these experiences were often valorized. As Daniel Pick notes, “War, it is suggested, is capable of defining precisely what it is to be human, because it involves giving up the supreme ‘self-interest’, life itself ” (Pick: 15). In the novel, antiwar protestors and conscientious objectors are caricatured as criminals, and Webb’s portrayals conform to postwar representations of these groups as unpatriotic and immoral, contributing in no small measure to the quagmire of the Vietnam War. The fictional stereotypes seem to indicate that there could be no legitimate reasons for opposing the war. Webb projects the politics of the civil rights movement and its influence in Vietnam as a betrayal of the brotherhood of combat. The black soldiers not only disrupt soldierly communion but they highlight racial politics which undermines the U.S. mission of freedom and democracy in Vietnam. Goodrich is taunted throughout the novel as a liberal whose background is inimical to the best interests of America. “His [Goodrich’s] classmates and professors reminded him of Tocqueville’s descriptions of the stratified, vaporous intellectuals who brought about the French Revolution in the name of unattainable ideals” (Webb: 430). Goodrich’s saving grace is that he is a soldier and learns the values of the U.S. and its warrior culture in Vietnam. Fields of Fire presents a world of sharp contrasts and it is a conservative novel, reinscribing some cherished myths and stereotypes of the Vietnam War: war is heroic and “as natural as the rain” (Webb: 194); antiwar protestors are naïve, ridiculous, or
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criminal; veterans are victims; the bombing of Cambodia was justified; all Vietnamese women are whores; the Vietcong is mindlessly and mechanistically violent. Hodges frets that the “damn gooks are everywhere” (177), and Webb characterizes one Vietnamese, Dan, who is virtually forced to join the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Dan tells his fellow soldiers “beautiful fairy tales about victories over the Marines” (198) and the Vietcong kill his family without any reason. There is no attempt to understand or even a reference to the dynamics and contradictions of revolutionary politics that engaged the NVA or the NLF (National Liberation Front), merely a set of caricatures that contrasts them with the heroic and patriotic models of Hodges and others. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) is concerned about representing Vietnam and the need to tell true war stories in the sense that Webb privileges the soldier narrative. Unlike Webb, O’Brien’s characterizations are subtle and multifaceted, creating a postmodernist fiction–truth matrix that complicates the telling of Vietnam War stories. In this as well as other novels, O’Brien emphasizes the importance of stories. In the chapter “Spin,” O’Brien writes: “Stories are for joining the past to the future … Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” In “Good Form”: “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present” (O’Brien: 38, 180). In “The Lives of the Dead”: “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head” (O’Brien: 230). In an interview, O’Brien reiterated this centrality of stories: I think two hundred years, seven hundred years, a thousand years from now, when Vietnam is filled with condominiums … the experience of Vietnam – all the facts – will be gone. Who knows, a thousand years from now the facts will disappear – bit by bit – and all that we’ll be left with are stories. (Lomperis: 10)
O’Brien is aware of the extent to which writings about the Vietnam War are a struggle over the remembrance of the war in American imaginative landscapes and how that battle is being won by Hollywood representations, political rhetoric, or fictional accounts that remake the conflict as a “noble cause,” a war fought for heroic but tragically misguided ends. O’Brien’s stories have greater integrity and truth than the ones told by Hollywood or Washington, but there is every danger that the privileging of story qua story contributes to the further de-historicizing of the Vietnam conflict. To perceive Vietnam purely or largely in terms of ambiguity, mystery, and endlessly multiplying narratives is to fall into a typically postmodernist trap. The problem of “facticity” in representations of Vietnam gives rise to a postmodern illusion of the free play of meaning whereby any set of “facts” can be wheeled out to prove or disprove any ideological or political view of the war. The way in which “facts” are wielded can alter perceptions of the conflict. From the combat soldier’s point of view, Vietnam was a mystery or unknowable simply because he was not equipped with
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any knowledge of the country and its people. Ignorance coalesced with the fear that combat engenders to create the sense of an inscrutable enemy. In purely epistemic terms, the problem seems to be not whether Vietnam was/is unknowable, but the extent to which fear and ignorance made it so. O’Brien’s fiction–memoir– autobiography interface does not steer clear of ugly, ignoble truths, but there is the discomfiting possibility that endless interpretations are not only possible but desirable, because stories are all that we have to comprehend the war. Like Webb, O’Brien too privileges the voice and authority of the veteran to tell these war stories. In asserting the value of storytelling as a means of ameliorating the horrors of Vietnam, he creates an overall mythic structure of love, comradeship, and forgetfulness in the very process of recovering that horror: “You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood – you give it together, you take it together.” Any outsider who is not a part of this “tribe” is just a “dumb cooze” (O’Brien: 192, 68). Unlike Webb, O’Brien articulates the ambiguity of being drafted to fight in Vietnam. He does not see the war as innately heroic or a template for valor. Instead, he is aware of less “noble” sentiments that lead to participation. O’Brien’s discomfort with the war is expressed clearly: In the June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naïve, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
The story of this chapter, “On the Rainy River,” had been narrated earlier by O’Brien in his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973), and its repetition is testimony to the intensity of his conviction. The basis of opposition is his belief that the war was unjust: It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistake. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead. (O’Brien: 40–1)
The chapter describes a classic crisis of conscience, the resolution of which is a critique of a basic notion that war is heroic: “I was a coward. I went to war.” O’Brien is a pre-eminent writer of the Vietnam generation and his novels have received critical and popular acclaim. Thus, his repudiation of a cornerstone of war mythology is crucial, even though it coexists with more conservative notions of the valorization of soldier narratives. O’Brien also goes some distance toward humanizing the enemy, although this too is qualified. In “Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien indicates the sense of a haunted landscape in which the Americans were aliens: “It was ghost country, and Charlie Cong was the main ghost. The way he came out at night. How you never really saw him, just
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thought you did. Almost magical – appearing, disappearing” (O’Brien: 202). One has only to read accounts and stories by “Charlie Cong” to realize that there was nothing “magical” in his existence, and O’Brien’s exaggerated account expresses the anxiety many U.S. soldiers felt when faced with a seemingly inscrutable and indestructible enemy. In a couple of chapters prior to this one, however, O’Brien describes with sympathy a Vietnamese soldier he has killed. He was not a Communist. He was a citizen and a soldier. In the village of My Khe, as in all of Quang Ngai, patriotic resistance had the force of tradition, which was partly the force of legend … He would have been taught that to defend the land was a man’s highest duty and highest privilege. (O’Brien: 125)
In “Ambush,” O’Brien writes: “I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty” (132). O’Brien moves beyond the “gook syndrome” and perceives the enemy as a fellow human with his own history, culture, family, and motivations for fighting. For American soldiers mired in their own traumas and desire for self-justification, this is a remarkable leap of imagination, albeit of limited scope and extent. It is in the writings of John Balaban that we encounter an engagement with the war and the Vietnamese that seems to move beyond the solipsistic visions of soldierwriters. Balaban went to Vietnam as a conscientious objector – an object of ridicule in Webb’s fiction – working as an instructor at the University of Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, and then as a field representative for the Committee of Responsibility to Save War Injured Children. He witnessed the destruction wrought by war during the 1968 Tet Offensive. In his memoir, Remembering Heaven’s Face (1991), Balaban attempts to distance himself from his fellow citizens: I was after all a conscientious objector to military service. Somehow I wanted Vietnamese to know this, as if they would appreciate the moral difference between my presence and that of 500,000 other young Americans who were pouring into the country: I had come not to bear arms but to bear witness. (Balaban: 17)
The idea of “witness” with its religious overtones creates a difference between Balaban’s and other veteran narratives. Fictions by veterans are also about witnessing and establishing the authority of the soldier-narrator, but Balaban’s memoir opens the field of representation to encompass the Vietnamese. Although he was not personally responsible for acts of violence, he feels a “burden of personal guilt” at what his country was doing to Vietnam. He recalls watching a Vietnamese toddler shriek with pain: The little toddler couldn’t help it and shrieked, “May bay” (Airplane) again and again until I was ashamed to be alive, to be human, let alone to be an American, to be one of those who had brought the planes to this sad little country ten thousand miles away. (Balaban: 104)
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Balaban’s experiences in Vietnam are a source of knowledge and maturity, not so much about the inviolate brotherhood fostered by war but about himself. “I grew up in Vietnam. In this particular sense of growing witness and wisdom, it wasn’t all bad” (Balaban: 187). Many veteran narratives stress the traumatic nature of war and the ways in which Vietnam scarred them for life. As Hodges asks rhetorically in Fields of Fire, “Who appreciates my sufferings? Who do I suffer for?” (Webb: 225). Balaban wishes to dissociate himself from this circle of victimhood, to perceive the war not as something that happened solely to America and Americans. Balaban returned to Vietnam after the war – as did many veterans – and he found a country less obsessive about the war: fifteen years after our war, wandering the city that had suffered so much at American hands, it seemed to me that it is only Americans who dwell on the war, that the Vietnamese have undergone a “change of season,” that they look to their futures not to their pasts, even though their present lives, marked by extreme poverty, are of course burdened by the past. (Balaban: 309)
He sees a Vietnam that was seldom perceived by the soldiers and not often mentioned in veteran accounts: “This was the Vietnam almost obliterated by the war. Everywhere about me – in all this dazzle of Delta life – I can see a happiness and a healing, a realm of heaven, earth, and humankind going on with full creative force” (Balaban: 321). While Balaban may exaggerate the healing and reconciliation aspect of postwar Vietnam (he does not mention the traumas faced by Vietnamese after 1975 such as the re-education camps or the “boat people”), his perspective challenges the inwardlooking aspect of mainstream American representations. At the end of his memoir Balaban exhorts American veterans to visit Vietnam: “Go visit Vietnam, I’d tell the troubled vets. Go visit, if you can, and do something good there, and your pain won’t seem so private, your need for resentment so great” (Balaban: 333). In Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers (1985), Chili Vendor says: “No Victor Charlie ever raped my sister. Ho Chi Minh never bombed Pearl Harbor. We’re prisoners here. We’re prisoners of the war” (Hasford: 67). Vendor echoes Mohammad Ali’s repudiation of the Vietnam War and stresses the continuities of a war culture in the reference to Pearl Harbor and the “good war.” In this context, not only the soldiers but American foreign policy seems imprisoned within a war matrix. In the fictions of Webb, O’Brien, and many other writers of the Vietnam generation there is interplay between the valorization of combat and the idea of the soldier-as-victim and the two seem to reinforce one another. Although Balaban’s Remembering Heaven’s Face is not strictly a work of fiction, it is crucial in its attempt to move out of this circle and to comprehend the country that was the site of the war – and its people. For Balaban, the cartography of Vietnam is a redemptive one and it is not shrouded in mystery: to read the faces of the Vietnamese is not to “read the wind” but to encompass future solidarities of hope.
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In spite of the hope that Balaban registers, the mythology of imperial mission remains for many writers an idée fixe in American life. For the novelist Robert Stone, a principal American requirement – and arguably the most destructive – is the imposition on Third World regions of the imperial American self: that messianic need, as Ralph Heath says in A Flag for Sunrise (1981), to provide the preindustrial world with a public demonstration of its own inferiority and to teach it “to be ashamed of being poor” (Stone 1983: 245). In Stone’s two best novels, Dog Soldiers (1973) and A Flag for Sunrise, the American government and its citizens appear largely ignorant of the sins of history, preferring to speculate on the personal and public gain that is available through the exploitation of Third World markets. America, says Marty Nolan, is “at a very primitive stage of mankind.” The country is Darwinistic and its behavior is “apelike.” Political morality exists on the basis of “what one pack of chimpanzees [can do] to another” (Stone 1983: 245, 23). As an imperial power, the United States preys on the weak and explains its mission by denouncing the enemies of God. Stone’s theme is salvation through cannibalism – a cannibalism generated by overproduction and a surfeit of capital, which is, for the American Puritan abroad, the profit of godliness. Stone’s novels are particularly interesting in the light of Puritan history, as they observe a direct correlation between the sense of mission in New England and the faith that sustains more recent adventures in Central America. For Stone, the confrontational language of the elect is a consequence of moral and economic ambition and a statement on the manners that have underpinned that ambition for 350 years. In Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise the American way of war is congruent with the American way of life: those who go abroad, as John Quincy Adams put it, “in search of monsters to destroy” have a clear, historical vision of the Antichrist. In Robert Stone’s work, America’s legitimate sphere of interest is now defined as an economic market. Furthermore, American economic imperialism is related to American cultural imperialism; both activities intersect in the use of mass advertising on television and the promotion of American consumer commodities and so-called “relevant” news. In Central America, argues Elizabeth de Cardona, the “primary influence of U.S. culture and commerce is now through the sales of T.V. programs” and the buying of prime slots by American advertising agencies (de Cardona: 60). The link between program advertising and U.S. consumer manufacture makes television a powerful medium for the export of American products. As Raymond Williams says, the “commercial” character of television has then to be seen at several levels: as the making of programmes for profit in a known market, as a channel for advertising, and as a cultural and political form directly shaped by and dependent on the makings of a capitalist society, selling both consumer goods and a “way of life” based on them, in an ethos that is at once locally generated, by domestic capitalist interests and authorities, and internationally organized, as a political project, by the dominant capitalist power. (Williams: 41)
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In Stone’s fiction, the process of control appears absolute. Provincial resistance movements are forced to compete for the hearts and minds of the native people with the imperialist energies of the American film industry. Political desire comes into conflict with consumer desire. Film and television are now the main agents of secular mission. The object of that mission is the stimulation of the mass market and the conferring of grace on those who support the ideology of what Alan Wells has termed “picture-tube imperialism.” In A Flag for Sunrise, American popular culture has penetrated even the most remote hinterlands of Latin America. In Zalteca, Frank Holliwell and Tom Zecca leave their car in the company of boys who exude “a movie-hoodlum confidence.” They await the appearance of the consul in a parlor where “prosperous-looking children were watching dubbed Yogi Bear cartoons on a color television set.” Throughout the novel there is a constant demand “to get the big picture pieced together.” The tragedy of Tecan is that it proves the undoing of those who do. The revolt against the right-wing regime is led by brigade commanders whose “only prior experience of massed weaponry and its effects had been at the cinema” (Stone 1983: 134, 366, 378). Similarly, in Dog Soldiers the television battles screened in Vietnam offer a scenario in which conflict is often perceived as a fantasy. In the Hotel Coligny, M. Colletti watches Bonanza on M.A.C.V. where “handsome” cowboys defeat “ugly ones” in a Cinderella firefight. “It’s the same in Saigon,” says Converse. M. Colletti, who has been everywhere, replies, “Here, Sure. Everywhere it’s the same now. Everywhere it’s Chicago” (Stone 1978: 38). Simplistic scenarios are what the culture exports. Cultural imperialism underpins economic imperialism; cultural diplomacy, which is often conducted through the work of multinationals, lies at the heart of American foreign policy. As Marty Nolan says in A Flag for Sunrise, “See, it’s all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else’s movie starts. In many ways it’s a very stupid country” (Stone 1983: 23). What America has created, as Colletti realizes, is a protection racket, a racket that protects the images and values of the dominant culture. A good-looking American who defends his patch against wilderness energies and maverick guns can fortify both body and soul. The problem for the rest of us is that the soul is America’s, not Vietnam’s. References and Further Reading Baker, Mark (1982). The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men who Fought There. London: Abacus. Balaban, John (1991). Remembering Heaven’s Face: A Moral Witness in Vietnam. New York: Poseidon. Beidler, Philip (1982). American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. Caputo, Philip (1985). A Rumor of War [1977]. London: Arrow.
de Cardona, Elizabeth (1977). “American Television in Latin America,” in Mass Media Policies in Changing Cultures, ed. George Gerbner, pp. 51–70. Chichester: John Wiley. Hasford, Gustav (1985). The Short-Timers. London: Century. Herr, Michael (1978). Dispatches [1977]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Jaspon, Philip K., ed. (1991). Fourteen Landing Zones. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
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Klinkowitz, Jerome (1980). The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change. Ames, I.A.: Iowa State University Press. Lewis, Lloyd B. (1985). The Tainted War: Culture and Identity in Vietnam War Narratives. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Lomperis, Timothy (1987). “Reading the Wind”: The Literature of the Vietnam War. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Louvre, Alf and Walsh, Jeffrey, eds. (1988). Tell Me Lies about Vietnam. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Mason, Robert (1983). Chickenhawk. London: Transworld. O’Brien, Tim (1990). The Things They Carried. London: Harper Collins. Pick, Daniel (1993). War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven, C.T.: Yale University Press. Pratt, John Clark, ed. (1984). Vietnam Voices. New York: Viking. Rapaport, Herman (1984). “Vietnam: The Thousand Plateaus,” in The 60s without Apology, ed.
Sohna Sayred, pp. 129–45. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press. Rowe, John Carlos (1986). “Eye-witness: Documentary Styles in the American Representation of Vietnam,” Cultural Critique, 3 (Spring): 132–50. Stone, Robert (1978). Dog Soldiers [1973]. New York: Ballantine. Stone, Robert (1983). A Flag for Sunrise [1981]. London: Picador. Taylor, Gordon O. (1983). Studies in Modern American Autobiography. London: Macmillan. Walsh, Jeffrey and Aulich, James, eds. (1989). Vietnam Images. London: Macmillan. Webb, James (1980). Fields of Fire [1978]. London: Granada. Wells, Alan (1972). Picture-Tube Imperialism? The Impact of U.S. Television on Latin America. Mary Knoll, N.Y.: Orbis. Williams, Raymond (1979). Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Glasgow: Fontana Collins.
15
The Rediscovery of the Native American Joy Porter
Native American Indian literature is an active, potentially activist literature. This is not to suggest that it is unentertaining, unfunny, or that it has no aesthetic impact. Yet it is hard to read the great diverse mix that is Native American literature simply on those terms or to read it passively as an ethnic literature whose message need not necessarily have an impact upon our thinking elsewhere. If we are to read Indianauthored literature and open ourselves up to its transformative impact, we are forced to consider some of the intellectual matters that are most important to us, including our understanding of American history and the past more generally on the American continent, our approach to things material and spiritual, our understanding of kinship and balance in terms of the environment, capitalism, and human and non-human relationships, the impact of colonialism and cultural destruction upon succeeding Indian survivor generations, and our stance in terms of what, if anything, may now be owed to them. Thus, several critics have suggested that when we approach Native American Indian literature we specifically adopt an active stance. For example, Gerald Vizenor, who is of mixed Euro-American, French, and Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Chippewa) heritage, has suggested that readers adopt a strategy of “active listening,” and Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez suggests that they take a “conversive” approach capable of encompassing a requirement for reciprocal dialogue between both texts and communities. This active stance is necessary because Native American Indian literature brings us into relationship with Native American communities themselves and a centurieslong and heroic story of survival in the face of almost overwhelming cultural swamping and repeated programs of ethnic cleansing. As one character in a 1994 novel by the late Choctaw-Cherokee-Welsh-Irish-Cajun writer and critic Louis Owens put it, “[w]e have survived a five-hundred-year war in which millions of us were starved to death, burned in our homes, shot and killed with disease, and alcohol. It’s a wonder any Indian is alive today” (Owens 1994: 165). Literature, therefore, is part of the web of cultural strength that has allowed Indian peoples to demonstrate remarkable
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resilience over time. This, in spite of the loss of 70–90 per cent of the indigenous population of the Americas in the first century of contact, the expropriation by nonIndians of over 95 per cent of the pre-contact Indian land base, the subsequent limitations placed on Indian control over the resources of the residual Indian territory, and the extreme poverty and disadvantage Indians have experienced since contact. Perhaps the essential historical fact to grasp when approaching Indian writing is that U.S. Indian population numbers reached an all-time low of 250,000 in 1900. Depending on conflicting professional sources, one, eighteen or perhaps tens of millions of North American Indians perished following “discovery” in 1492. As the poet Joy Harjo put it, there has been the “destruction of grandchildren” resulting in a “famine of stories”; that is, a sustained attack over centuries upon Indian populations with a corresponding impact upon the Indian imagination (Harjo: 14). Thankfully, however, since 1900, Indian numbers have increased dramatically. In 1990, the U.S. census enumerated 1.8 million Native Americans, while in the 2000 census 4.1 million people reported as American Indian and Alaskan Native alone or in combination with one or more other races; 538,300 reported as living on reservations or trust lands, meaning that by far the majority of Indians in the United States now live in urban environments. Thus, current levels of understanding and appreciation of Native American literatures should be seen in the context of a gradual renaissance of Native American numbers and in terms of a rebirth of the collective and individual purchase Native Americans exert, within nations, bands, and as individuals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given all of the above, the question of survival, and sometimes survivor guilt, is a theme within a number of texts. The popular Spokane-Coeurd’Alene writer Sherman Alexie even came up with a formula for Native American Indian cultural endurance: “Survival = Anger x Imagination” (Alexie 1997: 150), while the respected novelist and critic Gerald Vizenor has written extensively about his own new concept “survivance,” a combination of survival and endurance/resistance, part of a panoply of new words and ideas that Vizenor has employed as a way of unsettling the intellectual and conceptual legacy of colonialism. Clearly then, battles for Indian survival are far from over. Contemporary Indian communities face acute continuing threats to the sovereignty of their remaining land base and to the ecological balance of Indian environments from, amongst other things, nuclear testing and nuclear waste disposal, coal strip mining, logging, and oil and uranium extraction. Indian communities also face threats to the integrity of their tribal, national, and ethnic representation, and they suffer acutely from the internal conflicts at a family, community, and generational level created when a diverse set of peoples survive massive depletion in numbers, progressive engulfment by foreign cultures, repeated displacement, and a fundamental attack upon their spiritual life. Vizenor’s work highlights the way in which language and writing is, for many Native American writers, inextricably bound up with a colonized heritage and the unbeautiful emotional and physical scars of that colonizing process. The Spokane writer Gloria Bird, for example, has written of “the undertow of pain and
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disappointment” that has informed her writing, and how generational alienation within her family is directly linked to colonization. She has explained, “My writing reveals the strained relations between the factions of my family – the Catholics and the ‘Indians’ – and a resultant wrestling with past and present conditions” and has also made reference to “the reality of exploitation of the land that colonized people must face” (Ortiz 1994: 29). The Acoma Pueblo writer Simon J. Ortiz has also testified to the national disgrace of contemporary Indian conditions: “As an Acoma Indian in the Americas the dreaded reality of despair, death and loss because of oppressive colonialism has been too often present, and I cannot deny that. No one can, certainly no one who understands and has undergone debilitating colonialism” (Ortiz 1994: 88). Given how grim so many of the structural realities of contemporary Native American life can appear, and how depressing the legacy of death and cultural erosion, it is perhaps not surprising that, as other colonized cultures have done, Indian writers have made humor a key weapon against fear and alien dominant worldviews. Humor has a central, healing role within many aspects of Indian cultural life, from the social phenomenon that is Pow Pow to the daily difficulties of coping with persistent cultural stereotyping. It is notoriously culturally specific, but as Kenneth Lincoln’s book Indi’n Humor (1993) explains, Native American literature and life are replete with humor’s dancing, psychic strength, and it has always provided a valuable bridge between native and non-native ways of seeing the world. As Louis Owens has explained, its role has been “crucial” to the “long survival of Native American peoples” (Owens 1998: 159–60). Another aspect of many Native American writers’ strategies for cultural revival is the re-forging and/or reaffirmation of a tribal or pan-tribal relationship to place, land, and environment. A recent trend has been the increasing voice given within Indian fiction to the urban Indian experience as opposed to previous motifs which had centered upon a return to home – either to the reservation or to traditional lands. Consistently, however, there is an intentional sense of relatedness to place. As Ortiz commented in Fight Back (1980), his multi-genre work which directly asks readers to act in response to the environmental degradation being carried out by contemporary multinational energy companies: The land. The people. They are in relation to each other. We are in a family with each other. (Ortiz 1980: 31)
Varieties of academic scientists have for many decades hotly debated the duration and significance of Indian occupation of the land that is now the United States, but Indian literature is in general very comfortable with the fact that all of the Americas constitute “Indian land.” It is acknowledged that Indian peoples had formed a close relationship with the spirit of the land long before the first contact with Western
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Europeans. Therefore, Indians belong to America, as the Sioux spokesman Luther Standing Bear put it in his 1933 book Land of the Spotted Eagle, because of repeated birth and rebirth, because their bodies are “formed of the dust of their forefather’s bones” (Standing Bear: 248) Whilst it is true that place is not vital to every Native American writer, many have reiterated versions of Huron-Tsalagi(Cherokee)-French-Portuguese poet A. A. Hedge Coke’s remark, “Place is important. Essential” (Ortiz 1998a: 104). This centrality connects to worldviews that are fundamentally alien to mainstream Western thinking which has tended to separate land and animals from the human, and made time primary to understanding rather than lived experience within specific places. As the Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko said of “the interior process of the imagination” in the Paguate and Laguna context, there “awareness never deteriorated into Cartesian duality, cutting off the human from the natural world” (Ortiz 1998a: 15). Indeed, for many Native authors, land and language itself are intimately linked. For example, Jeannette C. Armstrong, who was born on the Okanagan Reserve in British Columbia, has highlighted how, according to her Okanagan ancestors, “language was given to us by the land we live within,” a belief she connects to the N’silxchn concept of speaking as a profound and sacred responsibility (Ortiz 1998a: 175, 183). The relationship of culture to land, or, specifically, Christianity’s lack of relationship to it, has perhaps been explored most trenchantly in the late Standing Rock Sioux author Vine Deloria Jr.’s critique, God is Red (1973). Here he argued that Western European peoples’ twentieth-century spiritual, economic, and ecological crises all stem from their time-centered, rather than place-centered, theology. An emphasis upon place can, in turn, be linked to a fundamental sense of connectedness and kinship with the animate and inanimate world that is characteristic of much Native writing both in English and tribal languages. Kinship with family and community, as well as with animate and inanimate entities deemed to be part of spiritual and communal life, is a fundamental part of the oral traditions that constitute the heritage that many but not all Indian writers draw upon. These Indian oral literatures have been categorized into four porous genre groupings: ritual dramas, including chants, ceremonies, and rituals themselves; songs; narratives; and oratory. As sacred and non-sacred storied expressions of language, they articulate, amongst many other things, Indian understandings of the fundamental truths of creation and the origins of human beings and their relationship to the universe. They continue to develop, change, and undergo extension across time in various contexts. An example is Leslie Marmon Silko’s much-praised novel Ceremony (1977). Here, the narrator begins by telling the reader that “Thought-Woman, the spider” created the world through thought and is thinking the story about to be told (Silko 1977: 1). Silko draws upon a Laguna oral tradition that can encompass both the ancient remembered past and the realities of a novel written in 1977 because the Laguna oral tradition is not confined by a linear understanding of time: it speaks not just to a history of the past but to a Laguna consciousness that is ongoing. Another example of oral tradition informing contemporary work is Gerald Vizenor’s use of trickster tales in Bearheart (1978),
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which is often considered the first Indian postmodern novel, and which uses trickster discourse to evoke liberating parody, doubt, and wonder so as to escape all kinds of boundaries. The Laguna-Sioux-Lebanese scholar Paula Gunn Allen argues that, optimally within Indian literature, Indian oral tradition and Western tradition are capable of interacting just like the wings of a bird in flight (Gunn Allen: 7). Very quickly upon beginning to read contemporary Native American literatures, the reader is forced to confront issues of agency, voice, and cultural authority. He or she may question, for example, whether the author of this very chapter has sufficient authority to contextualize Native American literature given that she is not herself a Native American. To the oft-times controversial Indian writer Sherman Alexie, who has been accused of racial essentialism and condemned by a foremost critic, Arnold Krupat, for his “smart-ass, bad-boy cracks,” the answer might just be no (Krupat: 142). Alexie has made clear his desire for Indian voices to be always primary when it comes to Indian matters. Alexie has carried this commitment to Indian ethnic primacy into his private life, and has made no bones about the fact that he “made a conscious decision to marry an Indian woman, who made a very conscious decision to marry me. Our hope: to give birth to and raise Indian children who love themselves. That is the most revolutionary act possible” (Krupat and Swann 2000: 7). Of course, not all who write or critique Native American literature think in an ethnically essentialist way (indeed, perhaps neither does Alexie consistently). This applies especially to those Native Americans who themselves feel they fall short in terms of any rigidly enforced scale of essential “Indianness.” As will have been obvious from the heritages listed for the authors cited so far, a majority of Native American Indian writers in the twentieth century and today are what is called “mixed-blood,” products of unions across multiple ethnic divides. This is to be expected, given that Indian communities have been engulfed by non-Indian communities for centuries and given that many have long traditions of adoption and acceptance of outsiders into the heart of their communities. Indeed, the very real danger exists that if “Indianness” is too strictly defined in terms of high blood quantum alone, and if intermarriage proceeds apace as seems inevitable, then Indians as an ethnic group will over time gradually disappear. Currently, Indian identity is routinely demonstrated through individual reference to membership upon tribal rolls and/or individual acceptance by specific Native communities, but the issue, along with the larger question of who has the right to speak about or for Native communities, continues to spur debate and to stimulate conflict. In contrast to Alexie, Louis Owens considered his mixed blood key to his sense of self and key to his literary project. Perhaps no one will ever be as articulate about the issue as Owens was, nor as articulate about the mutual attraction Indians and nonIndians have expressed for stereotypical versions of each other. He wrote: I conceive of myself today not as an “Indian,” but as a mixedblood, a person of complex roots and histories. Along with my parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, I am the product of liminal space … [a] liminal existence and a tension in the blood and
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heart must be the inevitable result of such crossing. How could it be otherwise? (Owens 1998: 176)
Owens was one of the strongest voices airing Native American Indian alienation in this sense and in describing the dislocation and cultural appropriation that are the legacy of cultural incomprehension between Indian and non-Indian communities over time. In his 1994 novel Bone Game, his mixed-blood character Cole McCurtain asks, “how come crazy white men want to be Indians?,” echoing another question the book also poses: “[h]ow come crazy Indians want to be white men?” (Owens 1994: 50). Owens has said that he began to write novels in the first place “as a way of figuring things out,” adding, “Though each of my works begins and ends with place itself, the mysteries of mixed identity and conflicted stories, both the stories we tell ourselves and the stories others tell about us, are what haunt my fiction” (Krupat and Swann 2000: 243). Identity politics and blood quantum have also preoccupied a number of other Native writers. For example, along with the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (law PL 101-644, requiring Native artists to prove their Native heritage) and the mixed effects of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, they have been discussed in some depth by Patricia Penn Hilden, who is of Nez Perce descent (Krupat and Swann 2000: 182–96). Other writers have bemoaned the literary turf wars that exist within Native American publishing and the racial hierarchies that accompany them. The AhtnaAthabaskan writer John E. Smelcer, for example, has expressed deep concern about the implications of “quantum logic” and the way his Indianness was disputed when he “began to be published at national level” and “began to encroach on other writers’ literary niches.” He was informed that he might find acceptance amongst those with an “eyedropper” full of Indian blood, but that “true skins” would never accept him (Krupat and Swann 2000: 335). For Elizabeth Woody, a Wasco-Navajo writer, blood quantum is also “a very sensitive issue” that has affected both her past and will affect her future. She points out, “As it is applied by Indian tribes, blood quantum is not an indicator of tribal continuity, nor does it measure the extent of degree of continuity” (Ortiz 1998a: 157). Mixed-bloodedness can be linked to the growing voice given in Indian fiction to the urban Indian experience. To some extent, this upsets an influential contrast once highlighted by critic William Bevis between Native American literature and other modernist writing. Bevis pointed out that, in the Euro-American literary tradition, individuals “keep leaving home” so as to gain self-knowledge, whereas Native American protagonists tend to “home in” and they do so, not for individual reasons but for a broader set of communal needs, for the “primary good” of their communities (Krupat and Swann 1987: 581–2). Whilst Native American Indian literature is fast growing and broad-based, like most literary fields there is what could be deemed a canon, or set of seminal texts that are generally accepted as fundamental to its ongoing dialogue. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the early texts by Indian authors directly responded to the main issues that
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have characterized colonialism, including displacement of Indian communities, the loss of land, racism and oppression, violence and, into the twentieth century, the multiple losses sustained by communities whose children were forced to attend what were known as “Indian schools.” The first published Indian text in English was, of course, a product of colonialism and of its sister movement in the Americas, Christian missionizing. The Mohegan Samson Occum converted to Christianity aged sixteen, and wrote Sermon Preached By Samson Occum … at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian in 1772 (Jehlen and Warner: 643–59). In writing an execution sermon upon the death of a fellow Indian, Occum necessarily danced a careful dance with his words, but he also made a number of important points about relations between Indians and EuroAmericans at the time. His text condemned the alcoholism that had prompted Moses Paul’s crime but, significantly, it also condemned the long history of settler use of alcohol as a means of creating dependency and controlling Indians who were susceptible to it. Implicit in the sermon was the message that sin is not confined to any one racial group, and explicit was another message: that Indian children were suffering and Indians in general starving as a result of their loss of land. One of the earliest native autobiographies was written by another Connecticut Christian mixed-blood Indian (who it is thought died eventually from alcohol), William Apess. He wrote A Son of the Forest in 1829, and did not attempt to hide either the negative effects of alcohol upon his life or the way in which it was used to hoodwink Indians out of their land and resources. As a Christian minister, Apess took on the hypocrisy of Christian oppression of Indians and attacked the bases of Manifest Destiny, the guiding philosophy of the time which relied upon the idea that Indians were “vanishing.” This philosophy underpinned the 1830 Indian Removal Act, designed to remove all Indians, supposedly for their own protection, to sites west of the Mississippi. Apess’s critique of relations between Indian and non-Indian was both immediate and metaphysical. For example, he was so incensed by the non-Indian desire to rename and recontextualize all things Native, including specific tribal names, he wrote that, since the word “Indian” was not in the Bible, he concluded that it must be “imported for the special purpose of degrading us” (Apess: 7). Thus, after 1830, Indians were exiled to the trans-Mississippi West, mostly to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. President Jackson and his supporters gave this forced relocation a philanthropic gloss, but their deeply patronizing and intensely paternalistic rhetoric did little to hide their desire for Indians to disappear so the country could fulfill what was thought to be its pre-ordained right to expand to the Pacific. Indeed, recurring tribal relocations simply could not keep up with the American settlers’ lust for land. The Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles) were forced to relocate even though they were highly structurally assimilated to nineteenth-century American ways, including owning slaves, having constitutional government, and producing the founding organ of Indian journalism, the Cherokee Phoenix. This happened despite the Supreme Court 1831 ruling in their defense, whereupon Indian tribes were deemed “domestic dependent nations” with a unique government-to-government relationship to the United
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States, resembling that of a ward to a guardian. Predictably, the best-seller of this era was anti-Indian, Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837). However, by 1847, the Ojibwe George Copway had published another early Indian autobiography, and by 1850, The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation, showing the central importance of place and oral tradition to the Ojibwe. This early history of Indian suppression and displacement should not be seen as discrete from twentieth-century Native American literature because centrally it informs both the plots and back-stories of many of the literature’s key texts. Opportunities for Indian writers to publish increased in the nineteenth century as the fascination with things Indian developed inversely to how likely Americans were actually to come into face-to-face contact with tribal peoples. Those they did encounter, having suffered progressive waves of foreign-borne disease, attack, and cultural erosion, tended to appear to fall short of the noble Indian popular within the national imagination. Nineteenth-century Native writers therefore faced the difficult task of writing in spite of, and in relationship to, such imagery, as well as the almost impossible task of asserting a viable Indian identity despite a national policy and an ideology that demanded instant Indian assimilation to the cultural mores of mainstream America. One key writer of the period was the Dakota Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) who witnessed the aftermath of the 1890 Wounded Knee Creek massacre, northeast of Pine Ridge Agency, when U.S. cavalry gunned down one hundred and fifty Indians, including women and children, before another one hundred or more died escaping into the snow. Of course, the significance of the Wounded Knee atrocity within Indian life and literature transcends Eastman’s experience, and still very much reverberates within and beyond specific Indian communities. The as-told-to biography, Black Elk Speaks (by John Neihardt, 1932) deals explicitly with the event, while the more recent The Master Butcher’s Singing Club (2003) by Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Louise Erdrich has a central back-story about Wounded Knee that haunts the main characters. Eastman’s writing, perhaps predictably, was conflicted about Wounded Knee as is clear in books such as Indian Boyhood which appeared in 1902. He later wrote of the many wrongs done to the Dakota by agents and government representatives and told of how his people were “relentlessly hunted down and slaughtered while fleeing,” noting “All this was a severe ordeal for me who had so lately put his faith in the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man” (Eastman: 290, 296). Another important mid- to late nineteenth-century writer, who provides an instructive contrast to Eastman, was the Northern Paiute Sarah Winnemucca who was explicit in her writing about her desire to fight for her people and, in all aspects of her life, keen to displace and subvert the popular stereotype of the “Indian princess.” Her Life among the Piutes (1883) stands as the first Indian autobiography written by a woman. One of the very first Indian novels was by the Cherokee and mixed-blood writer John Rollin Ridge. When the U.S. completed its continental spread via treaties with Britain in 1846, Mexico in 1848, and with the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, it brought many new Indian nations under its control. In particular, the discovery of gold in 1848 stimulated an invasion of miners into California, causing appropriation of tribal
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lands and a terrible decline in Californian Indian numbers. A flavor of the oppression and cruelty experienced by Indians in this era was deeply encoded in Rollin Ridge’s 1854 Western adventure, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. The book showed a commitment to full assimilation for Indians, but Ridge’s story spoke to the yet further oppression that was to come for non-white peoples. As settlers streamed West, more and more tribes were engulfed, and the pattern of compression of tribal territories and the relocation of survivors to reservations, which was federally applied in Texas, Oregon, and California, was in time applied to all Western tribes. By the early 1930s, print had become a strong vehicle for Indian oral traditions. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews published Sundown, and in 1936 D’Arcy McNickle published his novel, The Surrounded. Both novels had male protagonists who struggle to reconcile ideas about economic “progress” and Indian life, The Surrounded dealing more explicitly with the economic collapse that the allotment process forced upon Indian country. Another of McNickle’s novels, Wind from An Enemy Sky, not published until 1978, would deal in greater political focus with the crises caused on reservations by the imposition of the market economy and the failures of the next change in policy, the Indian New Deal. This was perhaps the first genuine attempt to improve Indian life that was not also a pretext for taking Indian land. It ended the previously imposed policy of individual allotment of land, re-established tribal government with “certain rights of home rule,” and established a revolving credit fund to improve reservation economics. Its architect, John Collier, was criticized for trying to ossify Indian culture and push Indians “back to the blanket” and for fostering tribal self-governments that promoted “progressive,” white-oriented Indians rather than “traditional” leadership. The increased role of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that accompanied the New Deal also focused complaints that, overall, it was cripplingly paternalistic even if its intentions were benevolent. Significantly, however, policy from 1934 to 1947 helped to increase the Indian land base by nearly four million acres and to save many Indians from starvation during the Depression. The advent of the civil rights era breathed new life into Native American literature, and many of the key voices who emerged, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, the Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday, and the Blackfoot-Gros Ventre author James Welch, built upon the literary mediations and traditions of resistance of previous authors including McNickle and Mathews. The aftermath of World War II had seen the drive to quickly make Indians independent citizens strongly reassert itself, and by the early 1950s what was known as Termination policy had been firmly established. Between 1952 and 1962, sixty-one tribes, groups, bands, and communities were stripped of federal services and protection. Overall, the policy proved negative for Indian tribes, not least because of the way in which it further poisoned relations between Indians and nonIndians. Arguably, a more positive aspect was relocation. Indians had been urbanizing for a half a century, but the specific relocation programs of the 1950s allowed Indians to settle in big cities like Los Angeles and Chicago with many retaining a satellite relationship to homeland reservations. By 1960, 35,000 Indians had relocated, a
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settlement shift that fostered greater cross-tribal cohesion and provided a basis for the activism that was to come. However, the relocation programs were badly organized and, often, Indian urban life simply meant poverty and alienation without the support of extended family. The problems of relocation, and of the articulation of a Native self in an urban landscape, were powerful central themes within N. Scott Momaday’s story of a returned veteran, House Made of Dawn (1968). Momaday’s book made history by winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and although it was criticized for being a book that simply put exoticized Indian experience into a modernist framework that mainstream critics could comprehend, along with several of Momaday’s other publications, it remains today utterly central to the field. At its heart, the book is about the main character Abel’s quest for place and recovery following trauma, and his fight against witchcraft (meaning, in analogous sense to Silko’s use of the term, all that is spiritually negative). Significantly, Momaday’s novel is contextualized by Indian words and Indian ways of comprehension: it opens with the Walatowa word “Dypaloh” and closes with the Jemez term, “Qtsedaba,” words used to signal the beginning and the end of a story within the Jemez Pueblo oral tradition. Momaday’s influence can be clearly detected in James Welch’s work, which repeatedly engages with specific historical events, such as, in Fool’s Crow (1986), a massacre that occurred on the Marias River in 1870 when over two hundred of the Pikuni Blackfoot band were killed by U.S. soldiers. Welch’s best known work, Winter in the Blood (1974), and his second novel The Death of Jim Loney (1979) both deal with the need to heal cultural alienation and alienation from the self. The 1974 text has a narrator who is profoundly empty and unable to return home, metaphysically as well as literally. He tells the reader, “Coming home was not easy anymore. It was never a cinch, but it had become a torture … And for no reason, I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years” (Welch 1986: 2). Silko’s work can in many ways be interpreted as more positive than Welch’s in that her characters tend to go beyond suffering, and structurally her work revels in subverting and inverting Western tropes and stereotypes. Her novel Ceremony, like Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, has a central mixedblood character who has suffered the trauma of war. He too fights witchery and the panoply of exploitation and imbalance that characterizes colonialism. In this and in succeeding texts by Silko, such as Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Gardens in the Dunes (1999), it is this fight that is fought again and again across time. One of Silko’s many achievements has been that of bringing female Native voices to the fore, and the late twentieth-century blossoming of Native women’s writing built upon her success. Authors such as novelist Louise Erdrich, the Navajo (Diné) writer Luci Tapahonso, and the Pawnee-Otie-Missouria writer Anna Lee Walters all, in a sense, stood on Silko’s shoulders, bringing a diverse and multiple set of Native women’s histories to life and to a burgeoning international audience. In such work, women’s neglected voices are reclaimed given that, historically, Euro-Americans elided, misrepresented, and ignored Native women’s often primary political and social roles within tribal communities.
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Erdrich’s work focused initially closely upon her Ojibwe mixed-blood heritage, first in poetry and culminating in critical acclaim for Love Medicine (1984), the first of what became a tetralogy of connected novels about Chippewa land, its people, and mixed-blood experience. These and her subsequent books, as well as forging new ground in literary, gender, and aesthetic terms, also provide a history of Indian relationships in the course and aftermath of key developments within federal Indian policy. Tapahonso’s work picks up upon a larger theme spanning much of Native American literature: a love of language, a veneration of the oral tradition, as well as a respect for the power of the spoken word. Readers may wish to begin to access her work with her 1997 book of poetry and story, Blue Horses Rush In, which sparkles with understanding of Navajo women’s roles, with the power and indestructibility of Navajo culture, and with a subtle but robust sense of cultural politics. Walters similarly provides unique instruction on native worldviews, as well as a polished depiction of cultural incomprehension over time. She is best known for her 1988 novel, Ghost Singer, which spoke to the sea-change that would result in the 1991 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (N.A.G.P.R.A.), a broad national reburial and repatriation policy for Indian human remains and sacred objects that has proved positive but highly controversial in implementation. Native American Indian literature continues to grow apace and seems likely to continue to establish itself as both foundational to American literature and as key to its lifeblood in the twenty-first century. Recent developments include the trend toward analysis of the urban Indian experience, increased work by Indian authors within cinema and television, plus continued adaptation of Native-authored books, as well as calls by dynamic new authors such as the Ojibwe-Austrian Jewish novelist David Treuer that the literary value and not just the political and cultural specificity of Native American literature be paid appropriate attention. This chapter has made reference to a Native American literary canon, but, in truth, Native American literature has only just begun: it is as diverse and as yet, perhaps, still as little known as Native American populations themselves. Whilst it has not been possible here to discuss the work of some other established writers, such as Joy Harjo, Carter Revard, or Linda Hogan, or, for that matter, to discuss the work of emerging authors, such as Kimberley Roppolo or Rebecca Hatcher Travis, Native American literature’s great and growing literary diversity exists, awaits the reader, and is increasingly available internationally. It is a literature of great transformative power at the forefront of how American literature more generally is defined.
References and Further Reading Alexie, Sherman (1997). The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. London: Vintage. Alexie, Sherman (2000). One Stick Song. New York: Hanging Loose.
Apess, William (1992). “A Son of the Forest [1829],” in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell. Amherst, M.A.: University of Massachusetts Press.
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Deloria, Vine, Jr. (1973). God is Red. New York: Grossett and Dunlap. Eastman, Charles Alexander (2001). From Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian [1916]. Chicago: Lakeside Classics. Erdrich, Louise (1994). Love Medicine [1984]. London: Flamingo. Erdrich, Louise (2003). The Master Butcher’s Singing Club. London: Harper Perennial. Gunn Allen, Paula (1994). Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900–1970. New York: Ballantine. Harjo, Joy (1990). In Mad Love and War. Middletown, C.T.: Wesleyan University Press. Jehlen, Myra and Warner, Michael, eds. (1996). The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800. London: Routledge. Krupat, Arnold (2002). Red Matters: Native American Studies. Philadelphia, P.A.: University of Pennsylvania Press. Krupat, Arnold and Swann, Brian, eds. (1987). Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press. Krupat, Arnold and Swann, Brian, eds. (2000). Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. New York: The Modern Library. Lincoln, Kenneth (1993). Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McNickle, D’Arcy (1978). Wind from an Enemy Sky. New York: Harper and Row. McNickle, D’Arcy (1994). The Surrounded [1936]. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Mathews, John Joseph (1988). Sundown [1934]. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Neihardt, John Gneisenau (2004). Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, by Black Elk [1932]. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Ortiz, Simon J. (1980). Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Ortiz, Simon J. (1994). After and Before the Lightning. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortiz, Simon J. (1998a). Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Ortiz, Simon J., ed. (1998b). Speaking for the Generations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Owens, Louis (1994). Bone Game. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Owens, Louis (1998). Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film and Photography. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Porter, Joy and Roemer, Kenneth M., eds. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Ramirez, Susan Berry Brill (1999). Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silko, Leslie Marmon (1977). Ceremony. New York: Viking. Silko, Leslie Marmon (1991). Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin. Silko, Leslie Marmon (1999). Gardens in the Dunes. New York: Simon and Schuster. Standing Bear, Luther (1933). Land of the Spotted Eagle. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Tapahonso, Luci (1997). Blue Horses Rush In. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Vizenor, Gerald (1990). Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles [1978]. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, Gerald (1994). Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Middletown, C.T.: Wesleyan University Press. Walters, Anna Lee (1988). Ghost Singer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Welch, James (1979). The Death of Jim Loney: A Novel. New York: Harper and Row. Welch, James (1986). Winter in the Blood [1974]. New York: Penguin. Wiget, Andrew (1994). A Dictionary of Native American Literature. New York: Garland. Wiget, Andrew (1996). A Handbook of Native American Literature. New York: Garland.
16
Trash Fiction Stacey Olster
Now you’re probably familiar with the fact that the per-capita production of trash in this country … is increasing at the rate of about four percent a year … I hazard that we may well soon reach a point where it’s 100 percent … Now at such a point … there can no longer be any question of “disposing” of it, because it’s all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to “dig” it … Donald Barthelme, Snow White (1967)
For Dwight Macdonald, “digging” trash was hardly an option, not after opening his essay, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” with the image of mass culture “ ‘min[ing]’ ” high culture “the way improvident frontiersmen mine the soil, extracting its riches and putting nothing back” (Macdonald: 60). Writing in 1953 about the suffocation, if not absorption, of one by the other, Macdonald conceded that the process “ha[d] not reached 100 per cent, and doubtless never will” (Macdonald: 71); he nonetheless ended his essay by comparing mass culture to a “reciprocating engine” that, once set in motion, could not be stopped, producing goods increasingly standardized and increasingly cheap. In contrast to the desire of Barthelme’s dwarfs “to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon” and celebration of its “everted sphere of the future” (Barthelme: 97), the prognostications of Macdonald could not have been more dire, as the final subheadings of his essay made clear: “The Future of High Culture: Dark,” “The Future of Mass Culture: Darker.” Had these been followed by one more devoted to “The Future of American Fiction,” it assuredly would have ended with the superlative “Darkest.” This is not only because the figure in whom Macdonald most embodies the qualities of American fiction is Mickey Spillane (Macdonald: 68). It is also because the origins of the novel as a genre only exacerbated longstanding doubts about the possibility of any American high culture ever being possible. What distinguished the novel as an art form from, say, music and painting, was the fact that its emergence in the late eighteenth century was dependent upon technological reproduction, the very quality that, in the minds
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of critics, formed the defining trait of mass culture. In addition, its dependence upon the growth of the book market, and not the support of patrons, made it a middle-class commodity from the start. When Alexis de Tocqueville, then, deemed America “the civilized country in which literature is least attended to” (Tocqueville: 58), it was as much to these specificities that he alluded – citizens who “prefer books which may be easily procured, quickly read, and which require no learned researches to be understood,” authors who aim at “rapidity of execution more than at perfection of detail” (Tocqueville: 62–3) – as it was to the country being born during the age of democracies. The writers who actually have composed that industrially reproduced fiction, however, typically have not shared the views of these critics of industrially reproduced fiction. This has been especially true of those twentieth-century American writers whose replacement of the adjective “mass” with the adjective “popular,” derived from the Latin word for “people” (populus), signals a view of culture less manipulated by conglomerate forces above and more a reflection of folk culture below, less defined by artifacts that turn isolatoes into crowds and more by a heritage that fuses those who share it into a community. In fact, with the waning of all those other bases on which community had been built – family, religion, nation – by the end of the twentieth century, popular culture, writers suggest, might offer the one way left of facilitating community. As those in the popular culture department of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), “known officially as American environments,” also understand (DeLillo 1985: 9), no longer must the artists of these environments be aesthetically monotheistic, worshipping a European modernism whose tenets for fiction issued from a Holy Trinity of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka. With film and television now subjects for exploration, and hard-boiled fiction and science fiction genres for appropriation, trash for American writers today is no longer something to be disposed of; rather, trash for these writers is, to reverse Macdonald’s early image, something to be mined, recycled, and, their caveats notwithstanding (and there are caveats), frequently relished.
The High/Low Life In juxtaposing high culture against mass culture in his argument, Dwight Macdonald was not alone; indeed, the cultural binarism he invoked, what Andreas Huyssen has called “the Great Divide,” only extended a debate whose terms have proved as resilient as its underlying assumptions have proved inflexible. Primary among those assumptions was the transhistorical fixity of high culture (as expressed by Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot) and the aestheticism that distinguished it from low culture. “Taste has varied, but not beyond certain limits,” wrote Clement Greenberg when reminding readers in 1939 of the “general agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the ages as to what is good art and what bad” (Greenberg: 104), or, as the title of his essay claimed, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” The former was exemplified by the
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abstraction of Picasso, typifying the modernism that, for Greenberg, formed “the only living culture we now have” (p. 101), whose values were “projected into it by the spectator,” the latter by the realism of Repin, who “pre-digests art for the spectator” (p. 105). Not that the consumer of mass culture was granted the possibility of individual, or independent, response by that time. Deprived of both imagination and spontaneity by a “culture industry” that had “molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product,” and so captivated by the formulae of success fed them as to “insist on the very ideology which enslaves them,” the consumer of mass culture had become a victim of mass culture, according to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno: 127, 134). And with the branches of that industry so economically intertwined by the middle of the century as to produce a “totality” in which art, too, had become a commodity, freedom of choice had dwindled to the “freedom to choose what is always the same” (Horkheimer and Adorno: 167). As the hyperbole that infuses such fears of cultural collapse suggests, more was at stake than mere culture; with the facts of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia as their historical touchstones, Horkheimer and Adorno had no doubts that “[t]he ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics” (Horkheimer and Adorno: 123). Yet, as Lawrence W. Levine has meticulously documented, cultural binarism in America has been informed by specific historical concerns since its emergence in the late nineteenth century as a response to the triple threat that urbanization, industrialization, and, most of all, immigration posed, and the phrenological terms “highbrowed” and “lowbrowed” that had been used to determine race and intelligence were impressed into the maintenance of social hierarchy (Levine: 221–3). To be sure, remnants of the bias that so informs the remarks of gatekeepers like Henry James and Henry Adams still infuse the remarks of their twentieth-century descendants. Greenberg, for instance, tips his hand when defining kitsch as made for those who are “insensible to the values of genuine culture,” in presumed contrast to those who appreciate Picasso because they are “sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities” (Greenberg: 102, 105). But when he goes on to describe kitsch, having already laid “traps” for the unwary and “fooled people who should know better,” embarking upon a “triumphal tour of the world” and “defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another” (Greenberg: 103), the terms he employs reflect debates on fascism, not classicism. No wonder, then, that it is the prospect of a “flaccid Middlebrow Culture that threatens to engulf everything in its spreading ooze” that evokes the worst opprobrium from Macdonald (Macdonald: 63–4). The feared collapse of cultural categories into “intellectual and aesthetic communism” (quoted in Levine: 215) in the late nineteenth century had been replaced by the real thing. This conflation of Cold War and cultural binaries – and the danger of their collapse – becomes especially apparent when we look at the 1959 book that Time, in its review of July 6, deemed one of the “Ten Best Bad Novels”: Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, a thriller about the brainwashing of American soldiers during the Korean War that reaches its climax with an assassination that takes place at one of the presidential nominating conventions in 1960. In 1956, Dutch psychiatrist Joost
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A. M. Meerloo had characterized brainwashing as a totalitarian practice aimed at producing mental and political submission (The Rape of the Mind ), and this is certainly the case in Condon’s novel. Yet what is also the case is the degree to which the Communist plot in question is modeled on the impact of American mass culture – as proved by Fredric Wertham’s The Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which, as the Pavlovian Dr. Yen Lo claims, “ ‘demonstrates how thousands have been brought to antisocial actions through children’s cartoon books’ ” (Condon: 41) – and is dependent on the existence of a synergistic culture industry in the West, where, as the Chinese doctor understands, “sensationalism is not only desirable but politically essential” (p. 45). With this depiction Condon fully concurs. Having stipulated in its opening pages that his book takes place “at a time when only sex criminals and dope peddlers tried to refuse to have their pictures taken by the press” (p. 3), he provides one example after another of a trash culture saturated by mass media. The programmed assassin, Raymond Shaw, accepts a Medal of Honor in front of press cameras. His mother appears on radio broadcasts and writes women’s interest columns for daily newspapers. His stepfather makes McCarthyite claims about Communists on national television, trained in the merits of tight shots and the avoidance of Nixonian five o’clock shadows. The nominating convention performance for which all rehearse, involving fake blood and bullet-proofed suits, on the one hand, and TV cameras and still photographers, on the other hand, is intended as an act of pure spectacle. Central to the entire plan is the conception of the “great American people” as comprised by “jerks” (Condon: 66), unable to think for themselves because “thinking made Americans’ heads hurt and therefore was to be avoided” (p. 131). This inability, in turn, is traced directly to the impact that a commodity culture already has had on Americans: Raymond’s mother settles on the number fifty-seven as the figure of known Communists in the Defense Department “not only because Johnny [her politician husband] would be able to remember it but because all of the jerks could remember it, too, as it could be linked so easily with the fifty-seven varieties of canned food that had been advertised so well and so steadily for so many years” (p. 132). Likewise, Raymond’s brain does not need much laundering because it is portrayed as never having had much in it to begin with. Introduced as an accumulation of absences at the beginning of the book (“motherless,” “fatherless,” “friendless,” “joyless”; p. 11) and eulogized as leaving behind not “the faintest rustle of his ever having lived” in its final line (p. 311), Raymond makes such a fine potential assassin (“Everybody saw him. No one recognized him”, p. 303) because the voiding of all ego that – in contemporary terms – would make him a perfect postmodern subject and that forms the basis of his own self-image as “invisible” (p. 286) pre-exists his 1951 capture in Korea. All the Communists who initially hatch their plot in 1936 (the year Walter Benjamin published “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”), and who decorate their auditorium with lithographs of Stalin and Mao, need to do to turn Raymond into “one of the Party’s most valuable pieces of apparatus in the United States” is turn him into a “mechanism” himself (pp. 139, 138), operated by “remote control” (pp. 32, 49) and subject – much like any appliance covered by warranty – to
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routine checks of the circuits “installed” every five years, which only confirm the reliability of the “linkages” (p. 137). Raymond’s commanding officer, Bennet Marco, by contrast, proves far less reliable. Less suggestible even before the nightmares and night sweats that prompt him to investigate what actually happened to their patrol in Korea, he remains conscious of being sick, although unable to “make himself learn how to know why he thought he was sick,” while being displayed on stage by Yen Lo to visiting Russian dignitaries (Condon: 46). But, then again, Marco, who “treasured poetic, literary, information, and cross-referenced allusions,” is introduced by the novel as “a reader” (p. 23), one so devoted to books that he has boxes of them shipped to wherever the military happens to send him. His ego, in contrast to Raymond’s emptiness, formed by a familiarity with high culture – “the paintings of Orozco, the modern French theater … the works of Yeats, the ramblings of the Bible, the novels of Joyce Cary” (p. 23) – that these books afford him, he remains “an intelligent intelligence officer” from beginning to end (p. 27). The “badness” of the book, the reason Time likened its appeals to “Loreleis on the rocks above” that “keep on luring readers,” stems from a twofold collapse of the cultural binaries on which it is predicated. As a political novel, it ends by completely exchanging the Cold War antagonisms that have underlain it for an amorphous “holy war” to be waged by Raymond’s mother once she and her husband are in the White House (Condon: 305), propelled by a lust for power (“She didn’t care where she found it,” even “if it were growing out of a manure pile”; p. 66) unconnected to any particular ideology after her discovery of what the Communists have done to her son. As a political thriller, it commits the equally grievous sin of aspiring to literary respectability – with prose that compares a telephone to an osculatorium and a wrist flicked to a digitorum gesticulatione, skips from the drama of Sophocles and Aristophanes to the chess of Capablanca and cuisine of Talleyrand to the crusades of Walter the Penniless, and invokes zymurgists, monotremes, and vangoghian swirls for no reason other than rhetorical flamboyance – all the while steeped in the overripe vernacular of pulp fiction. In this patois, treatment by the tabloid press is “an experience not unlike falling nude into a morass of itching powder while two sadistic dentists drilled into one’s teeth at the instant of apogee of alcoholic history’s most profligate hand-over” (Condon: 224), strolls down Broadway are immersions into “the fleshy, pig-eyed part of the city that wore lesions of neon and incandescent scabs, pustules of lights and color in suggestively luetic lycopods” (p. 171), and delays between phone calls leave people “sweating peanut butter” (p. 298).
Mixed Media It is certainly not the fall of the Berlin Wall that has inspired American writers today to reassess such cultural binaries. Most simply never subscribed to them, or, more to the point, the premises underlying them, in the first place. Acknowledging
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modernism as “unquestionably the characteristic aesthetic of the first half of our century,” but aware that “it belongs to the first half of our century,” John Barth advocated postmodern novels that would “rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism,’ pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction,” as befits a genre whose roots were “famously and honorably in middle-class popular culture” (Barth: 202, 203). The paradigms offered by contemporary novelists of vastly different predilections adhere to his admonition. Gore Vidal’s replacement of “the fictive law of absolute uniqueness” with “the relative fictive law of absolute uniqueness,” according to which characters who drop out of one narrative promptly reappear in a new narrative(s) as “there are just so many characters – and plots – available at any given time,” made moot the differences between original and copy (Vidal: 15). Hence the word processor linked to a memory bank of ten thousand popular novels in Duluth, which allows Queen of Romance (Harlequin-style) novelist Rosemary Klein Kantor to pick and choose plots as randomly as she hunts and pecks at the keyboard, promotes not “plagiarism” (a harsh word) but simply “creation by other means” (p. 16); ditto the team of word processors linked to “the largest memory bank in literary history” that assembles those “modern classics” taught in Langley, Virginia, courtesy of that “French CIA mole,” Roland Barthes (p. 170). Susan Sontag’s theory of cultural disburdenment scrapped a model of aesthetic deterioration for one of aesthetic liberation, according to which the commodification of the Portland Vase into Etruria Ware at the hands of Josiah Wedgwood in The Volcano Lover (1992) is a necessary step in its desired transmutation into camp. Indeed, every illustration of high culture playing host to a parasitic mass culture, as occurs in a book like Ann Beattie’s Love, Always (1985), in which Yeats’s “The Second Coming” passes from poem to television soap opera (Passionate Intensity) to novelization (Barren), can now be matched by numerous acknowledgments by authors of the frequency with which mass culture, print no less than film no less than vinyl, nurtures high culture. Norman Mailer combines pulp with porno and emerges with An American Dream (1965). Joan Didion entitles a 1979 essay collection The White Album after the 1968 Beatles album. Robert Coover frames A Night at the Movies (1987) as a theatrical program that includes “Top Hat,” “A Brief Encounter,” and, in a nod to Casablanca, “You Must Remember This.” Whether such wholesale appropriation of popular genres should be termed pastiche or parody, signaling the replacement of an actual past by a set of past styles randomly cannibalized (Jameson: 16–18) or the installing/ironizing of a past that by definition only comes to us by way of textual representations (Hutcheon: 93), continues to be a subject of scholarly debate. And whether an absorption of popular culture means a co-option of popular culture remains equally arguable. The bracketed years of release for Gidget and Friday the 13th in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) comically affirm those works as having become “classics.” The restoration of “equanimity,” domestication of the brute Hugo, and revirginization of a Snow White sent packing (into the sky, no less) that end Barthelme’s Snow White confirm a fractured fairytale turning into formula. These differing opinions notwithstanding, what underlies almost every
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discussion of trash in fiction today is the recognition of how much aesthetic categorization is a function of context and, as a corollary, the degree to which fluctuation is a product of time. To read H. P. Lovecraft’s Gothic tales in the twenty-first century is to be struck by their astonishing contemporary relevance: the fallen meteorite whose “dim though distinct luminosity” leaves behind unnatural vegetation, deformed species, and “infected” habitats in “The Colour Out of Space” (1927) a testament to ecological prescience (Lovecraft: 86, 97); the “civic degeneration” produced by “alienage,” intermarriage, and the infusion of “foreign blood” in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936) a realization of xenophobic paranoia (Lovecraft: 227, 231, 237). Yet this is to read the work of a writer – now viewed as the successor to Edgar Allen Poe (another example of fluctuating reputation) – whose work during his lifetime was confined to pulp venues such as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Likewise, to read Philip K. Dick’s futuristic fiction, with its blurred line between “authentic living humans” and “humanoid constructs” – evidenced as much by mutual appreciation of Mozart and Munch as mutual empathy in Do Androids Dream of Sheep? (1968) – in years that postdate the texts’ temporal settings is to be made aware of how much his works predate the ethical queries of scholars like Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles and fictional treatments that range from the cyberpunk of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) to the harvested donations of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Yet this is to read the work of an author whose straight-to-paperback publication by Ace in the 1950s and 1960s often left his books relegated to the status of “just” science fiction. In tracing the literary genealogy of trash, of course, it is important to remember that elements of popular culture do appear in the works of even the highest of high modernists – one thinks, for example, of the dance-hall rhythms that punctuate Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) – and so it is not the mere fact of trash’s integration that distinguishes American fiction today. Rather, it is a stance that replaces an authorial urge to condescend with the need to comprehend a “trash phenomenon,” to recall Barthelme’s phrase, which forms an increasingly large part of the world in which they live. The professors who comprise the “American environments” department in DeLillo’s White Noise quiz each other about where they were when James Dean, not John F. Kennedy, died because it is popular culture, not politics, that forms “the natural language of the culture” (DeLillo 1985: 68–9, 9). The minister who loses his faith in John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) finds renewal in the movingpicture houses of silent cinema because it is in these “church[es],” not those of Presbyterianism, that the needs of individual “worshippers” are channeled into “unified emotions” (Updike: 103, 105). This emphasis on the consolidation that popular culture promotes, to be sure, frequently comes with an array of caveats. E. L. Doctorow’s portrait in The Book of Daniel (1971) of a Disneyland beholden to giant corporate sponsors and defined by a “handing of crowds” that “would light admiration in the eyes of an SS transport officer” (Doctorow: 305, 306) perfectly embodies the Frankfurt School’s notion of an American “culture industry.” DeLillo’s depiction of family – the blended family of
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six in White Noise, the “world family” of thirteen thousand that opens Mao II (1991) – depends on members made silent and attentive by whatever authoritarian source happens to join them, a television set no less than the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And, as minority writers in particular are aware, the national community that popular culture promotes excludes many who reside within the country’s borders, often with tragic results. Toni Morrison employs the image of The Bluest Eye (1970) to portray the self-hatred that a steady diet of Ginger Rogers and Greta Garbo produces in African American girls during the 1940s, so extreme in their consumption – literalized in the three quarts of milk that Pecola drinks from a Shirley Temple cup – that even in madness the child despairs of having eyes that are sufficiently cerulean. Oscar Hijuelos adopts the image of a long-playing record in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) to depict the circular path traveled by Cuban immigrants who think that walking through the front door of clubs in small-town America will be as easy as walking through the front door of Ricky Ricardo’s apartment on I Love Lucy. Yet just as theorists of popular culture like Stuart Hall and John Fiske have exchanged a reception model of passivity for the possibilities of polysemy, so have American novelists offered more nuanced depictions of popular texts as sites of negotiated meanings. The portrayal of television in Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985) provides a perfect example. Appearing first by way of Tonight show reruns in which Joan Rivers substitutes for Johnny Carson, and prompting the Vietnam veteran Emmett – in an unknowing echo of Walter Benjamin – to complain that “ ‘nothing’s authentic anymore ’ ” (Mason: 19), television is introduced as mechanical reproduction incarnate. Transmitting syndicated episodes of M*A*S*H that Emmett and his seventeen-year-old niece, Samantha, watch nightly, television also is emblematic of an obsession with the past that leaves the two trapped inside a house that, as Sam’s mother astutely notes, “ ‘is going to fall apart from the weight of all the junk in it’ ” and that pervades all of Hopewell, Kentucky, in which “ ‘everybody’s looking backward’ ” (Mason: 169, 79). At the same time, however, television also provides Sam, who finds history books useless, with a vehicle to apprehend the part of her past that has been formed by Vietnam: each time she sees the M*A*SH episode in which Colonel Blake is killed, “it grew clearer that her father had been killed in a war” (p. 25). Even more important, television offers Sam, who fully realizes that people on television “always had the words to express their feelings” because “[o]n T.V., they had script writers” (p. 45), with an acceptable way to express her own antisocial feelings – notably, the need to escape a town she has outgrown that takes the form of an M.T.V. video in which, “somewhere, out there on the road, in some big city,” she is the young woman that Bruce Springsteen pulls from a concert audience and dances with in the dark (p. 190). John Fiske employs the term “excorporation” to describe the “process by which the powerless steal elements of the dominant culture and use them in their own, often oppositional or subversive, interests” (Fiske: 315), and Sam’s appropriation of television, probably the most reviled form of popular culture, certainly qualifies. But so do the actions of all those marginalized misfits, often portrayed as surrogate writers and/
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or trash themselves – W.A.S.T.E. in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and “wastelings” in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) – who steal the elements of popular culture, sometimes quite literally, and recycle them for their own purposes. When Moonman 157, a graffiti writer in DeLillo’s Underworld, spray-paints moving subway trains, his act of “get[ting] inside people’s heads and vandaliz[ing] their eyeballs” steals the “one truth” by which the Mad Men whose commercials are the reason for television live: “ ‘Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world’ ” (DeLillo 1997: 435, 530). When Thomas Pynchon inverts the patriarchal codes of ninja movies in Vineland to produce a Ninjette who scraps the honor of samurai bushido for the guerrilla warfare of “Vibrating Palm” and “Needle Finger,” he gives his own finger to a society in which gender repression is emblematic of systemic repression. Rarely do American writers fall prey to the illusion that such tough talk can eventuate in actual change, especially if their critiques of a dominant society are based on the media-infused nature of a society from which they must remain separate. For a novelist like DeLillo, who views America as so permeated by images as to have become a society of simulacra, such distance, finally, proves near impossible to maintain. “I’m a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick,” admits the reclusive novelist Bill Gray after finally surrendering his image to a professional photographer in Mao II, having already surrendered his belief in the novel’s power to “alter the inner life of the culture” to terrorism (DeLillo 1991: 54, 41). For a novelist like Robert Coover, concerned more with spectacle than simulacra, the work of the individual artist never had the power to effect that degree of change. “Ah well: art … not as lethal as one might hope,” thinks Arthur Miller, while watching a performance of The Crucible the night that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are to be executed in The Public Burning (1977; Coover 1978: 606). Coover instead places his hopes in the dynamics of the group carnival. Taking his cue from Émile Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence, he shifts the execution of the Rosenbergs from Sing Sing to Times Square, “The American Showcase, Playland U.S.A.,” to show popular culture fostering expression that has the potential of being liberating. In concluding with a novel set during the Cold War, I am deliberately returning to the political/cultural binaries with which I began. Specifically, I am returning to a 1953 trial whose defendants’ political affiliation, at the time, was deemed inseparable from their popular cultural appreciation, thus validating the fears about popular culture that permeated the mid-century period. Defined in those anti-Stalinist attacks, much like Raymond Shaw in Condon’s novel, by way of absences – “no eloquence and little imagination,” “no internal sense of their own being” – the Rosenbergs emerged as empty vessels who “filled their lives with the second-hand” (Warshow: 81, 74, 76), which is to say equal parts Communist ideology and an indiscriminate blending of Sinatra, Toscanini, and Laura Z. Hobson. Coover’s Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in contrast, have become “true Stars” by the night of their execution, “no less than Valentino and Garbo, Caruso and Bernhardt, the Barrymores and the Bumsteads, Rin Tin Tin and Trigger,” with “performances forever engraved upon the American imagination, their fame assured for generations
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to come.” This is not only due to the amount of popular culture that they have imbibed; it also is due to the fact that “[t]hey have worked hard at it themselves” (Coover 1978: 264). Yet – and this is Coover’s crucial point – so have all those involved in the case, “from the judge on down,” been “behaving like actors caught up in a play” (p. 145), steeped as they are in popular culture and intent on starring roles set forth in scripts from which they dare not deviate. President Dwight D. Eisenhower issues edicts modeled on High Noon ultimatums. Prosecutor Irving Saypol carries a gun in his back pocket so as to look like Sam Spade. And Richard Nixon, the narrator of every other chapter, draws upon so many disparate genres (Western, romantic comedy, gangster movie) and so many different actors (George Raft, Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin) for his self-fashioning as to be a compendium of twentieth-century cinema. Not surprisingly, his constructions of others tap into the same data bank: Ethel is a patchwork of Ruby Keeler, Claudette Colbert, Clara Bow, and Audrey Hepburn; Julius resembles Ronald Colman, “only more scholarly” (p. 388); even Uncle Sam appears as “Raymond Massey playing Abraham Lincoln” (p. 412). As opposed, then, to Condon, who counters the vacant “jerks” who are totally susceptible to Communist brainwashing with the highbrow Bennet Marco who is not, Coover provides no figure in whom a taste for high culture exists – the only possible exception being the implied author who borrows from opera in titling the divisions that punctuate his text intermezzos. As Nixon correctly realizes, the principals in the Rosenberg case are all of approximately the same age and they “all probably went to the same movies, sang the same songs, read some of the same books” (Coover 1978: 178). Therefore, one need not wait until the Vice President works backward over the trial transcripts for the “narrative” of the trial to become “unraveled” (p. 163), or, more dramatically, until he unravels the Manichean master narrative of which that trial is a part and discovers “something truly dangerous,” namely that “there is not even a War between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness” (pp. 449, 448). The novel’s collapse of cultural binaries undermines its political binaries from the start. Coover’s attitude toward that collapse is much like that of the projectionist in “The Phantom of the Movie Palace,” the piece that opens A Night at the Movies, who creates collages from montages of spliced-together film: “He knows there’s something corrupt, maybe even dangerous, about this collapsing of boundaries, but it’s also liberating … And it is also necessary” (Coover 1988: 23). “Dangerous,” in The Public Burning, because the notion of a War between Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness has allowed people to replace the terrifying “struggle against entropy” that history is with a preordained movement toward redemption that they want history to be (Coover 1978: 238). “Necessary” because the “Existence of the United States Foretold in the Bible” that underlies that fabricated conflict has been used to justify an “Expansion into the Millennial Republic, and Its Dominion over the Whole World” that dates back to the nation’s inception, as the title of an 1854 tract by S. D. Baldwin that Coover cites makes clear (1978: 10).
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Fittingly, the climactic scene in The Public Burning in which the people who gather in Times Square have these fictions exposed to them – quite literally, in the form of Uncle Sam’s naked buttocks – is framed by way of a cinema of imagistic collapse: “it’s all coming together here tonight in a magical fusion, the world of the sacred locking onto the world of the profane like the two images at a 3-D movie” (Coover 1978: 516). And, significantly, it is framed by way of a cinema in which the audience, wearing polaroid glasses and visually joining two projected images into a single threedimensional one, played a pivotal role. Midway through the novel, Coover provides a preview of what such collapse can reveal. When a man leaves a theater showing House of Wax (1953) still wearing his goggles, the “ocular reversals” that he experiences – in which people he sees through his right eye carry placards that read “save the rosenbergs!” and those through his left “ethel rosenberg bewitched my baby!” – signal a “radical truth” that leaves him in a panic (1978: 356, 355). Yet the people near the end of the book whose exposure to that same truth ends in pandemonium experience more than panic. The “sudden and unprecedented impotence” that comes from a litany of terrors – Wobblies and werewolves, King Kong and kamikazes, V-2s and vampires – released from the depths of their unconscious, is offset by “the culmination of that strange randy unease they’ve been feeling all day, ever since waking this morning in their several states of suspended excitation,” an expression of sexual potency that leaves even the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey commingling on Cecil B. DeMille’s stage (pp. 604, 609). The “single mindless seething mass” that desecrates also liberates in leaving behind a scene that is “not exactly Cotton Mather’s vision of Theopolis Americana” (pp. 608, 613). Aware that he can no more change the ending to the Rosenberg trial than Arthur Miller can change the ending to The Crucible – in other words, that there is a script that he, too, must follow – and aware that the human need for pattern trumps the human need to dismantle precedents, Coover can only portray that liberation as being temporary, a break in the evening’s proceedings. Invoking the artifacts of popular culture, he has his “Superchief in the Age of [Super]flux” return (much like Superman and Batman in today’s movies) with a “NEW New Enlightenment” (pp. 422, 612), a paradigm barely different from the old, that will save Americans from their fears. At the same time, however, Coover appropriates the mechanics of popular culture to rehumanize two people whose state-sanctioned murder has earlier required their transformation into “octopuslike” monsters “descending upon the city like the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” (p. 133). The sound of the Rosenbergs reading their letters that accompanies their walks to the electric chair is not part of DeMille’s program: “with a flick of her short curls, she [Ethel] has cued it” (pp. 635–6). The documentary film of their family intended to restore a certain monumentality to the event gets caught in the projector. And the image of a woman’s body, shot through with currents and “flapping out at the people like one of those trick images in a 3-D movie, making them scream and duck and pray for deliverance” (p. 640), breaks the boundary between participant and spectator, implicating all the people – which is to say all of us – in her dying.
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Barth, John (1984). The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: Putnam. Barthelme, Donald (1980). Snow White [1967]. New York: Atheneum. Condon, Richard (2003). The Manchurian Candidate [1959]. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Coover, Robert (1978). The Public Burning [1977]. New York: Bantam. Coover, Robert (1988). A Night at the Movies, Or, You Must Remember This [1981]. New York: Collier. DeLillo, Don (1985). White Noise. New York: Viking. DeLillo, Don (1991). Mao II. New York: Viking. DeLillo, Don (1997). Underworld. New York: Scribner. Doctorow, E. L. (1972). The Book of Daniel [1971]. New York: Signet. Fiske, John (1987). Television Culture. London: Routledge. Greenberg, Clement (1957). “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [1939], in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, pp. 98–107. Glencoe, I.L.: Free Press. Hall, Stuart (1991). “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, et al., pp. 128–38. London: Routledge. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, T. W. (1997). Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans. J. Cumming. New York: Continuum.
Hutcheon, Linda (1989). The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Huyssen, Andreas (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, I.N.: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Levine, L. W. (1988). Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. Lovecraft, H. P. (1997). Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco. Macdonald, Dwight (1957). “A Theory of Mass Culture” [1953], in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, pp. 59–73. Glencoe, I.L.: Free Press. Mason, Bobbie Ann (1986). In Country [1985]. New York: Perennial. Meerloo, Joost (1956). The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. Cleveland: World. Pynchon, Thomas (1990). Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1945). Democracy in America, vol. II [1840], ed. Phillips Bradley, trans. Henry Reeve, rev. Francis Bowen. New York: Vintage. Updike, John (1996). In the Beauty of the Lilies. New York: Knopf. Vidal, Gore (1988). Duluth. New York: Penguin. Warshow, Robert (1962). The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture. New York: Doubleday.
Part II
Selected Writers
17
Edith Wharton Pamela Knights
When Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1921 – the first woman to gain this distinction – she was already one of the most highly regarded American writers. Keeping her winning book, The Age of Innocence (1920) in view, this chapter considers Wharton’s career and reputation; its aim is to indicate the range of Wharton’s writings, mapping some biographical and critical perspectives, and bringing into the foreground various areas of interest for those who wish to explore her work more extensively. Descended from an exclusive New York lineage, independently wealthy, cosmopolitan, fluent in modern European languages, formidably well read, and famous for her intelligence, wit, and sophisticated style, her public image (not always entirely to her advantage) was that of a literary aristocrat. Born and raised as a lady, one of the “nice girls” whose narrow lives she would depict in her fiction, Edith Newbold Jones had been trained in etiquette, made her social debut, and attended the obligatory events of her select circle. After one broken engagement, she had fulfilled family expectations, and at twenty-three, in 1885, married a leisure-class gentleman, a Bostonian, Edward (“Teddy”) Wharton. The couple maintained homes in New York and Newport, but for many years also spent about four months annually touring in Europe. Wharton poured energy into her houses, gardens, interests in architecture and furnishings, and – one of her few shared enthusiasms with Teddy – the decorative lap dogs, conspicuous in many of her photographs. While such biographical details might seem trivial, throughout her writings Wharton would draw on her knowledge of this well-regulated social order, and of its costs: its venomous closed-mindedness, its shutters drawn down on the “unpleasant” side of life. The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s of Wharton’s girlhood, reconstructs the narrow geographies of her parents’ class, in all its details – from the nuances of a menu to the rituals (operas, balls, and weddings) that keep everything in place. As Newland Archer, there, begins to apprehend, such shelter creates “terrifying” products. The motif of the heroine as prize bloom, reared in a hot-house, is central
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to The House of Mirth (1905) – a freak beauty for which all other buds have been sacrificed. In a less ornamental variant, Newland sees his fiancée, May Welland, as a Kentucky cave-fish, evolved to exist without eyes. Trained not to possess “experience,” “versatility,” “freedom of judgment,” sexually ignorant until marriage, passionless after, such women as May embody a dangerously “abysmal purity” (Wharton 1985: 1050, 1020). The consequences for the individual are dire. Waste is evident in all Wharton’s narratives of confined, damaged lives: Kate Orme, in the novella Sanctuary (1903), “like some young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she takes for the actual world” (Wharton 2001: I.330); the invalid Mrs. Brympton, abused in unspeakable ways by a drunken husband in the ghost tale “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” (1902); and countless others, through to the vivid young American, Nan St. George, chained to a chilly English Duke in Wharton’s unfinished final novel, The Buccaneers, published after her death in 1937. Placing marriage at the center of many of her narratives, Wharton represents it, for men and women of any class, as often at best disappointment, at worst penal servitude; divorce is a scandal in polite society, an impossible luxury for the poor. So, in The Age of Innocence, Newland sits opposite May over after-dinner coffee, wishing her dead; in Ethan Frome (1911), Ethan’s heart leaps up when, for a moment, he pictures Zeena, his wife, murdered by tramps. Equally pervasive are Wharton’s images of wider social devastation: the closing down of cultural diversity and difference – those of other races, ethnicities, and classes are seen, if at all, at the fringes of these exclusive social scenes; the suspicion of the deviant or non-conformist; the resistance to passion, desire, art; the fear of intellect and horror at change: “New York, to Mrs. Archer’s mind, never changed without changing for the worse” (The Age of Innocence; Wharton 1985: 1219). Wharton’s narratives follow characters inside and outside this sphere, and especially those with an ambiguous relationship to it: Simon Rosedale, the rising Jewish financier in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, that novel’s heroine, or Ellen Olenska, in The Age of Innocence, who try to find security within its walls; Newland Archer, firmly at the center, but uneasy in its limits, who seeks an exit, but ends trapped within its confines. Emergence is painful, and many characters, like the errant wives, Lydia, in the story “Souls Belated” (1899), or Kate Clephane in The Mother’s Recompense (1925), merely rediscover old forms. Anna Leath, in The Reef (1912), looks for “the magic bridge between West Fifty-fifth Street and life” but finds herself in an airless cul-de-sac (Wharton 1985: 413). In The Age of Innocence, the promisingly colorful matriarch, Mrs. Manson Mingott (née Spicer), proves to be one of the petrifying forces of the present. Even the locally humorous simile that introduces her, comparing her engulfing weight of flesh with “a flood of lava on a doomed city” (Wharton 1985: 1036), ties her into the text’s far-reaching figurative network of immobility, life snuffed out or extinguished. Wharton follows those rare pioneers who escape, often, only as far as the threshold. Ellen Olenska, Mrs. Mingott’s grand-daughter, ends free and independent in her own Parisian apartment, but Wharton denies the reader entry. We see the scene only through Newland Archer’s imagination, as he sits rooted to a bench, staring at her balcony.
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As Wharton’s private writings testify, she regarded her own development as having been similarly blighted. The biographical fragment “Life & I” (in Wharton 1990) contains explicit criticism of her mother’s prudery and repression; and some critics have interpreted early tales, such as “The Fullness of Life” (1893) with its extended metaphors of vacancy and hollowness, as hints of a void at the heart of her own marriage. Unlike most of her characters, however, Wharton forged her way at last to a more expansive world, through her intelligence and creativity. In her homes, with her eye for the harmonies of a room, the vistas of a landscape, she produced spaces that are now being read as innovative texts, alongside parallel structures in her fictions (see Benert; Lee). But through her writing, she discovered, as she termed it, her citizenship of “the Land of Letters” (Wharton 1990: 873). Her intellectual interests were unusual (even aberrant) in a woman of her class, and were not shared by her husband. Nevertheless, she kept up keenly with modern science, sociology, and anthropology, as well as in the history, poetry, and European literary classics that she had absorbed from childhood. Always, even as a young girl, a compulsive story-maker, she began to see her work in print. A collection of verse was privately produced when she was sixteen; a few poems appeared in prestigious national magazines in 1889, followed by her earliest short fictions during the 1890s. Her first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored with a well-known architect Ogden Codman Jr., offered a guide to tasteful domestic interior design; and with its publication, she enjoyed growing confidence. Valuing her literary friendships, she sought to acquire the professional discipline she believed essential. The amateur artists and dilettante book-lovers who populate her fiction were often characters marked, like Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth, as dangerously ineffectual. She distanced herself from imposed social routines to arrange her time productively. Accordingly, in 1901, Wharton bought an estate in the Berkshire Hills, in Western Massachusetts, a place of strong literary associations (Melville’s “Arrowhead” and Hawthorne’s “Tanglewood” were close by). In her beautiful summer home, The Mount, built to her own specifications, she entertained and settled to work. Her mode of recreation, a chauffeur-driven motor, then a novelty, gave her access to the remoter parts of the region. Its more desolate features, as Wharton conceived them, enter some of her most powerful fictions: the grim manufacturing town in The Fruit of the Tree (1907), the derelict hill farm, gripped by winter, in Ethan Frome and the one-street village, “North Dormer,” in Ethan’s “hot” equivalent, Summer (1917). Such constructions of New England, Wharton claimed later, in her memoir, A Backward Glance (1934), were intended to correct what she viewed as the sentimental vision, the “rosecoloured spectacles,” of her predecessors, Mary Wilkins (Freeman) and Sarah Orne Jewett (Wharton 1990: 1002–3). As she became famous, her privileged circumstances, however, colored her reception. When she depicted social worlds so far from her own, some reviewers wondered what she could possibly know. Was Ethan Frome, for instance, which presented country people as outcroppings of the landscape, just patronizing, “local-color,” a view from the opera-box? Wharton would rebut such charges, insisting that both her familiarity
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with rural New England and her care with narrative perspectives, legitimized her venture. Approaching Ethan’s story through indirection, through the frame of an outside observer, had been intended to circumvent such problems. Much of the story, as the nameless engineer tells it, is composed of guesses. He, too, can reconstruct the inner life of the Frome household only by building up a picture from the “perceptible gaps” between the “facts” (Wharton 1990: 65). Later, in Summer, Wharton dropped the frame device; but, again, she initiated her narrative with the arrival of a stranger, an architectural historian, a man from her own cultural milieu. Murmuring at her fate in North Dormer: “How I hate everything!” (Wharton 1990: 159), Charity Royall, like Ethan, enters a narrative that raises hope of an exit. After a brief flare of color and passion, the horrors of this novella, too, lie in silence, inarticulacy, dead hopes, painful aspirations. Against the bare existence of her characters – Charity Royall, in North Dormer, or Ethan in Starkfield – Wharton’s own life could not have seemed more opposite. Publicity photos presented her stylishly dressed, stiffly posed, holding a pen at her library desk, looking the grand dame of American letters. Visitors to The Mount, in Lenox, today can glimpse behind the scenes: the bedroom, where she actually did her writing, in bed in the mornings, dropping her completed pages to the floor for her secretary to collect and type; the elegant Italian gardens in the view outside her windows; and the rooms for the guests who shared her literary world (even the specially wide bath-tub provided for Henry James). Biographers offer yet more startlingly intimate glances, in the details of Wharton’s other transformative experience. Kept secret, even from Wharton’s close circle, and remote from her reserved, autocratic, public image, this was her own, self-declared, awakening to sexual passion, in an affair with the journalist Morton Fullerton. Her fervent letters, erotic poems, and the “LoveDiary” she addressed to him, beginning on his visit to The Mount in 1907, and the turbulent undercurrents of desire, jealousy, and violent resentment, expressed in the fictions of these years – Ethan Frome and The Reef, in particular – communicate forms of knowledge repressed in conventional society. As the relationship finally evaporated (Fullerton was ever duplicitous), and as the Whartons’ marriage moved toward irretrievable breakdown, The Mount was sold. Deciding to move to Europe, Wharton enjoyed choices impossible to such characters as Ethan and Charity. She sought a divorce (finalized in 1913), and decided to make her permanent home in France. Wharton’s patrician status gave a stamp of authority to her fictions of a similarly aristocratic elite. She explored, even in early short fictions, the experiences of characters accustomed to trans-Atlantic journeys: rich and well-born Americans, connoisseurs and collectors, writers, architects, or, like her own husband and family, gentlemen and ladies of leisure – expatriates, or New Yorkers, traveling in France or Italy, following the routines of Manhattan high society, and moving to summer homes at fashionable resorts. With her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), she had tested a different arena, a romance of eighteenth-century Italy that she packed with historical research; but, already trying out a major treatment of modern New York, she took encouragement from Henry James to venture thoroughly into terrain she knew by
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heart. James, recognizing the temptations and pitfalls of dwelling on European scenes, had urged her, in a letter of 1904, to seize “the American Subject,” in short to “do new york!” (quoted in Beer et al.: xiii). The city had already figured significantly in Wharton’s first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (1891) and the novella “Bunner Sisters,” written in 1892, but published only in 1916 (in Wharton 2001: I and II). These narratives of impoverished characters, struggling for the smallest satisfactions in an economically ruthless metropolis, offer compelling instances of Wharton’s “non-society” fictions. However, for her first great novel of New York, she turned to the world of money. The House of Mirth was the runaway best-seller of 1905. Its protagonist, the beautiful Lily Bart, a somewhat tarnished “nice girl,” gambles, smokes, and flirts her way through Manhattan and Monaco high life, calculating and miscalculating her chances in the stakes for a millionaire husband. Lily’s desperate career gripped readers of the serial in Scribner’s Magazine, and, as a book, topped the sales charts well into the next year. The story confirmed Wharton, for many readers, as the insiders’ insider, whose descriptions of glittering social surfaces and the machinations of snobbish, rich, and rising Americans carried all the frisson of true-life gossip. But though a popular success, Wharton, as others discerned, was more than a particularly well-placed society columnist. She deployed the discourses of the gossip sheet (Town Talk or “Riviera Notes” of The House of Mirth), just as she used the terminology of Darwinism, sociology, economics, or allusions to myth, legend, or classical literature, as part of her analytical repertoire. Her insights into psychology and contemporary culture, and her style and grasp of form, won admiration from even her earliest reviews. In The House of Mirth, the tittle-tattle over Lily is part of a buzzing, urgent narrative, which immerses readers in the hum of the modern metropolis. In her memoir, A Backward Glance (1934), Wharton recalled, of working on the story, “My last page is always latent in my first” (Wharton 1990: 940), a comment that captures the narrative’s driving, searching, sense of inquiry, as it tracks, to its enigmatic final moments, the heroine’s spiraling journey. From Grand Central Station, where Lily first misses her train, the novel opens up an ever-widening panorama, of New York and the United States in motion, hurtling into the unknown forms of the new twentieth century. Lily seems distinct from the crowd; but, in a narrative full of images of tides, swirling currents, rapid transport, and ever-changing stage scenes (even allusions to the new cinematography), her destiny is caught up in larger social histories. Apart from the quiet spaces of the most exclusive echelons, the city is rendered in scenes of building works and urban degeneration, noise and smells, stagnation and restlessness, which offer material counterparts to the unstable and shifting landscapes of money, economics, and class. Though Lily seeks, in one of the novel’s key motifs, a space “Beyond!,” in her character, too, Wharton presents the impact of modernity on the self – its tax on the central nervous system, its shaping of the very unconscious (see Knights). Wharton earned critical regard in every genre she attempted, and, as with her reading, all her modes of writing enriched and informed her fictions. Over her
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lifetime, she published over forty books, including some dozen collections of short stories, and more than twenty novels and novellas. By the time of her award in 1921, her list of miscellaneous publications had extended beyond The Decoration of Houses to a collection of verse, essays, criticism and reviews, and to drama – a translation of a German play was well reviewed, although a stage adaptation of The House of Mirth (1906), with the then famous playwright Clyde Fitch, disappointingly, flopped. Various other plays remain unpublished, but Wharton’s interests in drama are evident throughout her fiction: in her skill with the cutting, epigrammatic one-liner; or in pervasive tropes of theatricality, showiness, and performance (the tableaux vivants, in which Lily displays herself, in The House of Mirth, offer a packed, multi-layered, example). Resonant allusions to Renaissance or Greek tragedy form another set of signification. Like the dark, Gothic elements of many of her fictions, or the spectral presences which Wharton warned – in her preface to her posthumously published Ghosts (1937) – might penetrate even houses with electric cooker and contemporary comforts, these complicate the texts’ more analytical, realist modes of analysis (see Fedorko). Such allusions dissolve the barriers between the conscious and unconscious, or between myth and contemporaneity: assaulted by the brutish Gus Trenor, blaming herself as soiled and guilty, Lily feels the Furies from Aeschylus’s Eumenides invade her New York cab, and beat their iron wings in her brain (Wharton 1985: 156). Wharton poured her passions for European tradition, especially architecture and history, into a sequence of travel writings and cultural analyses: Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904), Italian Backgrounds (1905), and A Motor-Flight through France (1907). These infused scholarship with atmosphere, communicating details of visual harmonies, or layers of story, unnoticed by the average tourist. In A Motor-Flight, she celebrated a new “romance” in travel, the thrill of roaming the roads at will, with her full-time chauffeur, in her automobile. A later motor-tour, a vacation in North Africa, in 1917, produced In Morocco (1920). Wharton’s approbation of French imperial rule, and her orientalist exclamations at scenes she regarded as impenetrable and exotic, are not surprising for a white American of her time and class. But her interest in the lives of women behind the veil – she visited a harem in Fez – chimes particularly with the investigations into forms of social power she pursued in her fictions. In The Age of Innocence, published shortly afterwards, Newland Archer, an amateur anthropologist, looks with a similar eye on the habits and ceremonies of his own tribe: even his own “nineteenth-century New York wedding” appears as “a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history” (Wharton 1985: 1157). Having made France her home, Wharton remained in Paris throughout World War I, throwing her energies into fundraising and work for refugees. She marshaled an array of artists and national leaders – including Hardy, Conrad, Yeats, Sarah Bernhardt, Igor Stravinsky – to produce a gift anthology, The Book of the Homeless (1915), in support of relief causes. She visited the Allied Front, and, in Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915), recorded her impressions, to rally American readers. In French Ways and their Meaning (1919), she painted France as Idea, the sum of all that the Allies were defending. Another Pulitzer winner, of 1923, Willa Cather, in One of
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Ours (1922), created a lyrical view of war, closing on homely expressions which drew comfort out of sacrifice. Wharton’s war fictions, The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923), end with more ambiguous hints of recovery. All these narratives of war, and the after-images of ruin, death, mourning, and commemoration that haunt so many of Wharton’s later writings, are now of intense interest to critics – particularly so, in the fresh wave of attention to trauma and catastrophe since the atrocities of 9/11 (see, for example, Lee; Olin-Ammentorp). In The Age of Innocence, with its repeated images of civilizations swept away, Ellen in the Museum muses on the forgotten people of Troy; and, by the end, old New York seems a lost Atlantis. In the novel’s coda, Newland sees the present (the early 1900s) as a dizzying kaleidoscope of “fads and fetishes and frivolities,” but rejoices in Dallas, his son, and a new generation. But read from the perspective of 1920, the gulf of the Great War lies ahead of the novel’s ending. Even Twilight Sleep (1927) and The Children (1928), ostensibly narratives of the frenetic twenties (full of serial marriages, film stars, fads, and crazes), gain resonance as “postwar” readings. In Wharton’s fictions of Europe and America, tropes of space, place, and landscape always color personality, and structure the contrasting worlds of any narrative (see Beer Goodwyn). Her reflections on France, in particular, present her sense of a deeper, more civilized way of living that she found absent in the United States. An explicit critique is made early, in The Decoration of Houses, written to counter the taste for the dark, heavy furnishings favored by Wharton’s mid-nineteenth-century ancestors. (Lily Bart’s aunt, Mrs. Peniston, in her mausoleum of a drawing-room is an oppressive exemplar.) Wharton’s expressedly simpler taste rebukes, further, the grandiose extravagances of the Gilded Age, the palaces and “cottages” erected by new industrialists and financiers, such as the real-life Vanderbilts, or the aspiring Welly Brys in The House of Mirth. Aimed at a well-off audience, Wharton’s book itself draws on grand examples: the Palace of Versailles, for instance, provides one of the illustrations for the chapter on “Doors.” But though features such as a small library or dining-room fountain seem unlikely to have been of immediate import to the majority of United States’ citizens, then or now, the book remains of special interest for Wharton’s accounts of the symbolic force of different household elements. One set of meanings is psychological: in her stories, houses, in any country, carry the freight of the unconscious. They have faces and personalities: Lyng, in the ambiguous ghost tale “Afterward” (1910), is not a “garrulous” house, but “the mute accomplice” of “the mysteries it had surprised” (Wharton 2001: 854). Sites such as thresholds, windows and curtains, entrances and façades speak of the occupants’ deepest fears and desires, marking what they keep out, where they are vulnerable (see, for example, Fryer; Totten). Another dimension is social. In the zones of culture and history, The Decoration of Houses anticipates the many texts in which Wharton plays European harmony (a repeated word) against what she perceived as American dissonance. In articulating her requirements for a more harmonious way of living, Wharton highlights many terms that would remain a constant in her fiction. The white glare of electric light was an abhorrence; it summed up, for her, the death of privacy in the American home
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– and, with that, the impossibility of reflection, intelligent talk, the life of the mind. This and related images (glare, varnish, gilt, and brightness) would signal, throughout her texts, vulgarity and ostentation, the mark of new money, the upstart. The Custom of the Country (1913) writes such terms across Wharton’s most extensive canvas. As the ruthless central character, Undine Spragg, blazes her destructive trail from West to East, New York to Europe, small-town street to Parisian mansion, the narrative conducts its inquiry into what makes for civilization. Although the partisans of tradition, in both older New York and in France, have their limitations, central voices in the text offer impassioned defenses of humane and artistic values. The novel’s rising billionaire, Elmer Moffatt (Wharton’s fullest portrait of a financier), exemplifies a dubious form of accommodation – in his transformation into a collector, he at least appreciates and conserves the objects that he loots. But in Undine’s depredations, her dazzle, her ambition, and her art of the make-over, Wharton presents a vision of the society of spectacle, commodity, and consumer culture, the debased coinage of language and art, and the death of inwardness, that foreshadows critiques of late capitalism at the turn into the twenty-first century. Many currents of her reputation meet in her Pulitzer award. By 1921, she was an authoritative voice in United States’ culture, and widely popular: The Age of Innocence appeared, first, as a serial, in the mass-market women’s magazine, the Pictorial Review. As a book, with attention-grabbing advertising (“Was She Justified In Seeking A Divorce?”), it rapidly became another best-seller, garnering Wharton $50,000 within the first two years (Lee: 587–90). It appeared as a silent movie (Warner Brothers, 1924), on the Broadway stage (1928), and as a “talkie” (1934); under Martin Scorsese’s elaborate direction (Columbia, 1992), it attracted fresh attention. Contemporary reviews hailed the novel as a classic; and it remains one of Wharton’s best-known works. It serves as a reference point at the start of Candace Bushnell’s chick-lit hit, Sex and the City (1996, “Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence”), and currently features in the high-profile project: the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts “Big Read.” For Wharton, however, the honor seemed dubious. Founded in 1917, the board set severe standards, moral and aesthetic. In 1920, no novel had fulfilled its then main criterion: to “best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood “(quoted in Lee: 586). In 1921, Wharton was dismayed to find her work judged appropriate. She responded apologetically to the congratulations of Sinclair Lewis, whose own, more abrasive, satire, Main Street, had been the literary committee’s first choice, but was by-passed as offensive. Wharton deprecated herself as a novelist of a bygone generation, but made plain her distance from conservative middle America – she despaired about “being rewarded … for uplifting American morals.” In a letter to her friend, the art critic Bernard Berenson, she dismissed her prize money ($1,000) as “tainted”; remarked that it would “come in particularly handy to polish off the gardens” at her new French Riviera home (Lewis and Lewis: 445, 441); and spluttered over the irony: her latest novella had just been rejected on the grounds of immorality. The Ladies’ Home Journal found “The Old Maid,” with its sexual secrets, illegitimacy, and maternal rivalry, “powerful but unpleasant,” “a bit too vigorous for us” (quoted in Lee: 592). Exasperated, Wharton
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wondered whether such people had read the classics – Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – or even her own Summer, another tale of extramarital desire and pregnancy. Although “The Old Maid” subsequently found a publisher, and was collected in Wharton’s experimental historical sequence, Old New York (1924), Wharton returned to take reprisal on this entire episode in her double volume, Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932). A narrative of the career of a young writer, this outspoken epic presented a caustic rendering of the modern American literary scene, including insensitive editors, a philistine publisher, Mr. Dreck (German for “excrement”), and the crude jockeying of writers for sexual and financial rewards. All these were conflated in Wharton’s sharpest satirical vignettes: the scenes of competition for a new prize for the Novel, bestowed by a wealthy patron of the arts, the rapacious Mrs. Pulsifer. Such contradictory visions – of Wharton as a refined, repressed, traditionalist, or as transgressive innovator – echo differing notes of judgment heard throughout her career. With modernist experimentation in the twenties, and “man-with-a-pail” realism in the thirties, the “conservative” view came to predominate. It reverberates today, in critiques of Wharton’s work as politically anti-democratic, apologias for a vanishing white elite (see Kassanoff). However, the opening of her private papers in 1968 ended easy labeling. Readers were stunned by R. W. B. Lewis’s biography (1975), which included her erotic poem to Fullerton, “Terminus,” and her pornographic fragment, “Beatrice Palmato,” an explicit moment of ecstatic father–daughter incest. As a test-study now, The Age of Innocence, as seen through the lens of the Pulitzer, might seem a nostalgic, memory-piece about the 1870s; a moralizing endorsement of decency and self-denial, far from the contemporary whirl of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, or the immigrant experience voiced in Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts, of that same year. Or, formally, in its restraint, its narrative authority, and its assurance about character and motivation, it might appear, perhaps, a throwback to a nineteenth-century realist tradition, taking its last breath in the year that William Dean Howells died. Conversely, with its silences and fractures, and its society of surveillance, genteel viciousness, and quiet violence, it might stand as testimony, that, to take Wharton’s words from an early story, in all her structures: “there was always blood in the foundations” (Wharton 2001: 895).
References and Further Reading Beer, Janet, Knights, Pamela, and Nolan, Elizabeth (2007). Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” London: Routledge. Beer Goodwyn, Janet (1990). Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bell, Millicent, ed. (1995). The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Benert, Annette (2007). The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton: Gender, Class and Power in the Progressive Era. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Edith Wharton: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2005). Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence”: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House.
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Edith Wharton Society (2008). “Works Online” (available at http://www.wsu.edu/∼campbelld/ wharton/works.htm; accessed July 20, 2008). Fedorko, Kathy (1995). Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Fryer, Judith (1986). Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Joslin, Katherine (1991). Edith Wharton. London: Macmillan. Kassanoff, Jennie A. (2004). Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knights, Pamela (2009). The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Hermione (2007). Edith Wharton. London: Chatto. Lewis, R. W. B. (1975). Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper. Lewis, R. W. B. and Lewis, Nancy, eds. (1988). The Letters of Edith Wharton. London: Scribner. Olin-Ammentorp, Julie (2004). Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War. Gainesville, F.L.: University Press of Florida. Singley, Carol J., ed. (2003). A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press.
Totten, Gary, ed. (2007). Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Wharton, Edith (1897). The Decoration of Houses. New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, Edith (1925). The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner’s. Wharton, Edith (1985). Novels: The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, ed. R. W. B. Lewis. New York: Library of America. Wharton, Edith (1990). Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Library of America. Wharton, Edith (1997). The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. Frederick Wagener. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Wharton, Edith (2001). Collected Stories, 2 vols., ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin (1977). A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, Sarah Bird, ed. (1995). Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920. New York: St. Martin’s. Wright, Sarah Bird, ed. (1998). Edith Wharton A–Z. New York: Checkmark.
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Willa Cather’s Entropology: Permanence and Transmission Guy J. Reynolds
Some of the most powerful recent writing about American culture and history explores what in Catherian terms we can call the “other side” of the national narrative, teasing away at the stories that are often overlooked during the construction of the U.S. “grand narrative.” Toni Morrison projected one such reading in Playing in the Dark (1992), the work that suggested that white writing has been haunted by blackness: this study famously included one of the most powerful arguments we have about Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). I now want to suggest that other such “hauntings” mark Cather’s work, and especially a form of literal haunting predicated on the loss of culture. Cather was infamously indifferent to the fate of the Plains Indians, though fascinated by Pueblo Indian cultures that left behind tangible artifacts and dwellings that could be seen, felt, and meditated on (as Thea Kronborg meditates on that culture’s pottery in The Song of the Lark, 1915). The nomadic Plains Indians seem to have left no trace, featuring in a small number of asides in her work, but little more. For Mike Fisher, in what remains one of the most critical accounts of Cather and the Plains Indians cultures, this made her, quite simply, an imperialist. My Ántonia (1918), Fisher wrote, is “a story of origins for whites only” (Fisher: 51). My argument here is that the larger pattern of Cather’s work looks at endings, as well as origins, and here Cather lacks imperialist triumphalism. For the Plains Indians are there, in a way, and their presence can be felt throughout her work: the haunting sense of cultural loss in her work must be linked imaginatively at some level to what the philosopher Jonathan Lear, in an important book on the Crow Indians, Radical Hope (2006), has called “cultural devastation.” Cather had registered the hard facts of life on the prairies, as witnessed in the recent “vanishing” of the Plains Indians: that this was a place of vanishings, and that her own culture, then coming-into-being, might simply go the same way. Cather’s 1923 essay (published in The Nation in a series of pieces about different states) “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle” does indeed announce the end of the pioneers. Throughout her work we
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find many suggestions that the European-American world she had grown up in might also face “devastation,” as it was succeeded by lesser forms of culture (for Cather: the movies or “gaudy fiction”) or by literal vanishing. As Cather writes: In Nebraska, as in so many other States, we must face the fact that the splendid story of the pioneers is finished, and that no new story worthy to take its place has yet begun … The generation now in the driver’s seat hates to make anything, wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past those acres where the old men used to follow the long corn-rows up and down. They want to buy everything ready-made: clothes, food, education, music, pleasure. Will the third generation – the full-blooded, joyous one just coming over the hill – will it be fooled? Will it believe that to live easily is to live happily? (Cather 2003: 47)
Here, the major text is Lucy Gayheart (1935), a novel steadily stripped of its heroine, its main protagonists – indeed, stripped of people, depopulated in an eerie prefiguring of that demographic reshaping that took place on the Plains after Cather’s death. Mockford and Sebastian die in the drowning accident; Lucy goes down into the waters. “And now the story was finished,” she writes: “no grandchildren, complete oblivion” (Cather 1935: 207). That this is not only a devastation of family and the individual, but also a form of Lear’s “cultural devastation” is amply demonstrated in the orchestration of those final few pages. The novel ends with the sealed room, Lucy’s room, with the photograph of Sebastian and the musical scores on their shelves: a cultural repository, an archaeological site now brought into the heart of Cather’s twentiethcentury American world. Gordon follows the Cather pattern of looking for an aidemémoire, something to establish the permanence of what he has experienced, in his memory. Jim Burden (My Ántonia) has his manuscript, Tom Outland (The Professor’s House, 1925) has the mummified skeleton (“Mother Eve”), Harry Gordon has the photograph. Like these other Cather males, he is a memory-fetishist. He takes the photograph of Sebastian – “It was the only thing he touched,” Cather writes. Like Tom, he is both a witness to a place of loss, and an obsessive who also needs to take something from that place in final compensation: When he came out of the house the last intense light of the winter day was pouring over the town below him, and the bushy tree-tops and the church steeples gleamed like copper. After all, he was thinking, he would never go away from Haverford; he had been through too much here ever to quit the place for good. What was a man’s “home town,” anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments and had learned to bear them? As he was leaving the Gayhearts’, he paused mechanically on the sidewalk, as he had done so many thousand times, to look at the three light footprints, running away. (Cather 1935: 231)
Cather’s narratives are haunted by loss, by cultural loss. In recent commentary, notably that of Steve Trout or Michael North, such loss is linked to the shattering effects of the Great War or a more general crisis of modernism, or a Spenglerian sense
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of Western demise. But one might argue that such a sense of loss, of cultural devastation, had haunted Cather from an earlier stage of her career: before the war, before the heyday of literary modernism. The early story “The Enchanted Bluff” (1909) is Cather’s prototype for later narratives about lost cultures: here, the Cliff-Dweller settlement whose demise begins when an “awful storm” washes away the fragile staircase up into the “village away up there in the air” (Cather 1965: 74). This would represent a more specific “Americanization” of Cather’s work, seeing her sense of loss as rooted in region and locale, in those broader patterns of historical memory that were with her from an early stage of her career. This is the American Cather of Western vanishings, not the Euro-American responding to the crisis of the early twentieth century. My focus on cultural endings might seem perverse. After all, Cather was fascinated by energy, newness, and “youth.” The pioneer novels, above all, explore migration and the immigrant experience as forms of cultural newness, and were celebrated by H. L. Mencken and Dorothy Canfield Fisher for this reason. But the sense of beginnings in Cather is always linked to the sense of endings, and the mapping of endings onto larger patterns of cultural formation and cultural collapse, and the haunting that then ensues. Thus the last line of “The Enchanted Bluff”: “Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing but the Enchanted Bluff” (Cather 1965: 77). Thus, the pervasiveness in her work of disappearances and vanishings, cultural death and loss, the fascination with archaeological sites and objects: the Cliff-Dweller city, Panther Cañon, Mother Eve, the shards of pottery found by Thea Kronborg. Even Jim Burden’s rediscovery of Ántonia at the end of the novel has the flavor of an archaeological trip about it, as Jim moves backward in historical time to become, finally, a man walking down a gravel road toward an isolated house, as if there really is little progress after the initial homesteading moment. Cultural loss is immanent within the first two pioneer novels. Even if they are about the making of America and the making of Americans, they also contain an anxious undertow that derives from this fear about cultural (im)permanence. The opening statements of O Pioneers! (1913) show us houses as unfixed as wandering cattle: The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. (Cather 1992: 11)
The pioneer project might very well fail, or be brief-lived, or lack in cultural and historical significance. I have argued elsewhere that Cather’s sense of history was cyclical rather than linear (Reynolds: 47–52), and one can clearly see that this sense of rise and fall, of inevitable decline, had been central to her imagining of the American past from her earliest fictions. What is important about the “Nebraska” essay is
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not so much its celebration of the pioneers as its lament for the shortness of their heyday. Very few commentators have seen the pioneer era as being as ephemeral as it is in Cather’s essay – just over one generation. Cather imagines the pioneer heyday as, really, extraordinarily brief – a kind of comma in the long continuum of Western time. In many ways, Cather was a typical modernist, exhibiting that paradoxical fascination with new forms and shapes for her writing, even as she reacted strongly against many forms of modern culture. Like D. H. Lawrence, whom she knew well (she interrupted work on Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1926 to spend a good deal of time with him in New York City – and Cather was the kind of person who kept a strict timetable when she was engaged on a project: you were given your time for tea, and that was that), Cather could be corrosive about contemporary industrial or consumerist culture. In this vision of cultural decline, human experience has lost potency. Experience is increasingly mediated through banal forms, such as the movies. Urban life means a loss of contact with the natural world. In place of craft, artisanal production, and direct exchange, mass-produced goods circulate through increasingly attenuated networks. Shallow hedonism has replaced real feeling. At some pervasive level, life is no longer “authentic.” These complaints became familiar the moment that Romanticism arose in reaction to industrial capitalism. In Cather’s work, in her imagined mesa lands or primitivist pioneer cultures or her memorializing of lost heroic figures (Ántonia or Tom Outland), we see a reconfiguring of these motifs within the American West. We can see that sense of cultural/material loss in fables such as that surrounding the skeleton of Mother Eve, in The Professor’s House: an authentically, indigenously American artifact (literally indigenous), stolen by a German adventurer and shipped out through Mexico. This is a parable about the evils of consumerist circulation in the global economy. The tricky part of Cather criticism has always been to align many of Cather’s other preoccupations with what I am calling “permanence and transmission.” Specifically, why did Cather make so much of music, specifically opera? A straightforward biographical response might simply note her passion for music, her erotic fascination with opera singers, and might ruminate on the imaginative plenitude that opera and performance offered to someone born into a straitened nineteenth-century small-town culture. But it is here that we can also see how wide-ranging and systematic the Cather project was. If we think of Cather as, above all, a writer fascinated by culture (its beginning and its end, its transmission, its commemoration as memory), then her fascination with opera becomes central. Opera – to be more precise, performance – is central to Cather’s reading of culture. Opera is performative and ephemeral; her representations of singing emphasize its passionate transience. But the sheer weight of musical practice – training oneself over many years, within the established structures of a discipline – also suggests permanence. For Cather, the music teacher is as important as the performer herself, since the teacher represents the permanence of a culture, even as he teaches the performer to work toward the highly ephemeral world of performance. The music teacher’s job is
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to transmit a culture. This is why music teachers have such a special place in Cather’s work – think of Wunsch (The Song of the Lark) or Sebastian (Lucy Gayheart). It’s also why, more generally, teachers are so important in Cather – one thinks of Gaston Cleric in My Ántonia or St. Peter in The Professor’s House. There are probably more teachers in Cather’s work than in the fiction of any comparable U.S. writer. And this educational plot in Cather is closely tied to meditations on culture, and how we transmit or transfer culture across generations. For a singer such as Thea, the performer voluntarily subjects herself to a disciplining within a highly stylized, deeply historical culture, only to deploy that transmitted and permanent cultural practice in performances marked by their sheer, ephemeral transience. The musician trains for years, only to use that training in the brief illumination of nightly performance. One might define opera in Cather as the disciplining of the body through the permanence of culture, in order to transmit a fierce, “natural” energy. This is Thea’s meditation at the end of The Song of the Lark: “Not for nothing had she kept it so severely, kept it filled with such energy and fire. All that deep-rooted vitality flowered in her voice, her face, in her very finger-tips. She felt like a tree bursting into bloom” (Cather 1978: 478). A tree’s blooming is transitory: Thea undertakes a journey into the permanence of musical culture, only to achieve temporary ecstasy. But, of course, that ecstasy is then transmitted – to the viewers and the listeners and the Moonstone townspeople who will remember her. Memory, then, becomes a compensation for inevitable and repeated cultural loss in the Cather schema. One can then see how, for Cather, the mechanical reproduction of contemporary culture – notably, film – threatened to destroy her own cultural model. Cather was suspicious of film because it offered a routinized reproduction, not that combined force of historical permanence and ephemeral performance prized by her artists. Although Cather made a tidy sum from the 1934 film version of A Lost Lady (1923), a mediocre production starring Barbara Stanwyck, she resisted the movies (in contrast to figures such as Fitzgerald or Faulkner). The “Nebraska” essay of 1923 laid into the “too many moving-picture shows” which Cather linked to a depleted, consumerist culture (Cather 2003: 46). From a Catherian viewpoint, movie time is simply banal – fixed and repetitive, as one plays the old story in the same form again and again. Cather, of course, famously noted that there were only two or three stories in the world, but within her own imaginary the trick was to frame this historical rootedness and sense of permanence within something temporary and thrillingly momentary. Performance, that is, is central because it reminds us of the evanescent nature of human experience, while grounding itself in the permanence of a classical training. If you are obsessed by the ideal of a permanent culture, but haunted by a sense of cultural loss, while being thrilled by the ecstasy of momentary performance, it is likely that you will have some very strange ideas about historical time. Cather did, indeed, have very odd conceptions of chronology, and her novels embody the new timescales she used to shape her innovative historical vision. In general, she bent, cut, twisted, expanded, and slowed down historical time, which is why the novels have their very distinctive, experimental rhythms. Note also the ending of her famous 1922 statement
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in Not under Forty: “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, and the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday’s seven thousand years” (Cather 1936: v). So, yesterday now lasts seven thousand years: a statement as worthy of attention as the idea that the world broke in two in 1922. If you sense that the culture that you are born into might not last, and if your imagination is captivated by scenes of pre-European civilization or colonial-era Quebec, you are likely to push at the limits of what narrative sequence might achieve. Hence the sudden cuts and historical reorientations in Cather’s work, or what might seem to be an almostfetishistic detailing of the minutiae of lives long go. What many passages in these novels – one might think of the domestic scenes between Cecile and her father in Shadows on the Rock (1931) – are asking us to think about is the final meaning of cultural significance. Shadows is a book where little happens, but the trivial is invested with massive importance. One can see the gamble that Cather has taken here: to show how ordinariness and the quotidian might gain a certain weight when placed in a culture of historical impact. I would link this interest in cultural loss to the anthropological and ethnographic drive of her imagination (ethnography: literally, “people-writing”). Although recent Cather criticism has done a good job at tracing the Southwestern roots of her interest in what can be seen as a form of fictional “fieldwork,” we can now see that Cather’s overall career had marked parallels with classic cultural anthropology. Her career reached its height at exactly the same moment that ethnography achieved its own intellectual breakthrough, in works such as Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Cather is the most ethnographic of American writers, in her attention to the “field,” her exploration of a diversity of cultures, her interest in an anthropological “dwelling” in culture (hence the exhaustive and meticulous background research that lies behind Archbishop, Shadows, and Sapphira). This is one reason why non-Americans find her work so interesting: the books feel like keys to an “Other” way of life, replete with their records of weather patterns, the attentiveness to ritual and ceremony, the interest in linguistic difference and translation that runs from the northern European tongues of the pioneer novels through to the Southern idiolects of Sapphira. Her sense of the felt textures of ordinary life is thoroughly anthropological. One can read a novel such as Shadows for its insights into cooking and medicine in seventeenth-century Quebec – in truth, the novel might better be titled, Cooking and Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Quebec. Second, the ethnographic imagination is by its very nature pluralistic and diverse. For some readers – notably, Walter Benn Michaels in Our America (1995) – that diversity is a sham, since various “Others” (typically, black or Native American or Jewish, as in much American modernist literature of the 1920s) are simply brought forward to confirm and affirm the identity of “Our” (that is, the white and nativist) America. I have an ethnographic reply to Michaels, which will unfold throughout the rest of this chapter. She is an ethnographic writer in that she understood, very quickly and as a modernist, the impact that the new disciplines of anthropology and archaeology would have on the novelistic imagination. Like many modernists, Cather had her moment
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of anthropological decentering, as she shifted her historical lens to take account of other, non-Western cultures. In Cather’s case, this came with the acclaimed trip to Arizona in 1912, a moment of psychological transformation, as Sharon O’Brien has argued, but also a moment that triggered a shift in Cather’s sense of American temporality. From now on, alongside the European classical heritage of music and literature, Cather had distinctively American models of culture to meditate on, and this was to provide the matrix for her finest meditation on the interplay between permanence and transmission, “Tom Outland’s Story.” Cather books become what we might call works of “entropology.” That is to say, they have the ethnographic impulse I identified earlier, but this writing of a culture is now devoted to the entropy of that culture and its imminent extinction. Many classic twentieth-century works of anthropology were entropological: Malinowski’s Argonauts, for instance, or Lévi-Strauss’s superb Tristes Tropiques (1955). We can see how Cather shares these writers’ interest in cultural disappearances, but she turns the fascination inward toward a domestic entropology of a succession of vanished Americas: the colonial Spanish America lost to Anglo-America after the Mexican War; the French America lost to the British; the pioneer West lost to “standardization” and a banal conformism; the defeated Confederacy of Cather’s Southern ancestors; the CliffDweller settlements. Some of these losses were political – alluded to or obliquely mentioned in Cather’s work, such as in her referencing of Kit Carson, agent of “progress,” in Death Comes for the Archbishop. But they were also, often, environmental vanishings: born from geographical isolation, extreme weather, demographic shifts. Michaels castigated Cather for her use of the vanishing American (the Indian). One reply would be that Cather was unusually interested in a variety of vanishings, not just that of the Native cultures. For Cather, many cultures are vanishing cultures. “Tom Outland’s Story” is for me the heart of Cather’s achievement, the moment when so many of her major ideas cross and intersect, and where she finds a language that can hold together her divergent conceptualizations of what culture might mean. In its fabular structure – the lost civilization, the boys’ adventure tale – we can see how Cather’s reading of cultures in terms of transmission and permanence led her finally to construct a story about American origins and endings. The idea of newness and of beginnings – how a life might begin, how a culture might begin – had been powerfully present in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, of course. In “Tom Outland’s Story,” we see both the beginning and the end of a culture, and we also see how Cather’s entropology transformed the fundamental structures of narrative itself. Therapists are trained to pay particular attention to changes in narrative sequence, particularly the break in time or viewpoint. “Tom Outland’s Story” reads like a dream about a culture, demanding cultural therapy. It is a dream about civilization: how it begins, is rooted in an environment; how it might pass away and be commemorated; how it will eventually become not a culture but a story about culture. Outland and his friends achieve a form of anthropological “dwelling” on the mesa, just as the Cliff-Dwellers (note Cather’s use of this ethnographic term) had done. Like them, they find that permanence is in fact temporary.
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As in her other cultural narratives, how to possess and how to hand on a culture becomes vital. As in Lucy Gayheart and My Ántonia, the interplay between male and female characters insistently but subtly reminds us that cultural transmission in Cather is a highly gendered process. Outland becomes the male memory-fetishist, commemorating the vanished or marginalized female protagonist (so: Jim and Ántonia, Harry Gordon and Lucy, Tom and Mother Eve). Memory intercedes, providing a form of compensation or imaginative plenitude for the losses we have witnessed. Nevertheless, the processes of obliteration and, that Cather term, “oblivion” continue: Tom will die in the war. Survivors such as Harry and Jim return, stoically, to lives that are hollowed out and enervated: a living oblivion. The best for Harry Gordon in Lucy Gayheart is Cather’s final brutal, bitter inversion of a Norman Rockwell piety: “What was a man’s “home town,” anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments and had learned to bear them?” (Cather 1935: 231). As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has written, every culture is a “gamble played with nature” (Sahlins: ix). It depends on a supportive environment, and risks collapse if such environmental conditions are not in place – events that many very serious people believe are now imminent within our own epoch. This is why Cather’s reading and rendering of environment are so important, not so much because of her interest in environment per se, but because environmental change might herald cultural collapse – a truly terrifying prospect in the Catherian scheme of things. “The Enchanted Bluff, we remember, envisages a cultural collapse precipitated by a storm: unable to get back to sanctuary, the tribe is decimated by another tribe: “While they were camped at the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the north came along and massacred ’em to a man, with all the old folks and women looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south and left the village to get down the best way they could. Of course they never got down. They starved to death up there, and when the war party came back on their way north, they could hear the children crying from the edge of the bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn’t see a sign of a grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there since.” (Cather 1965: 74–5)
Many Cather settings have the precariousness and sense of transience implicit in Sahlins’s commentary: the fragility of the prairie towns, or the demographic collapse that seems to take place at the end of Lucy Gayheart, where there are no clear inheritors to take the place of the dead generation of Sebastian Clement, Harry Gordon, and Lucy herself. Cather’s internationalist vision is also framed by this sense of entropology. France seems to have stood in her imagination as another crystallization of the process of transmission and permanence. French Canada and France meant a great deal to Cather: they represented an environmental-cultural monumentalism, seen in the “rock” of Quebec City in Shadows on the Rock or the “Midi”-style cathedral Latour constructs in Death Comes for the Archbishop. But French culture also embodied impermanence and collapse in its most poignant forms: the passing of French America into
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history. At the end of her life, remarkably, Cather was planning a project based on medieval Avignon, specifically the sudden emergence and disappearance of Avignon’s schismatic papacy within the space of three generations. The resulting text, “Hard Punishments,” was left unfinished at the time of her death – a final, poignant moment when permanence and transmission failed Cather. Cather probably knew of dozens of potential French tales that might have provided the materials for her narratives. Tellingly, she chose to site her stories in Quebec and Avignon: quintessence of cultures that appeared permanent, then vanished, and then were transmitted (as cultural memories and examples) through her own imaginings. Cather’s career straddled both the paradigmatic intellectual shift from late Victorianism to the modernist era and a bewildering array of forms of writing: short fiction, journalism, poetry, the novel. But the common thread is her obsession with the fundamental dynamics of human cultures. Writing about Pueblo architecture or the figure of the diva or the establishment of pioneer farms, Cather was in a sense addressing the same question again and again: what does it mean to be “in” culture?
References and Further Reading Bloom, Harold, ed. (1985). Willa Cather: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1987). Willa Cather’s “My Ántonia”: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House. Bohlke, L. Brent, ed. (1986). Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Cather, Willa (1935). Lucy Gayheart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cather, Willa (1936). Not under Forty. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cather, Willa (1965). “The Enchanted Bluff” [1909], in Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction 1892–1912, pp. 69–77. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Cather, Willa (1978). The Song of the Lark [1915]. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Cather, Willa (1992). O Pioneers! [1913], ed. Susan J. Rosowski et al. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Cather, Willa (1994). My Ántonia [1918], ed. Charles Mignon et al. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Cather, Willa (1997). A Lost Lady [1923], ed. Susan J. Rosowski et al. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press.
Cather, Willa (1999). Death Comes for the Archbishop [1927], ed. John J. Murphy et al. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Cather, Willa (2002). The Professor’s House [1925], ed. James Woodress et al. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Cather, Willa (2003). “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle” [1923], in Willa Cather: Critical Assessments, ed. Guy Reynolds, vol. 1, pp. 41–7. Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information. Cather, Willa (2005). Shadows on the Rock [1931], ed. John J. Murphy. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Crane, Joan (1982). Willa Cather: A Bibliography. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Fisher, Mike (2003). “Pastoralism and its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism,” in Willa Cather: Critical Assessments, ed. Guy Reynolds, vol. 4, pp. 51– 65. Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information Lear, Jonathan (2006). Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. Lee, Hermione (1997). Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up. London: Little Brown.
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Lindemann, Marilee, ed. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maddox, Lucy (1991). Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michaels, Walter Benn (1995). Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Morrison, Toni (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. North, Michael (1999). Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press.
O’Brien, Sharon (1987). Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, Guy (1996). Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire. London: Macmillan. Sahlins, Marshall (1985). Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trout, Steven (2002). Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Woodress, James (1987). Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press.
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Gertrude Stein and Seriality Ulla Haselstein
A thing you all know is that in the three novels written in this generation that are the important things written in this generation, there is, in none of them a story. There is none in Proust in The Making of Americans or in Ulysses. (Stein, Lectures in America, p. 184)
Gertrude Stein has been elevated to the status of a literary cult figure: in the 1930s, when she was recognized as a member of the avant-garde; and in the 1980s, when she was rediscovered as a lesbian feminist. Stein was a prolific writer and composed in virtually every genre. What in her own view constituted her masterpiece, however, namely her novel The Making of Americans – which she saw as “the beginning, really the beginning, of modern writing” (Stein 1986: 233) and on a par with Proust’s and Joyce’s achievements – continues to daunt readers to this day. The novel was begun in 1903; interrupted in 1905–6 for the collection of stories Three Lives; rewritten in 1906 and again in 1908; completed in 1911 (much earlier than Ulysses or A la recherche du temps perdu), but published only in 1925. It is almost one thousand pages long, and organized by serial repetitions, which became the stylistic trademark of most of her work and anticipated an important dimension of postmodernist art and literature; for example, Andy Warhol’s silk-screen prints, William Burroughs’s novels and films, Robert Wilson’s theatre productions, or Language Poetry. Stein’s initial concept for The Making of Americans was fairly straightforward: the topic was to be America as a new nation “whose tradition it had taken scarcely sixty years to create” (Stein 1995: 3). She planned to narrate the history of three generations of two immigrant families, the Dehnings and the Herslands: “The old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old, that is the story that I mean to tell, for that is what really is and what I really know” (3). Stein was not interested in subjective agency, but in the social forces that shape identity. The title of the novel suggests an almost mechanical mode of social manufacturing and implies a political stance against the rampant nativism of the time. Stein conceived of the process of
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Americanization in the following manner: the materialist and individualist orientation of American life stresses opportunity and allows for upward mobility, while dissolving the immigrants’ value systems based on religious beliefs and collective traditions; with the second and third generations of immigrants, a new milieu defined by cultural abstraction comes into being, namely an American middle class to which everyone can belong (at least in principle), since with few exceptions everyone in America has foreign-born ancestors, and little in the way of common customs or backgrounds exists. Lacking a cultural heritage, the American middle class lead lives that revolve around the “vital” and “monotonous” facts of human existence: Middle-class, middle-class, I know no one of my friends who will admit it, one can find no one among you all belong to it, I know that here we are to be democratic and aristocratic and not have it, for middle class is sordid material unillusioned unaspiring and always monotonous for it is always there and to be always repeated, and yet I am strong and I am right, and I know it, and I say it to you, and you are to listen to it, yes here in the heart of a people who despise it, that a material middle class who know they are it, with their straightened bond of family to control it, is the one thing always human, vital and worthy it – worthy that all monotonously shall repeat it, – and from which has always sprung, and all who really look can see it, the very best the world can ever know, and everywhere we need it. (34)
American culture produces a standardized way of life, which Stein (who lived as a self-exile in Paris from 1903 until her death in 1946) also found problematic in spite of her celebratory attitude: I say vital singularity is as yet an unknown product with us, we who in our habits, dress-suit cases, clothes and hats and ways of thinking, walking, making money, talking, having simple lines in decorating, in ways of reforming, all with a metallic clicking like the type-writing which is our only way of thinking, our way of educating, our way of learning, all always the same way of doing, all the way down as far as there is any way down inside to us. We all are the same all through us, we never have it to be free inside us. (47)
For Stein, there was only one dominant social type in America, whose “making” she set out to explore.
Allegory into Portraiture The subtitle of the book – Being a History of a Family’s Progress – provides some clues to the novel’s form. In Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, plot and characters are allegorical, with the latter representing either a positive or a negative moral trait conducive or obstructive as far as the common goal of all characters, namely their arrival at the Celestial City, is concerned. Stein translated Bunyan’s religious tale of pilgrimage and
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redemption into a secular tale about immigration and the rise of the second and third generations of immigrants to the American middle class. Thus, the allegorical structure of the narrative was kept intact, and this holds true for the characters as well, whom Stein conceived of as embodiments of American national traits. Their essence is not denotated by their name as in Bunyan’s book, but every time a character is mentioned in The Making of Americans, the same set of attributes serves as a name tag: [David Hersland] was big and abundant and full of new ways of thinking … [42]. As I was saying, Mr. Hersland was big and abundant and always very full of new ways of thinking. Always he was abundant and joyous and determined and always powerful in starting. Also sometimes he would be irritable and impatient and uncertain [46]. David Hersland was a big man. He was big in the size of him and in his way of thinking. [49] As I was saying the father was a big man. He liked eating … [49] And then as I was saying he was a big man and he was very fond of eating, he had a brother who had died a glutton, and he liked to buy things that looked good to him, and it would always be a very big one, he never liked to undertake anything that was not large in its beginning. The only time in his life that he ever took a little thing was when he chose his wife the little gentle Fanny Hissen … [50]
The narrator provides evidence for the characterizing statements, yet the underlying allegorical design remains discernible: “big,” “abundant,” “new,” “simple” – David Hersland, the second generation immigrant, is immediately recognizable as a typical American. While this renewal of allegory by national type is bolstered by a naturalist concept of character as defined by habits, the seriality of statements breaks with naturalist concepts of representation by focusing on the narrator’s consciousness. Referring to different facets of his personality, the memories of David Hersland (modeled after Stein’s father) are each reduced to their conceptual essence and identified by a marker such as “big.” Embedded in descriptive statements (“he was big”) and interwoven with anecdotes, the text thus registers the cognitive responses David Hersland provoked in the narrator. Certain memories are more frequent than others, and their markers trigger further associations: thus “big” refers to David Hersland’s physical size, and to eating, but also to the grand scale of his projects – too grand in fact, for he is often said to be incapable of following them through. The meaning of identical markers constantly and subtly changes as they refer to different memories of David Hersland, and to shifting emotional intensities in the relations between narrator and character, who is addressed as “David Hersland,” “Mr. Hersland,” “the father,” “this man,” or just plain “he.” Changes of tense and the modulation of adverbial phrases that indicate acts of comparison and reasoning add further nuance to the statements, whose serial configuration makes them resonate with previous statements, and anticipate others predicated on as yet unmentioned facets of David Hersland’s character: for he is not only remembered as “big” and “abundant,” but also as “irritable,” “joyous,” “queer,” “eccentric,” and “impatient.”
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Each marker subsumes several experiences under one concept; the recurrence of markers therefore indicates David Hersland’s most frequently noted – and hence characteristic – traits. At the same time, the markers acquire different shades of meaning with each iteration in new contexts. Stein thus emphasizes constancy and change in her profile of David Hersland, whereas a conventional portraitist would have congealed the recurrent elements of the memories into a fixed notion of identity. Stein’s serial composition was not without precedent, albeit in a different medium. Her reliance on elementary forms of language and the logical relations inherent in grammar recalls Cézanne, whom she always cited as her predecessor. Cézanne used to paint the same objects again and again in an effort of “realizing” them, disclosing the interplay of visual sensations with cognition, imagination, and memory by a fusion of color and geometrical form in a de-hierarchized surface structure. The closest parallels, however, are between Stein’s text and the analytic cubism of Picasso, a close friend of Stein, who built on Cézanne’s ideas by setting the abstract structural properties of the object against the field of vision, using compositional devices such as a representational space made up of multiple perspectives, or a unification of figure and ground by a multitude of interpenetrating color planes (see Dubnick; Perloff ).
Stein’s Typology of Character Modernist writers and painters responded to scientific inquiries into perception and consciousness. Attacking traditional artistic forms as conventional and stifling, they conceived of their work as experimental explorations of sensation and cognition designed to foster a critical awareness of the cultural routines that limit innovative thought. Writers like William James and Henri Bergson were particularly interested in philosophical inquiries into the temporal structure of consciousness, and the psychoanalytic notion of the timeless unconscious (Freud), as such notions contradict the linearity of narrative. William James must be credited as the most important influence on Stein (cf. Stein 1988: 137ff.), who studied with him from 1893 to 1897. James famously maintained that consciousness was in continuous flux, with thoughts overlapping and creating a halo of relations around any object selected by attention: the “specious present” of consciousness is made up of “events dawning into its forward end as fast as they fade out of its rearward one” (James 1981: 593). The spatial order of things and the temporal sequentiality of discrete events do not exist for the experiencing subject; rather, the forces of external reality and the properties of the cognitive apparatus together produce a stream of continuous, yet transitory thought. On the experiential level, subject and object cannot be divided; as the self is carried along with the stream of thoughts, it is made up of “substantive” and “transitive” states, of images of enduring objects and of feelings of changing relations toward the object (cf. James 1981: 239).
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The full impact of James’s model on Stein’s novel becomes evident in the text when Stein abandons her inquiry into the process of Americanization. Once she redefined the novel’s terms and conceived of the characters as specimens of a typology of “every one,” she could no longer rely on American national traits such as “big,” “new,” or “abundant” for the construction of her characters. She therefore conducted studies of her friends and family to identify basic human traits (“bottom natures”) which she could use to define the Herslands and Dehnings. Her portrayal of fictional characters was based on research: “this is not just talking, this all has real meaning” (Stein 1995: 299). The change of purpose is reflected in numerous passages in which the author explains her new goals: The Making of Americans also contains its own history. It is a history of struggle: “I write for myself and strangers,” Stein (1995: 289) declared, intimating a lack of support by her relatives and friends, but also a determination on her part to persist with her project. In spite of many instances in the novel where she expresses her lingering self-doubts, a self-confident authorial voice makes itself heard from the very beginning. After the first seventy-eight pages where the initial plan for the novel still remains legible, narration in The Making of Americans is increasingly fractured by a huge number of digressions and authorial reflections, and dissolved into repetitive clusters of abstract classifications. The family histories of the Herslands and Dehnings are reduced to mere details in a general “history of every one who ever was or is or will be living” (1995: 285). To isolate the basic traits out of a plethora of observations of different people required a complex strategy of (self-)observation. Since perception and analytic conceptualization must be regarded as different functional contexts for what William James called “undivided experience” (James 1996: 9), the flux of consciousness refers simultaneously to the traits of the observed people and to the consciousness of the author/narrator. Focusing on the repetitive speech and behavioral patterns of others, Stein analyzed impressions usually relegated to the “fringes” of consciousness where impressions are absorbed and integrated into concepts by being interwoven with memories – another description for habit and routine (cf. James 1981: 617). Stein had thus to work against her own habits of thought and resist pre-emptive cognitive syntheses in order to be able to scrutinize her impressions for hidden identities and recurrent variations. In this fashion, Stein eventually reduced her data to the difference between “independent” and “dependent” bottom natures, and at the same time assembled a stock of individual variations: Many things then come out in the repeating that make a history of each one for any one who listens to them. Many things come out of each one and as one listens to them listens to all the repeating in them, always this comes to be clear about them, the history of them of the bottom nature in them, the nature or natures mixed up in them to make the whole of them in anyway it mixes up in them. Sometime then there will be a history of every one. [183]
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Repeating then is always coming out of every one, always in the repeating of every one and coming out of them there is a little changing. There is always then repeating in all the millions of each kind of men and women, there is repeating then in all of them of each kind of them but in every one of each kind of them the repeating is a little changing … There are then many things every one has in them that come out of them in the repeating everything living have always in them, repeating with a little changing just enough to make each one an individual being. (191)
As before, the serial organization of the text stages the author’s/narrator’s consciousness, but Stein neither concentrates on recollections of a character nor conveys the actual process of observation and analysis of a character’s typical traits. Instead she discusses the typology she came up with, and refers to her characters as case studies. Stein’s notebooks show that Otto Weininger’s misogynistic study Sex and Character (1903, translated into English in 1906) served as a model for her endeavor. Weininger argued that character reveals itself in every thought and feeling. His typology was based on gender: the proposition that every human being was bisexual by nature allowed him to construct a scale based on the proportion of allegedly “male” and “female” psychological qualities. Stein was attracted by the systematic structure of this model, but in contrast to Weininger sought to derive the basic elements of her typology from empirical observation. Stein found people to be mostly mixtures of the two bottom natures as well, with the corresponding attitudes of “attacking” versus “resisting” (or, in mixed bottom natures, of “attacking resisting” versus “resisting attacking”) referring to the dominant mode of asserting identity and power in social relationships (see Doane). There are then two kinds of women, those who have dependent independence in them, those who have in them independent dependence in them; the ones of the first of them always somehow own the ones they need to love them, the second kind of them have it in them to love only those who need them, such of them have it in them to have power in them over others only when these others have begun already a little to love them, others loving them give to such of them strength in domination. There are then these two ways of loving there are these two ways of being when women have loving in them, as a bottom nature to them, there are then many kinds of mixing, there are many kinds of each kind of them, some women have it in them to have a bottom nature in them of one of these two kinds of loving and then this is mixed up in them with the other kind of loving as another nature in them but all this will come clear in the history of all kinds of women and some kinds of men as it will now be written of them. (Stein 1995: 165)
There are parallels between the attitudes of these two basic female character types and the psychoanalytic terms narcissistic and anaclitic love. After all, Stein’s preferred mode of observation – listening – and her attention to inconspicuous details of speech bear obvious similarities with the psychoanalytic cure, which became fashionable in Paris at the same time as The Making of Americans was written; Stein was familiar with
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Freud’s work since 1909 through her brother Leo. When Freud wrote his Three Studies on Sexuality in 1905 (translated into English in 1910), he referred to Weininger’s “unreasonable” book; like Weininger, Freud maintained that humans are bisexual by nature, but based this view on clinical evidence and used case studies for his character typology. Stein, in turn, did not adopt the notion of bisexuality, but, like Weininger, treated character types as compositions of abstract elementary traits, and, like Freud, sought to base her classificatory system on empirical evidence. In contrast to both Weininger and Freud, Stein translated her analytical model into a literary composition that profoundly irritated the readers’ cognitive and aesthetic habits.
Seriality and the Rhythm of Being In contrast to Proust or Joyce, Stein did not use a version of free indirect discourse to represent a character’s stream of thought; instead, she created a model for the stream of thought and used it as a device for her own efforts at creating a character portrait or, later, at presenting her character typology. She discarded narration and description as forms of language that prevented a more precise examination of the temporality of perception and cognition, and adopted three main strategies. First, she used ordinary words and a simplified sentence structure to highlight grammar as the basic conceptual grid for the understanding of external objects. Secondly, in order to mark the stream of thought as continuous with the past and anticipatory of the future, Stein relied on verb forms such as the gerund or the progressive form that indicate the duration of thought and hence the stability of the external object. Thirdly, in order to mark the stream of thought as flux, Stein constructed a series of repetitive sentences as freeze-frames into which variations and permutations are inserted to indicate temporality and movement. Together, these three features form a cinematographic strategy of seriality (cf. Stein 1988: 176) which allows the reader to observe both the enduring and the changing elements in the author’s consciousness. The main bulk of The Making of Americans is dedicated to discussions of Stein’s typology. The characters’ life histories are offered as proof for the conceptual validity of the typological categories, which is why Stein concentrates on typical actions and abiding inner states. Her attempts to determine the bottom nature of a person seek to integrate all possibilities of change and express the person’s true being. But, in time, Stein had to recognize the limits of her method. By focusing on repetitive behavior she could not sufficiently distinguish between unconscious repetitions and conscious imitations of social roles (cf. Stein 1995: 644). In other cases, she felt the need to further qualify the perceptual foundations of her construction of “bottom natures”; for example, by comparing a specific mode of attacking to a “slimy, gelatinous, gluey, white opaquy kind of thing” (349) or by distinguishing between “sensitive attacking, and trembling attacking, and quivering attacking, and obstinate attacking, and rushing attacking …” (605), efforts that did not render her concept of attacking more precise but rather dissolved its analytic force. With some people,
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Stein’s analysis failed to produce a consistent type, presumably because the components of mixed bottom natures vied for supremacy: “Every one was a whole one in me and now a little every one is in fragments inside me” (519). Most important, however, is Stein’s realization that her conception of character types as fixed combinations of basic traits was flawed, since habits could always be broken and new modes of perception and understanding could always be achieved, by changes of context, traumatic experience, or by will (cf. 441, 600; cf. James 1981: 277). In the end, Stein found a new rationale for her serial composition that turned the epistemological problem into an asset. After all, the insight into the constant possibility of a break with habit had already been implied in her own innovative text, which breaks with tradition by focusing on the stream of thought of the artist, and thereby invites the reader to transcend his or her habits of understanding as well and reach out for a new understanding of human identity. Stein repeatedly expressed her surprise that most people were unaware of their repetitions: “Mostly each one is repeating but mostly each one is not realising their own thing as repeating in them. It is a queer thing to me who am really entirely loving repeating that mostly not any one is seeing feeling hearing themselves as doing repeating” (599, cf. 296ff.). Instead of continuing to deplore her failure to determine the essence of character, Stein realized that to concentrate on unconscious repetition “as a way to wisdom” (299) meant to focus on “what William James calls the Will to Live” (Stein 1988: 169). For serial repetition is the basic modus operandi of the body and the brain. Each breath repeats a previous one; so does each step, each bite, each spoken word. At the same time, difference is inherent in repetition: the difference of the now is the difference of the new as long as the organism is alive. Seriality is therefore redefined as conveying the “insistence” of life (Stein 1988: 166), with a complementary shift of emphasis from propositional content to the materiality of language and the rhythm of patterned sound. The Making of Americans offers the reader an experience of repetition and difference as the matrix of the “living being” of “every one.” The montage of sentences linked by repetition and marked by difference is a mise-en-scène of the pulses of repetition and change in any person’s being – which pertain to cognition and writing by creating a continuous emergence of the new (see Levin; Meyer).
Seriality in Three Lives When Stein began to sit for her famous portrait by Picasso in 1905, she interrupted her work on The Making of Americans to write several shorter prose texts, of which the collection of stories Three Lives is the best known. The volume is indebted to Flaubert’s story “Un coeur simple,” which tells the story of Félicité, a poor and uneducated servant whose life consists of nothing but her daily chores. In two of the three texts of Three Lives, Stein rewrote Flaubert’s story by focusing on the lives of American immigrant women who live and die as servants. While Flaubert summarized Félicité’s repetitive life by comparing her to an automaton, Stein, however, gave at least Anna,
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the first of her two servant characters, agency and buoyancy in spite of the drudgery of her daily life. Using the same conceptual frame as in the first part of The Making of Americans, Anna is classified as a typical German, but in marked contrast to the novel, Stein creates a vivid presentation of Anna by citing and reciting her typical garbled speech patterns and describing her typical actions by mimicking Anna’s limited vocabulary. This strategy of description by mimicry is developed into serial repetition in the central story of Three Lives, “Melanctha,” where Stein deals with the life and death of a black woman and resorts to racist stereotypes to construct the basic traits of her character. Only after the novella Q.E.D. (written in 1903) was posthumously published in 1950 did it become evident that “Melanctha” is a coded rewriting of this early piece of autobiographical fiction, which tells the story of a lesbian love triangle. That Stein changed a Jewish American elite college milieu into a black working-class context and altered lesbian into heterosexual desire shows that she had, in fact, ceased basing her characters on socially or racially circumscribed types. Rather, the transposition is a (highly ambivalent) primitivist strategy (see North) that enabled Stein to create an abstract and rhythmic language as a mode of characterizing the protagonists. For, in contrast to The Making of Americans, “Melanctha” allows the reader to conduct his or her own psychological analysis. By way of serially organized dialogues in which Melanctha and Jeff Campbell (modeled on Stein herself) keep repeating themselves and each other in cumbersome efforts to express their thoughts and feelings, they can be observed as they fall in love, struggle with each other, and finally separate. “… What I mean Miss Melanctha by what I am always saying is, you shouldn’t try to know everybody just to run around and get excited. It’s that kind of way of doing that I hate so always Miss Melanctha, and that is so bad for all of us coloured people. I don’t know as you understand now any better what I mean by what I was just saying to you. But you certainly do know now Miss Melanctha, that I always mean it what I say when I am talking.” “Yes, I certainly do understand you when you talk so Dr. Campbell. I certainly do understand now what you mean by what you was always saying to me. I certainly do understand Dr. Campbell that you mean you believe it’s not right to love anybody.” “Why sure no, yes I do Miss Melanctha, I certainly do believe strong in loving, and in being good to everybody, and trying to understand what they all need, to help them.” “Oh I know all about that way of doing Dr. Campbell, that certainly ain’t the kind of love I mean when I am talking. I mean real, strong, hot love, Dr. Campbell, that makes you do anything for somebody that loves you.” (Stein 1979: 111)
These are the flirtatious beginnings of Melanctha’s and Jeff ’s love affair, but the repetitions show the insistence of certain traits which undermine their relationship: Jeff is naïve and self-righteous, insecure and afraid of sexual desire, while Melanctha is a person ready to risk herself in the passion of a moment. By writing Q.E.D., Stein worked through her relationship with May Bookstaver, and came to terms with its
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failure by declaring it a structural inevitability. By writing “Melanctha,” Stein experimented with recurrent speech patterns as a key to unconscious character traits, an insight that was crucial for the development of her character typology, and, later, for her notion of the vital rhythms of being. In addition to the major works discussed here, Stein also wrote other fiction, much of which was not published until after her death. A Novel of Thank You (written 1925–6, published 1958) is partly a self-reflexive account of preparing to write a novel. Lucy Church Amiably, written 1927 and published 1930, describes the experience of rural life in France and advertises itself as a “Novel of Romantic beauty and nature and which Looks Like an Engraving” (Stein 1972: 5). From the same period comes her one excursion into detective fiction, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, written in 1933 and published in 1948. Set in a country house, the novel avoids most conventions of narrative development; the last chapter inverts endings by beginning “once upon a time.” Finally, Mrs. Reynolds, published in 1952 with “novelettes” from the 1930s, attempts to convey the experience of a couple living through World War II. Historical detail is replaced by an extended evocation of daily life, because, as Stein explains in her epilogue, “it is a perfectly ordinary couple living an ordinary life and having ordinary conversations and really not suffering personally from everything that is happening to them” (Stein 1969: 267). In these still comparatively little-known works, Stein continues to develop the serial methods that she devised in Three Lives and The Making of Americans.
References and Further Reading Ashton, Jennifer (2005). From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benstock, Shari (1986). The Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Gertrude Stein: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Bridgman, Richard (1970). Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press. DeKoven, Marianne (1983). A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing. Madison, W.I.: University of Wisconsin Press. Doane, Janice L. (1986). Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press. Dubnick, Randa (1984). The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press.
James, William (1981). The Principles of Psychology [1890], 2 vols. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press. James, William (1996). Essays in Radical Empiricism [1912]. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Katz, Leon (1978). “Weininger and The Making of Americans,” Twentieth Century Literature, 24 (1): 8–26. Levin, Jonathan (1999). The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Meyer, Steven (2001). Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlation of Writing and Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press. North, Michael (1994). The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and 20th Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perloff, Marjorie (1979). “Poetry as Word System: The Art of Gertrude Stein,” The American Poetry Review, 8 (5): 33–43.
Gertrude Stein Ruddick, Lisa (1990). Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Shaughnessy, Nicola (2007). Gertrude Stein. Tavistock: Northcote House. Stein, Gertrude (1969). Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries. Stein, Gertrude (1972). Lucy Church Amiably [1930]. Millerton, N.Y.: Something Else. Stein, Gertrude (1979). Three Lives [1909]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stein, Gertrude (1986). The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933]. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Stein, Gertrude (1988). Lectures in America [1935]. London: Virago. Stein, Gertrude (1995). The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress [1925]. Normal, I.L.: Dalkey Archive Press. Wald, Priscilla (1995). Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Walker, Jayne L. (1984). The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from “Three Lives” to “Tender Buttons.” Amherst, M.A.: University of Massachusetts Press. Watts, Linda S. (1999). Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
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I Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 when his position as one of America’s greatest modern writers seemed secure. His reputation, though, tumbled from the late 1960s on, as feminism and then multiculturalism had their impact. But for many present-day readers, Hemingway cannot be sidelined so easily. Fredrick Busch admits the author’s failings: his “racial and ethnic bigotry”; his female characters who are “a projection of male needfulness”; his love of violent sport and especially the bullfight (so suspect to contemporary American and British taste); and the fact that he was “just plain mean” in his response to fellow writers – his “ingratitude, his viciousness, to Ford Madox Ford, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Gertrude Stein.” But Busch continues: “He is so very incorrect, except in this: He gave the century a way of making literary art that deals with the remarkable violence of our time. He listened and watched and invented the language – using the power, the terror, of silences – with which we could name ourselves” (Busch: 231–2). It is easy to confuse Hemingway with his fictional protagonists. The biographical experience on which much of his work is based, and non-fiction which features (a version of) the author, encourage this. But Hemingway and Nick Adams or Frederic Henry are not one and the same. Similarly, the public persona that Hemingway adopted was but one part of a more complex and multi-faceted subjectivity. It is true that the public Hemingway at times came close to self-parody, particularly in an assertive masculine performance that bears all the signs of hidden sexual and/or gender anxieties to a more knowing and suspicious contemporary audience. His various wartime exploits and love of big-game hunting, fishing, and bullfighting, as well as the “Papa Hemingway” sobriquet he adopted, were all part of this self-representation as red-blooded man of action. Edmund Wilson wittily commented on his “ominous resemblance to Clark Gable” – a resemblance extending beyond physical appearance to a shared form of “stylised masculinity” (see Raeburn: 55, 64). That last quality has
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found little favor in a modern American world where less assertive forms of behavior, and male sensitivity and emotional openness, are more highly valued, and where gender roles are no longer so rigidly constructed. Indeed, in the posthumously published Under Kilimanjaro, Hemingway acknowledges such critical public perceptions of him, listing “hairy chested bombast” (Hemingway 2005: 307) among the various “faults” of which he has been accused. Hemingway’s own gender performance has been seen in contradictory (if connected) ways, both as a sign of unreconstructed patriarchal machismo, and as the over-compensations of an insecure masculinity. Such contradictions carry over into his writing. Nick Adams’s synecdochal description of Trudy, his first sexual partner, in terms of her “plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts,” objectivizes the female body in specifically sexual terms (Hemingway 1987: 385). But this is a representation of Nick’s (not the author’s) thought processes and point of view, and an attitude to sex inevitably conditioned by, and reacting against, his father’s puritanical outlook shown in this same story (“Fathers and Sons,” 1933). The fact that the relationship occurs with an Indian girl, outside the scan of the everyday white middleclass world of convention and propriety, gives Nick, too, the space for such self-expression – for here desire can be (temporarily) acted out without fear of longterm consequence. In Hemingway’s later work, the masculine physicality of some of his protagonists is (over-)emphasized, and they tend to share characteristics associated with projected versions of the author himself. This accords with a certain loss of subtlety and flexibility, and even a tendency toward self-parody, in his prose as time passed. So Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not (1937) loses an arm after a shooting incident while illegally running liquor from Cuba, but his manhood and sexual potency (the two are equated here) continue, nonetheless, to be celebrated. And his proletarian virility (“That boy’s got cojones”: Hemingway 1953: 78), physical size and presence, and ability fully to satisfy his wife Marie, are sharply contrasted with the life of the adulterous writer, Richard Gordon, his failing and sterile marriage and unfulfilling life. Similarly, in Across the River and into the Trees (1950), Colonel Cantwell too often sounds like an exaggerated and one-dimensional version of the Hemingway code-hero – a man locked in existential battle, looking to live with dignity and courage in a naturalistic universe where, in the face of the constant presence and pressure of death, pain, and violence, even a “winner” (to slightly alter the title of one of the short-story collections) “takes nothing.” To concentrate on such examples, though, is to do Hemingway a disservice. If it is true that male protagonists are the main focus of his attention, he can (as in the 1927 “Hills Like White Elephants”) be damning on male insensitivity and selfcentered behavior, and sympathetic to the feelings and viewpoint of his female protagonists. And, overall, his fictional representation of gender role and sexuality moves in a number of different directions. At one level, Hemingway clearly found self-sufficient masculinity attractive – as, perhaps, a necessary response to a world where intimacy serves only as the prelude to crippling loss (see another 1927 story, “In
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Another Country”). But the majority of his early protagonists – and most especially Nick Adams, and Jake Barnes (in The Sun Also Rises, 1926) – are figures lacking such authority, unable to act effectively to influence the world through which they move. Paul Goodman notes perceptively that though Hemingway’s “characters [may] come on with a heavy preponderance of active verbs … the effect is passive.” Even when they initiate actions, “they influence nothing; events happen to them” (Goodman: 181). Jake Barnes’s emasculation, his impotence suffered as a result of war, consequently stands as the sign of a more general (modernist) anxiety about masculinity and its performance. So, in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick’s “cultivation of a traditionally female space … organising and tending his ‘homelike’ space” as he makes camp, follows the knowledge brought by war (and indeed by his whole early history) that manliness signifies neither autonomy nor invulnerability (Strychacz: 253). At the same time, forms of masculinity that are traditionally practiced – rituals of hunting and killing – are shown up, and especially in David Bourne’s hunting stories in the posthumous The Garden of Eden (1985), as destructive, desensitizing, and unnecessarily brutal. (Hemingway’s attitude to such male rituals was always ambivalent – thus, for instance, he would always celebrate bullfighting unreservedly.) Hemingway’s almost obsessive concern with androgyny in his fiction (most noticeably in The Garden of Eden) suggests an awareness both of the damaging constrictions of traditional male and female roles, and the attractions of other ways of practicing gender (and of sexual interaction). All this makes him sound rather less old-fashioned and more interesting than he is generally considered to be, and has certainly prompted new approaches to, and readings of, his work. In the last analysis, though, his writing usually ends – despite all such anxieties and instabilities – by validating male mastery and sexual authority.
II As Hemingway’s career progressed, so his literary style (like his own performance of masculinity) tended to become more rigid. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the late novella singled out for mention in the Nobel Prize award, is judged by some as one of his best books but, as time has passed, has increasingly been seen as badly overwritten (John Aldridge calls it “a classic parable in stone … quite dead”: see Lynn: 565). But Hemingway’s style at its best (and particularly early on) is one reason he remains such an important twentieth-century writer. American modernist authors – at least those like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Cather – were adept at learning lessons from more experimental artists of the period, and in then adapting them to realist narrative frames. Hemingway – forging his distinctive style in Paris from 1921 through 1928 – was particularly influenced by Ezra Pound and his Imagist precepts. Pound insisted on concreteness (“all knowledge is built up from a rain of factual atoms”: Gefin: 9–10)
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and on clarity, economy, and precision. He looked for a new twentieth-century poetry that was “ ‘nearer the bone’ … as much like granite as it can be … austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (Pound: 12). It was exactly such “slither,” the use of emotive, easily used, abstract, and inaccurate language that Frederic Henry dismisses in A Farewell to Arms (1929). Here, words such as “sacred, glorious and sacrifice,” used to exhort the troops during war, are deemed worthless and misleading (“the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it”); rejected as “obscene” when set alongside “the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers … and the dates” (Hemingway 1949: 191). Indeed, it is such latter detail that forms the “factual atoms” composing Hemingway’s “degree zero,” sparsely minimalistic prose. Such atoms take on crucial importance as they then serve to indicate a fuller contextual and emotional whole. Again Pound’s words fit Hemingway’s practice directly here: that the writer should focus on those details that “give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence and law … The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment” (Gefin: 8). It is a short step here to Hemingway’s own statements of aesthetic intent in Death in the Afternoon (1932). He first speaks of his early career: “I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty … was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced … the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion …” (Hemingway 1952: 2). Later in the book, he then propounds his (famous) iceberg theory: a view of artistic practice that stems from, and is a correlative of, that previous statement: Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over … If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader … will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. (1952: 191–2)
What Hemingway does in his prose is to present his reader with the bare descriptive facts of the event described, and the sequence of those events – the way one moment and event lead into the next – in a type of “and then” (paratactic) manner. The emotional resonance, and larger meanings of, these events remain unsaid but are – in accordance with the iceberg metaphor – nonetheless revealed to the reader as the fullest meanings of the first (motion and fact) stage of the process is comprehended. But there is another crucial element to Hemingway’s stylistic practice, learnt from Gertrude Stein. Stein was working at the radical end of modernist stylistic experimentation and influenced Hemingway considerably during the Paris years, teaching him – among other things – “valid and valuable … truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition” (Hemingway 1964: 17). Hemingway’s insistence on putting down “what really happened in action” suggests his strong commitment to
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realism (the text as a direct and transparent representation of an outside world). But his use of repetition is the main device he uses to formally structure his prose, and to introduce – through these “quasi-poetical links” (Seed: 20) – the metaphoric patterning that leads his reader toward interpretation. This patterning runs alongside, and is in tension with, the paratactic insistence on the direct sequence of described events. The opening of one of Hemingway’s most famous stories, “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925) offers one concrete – though necessarily brief – example of just how this whole stylistic process works. “The sequence of motion and fact” is clear, as one fact (“The train went on up the track …”) is followed by another (“Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas …”), then another (“There was no town, nothing but the rails …”), and so on. The “motion” here is both in the way we are taken, in the first two quotes, from one event to the next, but also in the way our readerly eye is being moved – from that departing train, back to the figure of Nick (the story’s central protagonist), then from the immediate rail track to the “burned-over stretch of hillside” where the town of Seney used to stand. The story continues in this way as we both follow Nick’s eye as he takes in the scene and follow his actions as he moves from the rail track to the bridge over the river nearby, and then takes the road leading “back into the country.” This sense of sequence, though, is balanced against – and affected by – the repetitions that pattern the first four paragraphs of the story. One series of repeated subject– verb combinations pulls the whole episode together, with variations of the phrase, “Nick [or he] looked … saw … [or] watched,” appearing twelve times. This establishes Nick, at this early textual point, as a passive (and, as will be discovered, a damaged) spectator rather than as an active doer. The burnt-over town he then describes, together with the blackened grasshoppers later, connote Nick’s own damaged subjectivity, and the impossibility of a simple return to past habit, practice, and being (the intact town “he had expected to find”). The reader reaches this interpretative conclusion as he or she uses the repeated (and metaphoric) detail of the ruined town and burnt-over landscape to move from the surface depiction of described event to an underlying further and hidden understanding of Nick’s emotional and psychological state (as in that “iceberg,” for nothing is directly told or shown here). There are a series of other repetitions in this narrative start, all of which reinforce a metaphorical reading of the story (lack of space prevents me from elaborating here, but see Messent 2007 for more detail, and Messent 1992: 22–39 on the 1927 story, “Now I Lay Me”). Such close examination reveals that a sequential reading of Hemingway’s prose – one absolutely tied in this case to the ongoing and closely detailed description of Nick Adams’s perceptions, actions, and thoughts in their exact chronological sequence – combines with the metaphorical prompts brought about by the use of repetition to take us from a textual world of apparently transparent and straightforward surfaces to interpretative work of some complexity. Hemingway’s style – at least in the early stories and novels (for his sentences can get considerably longer later in his career) – presents simple and bare-boned grammatical structures and an easy accessibility that nonetheless reveal considerable depths of feeling and meaning. His
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characters, too, share something of this same quality with a tight-lipped and minimalist use of language and an emotional reticence in almost direct correlation to the amount of feeling that they conceal. Hemingway’s controlled understatement and stress on the suppression (rather than an excess) of information, avoidance of sentimental excess and rhetorical flourish, and his use of dialogue as a means of conveying narrative meaning and significance, have had an enormous impact on the twentieth-century short story and novel. It is almost impossible to conceive of writers like Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Joan Didion (and many others) without him. As Russell Banks has said, “If you want to write in American vernacular English – and most of us do – then you have to turn to Hemingway. It was his invention” (quoted in Paul: 116).
III There are many aspects of Hemingway’s art and development left unconsidered here. I conclude this chapter, however, by reconsidering Hemingway’s relationship to his America, and tracing the different directions of his writing in this respect. The first such movement is back to his boyhood past, to an (at times) utopian sense of unspoiled country, and to the earlier Indian culture and relationship with the land that predated his white, Midwestern memories and heritage. The second is away from America and toward France, Spain, Italy, Cuba, and Africa, with an emphasis on a transnational and comparative cultural identity surprisingly contemporary in its dimensions. In passages cut from the final version of Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway describes the geographical movements of his own life, returning to the Michigan of his boyhood summers. His memory is of a vanished and simpler rural American world now obliterated: Michigan I loved very much when I lived in it … but as I grew up each time I returned to it it was changed … They cut down the forests, the streams lost their water, the lakes had their levels lowered and raised by the taking or not taking of water to float sewerage from Chicago down the drainage canals; they built concrete roads across all the country and around the lakes … [Y]ou will never know … what the heart of a country was after it is gone. (Beegel: 52–3)
Unspoiled country in America has been despoiled, suburbanized, polluted by the effects of urban living, covered over by the signs of a commercial and faceless mass culture. So, in “Remembering Shooting-Flying” (1935), Hemingway remembers the place where in boyhood he shot his first pheasant as now transformed: “there was a hot dog place and filling stations and the north prairie … was all a subdivision of mean houses” (Hemingway 1967: 188). Hemingway’s idyllic notion of America as sacred space, as true “home,” belonged to his childhood memory alone. He saw the “heart of [the] country” as consequently
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vanished, ripped out by modernization and its effects: a process that separated the author from both the land and from the citizens he saw contributing to its ruin. This vision, however, taken from his non-fiction writing, is represented (as so often in Hemingway’s case) in more complex form in his fiction. Here, the note of nostalgia is always strongly qualified, with a critical consciousness that acknowledges the impossibility of recapturing the idyllic moment, and of any pure return to nature and the “primitive.” Indeed, even that notion of an earlier boyhood America as sacred space or true home disappears, in a concern with what had already been lost as that world came into being. For the legacy of American Indian life and culture is a repeated concern in his fiction, most especially in the Nick Adams stories. There is a strong sense here of lost origins, of something irrecoverable associated with native life, culture, and land usage – obliterated as cultural interaction has occurred. Hemingway gestures toward that earlier Indian presence in the very name of one of his best-known stories, “Big Two-Hearted River,” while in “The Last Good Country” – a resonant title if ever there was one, and an unfinished story (posthumously published in 1972) – Nick retreats from law, the father, and social responsibility to find, with some difficulty, his way to a pastoral retreat in “a very old place … [where] the firestones are Indian” (Hemingway 1987: 518). Nick directly identifies himself here with the previous inhabitants, tells himself that “You should have been an Indian” (p. 530). The fact, though, that only the trace of an Indian presence remains here (the firestones), and that he ends the published version of the story reading Wuthering Heights – a book whose very subject is the inextricability of nature and white western culture – to the young sister who has accompanied him to this “Number One” camp (p. 529), suggests the impossibility of a return to unspoiled nature and to the (Indian) way of life Nick associates with it. Utopian origin, the quest for any original and pure version of America, in other words, retreats however far we pursue that quest. Hemingway does, however, seem to associate the best of America with the previous Indian inhabitants of the land. Hemingway’s attitude to his contemporary U.S. was generally dismissive. Presentday American literary critics have responded to the impact of globalization and to their own unease with an American exceptionalist discourse (the notion of a single national narrative significantly different from – and better than – that of other nations) by moving in a transnationalist direction. Rather than focusing on what makes the literature of a specific country identifiably “English” or “American” (for example), such an approach sets such different (national) cultural formations against each other both to illuminate the strengths, limits, and selective blindnesses of each and to emphasize the interrelationship between them. Hemingway and his fellow modernists – many of them based in Paris – should be considered in such a light: their artistic agendas and subject matter often making them early proponents of a transnational approach, though before the invention of that particular term. Gertrude Stein would famously say of American expatriation in the 1920s: “Of course they all came to France a great many to paint pictures and naturally they could not do that at home, or write they could not do that at home either, they
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could be dentists at home” (see Bradbury: 31). When Hemingway wrote about his present-day America he, too, would tend to characterize it as provincial, bourgeois, and narrow-minded – and as ugly too (“sewerage from Chicago”). In “Soldier’s Home” (1925), the religious pieties, conventional belief systems, and, indeed, very language of middle America are revealed as hopelessly irrelevant to a changed postGreat War reality. “Wine of Wyoming” (1930) uses a Prohibition theme to indicate the spiritual aridity of American life, but also suggests rich possibilities in the crossing of national and cultural boundaries. Such possibilities, however, can only exist if lessons are learned (as they fail to be learned here) from the way of life associated with the Fontan family, who provide a French enclave within the story’s American setting. The critique of American culture continues in Hemingway’s first bullfighting book, Death in the Afternoon. But here the transnational aspects of his writing are stepped up a level as Hemingway uses his representation of Spanish culture and his immersion in its rituals and ways of life as a comparative measure against which to judge America, and its modernized culture (see Messent 2004). The Spain that Hemingway describes becomes the healthy yardstick against which a distant and diseased America is measured. Hemingway’s association of his own sanitized country and culture – with its “Y.M.C.A. and other institutions for clean living” (Hemingway 1952: 103) – with the unhealthy rather than the healthy appears paradoxical, but is explained in his concern with what makes for the fullest response to life and its living. Thus, when Hemingway describes those “modern comforts” which include “a bathtub in every American home,” he implies the poverty of a materialistic and therapeutic culture, criticizing the way it chooses to repress any knowledge of, or “intelligent interest in,” more important things – in this case, the taboo subject of death. A healthily mature Spanish citizenry is quite different in this respect (pp. 266, 264). But throughout the book, America – and the value systems associated with its modernized culture – is (often implicitly but sometimes explicitly) unfavorably compared with Spanish traditionalism and ways of life. In the Spain of Death in the Afternoon, the sense of unspoiled country associated with Hemingway’s boyhood America is also (just) still present. The Spanish are described in terms of the meaningful rituals (and especially the bullfight) by which they live their lives, and their harmonic and pretechnological relationship with their land. The culture is associated with a “rural, primitive … ‘wholeness’ ” (see Manganaro: 29) which (even if it may now be disappearing) can still in Hemingway’s eyes be clearly identified and celebrated. (Hemingway reveals a clearly utopian strain in his thinking here: the desire for a pure and permanent natural space where the fullest human contentment can be found. As time went on, though, he was unable to finally identify this desire with any one particular country or geography – America, Spain, Africa, the Gulf Stream – but rather shifts between locations, all of which are affected by a constantly growing sense of contamination on a global scale.) What Hemingway, then, brings to his Spanish subject matter – and, in often very different ways, to his French, Italian, African, and Cuban material too – is an
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awareness of other cultures against which America and its values are measured and, for the most part, found wanting. The large amounts of time Hemingway spent abroad, and the fact that so much of his writing is set there, speaks clearly of this comparative consciousness. I focus, however, on Africa, represented in the underrated Green Hills of Africa (1935) as a “good country,” one of the “good places to go,” in contrast with an America made “a bloody mess” by its people. Judged a place where the Hemingway protagonist was able “to really live. Not just let my life pass” (Hemingway 1963: 285), there is something here of a colonialist mentality: Africa as an unspoilt geography where white manhood can be tested and proved in the hunting exploits Hemingway describes. But there is more to it than this. Hemingway recognizes alternative forms of manliness and of community in Africa, finding in a Masai village, “the tallest, best-built, handsomest people I had ever seen” with “that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from” (p. 221). And in Under Kilimanjaro (2005) – despite the often one-sided nature of the racial and economic exchange taking place, and the power and authority this necessarily gives his first-person protagonist – Hemingway shows a genuine interest in constructing an alternative form of social and cultural life, again in an African setting. This is an extremely odd book: one that shifts oddly in tone between intended comedy, serious social and descriptive commentary, and even tragedy (in an implicit sense of declining power and of missed opportunity, and with the reader’s knowledge – but with no mention in the text – of the two plane crashes that signaled the end of this African trip, and the start of a steep decline in Hemingway’s physical and mental health). In it, Hemingway shows his awareness of the way in which Africa, and the role of its white visitors, has changed as a result of historical events and the resistance to colonial rule. He also positions himself as a global traveler returning to “the best place I had ever been” (Hemingway 2005: 426) but very aware of the provisionality and instability of his position: I asked [Mwindi] for Wakamba words and tried to memorize them and then … went out to the fire to sit … in an old pair of pajamas from Idaho, tucked into a pair of warm mosquito boots made in Hong Kong … and drank a whisky and soda made from … boiled water from the stream that ran down from the mountain animated by a syphon cartridge made in Nairobi. “I’m a stranger here,” I thought … (pp. 164–5)
“A man,” Hemingway (or rather the version of him represented here) states, “must comport himself as a man … He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot” (p. 23). In this African context, he constructs a temporary way of life that (in theory) respects and follows the “laws and customs” of the local populations. (Though, as Jeremiah Kitunda suggests, the monologic quality of the protagonist’s voice may deflect from a more critical reading
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of his words and actions.) From his own viewpoint at any rate, he does integrate with the community around him. He tries “to learn Kamba” (Hemingway 2005: 42), a local dialect, and acts in the role of a law-giving authority figure to the community in the immediate vicinity (“The only laws are tribal laws and I was a mzee which means an elder as well as still having the status of a warrior,” p. 354). He attempts, not always successfully, to conduct his extramarital relationship with Debba – one apparently accepted in her tribe’s polygamous culture (and accepted, too, by Miss Mary, his own wife) – according to local rules and “correct etiquette” (p. 146). And he identifies himself with the native group with which he hunts: “For a long time I had identified myself with the Wakamba and now … the identification was complete” (p. 130). At the same time, in camp, he constructs – with his African employees/ companions – a hybrid set of beliefs and forms of social organization cherry-picked from their wider knowledge and experience: “We retain the best of various other sects and tribal law and customs but we weld them into a whole that all can believe in” (p. 89). These beliefs include a made-up religion (“the Holy War Meat Eaters and Beer Drinkers Happy Hunting Ground and Mountain religion,” p. 371): one where “we tolerate the whites and wish to live in harmony with them … But on our own terms” (p. 89). There is something strained, and even faintly absurd, about all this, as the Hemingway persona accepts. He admits to being “as always … a little appalled by my oratory” as he addresses the local tribal elders (44), and writes that, in the local village, “he is regarded as mad in the greatest tradition of Holy Men” (p. 103). And when Miss Mary says, “you all make up your lies and live in this strange world you all have … I feel superior to the nonsense and to the unrealness” (84), her words go unchallenged. At the same time I think we must take seriously Hemingway’s unease with whiteness (see the Moslem missionary’s “Sermon against the White Man,” pp. 251–2), the “homesickness for Africa” he feels when in America (p. 205), and his attempt – as he moves between different places and cultures – to construct some kind of system that takes the best, and rejects the worst, from all that he knows. His African camp, in this respect, acts a type of transnational experimental space where a new identity and way of life can be temporarily assumed. Hemingway could never, of course, shuck off his American identity, and that was the country in which he spent the last (and what seem to have been the most mentally agonizing) years of his life. But the time he spent in other countries, his unease with the values of his homeland, and his genuine interest in other cultural systems and art forms, make him a writer ripe for renewed attention and exploration as critical attention to transnationalism develops. Thus, Melling (2006) has written on his deep fascination with Cuban culture and Santeria (the syncretistic Caribbean religion), and on the whole Cuban–American intercultural exchange in The Old Man and the Sea. And there is, in particular, more work to be done on Hemingway and Africa. With such critical developments, Hemingway’s importance to American – and western – literary culture looks assured for some time yet to come.
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Beegel, Susan (1988). Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press. Bradbury, Malcolm (1982). The Expatriate Tradition in American Literature. Durham: British Association for American Studies. Busch, Frederick (1998). A Dangerous Profession: A Book about the Writing Life. New York: St. Martin’s. Donaldson, Scott, ed. (1996). The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eby, Carl P. (1999). Hemingway’s Fetishisms: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Gefin, Laszlo (1982). Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method. Austin: University of Texas Press. Goodman, Paul (1971). Speaking and Language: Defense of Poetry. New York: Random House. Hemingway, Ernest (1949). A Farewell to Arms [1929]. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Hemingway, Ernest (1952). Death in the Afternoon [1932]. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Hemingway, Ernest (1953). To Have and Have Not [1937]. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Hemingway, Ernest (1963). Green Hills of Africa [1935]. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Hemingway, Ernest (1964). A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Hemingway, Ernest (1967). By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, ed. William White. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Hemingway, Ernest (1987). The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Hemingway, Ernest (2005). Under Kilimanjaro, eds. Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming. Kent, O.H.: Kent State University Press. Kitunda, Jeremiah M. (2006). “Ernest Hemingway’s African Book: An Appraisal,” The Hemingway Review, 25 (2): 107–13.
Lynn, Kenneth S. (1989). Hemingway. London: Simon and Schuster. Manganaro, Marc, ed. (1990). Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Melling, Philip H. (2006). “Cultural Imperialism, Afro-Cuban Religion, and Santiago’s Failure in The Old Man and the Sea,” The Hemingway Review, 26 (1): 6–24. Messent, Peter (1992). Ernest Hemingway. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Messent, Peter (2004). “ ‘The Real Thing’? Representing the Bullfight and Spain in Death in the Afternoon,” in A Companion to Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon”, ed. Miriam B. Mandel, pp. 123–41. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House. Messent, Peter (2007). “Liminality, Repetition, and Trauma in Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ and Other Nick Adams Stories,” in Mapping Liminalities: Thresholds in Cultural and Literary Texts, ed. Lucy Kay, Zoe Kinsley, Terry Philips, et al., pp. 137–65. Bern: Peter Lang. Moddelmog, Debra A. (1999). Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Hemingway. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Paul, Steve (1999). “On Hemingway and his Influence: Conversations with Writers,” The Hemingway Review, 18 (2): 115–32. Pound, Ezra (1954). Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot. Norfolk, C.T.: New Directions. Raeburn, John (1984). Fame Became of Him. Bloomington, I.N.: Indiana University Press. Seed, David (1983). “ ‘The Picture of the Whole’: In Our Time,” in Ernest Hemingway: New Critical Essays, ed. A. Robert Lee, pp. 13–35. London: Vision Press. Strychacz, Thomas (1989). “Dramatizations of Manhood in Hemingway’s In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises,” American Literature, 61 (2): 245–60.
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John Dos Passos Andrew Hook and David Seed
Reading the U.S.A. trilogy in 1938, Sartre declared John Dos Passos to be the “greatest writer of our time” (Pizer 2003: 367). From that peak, Dos Passos’ reputation has declined steadily. In comparison with other big names of the interwar years, such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, he has received far less critical attention. The reasons for this neglect are complex. His gradual estrangement from the Left to his final stance as a Goldwater Republican in the 1960s, and his increasing use of fictional methods to describe the historical changes in the USA, played their part. Nevertheless, Dos Passos remains one of the most powerful analysts of American culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Dos Passos’ first inkling of the revolutionary changes in the arts that modernism would bring came before World War I when he was still a student at Harvard. In 1913, he had seen the Armory Show in New York which had introduced an American audience for the very first time to the new, experimental movements occurring in European painting. In the same period, he became aware of the Anglo-American Imagist movement in contemporary poetry which heralded the onset of the modernist poetic revolution soon to occur in the work of Pound and Eliot. In the years 1915–16, he began formulating his opposition to a literature glorifying the U.S.A. and uncritically worshipping the “two-fold divinity: Science and Industrialism” (Layman: 99). In these years, Dos Passos was also exposed to the artistic experiments that were taking place in Paris. The result was a conviction that “in the arts everything was abolished. Everything must be reinvented from scratch” (Dos Passos 1968: 24). In his draft novel “Afterglow” and One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920), Dos Passos explored ways in which semi-autobiographical young protagonists attempt to come to terms with the modern age. He was a keen admirer of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (1916), whose influence can be felt in the shape of these narratives. In these works, Dos Passos established his characteristic method of description through vivid visual detail. One Man’s Initiation demonstrates a rather awkward tension between the physical spectacle of warfare on the Western Front and the protagonist’s commitment
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to a cause, a tension which is addressed through the debates over humanity that punctuate the narrative. It was his first-hand experience of Paris, immediately after the end of World War I, which made Dos Passos alert to the significance for all the arts of the modernist movement. Looking back from the 1960s, he tells us that after the war “everything looked different in the light of what was happening in Europe” (Wagner: 48). After his war service he was able to study in Paris. In this period, his exposure to French experimentalism was increased, especially to Fernand Leger’s violent juxtaposition of contemporary material and Blaise Cendrars’ art of simultaneity. Dos Passos’ 1921 novel Three Soldiers marked a clear advance in technique, being constructed around the central metaphor of the machine. Here again, warfare is the subject, specifically the ways in which the military suppress the individuality of the raw recruits. The machine referred to in the section titles is thus a clear metaphor of how the army functions, and a rhythm is established early in the novel of characters merging into the anonymous collectivities of the army and detaching themselves from it, at which point their individuality is revealed. The philosophical discussions of Dos Passos’ first novel are replaced by arguments about the sort of allegiance demanded by the army. When the soldiers are being prepared for action in France, the first section – “Making the Mould” – suggests the first stage of a quasi-industrial process. Activities on the Western Front – “Machines” – are the sign that they have become cogs in a military machine embodied in the trains that transport them from place to place and in the lines of khaki-clad figures stretching away into the distance. Three Soldiers, however, gave little sign of the sophistication characteristic of the novel Dos Passos was shortly to publish. Manhattan Transfer (1925) deserves to be recognized as the first truly modernist American novel. Of course, this early in his career Dos Passos did owe something to the previous generation of writers who, pursuing the new directions of realism and naturalism, had brought a non-genteel challenge to the pieties of conventional American letters. But in terms of formal articulation, of how a work of fiction is structured and communicated to the reader, Manhattan Transfer represents a break with the past. Dos Passos is writing a new kind of novel, responding to the changes he recognized as occurring across all forms of art in the postwar world of the 1920s. It is no coincidence that in 1925 he also helped to secure publication of Hemingway’s most experimental volume of short stories, In Our Time (Carr: 209). As a young writer in America then, Dos Passos was determined to become part of the movement that he recognized as transforming all traditional modes of artistic expression and communication. After Paris, indeed, he seemed to see New York itself with new eyes: “New York was the first thing that struck me. It was marvelous. It was hideous. It had to be described … rapportage on New York … Fragmentation. Contrast. Montage” (Wagner: 63) To succeed in communicating such a vision of the city, new techniques were demanded of the novel. Here is how he subsequently described his thought processes at the time: “Why not write a simultaneous chronicle? A novel, full of popular songs, political aspirations and prejudices, ideals, hopes,
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delusions, crackpot notions, clippings out of the daily newspapers …” (Wagner: 49). Manhattan Transfer would be just such a simultaneous chronicle of the life of the city involving “a lot of different kinds of people.” After its publication, Dos Passos insisted that the modes of expression he had now begun to employ were the only way in which the imagination of the novelist could adequately represent the complexities of twentieth-century life: “The day of the frail artistic enterprise, keeping alive through its own exquisiteness, has passed. A play or a book or a picture has got to have bulk, toughness and violence to survive in the dense clanging traffic of twentieth century life” (Wagner: 63). The urban realities that he recognizes involve exactly these qualities and what he is developing are techniques to delineate such a world. One may choose to read Manhattan Transfer as a kind of dry-run for U.S.A., but we should be careful not to diminish the scale of the author’s ambition in Manhattan Transfer. The city itself is the overwhelming presence in the text, dominating and dwarfing the individual characters living within it, who are swept along by the impersonal forces that create and define the social world in which they live. These characters cross each other’s lives at random; there is no unifying plot ultimately linking them together. Their connections are rather accidental or incidental. New York is a contingent world in which accident rather than design prevails; indeed, accidents play an important role in the novel in bringing characters together. But the world of Manhattan Transfer is in the end a discontinuous, fragmented one. When an unnamed Jewish immigrant, near the opening of the novel, responds to a street advertisement by shaving off his beard, he is repudiating his own cultural and religious tradition in the hope of becoming a successful American. In this sense, he is an entirely typical character. Almost all the characters in Manhattan Transfer are looking for success. All share the belief that this is the promise of America. Dos Passos’ portrayal of the reality of American life – including the lives of those characters who are spiraling downward in New York City – is made all the more poignant by frequent allusions to the American Revolution, Patrick Henry, the 4th of July, the Statue of Liberty, and the text of the Declaration of Independence. Like The Great Gatsby (1925), Manhattan Transfer is yet another elegy for the death of the American Dream. Inevitably, there are plenty of allusions to the old, old myths of America as the land of opportunity and freedom, but for Dos Passos the promise of America has been betrayed, and the principles of the Founding Fathers have been perverted. Dos Passos’ account of New York City is modernist in its insistence on the frightening manner in which individual life seems diminished by the surrounding urban reality. But it is the manner in which this imaginative vision of the city is communicated that defines the novel as an exemplary modernist text. The overall effect is a kaleidoscopic one. Whereas, in U.S.A., the newspaper headlines are set apart in their own “Newsreels” sections, here the headlines, like the quotations from popular songs and nursery rhymes, appear within the main body of the text. Every chapter is headed by an italicized passage in which the narrative voice registers what are usually a series of sense impressions of New York City; the look, sound, smell, taste of the city in all
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its endless variety. The novel begins with a vivid, impressionistic account of a New York ferryslip. The scene is intensely visual: sky, sea, land are all evoked, but the language is also rich in words suggesting sound, movement, and even smell. The wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse is “manuresmelling.” This kind of stylistic usage involving the running together of normally separate words to create a single unified impression is one of the distinctive features of the language and style of the entire novel. Technology has its part to play here too. Dos Passos named Manhattan Transfer after a railway station in New Jersey opened in 1910 for passengers heading for New York. The title itself helps to foreground the importance of transport throughout the novel. Characters are constantly arriving by ferry, liner, and train; and, once inside the city, Manhattan proves to be packed with the sights, sounds, and smells of transport. The elevated railway (the El or L as Dos Passos calls it) is a prominent visual feature in many scenes, and the novel incorporates a depiction of the Eleventh Avenue railroad tracks that were so notorious for causing accidents that the street became nicknamed “Death Avenue.” Here, the milkman Gus McNiel has his accident which leads ultimately to his acquiring wealth. Dos Passos insistently reminds the reader of changes in transportation which correspondingly accelerate the tempo of the novel’s action. Automobiles replace horse-drawn vehicles; there is a steady increase in streetcars (electrified since 1909) and buses; and the other highways of New York harbor are constantly described with their respective traffic. At every point, the technological bustle of the city impinges on characters. It is a dynamic environment, developing from section to section. The city literally expands as we read the narrative. Dos Passos describes New York as a “city of signs,” and, indeed, hoardings offer commodities for sale or announcements of new constructions about to be built. Even the raw material of industrialism – coal, stone, different metals – makes its appearance, to help underline the point that the city is growing like some huge, commercial organism. Manhattan Transfer uses a method that makes it impossible to separate character from setting. The city penetrates characters’ lives at every point. Despite this, Marshall McLuhan accused Dos Passos of simplifying the lessons of Flaubert and Joyce since New York was “not envisaged as providing anything more than a phantasmagoric backdrop for [characters’] frustrations and defeats” (Hook: 154). His argument is that Dos Passos flattens out his characters by giving priority to their environment, whereas the novel shows many instances of characters internalizing the technological processes of the city. Ellen Thatcher’s dream of success in the theater is figured as an ascent triggered by a phrase she hears: “greatest hit on Broadway. The words were an elevator carrying her up dizzily, up into some stately height where electric light signs crackled scarlet and gold and green” (Dos Passos 2003a: 614). Conversely, when he loses his post as a reporter, Jimmy Herf hallucinates his relation to New York as a surreal transit across roof tops followed by a fall: “he dropped sickeningly fortyfour stories, crashed” (2003a: 791). Falling is one sign of his failure; diminution to the size of a dust-speck another.
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In terms of linear chronology, the novel is divided into three sections: the first section covers the years leading up to the war; the second section covers the period of the war; the third section focuses on the immediate postwar period. The lives of the novel’s characters are chronicled against this movement of history. But we have to remember that Dos Passos described his novel as a “simultaneous” chronicle. Hence, alongside this linear chronological movement, he attempts to find ways of suggesting the existence of a parallel but static world. The vertical timeline of the lives of the characters, that is, exists within the horizontal space of New York City itself. How is this concept created? First of all, the novel contains textual repetitions and circularities that suggest a non-progressive, non-linear dimension. What is most striking is the suggestion of a repetitive circularity (symbolized in the “Revolving Doors” section), embracing the lives of individual characters. Indeed, repetition itself becomes a major motif throughout the entire novel. In order to suggest the non-linear, spatial dimension of his novel, Dos Passos makes use of repeated motifs or images. Easily the most significant of these is fire. The clanging of fire engines thundering through the streets of New York is perhaps the dominating image of the entire novel. And the motif ’s centrality is suggested by the fact that the chapter exactly in the middle of the book – chapter four of the second section – is entitled “Fire Engine.” The initial fire occurs near the opening of the novel’s second chapter. Ed Thatcher, Ellen’s father, decides to “just take a look.” Hurrying home from this horrific spectacle, Ed brushes against a man whose clothes smell of coal oil: the firebug he decides. From this point on, references to fires and fire engines appear regularly in the text. The fire motif culminates in the terrifying evocation of Stan Emery’s confused and drink-sodden consciousness as in his apartment he brings on his own death by fire: “He looked out through the window. The street stood up on end. A hookandladder and a fire engine were climbing it licketysplit trailing a droning sirenshriek. Fire fire, pour on water, Scotland’s burning. A thousand dollar fire, a hundredthousand dollar fire, a million dollar fire. Skyscrapers go up like flames, in flames, flames” (2003a: 703). The novel’s final fire allusion, involving Jimmy Herf ’s baby son’s night-time terror at the sound of the fire-engine’s siren, reinforces the idea that balancing the vertical, linear, chronological movement of the multiple stories in Manhattan Transfer, there is a simultaneous, surrounding, horizontal, urban reality constantly intersecting with the character’s lives. Dos Passos uses recurring images, alongside repetitions of other kinds, to undermine the conventional notion of the necessarily linear movement of a novel’s narration. In an important essay in 1963, E. D. Lowry argued that the novel was more indebted to T. S. Eliot than to any of the previous generation of American realist or naturalist novelists (Hook: 53–60). The Waste Land (1922), he argued, with its picture of postwar London as a spiritual desert, is the major source for Dos Passos’ vision of New York City. The case Lowry makes is a good one. However, Dos Passos’ portrayal of New York is less entirely negative than Eliot’s picture of London. Much of the time in Manhattan Transfer, the city is simply observed and registered from a standpoint that is neutral, uncommitted. The streets, the skyscrapers, the traffic – even including
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the clanging fire engines – the mass and bustle of the people, the docks, the ships, the ferries, the trains and taxis, are simply the lineaments of the metropolitan reality. And part of Dos Passos’ major achievement is to succeed so well in communicating this vision of a moving, changing, variegated city life. When one looks at the people Dos Passos describes, however, the picture certainly darkens. There are no heroes or heroines here. Despite the vast range of characters, there is none with whom the reader can identify, though for a few we perhaps feel pity. The decision by Dos Passos’ surrogate, the journalist Jimmy Herf, to leave New York is in keeping with the negative characterizations of the novel. In Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos runs together a whole series of experimental techniques. As he started working on what was to become the U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1930; Nineteen Nineteen, 1932; and The Big Money, 1936), he separated out four different modes named in each volume: “Biographies,” “Camera Eye,” “Newsreels,” and narratives focusing on a particular character. Dos Passos introduces the trilogy with a preliminary sketch of a young man walking the city streets at night. This embodiment of the nation through a young male reflects Dos Passos’ homage to Whitman and anticipates both Number One (1943), framed by generic sketches of the man of the people, and the sketch which concludes Nineteen Nineteen – “The Body of an American.” For Donald Pizer, this sketch summarizes the “falsification of belief and language of the period” (Pizer 1988a: 39), but it also crystallizes the theme of human waste which runs throughout the trilogy. By naming him John Doe, Dos Passos makes him into the generic anonymous citizen turned war casualty. Civilization seems to be in conspiracy against him, and on his death his body is absorbed into the ground of France, while his symbolic national identity offers the pretext for emotive ceremonies honoring the war dead, performed around a void. Manhattan Transfer concludes with the journalist Jimmy Herf hitching a lift away from the city, heading “pretty far.” The road is such a tenacious image of possibility in American culture that the ending seems far from hopeless. At the end of the trilogy, however, a generic young man given the social label “vag” (i.e. vagrant) waits at the edge of a road for a lift that never comes. Meantime, far above his head, soars a transcontinental airliner. Dos Passos’ sense of the contrast between the haves and the have-nots could not be made clearer. The final perspective image, “a hundred miles down the road,” could be taken as a final depressing measure of the distance “vag” has to travel. The “Biographies,” written in the style of a prose-poem, include portraits of heroes of the American Left, such as Bill Heywood, Joe Hill, and La Follette. Most, however, burlesque the Horatio Ager rags-to-riches paradigm by showing the subjects to be self-obsessed or undermined by weaknesses. Andrew Carnegie is described as the “Prince of Peace,” but his status as philanthropic messiah is totally undermined by his investment in the arms trade. Woodrow Wilson, in contrast, mistakenly tries to maintain his “faith in words,” a legacy from his Presbyterian upbringing which ultimately betrays him. By naming this biography “Meester Veelson”, Dos Passos suggests a French perspective on the leader who should have dominated the Treaty of Versailles but who proved helpless before other national and commercial interests.
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Inventiveness in many of the biographies comes coupled with naïveté. Frederick Winslow Taylor, in formulating his gospel of efficiency, never paused to consider how this could be turned to exploitation. His system is followed by Henry Ford, the subject of the next biography in The Big Money. Here the narrative shows a cross-purpose in Ford’s life, a compulsion to publicize his ideas (notoriously anti-Semitic) as well as to assemble vast industrial plants. Paradoxically, in the very period of postwar boom when Ford’s prosperity was peaking, he turned away from the modern world and tried to reconstruct the world of his youth: put back the old bad road, so that everything might be the way it used to be, in the days of horses and buggies (Dos Passos 1996: 814)
And so Ford turns into an anachronism. The “Camera Eye” sections of the trilogy are connected with, but distinct from, stream of consciousness. As Donald Pizer has shown, they function “as a form of autobiographical symbolic poetry” (Pizer 1988a: 57). In the first volume, they summarize the growth of the author’s consciousness through techniques that combine subjective vision with cinematic depiction. As this consciousness matures, his role becomes that of an intermittent witness to public events. Camera Eye 46 in The Big Money, for instance, describes a return to New York where the simple act of walking identifies the narrator with the growing army of the unemployed. The “Newsreels” grew out of a practice Dos Passos had developed while composing Manhattan Transfer of jotting down news snippets “to give a taste of the times and places against which my characters’ lives were evolving” (Pizer 2003: 126). For the trilogy, he sectioned off these fragments, which he took from the Chicago Tribune for The 42nd Parallel and from the New York World for the other volumes. The “Newsreels” thus imitate the disjunctions of typical news-pages, as did many actual American newsreel films, but also offer the reader passages from the popular songs of the period. Although Newsreel 1 supplies fragments relating to the Spanish-American War of 1898, it carries the name of a more modern technology. The term “newsreel” entered the language in 1918 through Hearst reportage on World War I (most of which footage was fake) and soundtracks were added in 1928. Reporting on the 1932 Republican Convention in Chicago, Dos Passos stressed how important the mass media had become for the political life of the country, so that the “image-making faculty, instead of being the concern of the individual mind, is becoming a social business” (Pizer 2003: 121). And in his famous 1935 essay, “The Writer as Technician,” Dos Passos pleaded for resistance to a situation where “machinery and institutions have so outgrown the ability of the mind to dominate them” (Dos Passos 1988: 171). These insights from the 1930s are fed retrospectively into the narratives of the trilogy, whose “Newsreels” are given a “soundtrack” before that was technically feasible.
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Dos Passos organizes his “Newsreels” in such a way that the public rhetoric justifying events is undermined. The first, focused on the opening of the twentieth century, introduces the U.S.A. as a new player in the imperial scene through a chorus of applause from labor and the churches alike, ironically so since throughout the trilogy Dos Passos stresses social division. The ironies continue to multiply as he reveals hidden commercial motives, as in Newsreel 19 on the U.S. declaration of war. The announcement is followed by a brief quotation from the 1917 song “Over There.” What appears to be a reassuring call to the forces of democracy is reversed on the domestic scene by the quotation “plan legislation to keep coloured people from white areas” (Dos Passos 1996: 312). Thus, solidarity is directly contradicted by a plan for segregation. Newsreel 20, the first of Nineteen Nineteen, continues the theme of patriotic celebration, this time modified by an item about the rise of the New York Stock Exchange. Commerce is quietly repositioned as the ultimate priority in the conflict. Newsreel 44, introducing The Big Money, records arrivals from Europe, which should signal peace and prosperity, but conflict simply continues on the home front through industrial disputes. A news item about the news media tries to cast an anodyne, “health-restoring” gloss over these conflicts: “but has not the time come for newspaper proprietors to join in a wholesome movement for the purpose of calming troubled minds, giving all the news but laying stress on prospective calamities” (1996: 775). Dos Passos’ purpose is the direct opposite of reassurance. Through his careful assembly of fragments, so many of them highlighting public and private violence, he defamiliarizes news reportage and invites the reader to speculate about the relation of public rhetoric to economic and even sexual processes at work. Against the background of these sections, Dos Passos presents narratives of a relatively small number of named characters who are all locked in a “prison of stereotyped thought” (Pizer 1988a: 70). One of the major themes of the trilogy is established through the early experiences of Mac. He sets the keynote in being an itinerant, searching for odd jobs. One such is with Doc Bingham, a Dickensian huckster, who peddles pornography in the name of spiritual uplift. Later, Mac gets a job with an Italian printer; later still, he offers his services to the I.W.W. activists. Mac’s involvement with printing serves as a prelude to the introduction of J. Ward Moorehouse, for Donald Pizer the “fullest representation of the betrayal of American values” (Pizer 1988a: 125–6). Moorehouse is given a national symbolism from the beginning – his birthday is July 4 – and his career mirrors broader developments in the U.S.A. Beginning as a schoolboy orator, he then marries into money (the sexual dimension to his success is significant), and becomes active in a fraudulent real-estate project. When that fails, he joins the information bureau of a steel company, and by this point his main role in the trilogy has become fixed: he acts as the mouthpiece for capital, during World War I as “Major Moorehouse,” and during the postwar boom. Counterpointed against him are a series of characters representing different social fortunes. Charley Anderson supplies the socialist counterview of society; Eleanor Stoddard deals in a
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different kind of window-dressing in the business of interior decoration; and, after the war, Margo Dowling achieves some success as a Hollywood star. Each of these socially representative figures acts as a vehicle for Dos Passos’ satirical view of recent American history, and negative insights are dispersed throughout these sections, often from quite minor characters. At one point a sailor declares that the war is “crooked from A to Z” (1996: 527), reinforcing Dos Passos’ pungent irony that the most vociferous patriots are those who betray the nation’s ideals. In their reviews of Manhattan Transfer, Sinclair Lewis, Mike Gold, and D. H. Lawrence all drew analogies with film, and when reviewing the trilogy in 1938, Delmore Schwartz declared that Dos Passos had assembled the sequence like a movie director “by a procedure of cutting, arranging, and interposing parts” (Maine: 184). Indeed, during his visit to Moscow in 1928, Dos Passos had made a point of meeting Eisenstein, later recording that they “agreed thoroughly about the importance of montage” (Dos Passos 1968: 180). Throughout U.S.A., we are invited to read across sections, to constantly readjust our perspective through cross-relating segments. It is this sort of effect that Dos Passos had in mind when he later wrote: “I took to montage to try to make the narrative stand up off the page” (Pizer 2003: 166). Montage thus offered Dos Passos a means of blocking a conventional reading, thereby encouraging the reader to distrust public rhetoric, to measure the private against the public, and to look for hidden motives. By describing his narratives as “contemporary chronicles” (Pizer 2003: 165), Dos Passos was signaling an ambition to produce fiction with an historical scope, and, indeed, soon after he completed U.S.A., he embarked on a new series of works starting with Adventures of a Young Man (1939) which were to be “contemporary portraits in the shape of stories” (Ludington: 498). This novel introduced the District of Columbia trilogy, and after World War II, Dos Passos continued to mine the period he had covered in U.S.A., while extending the time-span of novels like Chosen Country (1951) backwards into the nineteenth century. Midcentury (1961) introduced some changes to his narrative method which suggest that Dos Passos was moving further in the direction of flat reportage. The “Newsreels” are now called “Documentaries”; the “Camera Eye” has been replaced by a series of monologues; and a greater range of characters figure in this examination of labor history. Just before his death in 1970, Dos Passos completed his last chronicle novel, Century’s Ebb, where he rehearsed the changing attitudes to the Left in the U.S.A. from the Spanish Civil War up to the Cold War. Here again he reserved pride of place for Whitman as a pioneer social campaigner, but as his final montage runs through the killings of President Kennedy and Malcolm X, the discovery of D.N.A. and the American moonshot, these events are loosely connected by the declaration that “we live in a time when scientism has been foisted as a nonreligion on most of the human race” (Dos Passos 1975: 472). This generalization totally fails to address the complexities of postwar America and is substantially the same assertion as that he had formulated in Harvard back in 1916.
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Carr, Virginia Spencer (1984). Dos Passos: A Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Casey, Janet Galligani (1998). Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dos Passos, John (1968). The Best Times: An Informal Memoir. London: André Deutsch. Dos Passos, John (1974). The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos. London: André Deutsch. Dos Passos, John (1975). Century’s Ebb. Boston: Gambit. Dos Passos, John (1988). The Major Nonfictional Prose. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Dos Passos, John (1996). U.S.A. New York: Library of America. Dos Passos, John (2003a). Novels 1920–1925. New York: Library of America. Dos Passos, John (2003b). Travel Books and Other Writings. New York: Library of America. Hook, Andrew, ed. (1974). Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Koch, Stephen (2005). The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles. New York: Counterpoint. Landsberg, Melvin (1972). Dos Passos’ Path to U.S.A.: A Political Biography, 1912–1936. Boulder, C.O.: Colorado Associated University Press.
Layman, Richard, ed. (1999). Afterglow and Other Undergraduate Writings by John Dos Passos. Detroit: Omnigraphics. Ludington, Townsend, ed. (1974). The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos. London: André Deutsch. Ludington, Townsend (1980). John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey. New York: Dutton. Maine, Barry, ed. (1988). Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Pizer, Donald (1988a). Dos Passos’ U.S.A.: A Critical Guide. Charlottesville, V.A.: University Press of Virginia. Pizer, Donald (1988b). John Dos Passos. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Pizer, Donald, ed. (2003). John Dos Passos’ U.S.A.: A Documentary Volume. Farrington Hills, M.I.: Gale Cengage. Rohrkemper, John (1980). John Dos Passos: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall. Rosen, Robert C. (1982). John Dos Passos: Politics and the Writer. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Sanders, David (1987). John Dos Passos: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Garland. Wagner, Linda W. (1979). Dos Passos: The Artist as American. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Thomas Wolfe Anne Ricketson Zahlan
Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900–1938) was considered by many to be the most likely of his generation to produce the “Great American Novel.” Sinclair Lewis, first U.S. recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, included praise for his younger compatriot in his 1930 acceptance speech. Lewis pronounced Wolfe’s recently published first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), “worthy to be compared with the best in our literary production.” Previously, he told an interviewer that Wolfe might “have a chance to be the greatest American writer. In fact, I don’t see why he should not be one of the greatest world writers. His first book is so deep and spacious that it deals with the whole of American life” (Kennedy: 192). William Faulkner, Nobel laureate in 1950, famously placed Wolfe at the top of his list of literary contemporaries (much to the irritation of Ernest Hemingway). According to Faulkner, “Wolfe stood highest … because he had tried hardest, had dared to throw style to the dogs, and had willfully broken rules” in his determination to put human experience into words (Idol: 69). Compared with Melville and Whitman for the largeness of his subject and the exuberance of his style, Thomas Wolfe made an enduring contribution to the literature of the United States. One cultural context that shaped Wolfe as writer and person is that of his native region. Long considered almost a nation within a nation, the American South is a society shaped by myth-making and storytelling, but also by humiliation and defeat. To the surprise of those who had dismissed the region as a cultural wasteland, the years after World War I witnessed a Southern literary renascence. The burden of the past that had kept the South backward now worked in an opposite direction: memory came to serve as both technique and theme. Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life recalls the growing up of an autobiographical protagonist, Eugene Gant, from babyhood through the stages of education to the moment of leaving his mountain homeland for good. It tells the story of a boy from a town in the American South, restricted by the limitations of family and community, but inspired by a great teacher to believe that he could accomplish
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valuable work and live a beautiful life. A product of modernist sensibility, it is an experimental narrative concerned with the “personal consciousness of the reflexive artist” (Holliday: 2). In the aftermath of the harrowing death of Eugene’s beloved older brother Ben, the book ends in the town square with a vision of the dead man come back to warn that “[t]here is no happy land. There is no end to hunger” (Wolfe 1929: 624). The spectral Ben prompts his brother’s realization that his voyage must be one of self-discovery. Look Homeward, Angel focuses on the experiences and sensibility of child, boy, and young man. It depicts also, and in merciless detail, the life of the town and the myriad foibles of its citizens. Although Wolfe is often thought of as a lyrical chronicler of experience like his own, even this first book makes clear his many facets as a writer. His narratives partake of realism and naturalism: they demonstrate mastery of satire, comic parody, and social and political critique. By the time of his death in 1938, Wolfe’s modernist focus on the personal and the aesthetic had broadened in response to his increasingly painful awareness of the injustices underlying American capitalism and the fearful threats to democracy and freedom abroad in the world. Wolfe’s second novel, Of Time and the River (1935), continues the story of Eugene Gant’s education, chronicles his travels, and ends with his discovery of the narrative vocation. Wolfe’s first two novels, as well as numerous sketches, essays, and short stories, were published in his lifetime. Two additional big books, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) were compiled from the manuscripts and outlines he left behind at his untimely death. Although Wolfe has been criticized for an alleged lack of formal discipline, his major texts remain in print and have never lacked for readers. Wolfe’s writings have continued to inspire not only readers but also generations of American writers, among them James Agee, Robert Penn Warren, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, William Styron, and Pat Conroy. “Of the novelists of the early twentieth century,” Robert Morgan attests, “only Hemingway and Faulkner have had a greater impact on the following generations” (Morgan: xiv). As for the secret of his impact, James Dickey recalls the powerful command conveyed by Wolfe’s writing: “to open up entirely to our own experience, to possess it, to go the whole way into it and with it, to keep nothing back, to be cast on the flood” (Skipp: xv). Whereas Wolfe is known chiefly for fiction, he began his writing life as an aspiring dramatist. Two plays, written in the 1920s, are still read today: Mannerhouse, a bitter drama of the antebellum South, and Welcome to Our City, a satirical attack on boosterism and greed in a North Carolina town very like Wolfe’s Asheville. Unable to confine his vision within the limits of a producible stage play, Wolfe, after a few frustrating years, abandoned his theatrical ambitions and turned to narrative. Traces of playwriting practice remain, however, in his skillful framing of scenes of conflict and in the effectiveness of his dialogue. During the playwriting years, Wolfe’s skill at characterization developed, and he has created some of the most astounding personages in American literature: W. O. Gant, for instance, and Eliza Pentland Gant, parents to Eugene, and, Esther Jack, muse and lover to George Webber. Although Wolfe provides striking descriptions of features and bearing, he consistently renders the essence of people through the way they talk.
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Making use of such diverse elements as African American and “mountain grill” talk, demotic dialogue from the New York streets, and the fashionable chatter of Manhattan soirées, Wolfe weaves a rich tapestry of speech types. The notebooks contain transcriptions of overheard dialogue, and his fictional works incorporate skillfully imitated speech typical of region, ethnic background, class, or profession. In addition to eccentric professors and histrionic actors, he renders policemen and hotel clerks of the urban North and countrymen and lynch mobs of the mountain South. As James Joyce in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses presents examples of successive styles of English prose, so Wolfe offers virtuoso samplings of American speech. Almost all the writers of the 1920–1950 Southern Renascence, as Robert Penn Warren observed, “had some important experience outside the South.” Thomas Wolfe was no exception. In 1920, he boarded a North-bound train, never again to live in his native state. Far from North Carolina, Wolfe could create the experiences of Eugene Gant of Altamont and George Webber of Libya Hill. He could call also upon his own experiences of exile in relating the later stages of his characters’ education. Of Time and the River opens with the protagonist’s long-desired escape from family and homeland: an impatient Eugene finally hears “the wailing cry of the great train, bringing to him again its wild and secret promises of flight and darkness, new lands, and a shining city”(Wolfe 1935: 404). Of Time and the River’s Book IV tells the story of what happens to the young man from Old Catawba in the “shining city” of his boyhood dreams. This account of Eugene Gant’s residence in 1920s’ New York captures the immigrant’s raw ignorance and the painful but salutary lessons inflicted upon him by the shock of the city’s reality. Overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of urban streets, Wolfe’s protagonist is horrified by the “million faces” of the crowd: “the faces stamped with all the familiar markings of suspicion and mistrust, cunning, contriving, and a hard and stupid cynicism” (Wolfe 1935: 416). Eugene comes to associate the city with rock and iron and to view it as a mirage that deceives the hopes of youth rendered powerless by its might. Wolfe’s Eugene Gant comes to terms with the city – and with his own ambitions – by getting away. A weekend at a palatial Hudson River estate impresses upon him the falsity of the exclusion practiced by the very rich in a country that was supposed to represent a new and just social order. He realizes that no privileged enclave can contain the true essence of America. He realizes also that love for the people cannot be limited to any group or class or region – not even to his own forefathers, “who were great men and knew the wilderness, but who had never lived in cities” (595). Overcoming his revulsion for the urban manswarm, Eugene discovers in New York’s human cityscape a broader and truer America than he had known before. The concluding books of Of Time and the River – as well as significant sections of The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again – take place, not only outside the South, but outside the United States, and these texts powerfully evoke the expatriate’s ambivalent relationships to the lost country and to the spaces of his exile. In The Story of a Novel (1936), Wolfe articulates this ambivalence: “I think I may say that I discovered America during these years abroad out of my very need of her.” During each
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visit to Europe, he “felt the bitter ache of homelessness, a desperate longing for America, an overwhelming desire to return” (Wolfe 1936: 25). In Of Time and the River, Wolfe’s Eugene Gant – overseas, and specifically in France – comes to productive terms with history and homeland by learning to view them from the enlightening “triangular” perspective constructed by complementing “North” and “South” with “Abroad.” As Wolfe himself also did, both Eugene and later George Webber take on the task that Timothy Weiss assigns “the exiled artist”: “to transform the figure of rupture back into a figure of connection” (Weiss: x). As an expatriate, Eugene avails himself of the perspective of “outsideness” that Bakhtin deems essential for the writer, what Tzvetan Todorov calls the “epistemological privilege” of being a stranger (Weiss: 12). He comes to know his place of origin as he could not have known it from within. The saga of the sensitive provincial struggling for self-expression and fame lies unmistakably at the heart of Wolfe’s first two large narratives. A focus on characters like himself prompted (and continues to prompt) charges that his works are too autobiographical and has led to critical obsession with, for instance, parallels between his bodily size and the heft of his manuscripts. Recent recognition of the fluidity of genre, however, restores perspective: in “Welcome to the Dark Continent of the Self: Thomas Wolfe and Autobiographical Desire,” for instance, Steve Bourdeau reassesses Look Homeward, Angel with reference to Paul de Man’s view that autobiography “is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts” (Bourdeau: 6). Wolfe’s own view is clearly stated in The Story of a Novel: “my conviction is that all serious creative work must be at bottom autobiographical and that a man must use the material and experience of his own life if he is to create anything that has substantial value” (Wolfe 1936: 21). Accusations not only of autobiography, but also of excess and formlessness were brought against Wolfe, especially in the wake of his second novel and most cruelly by Bernard DeVoto. Criticism was prompted also by Wolfe’s overstatement of the role played by Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins in preparing his manuscripts for publication. Thanks to Arlyn and Matthew Bruccoli’s meticulous restoration of the text of O Lost, it is clear, at least, that the original unedited text of Wolfe’s first novel, though somewhat longer than Look Homeward, Angel, was far from formless. In The Story of a Novel, based on a 1935 speech at the University of Colorado, Wolfe confesses to a “chief fault” of writing too much: [T]ime and time again my enthusiasm for a good scene, one of those enchanting vistas which can open up so magically to a man in the full flow of his creation, would overpower me, and I would write thousands of words upon a scene which contributed nothing of vital importance to a book whose greatest need already was ruthless condensation. (Wolfe 1936: 83–4)
He indicates also that, without the help of Maxwell Perkins, he could never have brought the manuscript of his second novel into publishable form. Such exaggerated admission of dependence on Perkins harmed Wolfe’s reputation.
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To regret the effect of The Story of a Novel is not, however, to dismiss the crucial role Maxwell Perkins played in Wolfe’s life and work. Regarded as the greatest American editor of the twentieth century, Perkins acted as spiritual father to a spiritually fatherless man, and his guidance facilitated Wolfe’s accomplishment. Because of the damage done to his reputation, however, Wolfe felt impelled to cut himself off from Perkins and from Scribner’s. Having taken a liking to the young editor, Edward Aswell, Wolfe signed a contract with Harper and Brothers and accepted a generous advance. Consequently, after the author’s death in 1938, Aswell edited and Harpers published three volumes of Wolfe’s work: The Web and the Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond (1941). The Web and the Rock introduces a new protagonist, culminating incarnation of a succession of young provincials in quest of fulfillment and success. The novel’s earlier sections establish the origins and youthful experiences of George “Monk” Webber so as to distinguish him from Eugene Gant. The Altamont of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River is displaced by Libya Hill, as the state university metamorphoses into Pine Rock College, “Olympus in Catawba.” In contrast to the impassioned volumes devoted to Eugene, The Web and the Rock renders Monk’s character and experience from a greater chronological and narrational distance. Rather than a play-byplay account of family and school life, Webber’s youth is rendered in salient scenes that are explicitly removed in time. Strongly delineated episodes – some published elsewhere as separate stories – render the violent texture of life in the Southern town of his upbringing. “Three O’clock,” for instance, places a young boy in the sunny frontyard of his uncle’s home where he witnesses dog fights and fatal accidents and undergoes bullying by thuggish enemies and rescue by a fearless friend. Torn between the world of the Northern father who abandoned him and that of his dead mother’s mountain kin, George Webber grows up afflicted by a painfully divided self. Escaping the entangling webs of family and background, Webber flees to the city of his dreams only to encounter resistance to their realization and to suffer “loneliness unutterable” (Wolfe 1939: 275). A fantasy of work accomplished and love fulfilled effects a narrative transition into the account of a young writer’s passion for a sophisticated older woman. George Webber’s love for Esther Jack, inspired by the author’s relationship with stage designer Aline Bernstein, was originally part of Eugene Gant’s story. It was cut, however, from the already gargantuan Of Time and the River and later incorporated into The Web and the Rock. In the unrestrained style of his earlier writings, Wolfe recounts the tumultuous affair between a young Southerner and the wealthy married woman many years his senior. Although the relationship is doomed, Esther Jack is not only one of Wolfe’s “richest” characters, but also, according to John Idol, “one of the best portraits of a lady in the whole canon of American fiction … taking her place alongside Hester Prynne, Isabel Archer, Sister Carrie, and Edna Pontellier” (Idol: 103). Despite the bitterness that at last overtakes Esther and George, Wolfe’s account of their love occupies a cherished place in American literature. Wolfe originally wrote the core narratives of “Penelope’s Web” as “The Good Child’s River,” and his shaping of the Esther material, much of it derived from written
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as well as spoken words of Aline Bernstein, demonstrates a sure ear for the habits of diction and intonation that reveal individual character. Esther’s exuberant appreciation of beauty wherever she finds it informs even casual conversation. Her narratives of her past and that of her family are lovingly rendered. The poetic quality of her desire to offer up all she can to her lover is captured in the refrain: “Long, long into the night I lay awake, thinking how I should tell my story” (Wolfe 1939: 407). While Monk’s beloved Esther is a child of the rock-hard city, she nonetheless weaves “Penelope’s Web” with her skills in art, cooking, love, and storytelling. Having evaded the world of his mountain ancestors as represented in the endless tales spun by his talkative aunt, George finds himself once again entrapped. The final sections of The Web and the Rock trace another abortive attempt at escape. In Germany, land of his paternal forebears, Wolfe’s Webber is drawn into the drunken violence of Oktoberfest. Recovering from his injuries in a Munich hospital, Monk stares into a mirror at the image of his battered head and “rakishly tonsured skull” (Wolfe 1939: 689). He engages his dishonored body in dialogue, summoning up memories of good times past and recalling “lost kinsmen in the mountains long ago.” The book ends, as does the ironic dialogue, with Body’s retort, “But – you can’t go home again” (695). Although You Can’t Go Home Again resembles an anthology more than a unified narrative, it does trace a young man’s struggles to withstand the lure of love, luxury, and fame against the feverish background of the 1920s and 1930s. “The Native’s Return,” opening section of this second posthumously published Wolfe text, shows how George Webber’s homecoming visit to a Libya Hill swept up in speculative greed founders on his realization of the financial and moral ruin of a “City of Lost Men.” Outstanding among the accounts of George’s experiences after the success of his first novel are two that can and have been read independently: “The World that Jack Built” and “I Have a Thing to Tell You.” The former, condensed from a longer version (later restored and published as The Party at Jack’s: A Novella), contrasts the pleasures enjoyed by a cultural and financial elite to both the exploitation of working people and threats posed to the freedom of the artist. The story lovingly renders a tasteful opulence of furnishings, clothing, food, and drink, only to expose all as false and pernicious. The party recounted in “The World that Jack Built” takes place on October 17, 1929, and the text seems to relish foreshadowing disaster. The Park Avenue apartment house where the Jacks live and entertain their friends is built over train tracks whose subterranean rumblings send tremors throughout the structure: “The building was so grand, so huge, so solid-seeming, that it gave an impression of having been hewn from, the everlasting rock itself. Yet this was not true at all. The mighty edifice was really tubed and hollowed like a giant honeycomb” (Wolfe 1940: 197). Wolfe uses the building to embody the state of American society, so much less stable than it appears to those on top. At evening’s end, fire breaks out, an event manifested in the Jacks’ flat in just a faint odor of smoke. There are, however, casualties: two elevator operators die trapped when “some excited fool” inadvertently shuts off the electricity
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(311). The deaths of these common men go unperceived, however, by the wealthy tenants whom they have served. “The World that Jack Built” fits into George Webber’s story because the lavish party’s hostess is his mistress, Esther Jack. When both party and fire are over, Esther and her young lover sit together in the otherwise empty parlor. Whereas she revels in her success as hostess and in her love for George, he realizes the urgent need to save himself from corruption: He had sensed how the hollow pyramid of a false social structure had been erected and sustained upon a base of common mankind’s blood and sweat and agony, so now he knew that if he was ever to succeed in writing the books he felt were in him, he must turn about and lift his face up to some nobler height. (Wolfe 1940: 320–1)
After the break with Esther, an almost penitential George goes to live in an increasingly impoverished Brooklyn where he sees and feels the degradation visited upon his fellow citizens by the economic system that produced the Great Depression. Exhausted by work and craving escape from the mid-thirties’ U.S., George Webber, following his creator’s example, sets sail for Europe. He spends a fall and winter in London, working intensely and marveling at the inexplicable conservatism of his royalty-besotted cleaning lady. During this period, he accompanies a famous and alcoholic American author (reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis) on a surreal foray into the countryside. After a year back in New York finishing his second novel, George succumbs again to the urge to wander, and in the spring of 1936, he finds himself in Germany, the land in which he has felt most at home: “This time,” however, “things were different. Germany had changed” (Wolfe 1940: 621). This altered country is the scene of “I Have a Thing to Tell You.” Fond of Germany and glorying in his popularity as a “famous American author,” Wolfe’s Webber is reluctant to recognize what is really happening. At first he can only celebrate the “golden sparkle” of a glorious springtime in Berlin (Wolfe 1940: 622); then, as Wolfe himself did, he attends the Olympic Games of 1936, watching from the U.S. ambassador’s box and cheering for the American runner Jesse Owens. The imposing spectacle of the games, the ceremonial arrivals and departures of the Leader, and the increasing unease of the visitor are all recorded in You Can’t Go Home Again. The visitor is perplexed when German friends tell him that they can no longer associate with other friends and alarmed when he is warned to avoid talking to certain officials. Gradually, he comes to some understanding of the situation, all the while holding on to his admiration for the spirit of German culture. As the summer passes, however, George must acknowledge “the shipwreck of [this] great spirit”: The poisonous emanation of suppression, persecution, and fear permeated the air like miasmic and pestilential vapors, tainting, sickening and blighting the lives of everyone he met. It was a plague of the spirit – invisible, but as unmistakable as death. Little by little it sank in on him through all the golden singing of that summer, until at last he felt it, breathed it, lived it, and knew it for the thing it was. (Wolfe 1940: 633)
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As Wolfe himself departed Germany after his 1936 visit, he witnessed the arrest of a Jewish man who was trying to escape the country. He told the story of the man’s fear, his capture, and the reaction of his fellow passengers in “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” a piece first published serially in The New Republic (Idol: 3). The longer version incorporated into You Can’t Go Home Again ends with George Webber’s final glimpse of the doomed man as he is taken away by his captors: He looked once, directly and steadfastly, at his former companions, and they at him. And in that gaze there was all the unmeasured weight of man’s mortal anguish. George and the others felt somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. They all felt that they were saying farewell, not to a man, but to humanity: not to some pathetic stranger, some chance acquaintance of the voyage, but to mankind; not to some nameless cipher out of life but to the fading image of a brother’s face. The train swept out and gathered speed – and so they lost him. (Wolfe 1940: 699)
In this account of the helplessness of the individual in the face of ruthlessly wielded power, Wolfe exposes the cruelty of human beings and the constant vigilance necessary to keep that cruelty at bay. Thomas Wolfe began his writing career with a lyrical coming-of-age novel and continued the story of his youthful protagonist to complete a two-volume portrait of the artist marked by poetic exuberance but also by keen observation and social critique. In the years after 1929, Wolfe gradually weaned himself from a romantic preoccupation with art and the artist to become more aware of the struggles of working Americans in a desperately unjust social context. The posthumously published large novels feature a protagonist sensitive to the sinister reality of the 1930s, who, in a farewell message to his erstwhile mentor, recounts a change of perspective common to character and author: Through these years I was living in the jungle depths of Brooklyn, and I saw as I had never seen before the true and terrifying visage of the disinherited of life. There came to me a vision of man’s inhumanity to man, and as time went on it began to blot out the more personal and self-centered vision of the world which a young man always has. (Wolfe 1940: 724–5)
In “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” Wolfe imposes on his protagonist, as on his readers, a chilling realization not only of the threat of Nazism but also of America’s own peril. “So it was, in this far place and under those profoundly moving and disturbing alien circumstances,” George Webber confides to Foxhall Edwards (fictional standin for Maxwell Perkins), “that I realized fully, for the first time, how sick America was, and saw, too, that the ailment was akin to Germany’s – a dread world-sickness of the soul” (Wolfe 1940: 730). Yet Wolfe’s Webber steadfastly refuses to succumb to a resigned pessimism, distancing himself from Edwards in this regard. Although George believes that “we are lost here in America” and that the self-destructive life the nation has come to live “must be destroyed,” he refuses to abandon hope:
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I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. (Wolfe 1940: 741)
Thus Wolfe’s life work is a song not finally of the self but of America in which continual celebration of land and people coexists with deeply felt protests against injustice. Clear-eyed and ferocious in his condemnation of his country’s flaws, Thomas Wolfe, like Walt Whitman, is a poet of democracy. Despite his inherited and almost instinctual prejudices, Wolfe learned through the empathy necessary to his art to identify with the cultural and racial other: the “Microscopic Gentleman from Japan,” for instance, and the Jewish “Good Child,” and the African American “Child by Tiger.” Making his peace with even the once-despised urban working class, Wolfe arrived at an inclusive vision of a democratic nation: So, then, to every man his chance – to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity – to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him – this, seeker, is the promise of America. (Wolfe 1940: 508)
References and Further Reading Bourdeau, Steve (2004). “Welcome to the Dark Continent of the Self: Thomas Wolfe and Autobiographical Desire,” The Thomas Wolfe Review, 28 (1/2): 5–13. Donald, David Herbert (1987). Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown. Ensign, Robert Taylor (2003). Lean Down your Ear upon the Earth and Listen: Thomas Wolfe’s Greener Modernism. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Holliday, Shawn (2001). Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism. New York: Peter Lang. Holman, C. Hugh (1975). The Loneliness at the Core: Studies in Thomas Wolfe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Idol, John Lane, Jr., ed. (1987). A Thomas Wolfe Companion. New York: Greenwood Press. Kennedy, Richard S. (1962). The Window of Memory: The Literary Career of Thomas Wolfe. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Mauldin, Joanne Marshall (2007). Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin? Knoxville, T.E.: University of Tennessee Press.
Morgan, Robert (2006). Introduction to Look Homeward Angel: A Story of the Buried Life, pp. xi– xxvii. New York: Scribner. Reeves, Paschal (1968). Thomas Wolfe’s Albatross: Race and Nationality in America. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. Rubin, Louis D., Jr., ed. (1973). Thomas Wolfe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. (1985). “Thomas Wolfe,” in The History of Southern Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Blyden Jackson, Rayburn S. Moore, et al., pp. 343–50. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Skipp, Francis E., ed. (1989). The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe. New York: Scribner. Thomas Wolfe Society (1981– ). The Thomas Wolfe Review. Bloomington, Indiana (available online through EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest: www. thomaswolfereview.org). Weiss, Timothy (1992). On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul. Amherst, M.A.: University of Massachusetts Press.
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Wolfe, Thomas (1929). Look Homeward Angel: A Story of the Buried Life. New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, Thomas (1935). Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in his Youth. New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, Thomas (1936). The Story of a Novel. New York: Scribner’s. Wolfe, Thomas (1939). The Web and the Rock. New York: Harper. Wolfe, Thomas (1940). You Can’t Go Home Again. New York: Harper. Wolfe, Thomas (1983). Welcome to Our City: A Play in Ten Scenes, ed. Richard S. Kennedy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Wolfe, Thomas (1985). Mannerhouse, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and John L. Idol, Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Wolfe, Thomas (1991). The Good Child’s River, ed. Suzanne Stutman. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Wolfe, Thomas (1994). The Lost Boy: A Novella by Thomas Wolfe, ed. James W. Clark, Jr. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Wolfe, Thomas (1995). The Party at Jack’s: A Novella, ed. Suzanne Stutman and John L. Idol, Jr. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Wolfe, Thomas (2000). O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life (the original version of Look Homeward, Angel), ed. Arlyn Bruccoli and Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald William Blazek
He wrote two of the classic novels of twentieth-century literature, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934), yet F. Scott Fitzgerald is still often remembered as much for the trajectory of his life as for his work across two decades as a professional author. That his career paralleled the economic graph of the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, from postwar boom through economic collapse, and that his life and art were more intimately bound together than those of most other writers are partial explanations for the imperturbable perception. Another might be that Fitzgerald represents a glamorous and salutary chapter in the story of U.S. fiction: a public life that opens with the twenty-three-year-old writer’s marriage to Zelda Sayre eight days after the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the book that established the image and tone of America’s restless young generation living in the decade that Fitzgerald himself labeled the Jazz Age. From that early promise and timely fame, the path of his career moved rapidly upward, with success as a profitable short-story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other mass-market magazines. He calculated his earnings at $36,000 a year (equivalent to perhaps $300,000 today), overspent that income by about $4,000, but characteristically restored some of the balance by writing two complementary and self-deprecatory articles, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year.” The earnings from popular magazines gained him time for writing what he considered more substantial and serious work, especially novels. Fitzgerald desperately sought critical recognition, and won it through the refined talent and diligent effort that went into the making of The Great Gatsby. But by that time he was an alcoholic, and for the rest of his life he struggled with the duel burdens of financial need and addiction. The alcohol-fueled dissipations of the twenties, years spent both in America and among literary expatriates in Europe, were encouraged by easy money and overconfidence in his abilities. Zelda’s mental breakdowns began in the year of the Wall Street Crash, and Scott Fitzgerald’s own physical decline and personal regrets in the 1930s he recorded as “Waste and horror – what I might have been and done that is
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lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable” (Fitzgerald 2005: 167). There was a nine-year gap between Gatsby and the publication of his second great novel. Fitzgerald’s debits to health and creative vigor are recorded in “The Crack-Up” articles that he wrote for Esquire magazine after Tender proved not to be the critical and popular salvation of his hopes. From 1937, he lived in Hollywood, writing for the movie industry, trying to pay back what he owed to Scribner’s, the publisher of all of his books, to his agent, Harold Ober, to doctors and other creditors. Outside some notorious lapses, he spent most of his remaining days soberly at work, nursing a slow revival of his creative powers and ambitions, drafting the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon (1941), until he died of a heart attack in December 1940.
A Second Life: The Critical Revival “There are no second acts in American lives,” Fitzgerald wrote in his notes for The Last Tycoon, yet the celebrity author of the Jazz Age experienced a series of renewals within his career and a powerful revival in his literary reputation from the 1950s, one that continues undiminished to the present. Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s classmate at Princeton and his “intellectual conscience” (Fitzgerald 2005: 148), published his annotated version of The Last Tycoon in 1941 and edited The Crack-Up (1945), a miscellany of Fitzgerald’s essays, letters, and ledger notes. The first full-length Fitzgerald biography and critical studies, Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise (1951) and James E. Miller’s The Fictional Technique of Scott Fitzgerald (1957), respectively, were supported by formalist studies in the era dominated by the New Criticism, focusing on the rich symbolism of Fitzgerald’s lyric prose and the technical and structural development of his style. Canonization requires not only critical advocates but also material evidence, and this was supplied to scholars through the manuscript studies by Matthew J. Bruccoli, beginning with The Composition of “Tender is the Night” (1963) and culminating in the eighteen-volume F. Scott Fitzgerald: Manuscripts (1990–1). Other bibliographical work, notably by Jackson R. Bryer and Henry Claridge, provides further tools for interpretive analysis. Over a dozen biographies, including Bruccoli’s own authoritative Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (2nd edn. 2002), have examined the panoply of Scott Fitzgerald’s eventful life, creating in the process new ways of telling a familiar American story of success and downfall, especially the contentious interpretations and reinterpretations of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. Nancy Mitford’s bestseller Zelda (1970) and more recent biographies by Sally Cline and Linda Wagner-Martin present damning portraits of Zelda’s husband, while a collection of the couple’s letters to each other, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (2002), edited by Jackson Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, serves those interested in the case with the fullest direct textual evidence of the Fitzgeralds’ often volatile and clearly mutually dependent relationship. The best collection of the author’s letters, Bruccoli’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (1994), is a remarkable testament of how closely and often painfully Fitzgerald’s art merged with his life, yet
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it is even more valuable in how it documents the intellectual foundations of his writing. In a sustained effort now encompassing five critical studies, Ronald Berman has revolutionized critical appraisals of how philosophical and intellectual concepts can be applied to Fitzgerald’s oeuvre. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, an annual journal first published in 2002, recognizes the popular appeal of both the life and writings of the author and has printed memoirs and occasional biographical articles along with the textual scholarship and critical essays that fill its pages. The Review also contains an annual bibliography that sometimes stretches to over a hundred entries, while the 2007 issue also reviews sixteen new books in Fitzgerald studies. Supporting all of the critical explorations, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald will, by the time of its completion, be the most comprehensive set of standard scholarly texts available on any American writer of the twentieth century.
This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned Looking back on his first and most popularly influential novel from the perspective of an established professional writer with the critical entitlements of The Great Gatsby to support his self-reflection, Fitzgerald could practically dismiss it as “A Romance and a Reading List” (Bruccoli 1978: 1021). Indeed, Dorothy B. Good counts sixtyfour titles and ninety-eight authors mentioned in the text (cited in Bruccoli 2002: 124). In the mid-1960s, Charles E. Shain acknowledged that it was approached even then as if it were an archaeological ruin, an historical document about scandalous young women and rebellious young men in the twenties; yet he reacquainted readers with the novel as essentially a moral tale and philosophical quest, asserting: “The real story of This Side of Paradise is a report on a young man’s emotional readiness for life” (O’Connor: 94–5). Fitzgerald helped to engineer popular interest in the appearance of the novel through the publicity attached to the publication of related early short stories, including “Babes in the Woods,” “Benediction,” “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” and “May Day” in New York periodicals, especially the trend-setting monthly Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. The savvy advertising and self-promotion that Fitzgerald learned early in his career would also prove detrimental when he sought to escape from his reputation as a Smart Set and Post writer of marketable fiction; nevertheless, several key themes that reappear in his major works are established in This Side of Paradise (1920), while its formal and technical innovations were utilized afterward, albeit in better-integrated fashion. The novel expresses the major theme of loss in different contexts, including romantic disappointment, financial decline, and thwarted social ambition. Ironically, these failures and regrets for the protagonist Amory Blaine result in an invigorating reappraisal of his personal goals and his country’s public values. En route to an inconclusive new direction for his energies, he faces a decisive moment when he chooses selfsacrifice over self-preservation, taking the blame when police intrude during a spree involving his Princeton classmates and some carefree young women. Deciding between
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selfishness and selflessness reappears in different guises throughout Fitzgerald’s novels, both in personal choices and in how best to channel America’s national vibrancy into an uncertain future. Fitzgerald did not temper his preference for dramatic or lyrical endings in this novel, with its closing anticipation of individual and national revival, but there are further reasons for treating his first major publication as more than a piece of juvenilia or apprentice work. This Side of Paradise also addresses contemporary concerns about generational change and class boundaries, examines postwar disillusionment and cultural displacement, and employs collage as its most distinctive narrative strategy in ways that suggest how the text might be read as more advanced technically than most commentators would give it credit. The novel can best be understood through its models in variety shows and musical theater, rather than thinking of it as an inchoate rattlebag of genres and styles. Although often seen as a novel written in response to Mencken’s promotion of literary naturalism, The Beautiful and Damned (1922) follows that mode more in its plot and characterization than in its style, which is almost as varied in its use of narrative devices as Fitzgerald’s first novel. The plot centers on the glamorous marriage of Anthony Patch – the presumptive heir to his demagogue, anti-vice-campaigning grandfather’s huge fortune – and Gloria Gilbert, and follows their downward spiral into relative poverty, alcoholism, faded youth, and physical incapacity. Fitzgerald presents them as victims of their own egocentrism and the expectations of financial ease. “I need work to do, work to do” (Fitzgerald 2008a: 52), he declares, yet he finds nothing to suit his interests nor his limited will power. “I don’t want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care of” (2008a: 59), she explains, and she gets her wish, joining Anthony in a lonely life, attempting too late to take up an acting career and connect to something or someone beyond herself. While the plot focuses on their descent into the lower orders of Manhattan, their hopes for victory in a legal inheritance case that echoes Bleak House, and their expense of effort in pursuing that goal, much of the novel’s interest lies in its depiction of New York City and of the new world that grows around the Patches while their youth and the memory of its dashing promise fade away. Juxtapositions between urbanity and underlying class prejudice are reflected in the distended financial circumstances that the couple experience. New York is “the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams” (2008a: 237), inhabited not only by the Ivy League-educated elite of Anthony’s class but also by immigrants such as the movie producer Joseph Bloeckman, whose financial acumen and learned sophistication contrast sharply with Anthony’s fear of “the slow, upward creep of this people” (2008a: 237) and Gloria’s vision of the masses “swarming like rats, chattering like apes” (2008a: 326). Although money or its scarcity might be seen as the corrosive element in the melting pot, the novel proposes another source, and one that finds its way into each of Fitzgerald’s major texts. The failure to engage in a meaningful life, mainly through fulfilling work, lies at the heart of matter. Anthony’s friend Maury Noble states the problem: “Nothing – quite – stirs me” (2008a: 49). Gloria’s childlessness symbolizes
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(or stereotypes) that lack of volition and care, while Anthony experiences “each lesion of vitality” (2008a: 238) to such an extent that the closing scene finds him in a wheelchair on a ship bound for Europe, his 30-million-dollar fortune won back, and his gumption restored to the point where Fitzgerald can deliver his closing words with supreme irony: “ ‘It was a hard fight, but I didn’t give up and I came through!’ ” (2008a: 369).
The Great Gatsby Each of Fitzgerald’s first three novels expresses the sadness of lost youth, the power of memory to revitalize ideals, and the marginal degrees of happiness that humans are capable of. In This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine “realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again” (Fitzgerald 1995: 88); in The Beautiful and Damned, while thinking of Gloria, Anthony Patch “found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness” and “that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore” (2008a: 236). The best parallel from The Great Gatsby (1925) might be “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!” (Fitzgerald 1991: 86), or perhaps the Keatsian lines that hang between imperishable ideals and mutable reality: “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God” (1991: 86). The latter passage also serves to correct a common misconception about Jay Gatsby’s ambitions, for his initial goal is not directed by the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, not toward recovering the golden girl from his past, but rather his original aim was to become “a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country” (1991: 131), as his father claims after Gatsby’s death. Gatsby’s transformation from the North Dakota farm-boy, James Gatz, began long before he first met Daisy, in his officer’s uniform, on the way to fighting in the war that would transform the United States into a great world power. Daisy’s role, then, might be that of the femme fatale, but she and Gatsby also enact the consequences of decisions made in life, as well as the often mistaken desires that focus American energies toward making money. As the narrator, Nick Carraway, documents Gatsby’s single-minded and ultimately tragic pursuit of Daisy, he also highlights the failure to assimilate the two halves of American society represented in the Long Island communities East Egg and West Egg. Instead, the established elite that finds its protective spokesperson in Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, is marshaled against the dynamic forces of change epitomized by Gatsby and his partner in the criminal underworld, Meyer Wolfsheim, and by the movies and Broadway, immigration, and redefined boundaries of race and ethnicity. “Can’t repeat the past?” is both a hopelessly naïve response and an irrepressibly heroic one. It encapsulates the ambiguities of American history, wherein the pursuit of happiness is a dream, like Gatsby’s, enabled by “an extraordinary gift for
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hope, a romantic readiness” (1991: 6), as well as a phantom that threatens the common good. In Fitzgerald’s America, the idealized past and an improved future are always more romantically appealing than the contentious present. The ways that Fitzgerald depicts past and passing time in The Great Gatsby through the double consciousness of Nick Carraway is one of the key innovations of this novel in comparison with the earlier efforts. Nick’s position as both actor and narrator allows readers insights into both East and West Egg society, a perspective from which to both doubt and admire Gatsby. Readers also become aware of the narrator’s own flaws as he presents a carefully constructed tale that increasingly becomes the story of Nick himself during the summer of 1922 and the intervening two years until the retelling is completed. His movement from a largely passive observer to critical participant runs alongside his moral awakening to the prejudices and self-serving nature of the Buchanans as well as his discovery of tolerance and empathy for Gatsby’s quest. Thus, initially, Nick can joke with Daisy about how she is missed in Chicago: “The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there’s a persistent wail all night along the North Shore” (1991: 11), indicating his insouciant manner but also foreshadowing the three deaths to come in the text, specifically the fatal car accident that buries the novel’s social critique in human tragedy. Nick’s class-based suspicions about Gatsby run from a mocking reaction to seeing Gatsby’s war decoration from “Little Montenegro!” and Gatsby’s postwar photograph from Oxford: “Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal …” (1991: 53), but they turn to admiration for the foundation of Gatsby’s faith in winning back Daisy and for Gatsby’s selfsacrifice in concealing her responsibility for the road accident that kills her husband’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Nick makes two final remarks to Gatsby, the second one to a corpse: “They’re a rotten crowd … You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” (1991: 120), and in digging up an audience for Gatsby’s funeral: “I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry. Just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you –” (1991: 128). The words are directed at Nick’s own class and toward the readership of his text, who are also asked to trust Nick as he delivers Gatsby’s life for inspection. The techniques for constructing the narrative include lists, such as the one that Nick had written on a July 5, 1922 train timetable, enumerating the guests at Gatsby’s party who came from East Egg and from West Egg, illustrating the division of family origins and wealth-building occupations between the two sets. Near the end of the narrative, a flashback to Gatsby’s youth as James Gatz arrives in the form of two lists, a September 12, 1906 daily “Schedule” of timed activities for the aspirational teenager, and “General Resolves” composed in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin (1991: 134–5). The use of time signatures is important because of the way the first-person narrator portions out information about the title character, presenting him first as an extravagant and secretive character whose background and motivations are steadily, often unexpectedly, revealed by Nick, as if it took two years not only to piece together the facts but also to comprehend the meaning of Gatsby. Filmic
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techniques are also applied in the narrative to add to the sense of interwoven time – personal and epic in scale, and balanced between stillness and motion (Berman 1994: 137–59). Another way in which this text is crafted is through controlled symbolism. The green light is indicated on three carefully appointed occasions. Through repetition and variation, the color yellow becomes a trope for money, radiance, and cowardice. Automobiles depict class distinctions, the benefits and dangers of new technologies, and the fatal flaw of pride. Re-reading the text will uncover many more examples, and perhaps the overuse of one word meant to convey the difficulty in finding a solid center for American identity: Gatsby is called “Mr. Nobody” by his rival and equally determined counterpart, the brutal and hypocritical Tom Buchanan; and “nobody” is frequently repeated in the narrative. The Valley of Ashes, where Myrtle Wilson meets her death, evokes a more deeply layered symbol of degeneration. Yet, rejuvenation remains the abiding theme in The Great Gatsby, despite the severe disappointment expressed by Nick Carraway after his exposure to America’s deep class conflicts and his retreat to his Midwest roots. He has found in the East that the country has changed immeasurably after World War I: “The creation and fostering of personality seem to have replaced the embodiment of earnestness. We are now interested less in rising than in changing,” as Berman argues (1997: 134). Describing the exotic details that he sees while crossing the new Queensboro Bridge on a drive into New York City with Gatsby, Nick remarks: “ ‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all …’ Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder” (1991: 55). The American Dream of opportunity for all is reaffirmed and challenged in The Great Gatsby, while hope and the “capacity for wonder” (1991: 140) remain the inescapable forces from America’s history that will drive the country into “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning –” (1991: 141).
Tender is the Night Fitzgerald’s last completed novel charts the shockwaves that ran through western culture following World War I, and it applies a wider perspective to the theme of historical change explored in The Great Gatsby. Tender is the Night (1934) also projects a complex sense of America’s involvement in global economics and the nation’s corrosive role in changing popular tastes and social mores beyond its borders. In addition, the novel contains some of the author’s finest writing, especially in the emotional intensity of its dramatization of a marriage in decline, and in descriptive passages evoking settings in the Riviera, Paris, Switzerland, and Italy. Subtle combinations of romantic lyricism and modernist manipulations of time and perspective give the text a stylistic sophistication to match its naturalist philosophy and intellectual scope.
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The novel had long been considered a flawed masterpiece, a view formed partly because of its initial reception and later by the publication of Malcolm Cowley’s edited version (1951), which reordered the original sequence of chapters into a chronologically based arrangement. Fitzgerald reworked his plans for the narrative in seventeen drafts involving three different storylines before settling on the published version, although the novel text was altered significantly from the earlier magazine serialization. During the prolonged genesis of composition, Fitzgerald’s personal life became unalterably complicated by his wife’s institutionalization for what was diagnosed as schizophrenia, and the financial and emotional crises that followed have given critics and biographers a store of evidence to suggest that the quality of Tender is the Night was compromised by these matters. However, Bonnie Shannon McMullen asserts that, far from the impression that the novel was salvaged from Fitzgerald’s lost years as a writer, “The unsettled and self-destructive years between 1925 and 1934 were, paradoxically, among the most professionally successful of Fitzgerald’s life,” when he wrote over sixty stories, “that comprise not only much of Fitzgerald’s best, and best-paid, writing, but some of the best of the century” (Blazek and Rattray: 16). Nevertheless, for the novel to reach the critical acclaim of Gatsby, two elements were required: a full understanding of the text’s deep engagement with history (influenced by the early twentieth-century cultural historian Oswald Spengler’s opus The Decline of the West, 1918, rev. 1923) and the recognition and delineation of Fitzgerald’s intellectual concerns (addressed by Milton R. Stern and Ronald Berman), so that the task remaining was to show how the novel’s modernist techniques – particularly its fragmented structure and multiple focus points – are attuned to its subject matter (Blazek and Rattray: 121–42; Curnutt 2007: 121–2). Opening with luxurious but unsettling descriptions of established and newly arrived expatriate Americans on the Riviera in 1925, seen from the viewpoint of the young movie star Rosemary Hoyt, Tender is the Night steadily zooms in on the marriage of the psychiatrist Dr. Dick Diver and the extravagantly wealthy Nicole Warren. Rosemary appears like a rejuvenating tonic to the Divers’ entourage of friends that includes an alcoholic music-composer, Abe North, and a French American mercenary soldier who eventually becomes Nicole’s lover, Tommy Barban. Building chapters like film reels with the material of domestic melodrama and historical epic, Fitzgerald joins the story of the Divers’ marriage breakdown to a critique of consumer capitalism, psychiatric practice, and America’s leading role in shaping the modern world. The narrative of Book I watches the cracks appear in the façade that Dick Diver has built around his “power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love” (Fitzgerald 1934: 27), and reveals the stresses involved in his efforts to control his wife’s mental condition and to retain some measure of his own independence, professional ambition, and personal worth. Using a dramatic eight-year flashback to the war years, Book II documents Dick’s early medical training, his desire “to be a good psychologist – maybe to be the greatest one that ever lived” (1934: 132), his unexpected romance with Nicole, a patient suffering from the trauma of her mother’s death and of incest with her father, and the ways that Dick and Nicole devise to live together as husband and
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wife as well as doctor and patient. Neither the imposed ethics of his profession nor the corrupting influence of the Warren fortune proves to be the cause of the marriage’s collapse, however, but rather the outdated character values that Dick struggles with – “ ‘good instincts,’ honour, courtesy, and courage” (1934: 204) – after their exposure to the horrors of the Western Front and as they conflict with the potent, hyperactive claims of Jazz Age modernity. Book III follows the “transference” of vitality and control from Dick to Nicole, and reintroduces Tommy Barban as provider of the martial – as opposed to medical – support that Nicole’s accumulating wealth and more fully independent self now needs. Abe North’s widow, newly remarried to a wealthy man of color, states the terms of modern expectations: “All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment” (1934: 313). Under these conditions, women, especially exponents of conspicuous acquisition and consumption such as Nicole, are shown to be more adaptable in their plans and more flexible in their loyalties than men, and therefore better suited to the new era of movement, image-display and mass self-indulgence.
Energies and Choices Including the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon and many of the short stories that place Fitzgerald among the leading practitioners of the genre in U.S. literature of the first half of the twentieth century, Fitzgerald’s work often explores the choices that individuals must make between loyalty to personal desires and submission to social duty or expectations. Facing choices is usually indicated in the texts by a loss of vitality or increased restlessness, leading either to a return to comforting passivity or a spur to action. Berman cites the philosopher William James’s hope “that nervous energy would be a natural reservoir for moral action” (Berman 1997: 142). Daisy Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson present two examples of the dangers involved in the constraint and release of feminine energies under patriarchal control, while the Divers’ broken marriage is marked by the physical deterioration of Dick and the reinvigoration of Nicole’s senses. In The Last Tycoon, the movie executive Monroe Stahr battles with declining health, enervating sorrow over the death of his wife, as well as his decision to inject aesthetic quality into the movie industry and thereby balance art’s civilizing influence against America’s rampant materialism. The illusory power of money, and the violent means needed to protect it, form the bizarre contradictions examined in Fitzgerald’s 1922 parable of America’s morally fraught drive to economic supremacy, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” On a more personal scale, the intense emotions of the story “Benediction” center on the dilemma facing nineteen-year-old Lois: whether or not she can commit herself to married life and motherhood, as her older brother has given himself to the discipline of the priesthood. Fitzgerald’s Catholic education provided him with a clear understanding of the gap between moral aspirations and the compromises of everyday existence. His career as a writer was in itself a moral stance against misdirected channels of American energy,
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and was the main security against his own failings outside his work. His fictional characters enact the paradoxes of America’s history, expressing both hopeful visions and troubling dreams of national unity, balanced gender relations, ethnic and racial tolerance, and meaningful endeavor. If loss and failure are the result of high expectations, then Fitzgerald places great emphasis on aspiration as a value in itself. Benjamin Franklin did not reach his impossible goal of moral perfection, but he found that, in setting out the means for achieving it, he gained the skills and experience that made him successful in business, science, and politics. Fitzgerald’s time in American history was ruled by skepticism, but he could never be a nihilist. In his story “The Swimmers,” he stated a patriotic and personal credo in the shape of Henry Clay Marston’s meditation about his country’s identity: “France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of an idea, was harder to utter … It was a willingness of the heart” (Fitzgerald 1989: 512). References and Further Reading Berman, Ronald (1994). “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Berman, Ronald (1997). “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Blazek, William and Rattray, Laura, eds. (2007). Twenty-First-Century Readings of “Tender is the Night.”Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bruccoli, Matthew J. (1963). The Composition of “Tender is the Night.” Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. (1978). The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. (1994). F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. New York: Scribner’s. Bruccoli, Matthew J. (2002). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd edn. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Bryer, Jackson R., ed. (1978). F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin. Bryer, Jackson R. and Barks, Cathy W., eds. (2002). Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda. New York: St. Martin’s. Bryer, Jackson R., Prigozy, Ruth, and Stern, Milton R., eds. (2003). F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Twenty-First Century. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Curnutt, Kirk, ed. (2004). A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press. Curnutt, Kirk (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1934). Tender is the Night. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1935). Taps at Reveille. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1989). The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection. New York: Scribner’s. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1991). The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1993). The Love of the Last Tycoon, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1995). This Side of Paradise, ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2000). Flappers and Philosophers, ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2002). Tales of the Jazz Age, ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2005). My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920–1940, ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
F. Scott Fitzgerald Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2007). All the Sad Young Men, ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2008a). The Beautiful and Damned, ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2008b). The Lost Decade: Short Stories from “Esquire,” 1936–1941, ed. James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hook, Andrew (2002). F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan. LeVot, André (1983). F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life, trans. William Byron. New York: Doubleday.
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Miller, James E. (1957). The Fictional Technique of Scott Fitzgerald. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Mizener, Arthur (1951). The Far Side of Paradise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. O’Connor, William Van (1964). Seven Modern American Novelists. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press. Prigozy, Ruth, ed. (2001). The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, Milton R. (1970). The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Way, Brian (1980). F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Born January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, Zora Neale Hurston was the fifth child and second daughter of John Hurston (1861–1917) and Lucy Ann Potts Hurston (1865–1904). Hurston’s father began his life as the oldest of nine siblings in an impoverished sharecropper family near Notasulga. In 1893, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida, which Zora always called home, and where John Hurston achieved substantial influence as a minister, carpenter, and local politician. Lucy Potts Hurston grew up as part of the landowning Potts family that literally lived across the creek (the Songahatchee River) from the dirt-poor Hurstons; she openly defied her parents in order to marry John Hurston and was barred from the family home as a result. Hurston credits her mother as being the primary guiding force in her life, a woman who urged her children to jump at the sun. After her mother’s death in 1904, Zora’s father sent her to Jacksonville, Florida, to attend Florida Baptist Academy. Naturally bookish and possessed of an exuberant spirit, Zora fared well during the school year; she recalled, however, that the experience away from all-black Eatonville made her very conscious of her “difference.” When her father refused to send money for her trip home at the end of the year, a school administrator advanced Zora the fare home. Soon at odds with her new stepmother, Zora left her family home in 1905, returning once, very briefly, in 1911. She had foreseen homelessness in one of several prescient visions she began experiencing when she was about seven after eating what she believed was a large raisin. Her schooling suffered as she was forced to move from house to house. By the time she turned fifteen, she was working, serving primarily as a home care nurse to elderly whites or performing domestic duties. More interested in reading than cleaning house, Hurston was often searching for a new job, and it was while she was looking for work that she found a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost in a pile of rubbish. Falling in love with Milton’s way with language, she read the book over and over. She found employment at a doctor’s office, lived with relatives for several years, and endured an abusive common-law relationship before landing a job as lady’s maid to the lead singer of a
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Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. Her travels with the troupe and her interactions with its members for some eighteen months helped her to develop sophistication. Hurston was twenty-six when the job ended in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1917. Hurston then shaved ten years off her age in order to qualify for free schooling. After first attending night classes, she enrolled in Morgan Academy (the high school division of what would become Morgan State University), and later moved to Washington, D.C. in order to prepare for enrollment at Howard University where she connected with philosophy professor Alain Locke and joined the staff of Howard’s literary club journal, The Stylus, which published her first short story. She attended poet Georgia Douglas Johnson’s famous literary salons and rubbed elbows with budding and established poets, playwrights, novelists, and critics. She also met the man who would become her first husband, Herbert Sheen. Hurston left Howard after fall 1923, never having completed the degree program. She began her publishing career in earnest the following year when the short story “Drenched in Light,” which she had submitted at the behest of Alain Locke, appeared in the December 1924 issue of Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity Magazine. In January 1925, she moved to New York City. In New York, Hurston attended the May 1, 1925 Opportunity literary contest awards dinner where she met and formed fruitful associations with three influential white Americans: Annie Nathan Meyer, a prolific author and a founder of Barnard College, who offered Hurston a chance to attend the college beginning in the fall of 1925; novelist Fannie Hurst, for whom she would serve a brief time as personal secretary and later as confidante and companion; and the well-connected Carl Van Vechten, writer and patron of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston studied at Barnard while interacting with other young artists. She contributed to and helped produce the short-lived Fire!!, a literary journal that saw only one issue, in November 1926. The following year, with a research fellowship arranged by famous Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston traveled South to collect folksongs and folktales. She was also supported by Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy widow who subsequently tried to control Hurston’s publications. During her first formal research period, she took time to reconnect with family and also to marry Herbert Sheen on May 19, 1927 in St. Augustine, Florida. The marriage ended in divorce in July 1931. Though she married at least two other times (to Albert Price, III from 1939 to 1943, and James Howell Pitts for eight months in 1944), she described the much younger Percival P. Punter as the love of her life. A prolific writer, Hurston published seven books during her lifetime: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), a novel; Mules and Men (1935), collected folktales and Hoodoo practices; Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a novel; Tell My Horse (1937), collected folktales and Voodoo practices; Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), a novel; Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an autobiography; and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), a novel. In addition, she published some eighteen short stories and a compilation of tales titled The Eatonville Anthology (1926). Numerous posthumously published and variously edited volumes of her work are now available. Hurston completed another novel, Mrs. Doctor,
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but it was never published. She spent her final years working on a novel about the life of Herod the Great which she was never able to complete, but which has been discussed in some detail in Deborah Plant’s biography (2007). Hurston’s professional life began a period of marked decline shortly after the release of Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948, when Hurston was arrested and falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy; the case was dismissed six months later, but the damage had been done. During the last decade of her life she was frequently without money, sometimes pawning her typewriter to buy groceries. Still, her independent spirit and conservative mindset were never more evident than in her August 11, 1955 piece in the Orlando Sentinel criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954). Between 1951 and 1956, she lived in Eau Gallie, Florida. In 1956, she began a job as a librarian at the Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, but she was fired in 1957. Between 1957 and 1959, she wrote a column titled “Hoodoo and Black Magic” for the Fort Pierce Chronicle and, in 1958, she served as a substitute teacher for Fort Pierce Florida’s Lincoln Park Academy. She entered the St. Lucie County (Florida) welfare home in 1959 after suffering a stroke; she died there the following year on January 28. She was buried in an unmarked grave at Fort Pierce’s segregated Garden of the Heavenly Rest cemetery. During her lifetime, Hurston appeared on the cover of the Saturday Review, and was the recipient of a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship, two Guggenheims, an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Morgan State College, an Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, the Howard University Distinguished Alumni Award, and Bethune-Cookman College’s award for education and human relations. In the wake of mid-twentieth century social and cultural movements, Alice Walker’s search for black literary foremothers and Robert Hemenway’s seminal 1977 biography led to renewed interest in Hurston’s life and work. In her dedication of I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … and Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive (1979), Walker describes Hurston in terms that she will later use to articulate her own womanist aesthetic. Zora Neale Hurston is now recognized as one of the most notable figures in African American and American literary history.
Significant Works Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, is autobiographical in that it mirrors certain aspects of the relationship between Hurston’s mother (Lucy) and father (John). Like her other novels and a number of her short stories – including “Spunk” (1925), “Sweat” (1926), and “The Gilded Six Bits” (1933) – Jonah’s Gourd Vine casts a critical eye on heterosexual relationships and social constructions of manhood and womanhood. Its title refers to the biblical section from Jonah 4: 6–10, a parable about a gourd vine that grows to huge proportions overnight only to be destroyed by the operations of a worm. In the biblical story, the gourd vine grows to provide shade/ shelter for Jonah. Collectively, Lucy, home, family, and community serve as the most
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obvious parallel to the biblical gourd vine for John, though Lucy clearly represents the core or central aspect of it. The obvious parallel to the destructive worm is John Buddy’s unbridled libido, which causes the collapse of the shelter’s foundation. The narrative follows John Buddy Pearson’s tragic journey toward self-discovery. Hurston depicts John Buddy Pearson as a strong, attractive, gifted, and intelligent black man who recognizes the special qualities of Lucy Potts’s womanhood and marries her because of them. His many extramarital affairs lead to a breakdown in his first marriage, wife Lucy’s death, a subsequent disastrous marriage to Hattie Tyson, and John’s alienation and exile from family, church, and community. The remorse he feels after cheating on third wife Sally Lovelace, and his recognition of the value of the new sheltering vine he has found in that marriage, come only moments before he is killed by an oncoming locomotive, an obvious symbol of phallic energy and power. Hurston’s next major work, Mules and Men collects folktales and Hoodoo practices from her travels and research through the American South – primarily Florida and Louisiana. Part one, “Folk Tales,” contains seventy tales and parts of tales; it is further divided into ten subparts that group tales together based on common social context, location, or subject matter. Included are sermons, songs, and several kinds of tales, including tall tales such as “The Goat that Flagged a Train” and “Tall Hunting Story,” and origin tales such as “How the Cat Got Nine Lives” and “How the Squinch Owl Came to Be.” The folktales are like much of African American folklore in terms of form and function; however, Hurston’s participatory approach to presenting the material makes the first section unfold like a novel, complete with plot, antagonists, protagonists, and recurring themes and motifs. The result is a rich and multi-dimensional collection unlike anything that had been produced before, for it is within the contexts of the exchanges and conversations among groups, and between members of groups and Hurston as narrator, that the true meaning of each tale is revealed without the intrusion of scholarly analysis. Part two, “Hoodoo,” contains seven subparts, which include conjure stories, information about the origins of Hoodoo, and details about rituals learned under several conjurers and/or Hoodoo doctors. The rituals are typically geared toward specific objectives, such as ruling the man you love, keeping a husband faithful, and exerting power over your enemies and perceived enemies. Hurston begins by casting the creator of the universe as the first Hoodoo doctor and the biblical Moses (after whom she fashioned the title character of her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain) as a great Hoodoo doctor. As Hurston explains, “Hoodoo” is a term related to the West African term “juju”; among African Americans, the term is also used interchangeably with “conjure” and “roots,” though these two terms are more readily associated with healing, rather than magic. Hoodoo serves a number of purposes, including healing, empowerment over real or perceived adversaries of varying kinds (including causing the adversary’s death), and securing love or the loyalty of a loved one. Some conjurers and/or root doctors focus only on healing, while others engage in other work requiring magic. All are typically categorized as Hoodoo. A glossary and an appendix containing four sections – ”Negro Songs with Music,” “Formulae of
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Hoodoo Doctors,” “Paraphernalia of Conjure,” and “Prescriptions of Root Doctors” – round out the volume. Hurston produced her best known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, while conducting research on Voodoo (the Caribbean parallel to Hoodoo) in Haiti for Tell My Horse. A basic quest narrative, the central story is protagonist Janie Mae Crawford Killicks Starks Wood’s spiritual, emotional, and physical journey toward self-actualization. Readers are invited to experience the novel as an odyssey, as a series of adventures through which the protagonist obtains experience and, increasingly, self-knowledge. Secondly, it treats the subject of black female sexuality realistically, making it an intrinsic aspect of the protagonist’s process of self-actualization. Janie’s quest for self-knowledge includes the desire to expand the meaning of respectable womanhood to include the full expression of her (hetero)sexuality. Another important aspect of the novel is Hurston’s capacity for metaphor, especially her use of trees and pear blossoms. As critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has noted, variations on the tree metaphor mark not only the protagonist’s own desires but also the distance of persons with whom she interacts from those desires. Hurston’s intimate knowledge of the oral folk vernacular – her incorporation of folktales, lying contests, and other aspects of the oral tradition, along with her general intimacy with spoken language – assist in giving her work the ring of authenticity. Hurston’s focus on orality is also appropriate in her project of giving voice to the heroine’s quest in her journey toward self-knowledge. Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti to collect the raw material for her next book, Tell My Horse, which was subsequently published in Great Britain as Voodoo Gods: An Inquiry into Native Myths and Magic in Jamaica and Haiti (1939). “Tell my horse” is the English translation of the Creole phrase, “parlay cheval ou,” which Hurston heard often during her time in Haiti. According to Hurston, peasants in Haiti used the phrase as a disclaimer, invoking Guede (pronounced “geeday”), a powerful and boisterous god/loa/deity that made himself known by mounting or possessing someone and speaking through them. Guede was the force behind their caustic or frank comments. Thus, the phrase and the loa are identified with the common folk who do not bite their tongues or pull punches. The title is an apt one for a volume in which Hurston speaks so frankly about race, class, politics, and (particularly) gender relations in Jamaica and Haiti. Her presence as narrator and participant is once again apparent as it was in Mules and Men. The volume is divided into three parts, with part one set in Jamaica and parts two and three set in Haiti. The folklore, ceremonies, and rituals she includes in the volume represent centuries of knowledge and practice. Hurston locates the origins of Voodoo in the beginning when the universe came into being through a major act of conjure; she explains that Voodoo is a religion older than Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Voodoo is centered on creation and life; natural forces such as the sun and water serve as the foci of its worship. Along with her discussion of society and religion, Hurston provides details about everything from hunting and barbecuing wild boar – right down to the jerk spices used to season it – to the ritual performed on the third night following a death to prevent the duppy (the deceased’s spirit’s heartless and mindless ghost) from leaving the grave and
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returning to do harm to the living. She even includes a photograph of what she believes is a zombie. In Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston uses the mythic story of Moses, best recognized in western culture as the biblical Hebrew hero of the book of Exodus, who led his people out of Egyptian bondage into Canaan/Israel/the Promised Land, to create an allegory of African American life from slavery to freedom. Hurston published the germ for her book-length treatment of the Moses story five years earlier in 1934 in the short story, “The Fire and the Cloud.” For her version of the Moses story, Hurston uses traditional biblical settings: Egypt, Goshen (the slave ghetto), the Red Sea, Midian, Koptos, and the wilderness of newfound freedom on the way to the Promised Land. She depicts Moses as an extraordinary master of conjure, a Hoodoo doctor extraordinaire, his feats second only to the male/female collaboration that gave birth to the universe. The story is presented as timeless, one that is relevant for any group or individual that desires to experience the full meaning of freedom. An allegory for the black struggle in America from slavery through the Harlem Renaissance, the novel stresses individual self-determinism and sound leadership, while taking aim at what she saw as the inadequacies of black leadership during the time that the volume was produced. Hurston begins her next work, the autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, with a lie: that she was born in the “pure Negro town” of Eatonville, Florida. Though Hurston was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama, Eatonville, Florida, has become famous for its long association with Hurston and, since 1991, has hosted the annual multidisciplinary Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, which celebrates Hurston’s life and work along with Eatonville’s cultural history. Regardless of whether she was conscious of the lie about her birthplace when she penned her autobiography, later in the work, she admits deliberately lying about her age in order to qualify for free public education; hence her deliberate vagueness about her age throughout Dust Tracks. More memoir than conventional autobiography, Dust Tracks focuses on specific moments, events, and people; it leaves the reader with an impressionistic rendering of the author/artist. Interpretations and criticism of the work varied depending on the experiences, ideological influences, and beliefs of the readers. Its most strongly negative reviews came from leftist white critics and male members of the black literary establishment, including Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, Alain Locke, and, later, Darwin Turner. Careful consideration of the details surrounding publication of the first edition of Dust Tracks reveals Hurston’s lack of agency as a black woman writer subject to the mandates of a white-controlled publishing industry targeting a largely white American reading audience. By the time the manuscript went to press, it had gone through many changes and revisions that resulted in a representation of Hurston with which she was clearly not comfortable. A note she appended to the complete version of Dust Tracks donated to the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale’s Beneicke Library explains how the 1942 published version was edited by her publisher. Indeed, manuscript drafts reveal that she was forced time and again to change her own words and
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opinions. New releases of Dust Tracks in the late twentieth century appended or restored the excised and/or dispersed material. While the conditions surrounding its production and publication were truly unfortunate, Dust Tracks illustrates the kinds of compromises Hurston had to make in order to get her work into print, and it serves as an invaluable contribution to our understanding of American history and culture. The last book Hurston published was titled Seraph on the Suwanee; its primary characters are Southern whites, and the novel represents the dominant ideological perspective of postwar America on marriage, home, and family life for white America. The novel’s perspectives on women (and gender), race relations, images of African Americans, the poor (regardless of race), and disabled persons must all be attributed to the fact that the reader is placed in a subject position that is, among other things, white, male, privileged, and heterosexual – which means that LGBT persons are as invisible here as they are in the rest of her body of work. The word “seraph” in the novel’s title comes from the Hebrew word that means “to burn”; in Isaiah 6: 1–3, it refers to a certain order of protective angels with six wings. The passage reads in part that the sounds of the seraphim’s voices moved the “foundations of the thresholds” of the Temple. In Numbers, the word is associated with a fiery or poisonous serpent, and here it is tempting to read the scene in which protagonist Arvay Meserve’s husband Jim is almost killed by the snake in combination with Arvay’s subsequent burning of her old family home on the Suwanee. In each case, foundations are destroyed. After the snake incident, Jim leaves the marriage, and after Arvay burns down her childhood home and the rats in its walls, she feels confident enough to take the time she needs to complete her journey of self-discovery before returning to the marriage as the woman of agency depicted in the final scenes of the novel. While it is always important to be aware of the subject position from which a narrative proceeds, readers should be especially cognizant in reading Seraph. Individual characters’ words and actions must be considered along with the narrator’s ideological biases. For example, though we are reminded time and again of Jim Meserve’s fairness, we must also consider that he is the descendant of slaveholders and develops his wealth through the deliberate exploitation of people considered his racial, ethnic, gendered, or economic inferiors. Everyone works on his behalf, and he is perceived as the natural superior of white women and people of color. Jim even rejects his own son, Earl, whose mental condition serves to render him different, Other, black, and therefore subject to lynching after his awkward attempt to mate with Lucy Ann Corregio. Though it is easy to argue that Seraph illustrates Hurston’s belief that human beings are human beings, regardless of skin color, it also creates a record of a skewed system of economic access. Almost always, Hurston’s fiction reflected her intimate knowledge of folk culture, particularly the specific cultural milieu from which she had emerged in central Florida and also in the African diasporic cultures she encountered in her travels and fieldwork in anthropology. Her writings focused attention on basic human motivations and the issues that arise out of everyday human interactions. Her stories celebrate what she felt was the beauty and depth of the interior lives of black people and often served as the source material or germ for her longer works.
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One of the most obvious examples is the short piece, “The Fire and the Cloud,” which serves as the germ for Moses, Man of the Mountain. For her memorable opening of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston combined John Redding’s inability to act on his dream of going to sea in “John Redding Goes to Sea” (1921) with the young female protagonist’s ability to transcend constraints in “Drenched in Light” (1924). While “John Redding Goes to Sea” was a product of Hurston’s undergraduate years at Howard University, “Drenched in Light” introduced her to the literary world of New York City. Protagonist Isie (or Isis) Watts is remarkably similar to the young Zora Neale Hurston who emerges from subsequent writings, including Dust Tracks on a Road. As such, the story is an assertion of Hurston’s personal identity and an affirmation of the special nurturing she experienced growing up. The irrepressible Isis turns somersaults, dances, runs with the family dogs, and even tries to shave Grandma’s Potts’s facial hair while the old woman is asleep. Isis’s favorite activity is engaging with the people who travel on the road past the gatepost where she waits, eager to perform for them or to secure a ride in their cars. The almost completely autobiographical story tracks a day in Isie’s life, while providing a glowing perspective on self-governing, all-black Eatonville, Florida. The story is simply one of the first of Hurston’s many celebrations of rural Southern black culture in her fiction. Between June 1925 and November 1926, Hurston published five more short stories, including “Spunk” (June 1925); “Magnolia Flower (July 1925); “Muttsy” (August 1926); “ ‘Possum or Pig?” (September 1926); and The Eatonville Anthology (September–November 1926). Hurston published four short stories during the 1940s: “Cock Robin Beale Street” (July 1941); “Story in Harlem Slang” (July 1942); “High John De Conquer” (October 1943); and “Hurricane” (1946). During her final decade, she published: “The Conscience of the Court” (March 1950); “Escape from Pharaoh” (1950); and “The Tablets of the Law” (1951). One of Hurston’s most often anthologized short stories is “Spunk,” which exemplifies the author’s continuing concern with gender matters, especially representations of manhood and masculinity. Spunk Banks represents society’s notion of masculinity taken to the extreme. His physical stature, strength, and capacity for finessing the most difficult machinery at the mill are not enough; his feelings of masculine superiority are manifested in the public dating of the married Lena Kanty, whose husband Joe is both smaller in stature and less prideful and ego driven. Still, Joe Kanty must follow the dictates of honor and manhood: he confronts Spunk with a pocket razor and Spunk kills him with an Army 45 gun – a superior weapon. After a brief trial, Spunk is free to take full, legal possession of Lena, but he begins to believe that he is being haunted by Joe in the body of a black bobcat; later, as Spunk lies dying from a work-related injury, he swears it was Joe’s spirit that pushed him into the machinery. Hoodoo (which is used more explicitly as a medium for exacting revenge in Hurston’s short story “Black Death”) is implicit in this story as the source of Spunk’s decline in prestige and demise, alongside a growing myth of Joe’s superior courage. The story ends with a suggestion that both men would have been better off had access to Lena’s affections not been important to their identities as men.
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Hurston continues her engagement with heterosexual relationships in other stories like “Sweat” (1926), a story about faith, suffering, and the demise of an abusive husband, and “The Gilded Six Bits” (1933), a meditation on desire and marital infidelity. In the story, which seems based on the homily that all that glitters is not gold, relative newlywed Missie May is lured into infidelity by her desire to secure what turns out to be fake gold work around the neck of paunchy blowhard Otis Slemmons. Cuckholded, Joe is hurt and withdraws emotionally, but Missie May is redeemed when she bears the child that is obviously Joe’s son. The story is much more complex, however. Joe indeed works hard to support his household, while Missie May works to create all the comforts of hearth and home. On payday, they engage in a ritual during which Joe tosses silver dollars into the doorway and Missie May collects and saves them for their future. Still, the explanation Missie May offers for sleeping with the unattractive Slemmons is that she wanted to secure gold for Joe. Hurston subtly invites the reader to question why Missie May would engage in such an act when the man she loves throws silver dollars in her doorway every Saturday. Though her creative spirit is exhibited in the pleasing aesthetics of their colorful yard and the food she takes such pride in preparing for Joe, the events of the story suggest that Missie May desires something more than her marriage provides, and that something is much more complicated than a brief encounter with another man. Whether she wants the gold for Joe to make him equal to Slemmons in his own mind, or whether her act masks a deeper desire, the otherwise simple story brilliantly illustrates Hurston’s amazing skill at her craft. Her body of work demonstrates that she consistently drew upon a wealth of cultural and other materials to expose the intricacies of human emotions and relationships.
References and Further Reading Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Zora Neale Hurston: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Boyd, Valerie. (2003). Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner’s. Cronin, Gloria L., ed. (1998). Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. New York: G. K. Hall. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Appiah, Kwame Anthony, eds. (1987). Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Lemke, Sieglinde, eds. (1995). Zora Neale Hurston: The Complete Stories. New York: HarperCollins. Glassman, Steve, and Seidel, Kathryn Lee, eds. (1991). Zora in Florida. Orlando, F.L.: University of Central Florida Press.
Hemenway, Robert (1980). Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography [1977]. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Hill, Lynda Marion (1996). Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. Holloway, Karla (1987). The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Kaplan, Carla, ed. (2002). Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday. King, Lovalerie (2008). The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lester, Neal (1999). Understanding “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Westport, C.T.: Greenwood.
Zora Neale Hurston Lowe, John (1994). Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards (1999). Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Plant, Deborah G. (1995). Every Tub Must Sit on its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Plant, Deborah G. (2007). Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. New York: Praeger. Walker, Alice (1983). In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace.
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Wall, Cheryl (1995a). Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington, I.N.: Indiana University Press. Wall, Cheryl, ed. (1995b). Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America. Wall, Cheryl, ed. (1995c). Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America. Wall, Cheryl, ed. (2000). Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press. West, M. Genevieve (2005). Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. Gainesville, F.L.: University Press of Florida.
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Two episodes in Sister Carrie (1900) illustrate responses typical for Dreiser’s characters. In one scene, Carrie has just met the “masher” Charlie Drouet, whose stylish clothes and metropolitan manner make her “conscious of an inequality.” Mindful of being seen as the provincial that she is, Carrie “felt the worn state of her shoes” (Dreiser 2000c: 5). In a second episode, Carrie escapes the gloomy New York flat she shares with George Hurstwood to stroll along Broadway. Throngs of well-dressed people form a “showy parade” and Carrie “found herself stared at and ogled.” Again, “Carrie felt that she was not of it”; a sense of personal deficiency “cut her to the quick, and she resolved that she would not come here again until she looked better.” But this time the experience of personal lack increases Carrie’s aesthetic sensitivity, making her “exceedingly receptive” to the play she attends and leading her to wish she could herself “give expression to the feelings” she observes on stage (2000c: 298–300) – a desire that proves, of course, highly consequential to the plot. In both of these scenes, Carrie’s longing for finery speaks so loudly that it is easy to overlook Dreiser’s quieter point, about what the character feels as well as what she wants. In the second scene, her desire for better clothes pales beside two emotions: a sense of personal inadequacy and an identification with the play, a performance which, in turn, makes her empathize with the actors so that their “feelings” seem her own. The narrator of Sister Carrie grumbles about the difficulty of putting feelings into words, an odd statement from such a long-winded raconteur. But the idea becomes less strange when we recall how difficult it is to articulate, for instance, how dearly we love one person or how sadly we grieve the loss of another. Dreiser’s characters constantly feel emotions they can scarcely express, and their struggles to do so illuminate an important historical shift involving how people understand their subjectivity and what they expect from their families. Cultural commentator Christopher Lasch describes the idealized family as a “haven in a heartless world” – a safe place to cultivate subjectivity and emotions. This ideal may sound self-evident but, in fact, is of recent origin. For generations before the
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development of mass production, the family was primarily an economic unit (growing vegetables, spinning cloth, preserving food, and so on). Only after the Industrial Revolution, once the factory emerged as the locus of economic activity, did the family become reconfigured as a haven for emotions and subjectivity. Dreiser, who grew up during this transitional period, populates his novels with characters who exhibit this new sense of subjectivity, particularly as seen in their upwelling emotions, but whose families – whether because of absence or ineffectuality – fail to provide a haven. Dreiser’s novels explore what happens to feelings when the family cannot or will not nurture them. The first paragraph of Sister Carrie dispenses with any notion of Carrie’s attachment to the family she leaves behind. The expected sentiments – “a gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked” – do not materialize. Instead, we hear that “the threads which bound [Carrie] so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken” (Dreiser 2000c: 1). Poof: the family has all but vanished, and Carrie’s feelings leave her family forever. Dreiser’s own family experiences nurtured in him strong and contradictory emotions. The family’s poverty bred in the future writer a sense of marginality and deep longing. Autobiographical writings, such as Dawn (1931) and Newspaper Days (2000, originally published as A Book About Myself, 1922), make clear that Dreiser found his family the source of considerable embarrassment as well as great love. Dreiser’s father, a German immigrant, after suffering a serious workplace accident, became unable to support his large family. In order to make ends meet, Dreiser’s mother – whom he adored – took several of the children, leaving the rest with his father. As an adult, Dreiser was very critical of his father, particularly for the strict Catholicism that he felt kept the elder man’s eyes fixed on the next world to the exclusion of this one, while correspondingly praising his mother for her loving and “pagan” temperament. Although loosely based on the scandalous behavior of one of Dreiser’s sisters who ran off with a married man, Sister Carrie reads like a fantasy of leaving one’s family behind for good. The early chapters which describe Carrie settling in Chicago with her sister and brother-in-law suggest why family ties seem so burdensome to her. When Minnie Hanson greets her newly arrived sister, she offers only “a perfunctory embrace” (Dreiser 2000c: 9). The Hansons, who see Carrie less as a beloved relative than as a paying boarder, worry that if she insists on spending money, “how was her coming to the city to profit them?” (p. 31). Rather than provide a haven from the heartless world, the Hansons bring the values of the marketplace into the home. No wonder that, after the expansive feelings Drouet kindled, upon meeting the Hansons, Carrie “realized the change of affectional atmosphere at once” (p. 9). This surprising concept of “affectional atmosphere” proves central to Sister Carrie. Dwellings (as well as more public buildings such as department stores and, as we shall see, theaters) reflect and magnify the emotions of those within. These emotions, in turn, generate powerful affectional atmospheres that can influence others. Thus,
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Carrie soon realizes that her brother-in-law’s “morbid turn of character” saturates “the entire atmosphere of the flat” (p. 29). She apprehends a “new phase of its atmosphere”; while the flat itself “was unchanged,” the narrator explains, “her feelings were different” (p. 49). For the first of several times we hear that Carrie’s “heart revolted” (p. 40). Although people typically associate emotion with women, Dreiser valued emotional warmth in men, as seen in his portrayal of Drouet and Hurstwood. The drummer’s “upwelling feeling of pity in his heart” causes him to give to needy beggars (p. 135). A similar emotional expansiveness draws Carrie, for when “Drouet looked at her … his thoughts reached home.” In one of a number of passages describing a wordless interchange of sympathy, we hear of “an interchanging current of feeling” connecting the lovers (p. 59). Hurstwood’s emotional needs initially appear in the novel as we hear of their frustration. With considerable understatement, the narrator remarks no “lovely home atmosphere” infuses the manager’s house, which lacks any of the “mystic chords which bind and thrill the heart of the nation” (p. 82). Hurstwood, “the deep-feeling manager,” lives in a luxurious but barren dwelling (p. 123). Dreiser lovingly commemorates emotional men he knew in several of the sensitive biographical sketches that appear in Twelve Men (1919). In particular, “My Brother Paul” honors a man characterized by a “really great heart” (Dreiser 1998: 77). Dreiser’s oldest and “dearest brother” Paul Dresser (who anglicized the family name) dazzled the family by becoming a successful songwriter. Dreiser’s description of Paul’s best-known songs illustrates both disdain and admiration for their emotionalism: “mere bits and scraps of sentiment and melodrama … most asinine sighings over home and mother and lost sweethearts and dead heroes … and yet with something about them … which always appealed to me intensely” (p. 97). According to Dreiser, “sympathy was really [Paul’s] outstanding characteristic” (p. 82), and he loved his brother for it. Family historian Stephanie Coontz explains that, by the late nineteenth century, the nuclear family had become idealized as the cradle for emotions and subjectivity precisely because market principles and extreme individualism had come to structure public life. Thus, many of Dreiser’s characters seek the emotional haven that the changed economy made people crave but that actual families did not always provide. The Hurstwood family remains together – barely – because they extend, rather than provide refuge from, the increasing commercialization of American culture. The manager sees his family as little more than the accoutrements of a successful businessman. Julia Hurstwood recognizes her husband solely as the provider for her escalating needs and their children as means for vicarious social advance. She is, as the narrator damningly remarks, “cold” (p. 110). The Hurstwood family has degenerated into an empty and expensive form – a public showplace for social and monetary connections rather than a private haven for interpersonal and emotional ones. Other characters form alliances that simulate nuclear families, such as Carrie and Drouet’s living together out of wedlock. Dreiser does not focus on the morality of such relationships; in fact, the narrator comments shortly after Carrie moves in with
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the salesman that people who would condemn the young woman for her decision apply only an “arbitrary scale” (p. 90). Since Dreiser feels that traditional morality no longer provides a useful compass, in Sister Carrie he evaluates relationships based on their depth of feeling. Drouet and Carrie’s relationship is “not evil” because of the drummer’s “good heart” (p. 60); indeed, their relationship seems more genuine than the emotionally impoverished Hurstwood marriage. To capture the development of Hurstwood and Carrie’s relationship, Dreiser blends the language of psychic communication with that of affectional atmospheres: Hurtstwood “seemed to radiate an atmosphere which suffused her being” (p. 116). Before long, he charms Carrie by confiding that he has no one to whom he can “appeal for sympathy or talk to with pleasure” (p. 126). Given what we have seen chez Hurstwood, his mournful self-characterization sounds accurate, but it is also the perfect come-on, since Carrie by this time has concluded that Drouet sees her more as a pretty plaything than a beloved mate. And so Carrie “basked in the warmth of [Hurstwood’s] feeling, which was as a grateful blaze to one who is cold” (p. 126). The warmth of emotion, captured by the homey image of a comforting fire, legitimates the relationship, in contrast to Hurstwood’s marriage to the “cold” Julia. Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and The Financier (1912) make similar points about emotion, not marriage certificates, determining the soundness of relationships. The protagonists and the novels in which they appear could not differ more from each other: Jennie Gerhardt is a poor young woman, dedicated to helping others, particularly her nuclear family; Frank Cowperwood, a brilliant and ruthless financial speculator whose motto is “I satisfy myself” and whose response upon the birth of his first child is, “He liked it, the idea of self-duplication. It was almost acquisitive” (Dreiser 1995: 121, 57). Jennie has a child by one man and lives for years with another who never marries her – yet Dreiser keeps insisting on her essential purity and decency. Because of Jennie’s “bigness of emotion” and “unutterable feeling,” Dreiser presents her liaison with the wealthy Lester Kane as more genuine than his subsequent marriage to an heiress whose feelings lack the depth of Jennie’s (Dreiser 1992: 72, 88). (In another example of the failure of the conventional family, the Kanes pressure Lester into discarding the “warm” [p. 34] woman he loves to marry a colder one they consider more socially fitting.) The Financier’s Frank Cowperwood marries early in the novel, but his wife remains a background figure, completely overshadowed by the young and feisty Aileen Butler, who has a passionate affair with him. Toward the end of the novel, while Cowperwood is imprisoned for financial misdeeds, Aileen visits him and a memorable scene shows a crack in the façade of the strong man. Because Aileen’s “love was so full – so genuine,” Cowperwood loses his self-control for the only time in his life and breaks into tears while his young lover mothers the man she calls “My baby – my honey pet” (Dreiser 1995: 413). Although many readers find scant indicators of love in Sister Carrie, the narrator insists that the title character is “rich in feeling” (Dreiser 2000c: 140, 141). Although she rejects factory work, flees the constricting lifestyle of the Hansons, and ignores beggars on the street, Carrie manifests considerable, if rather abstract, emotional
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reactions to the struggling poor. “Sorrow in her was aroused by many a spectacle,” such as pale, ragged men or “poorly clad girls” (p. 141). The unnamed poor in Sister Carrie function as a sort of chorus offering silent commentary on the plot trajectory. They also reflect historical circumstances: industrialism produced, in addition to the prospects of great wealth (such as lure Carrie), a new cohort of very visible homeless people (such as Hurstwood becomes). When Carrie sees the homeless, she “pitied them from the depths of her heart.” Her sympathies even extend, albeit in a purely theoretical way, back to her family, when she recalls “Her old father, in his flour-dusted miller’s suit.” As Dreiser sums up, Carrie retains “deep sympathies … with that underworld of toil from which she had so recently sprung” (pp. 141, 142). The safest haven that Carrie finds for these feelings turns out to be not any makeshift family but rather the theater. Carrie’s debut in Augustin Daly’s popular melodrama Under the Gaslight (1867) foreshadows her success at the novel’s end and also pivots the plot from Drouet to Hurstwood, from Chicago to New York. Carrie plays the part of Laura, a young woman who loses both social position and fiancé due to false accusations from an unscrupulous man who mocks family feeling by pretending to be her long-lost father. The play’s happy ending reunites Laura with her lost love, restores her social position, and confirms that “heart” trumps money, social standing, and accomplishments. This role is tailor-made for Carrie because, as the narrator remarks, it “was one of suffering and tears” (p. 155). Through the interplay of actress and audience, Dreiser delineates a curious feedback loop of feelings. Once Carrie, after a rocky beginning playing Laura, conveys emotional sincerity, she creates a powerful affectional atmosphere which moves the audience, whose response, in turn, enhances her performance. Hurstwood, for one, “caught the infection. The radiating waves of feeling and sincerity were already breaking against the farthest walls of the chamber” (p. 176). The whole audience responds with “a drawing, too, of attention, a riveting of feeling,” and this “general feeling reacted on Carrie” (pp. 176, 179). Emotions of actress and viewers reverberate in the auditorium, heightening each other. Dreiser uses Carrie’s acting to explore the power of art to simulate the emotional connection often romanticized as the family’s terrain. Carrie’s performance, “by a combination of feelings and entanglements, almost deluded [Hurstwood] by that quality of voice and manner, which, like a pathetic strain of music, seems ever a personal and intimate thing.” In other words, art produces an illusion of interpersonal intimacy that fosters subjectivity and emotion. “Pathos has this quality,” the narrator explains, “that it seems ever addressed to one alone” (p. 180). By novel’s end, Carrie is receiving offers of marriage from men who have not even met her but consider themselves her intimates because her acting has moved them. In the heartless world, art may provide at least temporary haven. Bob Ames’s cameo appearance consolidates Dreiser’s ideas about the emotional appeal of art. Ames attributes Carrie’s success not to talent, practice, or even luck, but to unusually expressive facial features: her mouth looks “peculiar,” he says, as if
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she “were about to cry.” He then explains art’s function: “The world is always struggling to express itself,” says Ames, but “Most people are not capable of voicing their feelings.” Dreiser now suggests a solution for the inadequacy of words to express feelings, or of family to nurture them: artistic “genius” can channel unvoiced feelings (p. 468). The famous coda to the novel substantiates the point: “In life there is ever the intellectual and the emotional nature – the mind that reasons, and the mind that feels.” Of these two groups, intellectuals become “men of action,” whereas the feeling souls become “poets and dreamers – artists all” (pp. 484–5). The role of the artist – whether Carrie Meeber, Paul Dresser, or Theodore Dreiser – is to articulate feelings that most cannot express. Dreiser’s most autobiographical novel The Genius continues Sister Carrie’s examination of the place of feeling in art and in sexual relationships. (The “Genius” was initially published in 1915, with quotation marks around the noun. The discussion here draws from some passages that appear only in Dreiser’s initial version of the novel composed in 1911, recently published as The Genius.) In this novel, Dreiser fictionalizes his tempestuous first marriage and concurrent difficulties in launching his career as a realistic novelist. Protagonist Eugene Witla pursues many women both before and after his marriage to Angela Blue; he also struggles to find an audience for his gritty realistic paintings. But despite the novel’s focus on the career trajectory of a male artist, the towering character of Angela emerges as a genius of feeling, a quality that leads to some curious sexual politics. Early in The Genius, Eugene compares his Midwestern fiancée to more sophisticated East Coast women. Angela, he concludes, seems lacking “on the intellectual and artistic side” – yet he admits she “more than hold[s] her own emotionally” (Dreiser 2008b: 138). Sister Carrie’s contrast between intellectuals/doers versus artists/feelers resurfaces in Eugene’s reflection on how people can be “intellectually indifferent or even deficient while being emotionally marvellous” (p. 138). When he compares Angela to Sarah Bernhardt on the ground of their powerful emotionalism, the characterization smacks of a backhanded compliment, yet Eugene’s later reflection confirms his wife’s pre-eminence. He marvels at Angela’s “great emotion, effective, dramatic, powerful,” and affirms “No really common soul could have it.” Comparing Angela to operatic heroines such as Camille, Sapho, and Carmen in the intensity of her feeling, Eugene ranks his wife above sophisticated Eastern women, telling her, “I’d rather have your deep, natural upwelling of emotion.” He concludes, as does Bob Ames about Carrie, that “great art is based on great emotion” (p. 256), and that Angela is no less than an “emotional genius” – an especially significant tribute given the title of the novel and Eugene’s struggles to attain artistic success (p. 271). Shifting focus from a female to a male artist, and from the struggles of individuals to develop their subjectivity to the complexities of subjectivity within marriage, The Genius revises the emotional dynamics of Sister Carrie. While Angela’s emotionalism draws Eugene, the bond it creates proves tenuous. On the very day of their marriage, Eugene begins to wonder: Angela “was emotionally responsive” but is that quality
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“really enough”? Might there be some “union of fine thoughts and feelings” on a higher level (p. 193)? Shortly after the newlyweds settle in Greenwich Village, Eugene’s former girlfriend, Miriam Finch, offends Angela, who directs her rage toward her husband in a scene that we hear from his point of view: “Eugene was … pained and terrorized by this persistent and unexpected display of emotion.” Angela, of course, does not see her outburst as emotional terrorism but rather as a way to “get the moral, mental, and emotional upper hand.” However, she undeniably uses emotions for maximum impact: “She knew very well what she was doing in her anger and rage … She felt he ought to be made to suffer … and tears … would do it.” Whereas Eugene earlier felt Angela’s emotional genius distinguished her from other women, he begins to feel “he preferred the lofty indifference of Miriam … This noisy, tempestuous, angry emotion was not quite the thing” (pp. 212–13). In the novel many consider Dreiser’s masterpiece, An American Tragedy (1925), feelings determine the plot even when they prove inauthentic. The novel begins with the overpowering feelings of embarrassment and alienation experienced by Clyde Griffiths as a boy growing up with evangelical parents who run a Kansas City mission on a shoestring. Whereas passers-by find themselves “interested or moved sympathetically” by the girl playing the organ or the shabby father, to Clyde, the family spectacle makes him feel “ashamed, dragged out of normal life, to be made a show and jest of” (Dreiser 2000a: 2, 4). Clyde is nothing if not intensely emotional. “Decidedly more sensitive” than others, the thin-skinned youth is prone to “resent and even to suffer from the position in which he found himself” (p. 3). He will do anything to distance himself literally and emotionally from his family. Perhaps Clyde’s greatest mistake is to try to replace his embarrassing, ineffectual nuclear family with a fantasy family that shares his last name but little else. Clyde’s uncle, Samuel Griffiths, is everything his father is not: rich, successful, self-assured – an exemplary modern American male. Although Samuel deigns to give his nephew a job in his shirt factory in Lycurgus, New York, he acts as a philanthropic capitalist, not as a loving uncle. Indeed, Samuel counsels his own family not to treat Clyde like the cousin he is: “I don’t expect any of you to pay him any social attention,” Samuel warns. Clyde should be treated like any other expendable employee, and if he does not perform, “we will have to toss him aside, of course” (p. 160). Samuel Griffiths’s coldness recalls Julia Hurstwood’s demeanor, but in An American Tragedy, Dreiser takes pains to locate the behavior as a function of class position. Samuel’s treatment of his nephew embodies the values of his social class, which Dreiser describes as “ultra-successful” (p. 149). Capitalists value cool, crisp, detachment, and condemn hot, mushy emotion – especially in the workplace, where nothing should stand in the way of making money. Historian Eli Zaretsky explains the phenomenon: “the need to recycle all wealth into the process of capital accumulation” nurtures the “ethic of self-abnegation and denial” (p. 50). In particular, An American Tragedy casts the ultra successful as “indifferent to sex, a disgraceful passion” (p. 171). The lesson is not lost on the impressionable Clyde who, upon meeting his uncle, fantasizes that he has himself grown more “reserved” and vows to become “all that his uncle …
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expected of him – cool, cold even,” especially when it comes to women (pp. 171, 240). No dangerous feelings shall stand in the way of social advancement. Clyde embraces the anti-emotional cult of the capitalists, who display “Girls Wanted” signs to seek employees, not girlfriends (p. 253). Or, rather, Clyde tries to embrace this cult, but his feelings get in the way. Ironically, Samuel places his romance- and sex-starved nephew in charge of hundreds of young women. The hormone-fanned heat of emotion melts the icy Lycurgus work ethic and draws Clyde toward factory hand Roberta Alden, leading to the most consequential of many times when feelings overpower his conscious intent. Dreiser assigns Roberta’s feelings an authenticity that cannot be doubted. Persistent “emotional aches” persuade her to become sexually intimate with Clyde (p. 295). But practically before they consummate their passion, Clyde is seeking release from it, having chanced upon the beautiful heiress Sondra Finchley whom he decides better fits his social and emotional ambitions. Still, Roberta’s “ ‘blues’ ” and their similar family backgrounds create an “emotional compulsion” Clyde cannot resist, no matter how he tries (p. 381). After impregnating Roberta and trying to extricate himself, Clyde’s wavering renders him unable to leave her. As the narrator explains, the young man’s “strain of tenderness” makes him “soft and melting. His manner,” the narrator goes on to explain, “was as tender and gentle almost as that of a mother and a baby” (p. 374). Here Dreiser rewrites the scene in The Financier in which youthful Aileen mothers her older lover; An American Tragedy casts Clyde in the role of sympathetic mother. The comparison is telling, because the “principal thing that troubled Clyde,” and hence conditioned his emotionalism, was the sense of his “shabby” family’s insufficiency (p. 8). No matter how he tries, Clyde just cannot reprogram his emotions from how they were initially conditioned by his Kansas City family. While reading An American Tragedy, the reader likely experiences his or her own conflicting emotions about the protagonist. At times, especially when Dreiser emphasizes the intensity of Clyde’s longing, empathy comes easily. But at other times, Clyde comes across as positively hateful, particularly when he betrays or fakes emotions. This tendency is especially evident as Clyde continues sleeping with Roberta even while wooing Sondra. He tries to “conceal … his recent contact with Sondra behind a veil of pretended, unmodified affection” that fails to persuade Roberta (p. 343). By “telepathic” intuition that recalls the psychic communication in Sister Carrie, Roberta figures out the identity of Clyde’s fantasy girlfriend and demands he marry her. Instead, Roberta ends up dead at the bottom of a lake (p. 372). Proliferating ironies during Clyde’s capture and trial set in motion a process that makes him appear to lack feeling and hence become to the public eye unworthy of sympathy. First, although Clyde plots to destroy what could constitute his new nuclear family (Roberta and his unborn child), at the last minute he cannot go through with murder – yet a series of accidents make his dark desires come true without his, technically, acting on them. Irony compounds when the district attorney, jurors, and general public interpret Clyde as if he were a member of the “ultra-successful” Griffiths family that in fact shuns him, and because of that assumed affiliation, find
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him guiltier than they would a poor lonely youth (such as Clyde actually is). Finally, his attorneys try to restore sympathy by constructing a defense that, at the last minute before Roberta fell from the boat, Clyde experienced what they call a “change of heart” (p. 640). Ironically, while the defense lawyers do not believe their concoction, it is true. But emotional manipulations render it impossible for either legal professionals or gawking spectators to believe Clyde’s change of heart. When District Attorney Mason reads the most dramatic evidence against Clyde, the dead Roberta’s mournful letters pleading for marriage, he finds himself “greatly moved.” But Mason’s “feeling” smacks of inauthenticity – first, because he wrongly assumes Clyde to be wealthy and, in his mind, therefore unworthy of sympathy; second, because Mason considers this prosecution his ticket to re-election (p. 606). Thus the district attorney manipulates feeling for political gain, reading Roberta’s letters aloud during the trial “with all the sympathy and emotion which their first perusal had stirred in him. They had made him cry” (p. 694). Although the judge instructs the jury to disregard the letters, their “pathetic significance” influences the verdict of guilty in the first degree (p. 683). Dreiser also traces the manipulation of emotion into the marketplace, detailing the selling of Roberta’s letters as a pamphlet to an eager crowd, causing “a wave of pity” for Roberta to exacerbate “a wave of hatred for Clyde” (p. 666). This commercialization of Roberta’s emotion (to say nothing of the invasion of her privacy) only pretends to emotional sincerity. Mason’s and the press’s exploitation of emotions exemplifies Dreiser’s exasperated comment on the trial as “from start to finish … unfair. Prejudice and bias had governed its every step” (p. 776). And when, weeks later, the governor turns down the plea of Clyde’s mother for clemency, the reason he gives is “I cannot act upon sympathy alone” (p. 844). But sympathy, Dreiser suggests, must factor into humane decisions about such weighty matters as guilt or innocence, life or death. The more readers attend to the social context that influences Clyde Griffiths’s attitudes and behaviors – how and why he pursues wealth and considers human lives disposable – the less comfortably can we judge his actions. Dreiser delineates, after all, “an American tragedy,” involving political ambition, media commercialization, and, particularly, class inequities – not an idiosyncratic personal tragedy. As Dreiser explains in a retrospective essay, Clyde’s attitudes were not anti-social but pro-social, reflecting the values of his culture. Family historians such as Eli Zaretsky and Stephanie Coontz criticize how sentimentalization of the nuclear family as the haven for subjectivity and emotions lets people ignore their connections and responsibilities to society at large. Coontz explains that the recent idea of family-based morality “substitut[ing] for … public values and societal bonds[,] far from being a source of social commitment and responsibility … helped erode those traits” (p. 54). Because his characters often have fractured or dysfunctional families, Dreiser, especially in An American Tragedy, presses for acknowledgment of the human family to which we all belong. Drouet’s generosity to beggars, Carrie’s abstract sympathy for the poor, may be steps in the right direction but finally prove insufficient haven for homeless feelings.
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References and Further Reading Bell, Michael Davitt (1993). The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cassuto, Leonard and Eby, Clare, eds. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coontz, Stephanie (2000). The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books. Den Tandt, Christophe (1998). The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Dreiser, Theodore (1992). Jennie Gerhardt [1911], ed. James L. W. West III. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dreiser, Theodore (1995). The Financier [1912]. New York: Meridian. Dreiser, Theodore (1998). Twelve Men [1919], ed. Robert Coltrane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dreiser, Theodore (2000a). An American Tragedy [1925]. New York: Signet Classic. Dreiser, Theodore (2008b). The Genius [1911], ed. Clare Virginia Eby. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Dreiser, Theodore (2000c). Sister Carrie [1900]. New York: Signet Classic. Eby, Clare Virginia (1998). Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo. Columbia, M.O.: University of Missouri Press. Fisher, Philip (1985). Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. Fleissner, Jennifer L. (1995). Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gerber, Philip (1992). Theodore Dreiser Revisited. New York: Twayne.
Howard, June (1985). Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Hussman, Lawrence E. (1983). Dreiser and his Fiction: A Twentieth Century Quest. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kaplan, Amy (1988). The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lasch, Christopher (1995). Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: Norton. Lingeman, Richard (1986, 1990). Theodore Dreiser, 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s. Loving, Jerome (2005). The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press. Michaels, Walter Benn (1987). The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley, C. A.: University of California Press. Mitchell, Lee Clark (1989). Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Moers, Ellen (1969). Two Dreisers. New York: Viking. Pizer, Donald (1976). Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press. Pizer, Donald, ed. (1991). New Essays on Sister Carrie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pizer, Donald, Rusch, Frederick E., and Dowell, Richard W. (1991). Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide, 2nd edn. Boston: G. K. Hall. Sundquist, Eric J. (1982). American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore, M.D.: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Zaretsky, Eli (1976). Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life. New York: Harper & Row.
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William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Charles A. Peek
Despite the inability to document Faulkner’s massive career in a small space, it is possible to focus on its dominant features. Capturing, in particular, the features of Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County challenges the more persistent mis-readings and allows readers to locate the drawn-to-small-scale mythic county within the “large scale” of realities and narratives that shape us irrespective of our differences. One can draw the mythic county to such larger scale from several perspectives, any one of which readily dispels a notion of Faulkner having had an apprenticeship, then Great Years, then decline. Doubtless, Faulkner did not always like the vision that appeared under his pen, the differences between the person and the writer signaling his own internal conflicts. Faulkner loved his southland, his America, his independence. Perhaps no writer ever looked with more affection on his characters. In The Mansion (1959), Gavin Stevens comments, “People just do the best they can”; Ratliff replies, “The pore sons of bitches” (Faulkner 1965: 429). Yet, there is some of Faulkner in the exchange between Shreve and Quentin in Absalom, Absalom! (1936): “Why do you hate the South?” Shreve asks. “I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” (Faulkner 1990a: 303). The conflict between hate and love gave rise to a genius that endured more than a few “major years.” Praise and criticism spanned his career: upon the publication of Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Arnold Bennett called Faulkner “the coming man” (Hamblin and Peek: 360). Upon the publication of A Fable (1954), Norman Podhoretz said that he did not know if it was the worst novel Faulkner ever wrote, but that he declined to re-read Mosquitoes (1927) to find out. Many of the stories set in Yoknapatawpha interrelate, characters in one story appearing in others, different aspects of their personalities stressed, downplayed or even altered. Even more than in its prototype in Hardy’s Wessex, Yoknapatawpha is an intricate web of relations among events and characters, the web expanding as Faulkner learned the limits and potential of his creations. Yoknapatawpha evolved from Faulkner’s twin conceptions: a version of Eliot’s Prufrock and his invention of
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the Snopes clan. Faulkner’s variations on Prufrock appear as “Elmer,” an early unpublished manuscript; then as Dawson Fairchild in Mosquitoes (1927), a satire of New Orleans’ artists and writers; re-emerging as Horace Benbow of Sartoris (1929) and Sanctuary (1931), Quentin of The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Gavin Stevens of the Snopes trilogy, Requiem for a Nun (1962), and Intruder in the Dust (1948). His invention of the Snopes, whose name Faulkner considered his one thing of genius, comes replete with various richly named members: Ab and Flem, Admiral Dewey and Montgomery Ward, each of whom is said to be “THE son of a bitch’s son of a bitch.” Ab appears as the discontented sharecropper in “Barn Burning” (1938), in which his son Sarty must choose between “blood” and integrity, while Flem’s arrival signals the unseating of the older planter aristocracy by the newer upstart countrymen-cometo-town seeking respectability. Alongside the evils of Ab Snopes run the evils of the share-crop system and of Major De Spain, “the man who aims to own” Ab for a period of eight months. Indeed, part of Ab’s rebellion is occasioned by the revelation, to him as to Wash in Absalom, Absalom!, of how thin was the façade of nobility in the planter aristocrats who were the heroes of the Confederacy. To his attenuated personalities and his Snopes, Faulkner added a cast of planters and townspeople, often drawn from his own family tree, and choruses of rustics. Sanctuary is instructive as to the amalgam. The novel began as a potboiler until Faulkner’s sense of his literary reputation came to his rescue. Extensive revisions in the galley proofs delayed publication but created a novel that probes the degeneracy of the white community by juxtaposing to it the seedy and criminal underworld of bootlegging and prostitution associated with the psychopathic Popeye who rapes Temple Drake, using a corncob to compensate for his own impotence. Horace Benbow of Sartoris returns, here first seen narcissistically viewing his own face reflected in a pool. Temple Drake’s alienation here from her own experience – she ends the novel taking her leisure in the Luxembourg Gardens amidst the innocence of childhood pursuits (a scene reminiscent of those Faulkner noted during his stay in Paris in letters sent to his mother in which he reconstructs “home”) – haunts her later in Requiem (see Faulkner 1966; Watson 1992). Horace’s sister, Narcissa, is haunted here behind her sequestering walls by the voyeurism of Byron Snopes, counterpointed with an adventure of comic buffoonery in Memphis in which Miss Reba’s brothel is mistaken for a rooming house. As in most of his novels, the cast is here in toto. Like Sarty in “Barn Burning,” Faulkner loved his place and people enough to find it a painful and wrenching prospect to step away from the myths and legends that family, monuments, and pulpits handed down to him. His was the culture of the Lost Cause, with all its mappings of sexual roles, gender boundaries, racial stereotypes, and political attitudes. How to expose the myths and exorcise their ghosts, without at the same moment being dispossessed of the people and place he loved! Yet, it was indeed his project to lay the legends bare, to escape their harrowing inscription on his own identity, to make fiction of his dispossession. Being a prophet without honor contributed to making fiction of that dispossession. He was a neglected writer, except in France and L.A. – Los Angeles (Hollywood) or
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Latin America. (On Latin American aspects in Faulkner’s writing, see Glissant; on film, see Brodsky and Hamblin; Kawin; and Phillips.) Hollywood was fitting since early on Faulkner play-acted his way into many of the possible selves he imagined in his young adulthood. Donning military insignia he had not earned, telling stories of military exploits he had never had, he struck a romantic pose for squiring Estelle Oldham and Helen Baird and writing them romantic poems. The white child of Bible-reading Methodists took to juke joints, bootleggers, and brothels in the Black Delta where the Blues first emerged. In New Orleans, he frequented the circle gathered around Sherwood Anderson and his “anti-village” legacy of grotesques that fired up a generation of writers of greater talent than Anderson’s own. There, too, he took part in discussions of Freud, whom he later claimed never to have heard of. Attracting the attention of local Phil Stone who helped him publish, he wrote scathingly of the society of which Stone was a scion and the two ended permanently estranged. Most comfortable hunting with locals in the diminishing big woods, he took himself off to Hollywood, scriptwriting for movies. Desiring recognition, he buried himself in the remote region of the closed society of Mississippi; desiring nothing more than to be left alone, he became a traveling ambassador for world understanding. Scathingly critical of almost every idea of God he heard trumpeted from Southern pulpits, he died in an asylum in Byhalia with Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651) at his bedside. His characters are always placed in that hallmark of American writing: the landscape. America’s vast and varied geography gave rise to a penchant for immersing readers in landscapes as though they needed to see where we live to understand why we live the way we do. In Faulkner, rural shacks and antebellum mansions, eroded land and fecund earth, mossy undergrowth and stellar lights come to life and surround the lives of country and city folk, their customs and their clatter, the land, the vegetation, the skies each taking on a life of its own, independent of individuals, the individuals sometimes independent of even thinking and will, turning to evidence of the unseen. His postage stamp of native soil, as it touched that ineffable world just beyond: that was his subject. His eventual stories and their settings were, however, a long way off from his childhood and youth in the small towns of the northern Mississippi hill country, where to grow up meant wading in the deepest swamps of what Mark Twain referred to as petrified opinion and to emerge into a dusty twilight trailing the Spanish moss of bastard legends, the mud of former glories fast-drying to dust, haunted by the clinging ghosts of the stillborn children of the promise of America. Of that dust and twilight, those legends and their ghosts, he made fiction, a body of work mapping the misrepresentations in the stories he had been told, charting the dispossession characteristic of our common experience. The first substantive word of his “Appendix” to The Sound and the Fury would be “dispossessed,” attached first to the Indians: “ikkemotubbe. A dispossessed American King” (Faulkner 1994: 203), who once occupied the space his people now possessed, people whose history began with a similar dispossession (“quentin maclachan …
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Fled to Carolina from Culloden Moor,” 1994: 204). As Ike and his cousin debate their history in “The Bear” section of Go Down, Moses (1942), one trumps the other: “As your Authority states, man was dispossessed of Eden” (Faulkner 1990c: 246). The ubiquitous dispossession would trace itself through the African Americans still being dispossessed in Faulkner’s time, stretching to Butch Beauchamp of Go Down, Moses who is “ordered … off the [McCaslin/Edmonds] place and … forbidden … ever to return” (1990c: 355), just as dispossession would end the story of the Compson family when Quentin leaves them behind to run off with a carnival worker, dispossessing Jason of the money of which he has over the years dispossessed her, money sent by her mother, Caddy, the dispossessed “fallen woman” of the family. The white family in decline and their black servants provide a frame for much of Faulkner’s work, especially The Sound and the Fury, his stream-of-consciousness portrait of the degenerating fortunes of the Compsons and the sufferings of “their” black family, the Gibsons. At its heart is an image of a little girl in muddy drawers up a tree trying to see into the room where her grandmother, Damuddy, awaits her funeral. Below, her brothers peer up, admiring or resentful of her daring. Faulkner told Caddy Compson’s story from four points of view, each beginning at a threshold that turns out to be a barrier: Benjy’s, Caddy’s idiot brother whom she loved; Quentin’s, the brother sent to Harvard who commits suicide there because he loved death even more than Caddy and honor; Jason’s, the calculating brother left with the mess generations created, exacting his revenge by robbing Caddy’s daughter Quentin of the support the banished Caddy sends; and, finally, a third-person narrative’s focus on Dilsey Gibson, a black character based on Faulkner’s “other mother,” his nanny “Mammy” Callie Barr. Events in the novel span thirty years, but time present is the end of Passion Week 1928. When Malcolm Cowley created The Portable Faulkner (Faulkner 1946), he felt the excerpted Dilsey section could not appear without explanation. Faulkner supplied Cowley with “The Compson Appendix.” Written as a genealogy, even an obituary, headed by a gravestone inscription, and confounding the Southern custom, that of identifying servants by the name of the family for whom they worked, by asserting in one of its headings that the Gibsons “were not Compsons,” the “Appendix” sets the story in a deeper historical context of displaced and dispossessed clans and tribes. These Compsons would reappear in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s “meditation” on what we can know of the past, where Quentin attempts to grapple with the legendary Thomas Sutpen, only to find that history has retreated behind racial and sexual fears past and present. Only imagination, reconstructing the past, reveals anything substantial, art trumping history as a way of knowing. Ironic parallels between the cycles of possession and dispossession of his own Scots heritage and those marginalized heritages that haunt the American landscape, those of the African American and the American Indian, became focal points for Faulkner’s work, epic portraits of the people who knew each other but could not live together, yet, paradoxically, lived side by side without knowing each other, as in his depiction of the Grand Jury in Light in August (1932), preparing “to take the life of a man whom
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few of them had ever seen to know, for having taken the life of a woman whom even fewer of them had known to see” (Faulkner 1985: 416). Experiments with multiple narrators expanded to experiments with multiple narratives in Light in August. Here, three stories – the redemption of disgraced minister Gail Hightower, the tragedy of Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, and the comic romance of Lena Grove and Byron Bunch – variously touching or barely missing each other, develop a “deconstruction” of the racial and gender underpinnings of the society of the South. Women are relegated to the margins by the men in the story, an unseen and even feared sex; yet some are capable of the identity that eludes Joe who, unable to know whether he is black or white, lacks the only terms available in his world to define himself. The novel is one of what Jay Watson calls Faulkner’s “forensic” fictions. Faulkner ties the stories together by paralleling the motifs through which the stories are told, using each strand of the novel to question how we know what we think we know and how we decide to act as we decide to act: “Memory believes before knowing remembers” (Faulkner 1985: 119). Elements of the birth and passion narratives from the gospels again underscore this probing of how far the meaning of the crucifixion will stretch, making the “loosely Episcopalian” Faulkner a “catholic writer,” at least in the broadest meaning of the term (see Barth). Even before Light in August, however, Faulkner had published his first collection of short stories, These Thirteen (1931); several of his best stories appear here. Sections one and three present mood-pieces, including stories drawn from the Great War and “Carcassonne,” all of them elaborating a theme of mutability. Section two includes notable stories: “Red Leaves” depicts a ritual of death-in-life, lampooning white rhetoric defending slavery by echoing it in the words of Chickasaw Indians who have adopted the practice of slavery; “Dry September” roots the actual lynching of Nelse Patton in Oxford, a community depicted as a voiceless mass in whose prejudices the subordinate position of African Americans and supposed idealizations of white womanhood are seen to be complicit villains in the violence; “That Evening Sun,” a blues riff on Nancy Mannigoe, whose misfortunes again expose the racism that created its own identifiable types of passive and active resistance. This story revisits the Compson family, and its Nancy will reappear in Requiem for a Nun; and the most highly anthologized American short story, Faulkner’s exploration of the warping influence of a patriarchal father and a hegemonic community, “A Rose for Emily” (see Towner and Carothers). Faulkner’s first foray into Yoknapatawpha, Sartoris (1929), a shortened version of the fuller Flags in the Dust published only later (1973), challenged myths of family and land. Having discovered in the “Falkner” family tree (as with Hawthorne, whom he claimed never to have read, Faulkner added a letter to the family name) a fictional genealogy that would bear the weight of a novel, he would draw from it the Sartorises whose story would variously tell of the South, critique American life, and provide a psychological portrait of its characters.
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Returning from World War I in which his brother Johnny was killed, airman Bayard Sartoris bears the guilt of having survived (and the later guilt of having killed his grandfather in an auto accident) and suffers the ghosts of the Lost Cause that haunt him with doomed ideas of honor. He eventually marries Narcissa Benbow, a flower behind a garden wall, sister to another returnee, the Prufrockian Horace, who served as a noncombatant. Filled with Sartoris braggadocio, Bayard contrives his own death in an air show, leaving Aunt Jenny to muse over the gravestones that herald contrived honor and misplaced pride. She explains the absence of anything but a name and dates on his gravestone: “No Sartoris man to invent bombast to put on it” (Faulkner 1974: 426). These Sartorises live cheek by jowl with the “Negro” family of Simon Strothers; though Faulkner’s portraits of Negroes are here superficial, the novel attests to his early feeling for the humanity of blacks and their importance for his fiction, as well as his prescient understanding that the war had brought changes in the attitudes and expectations of Negroes, changes that would justifiably threaten a white and racist community. Though he would populate several stories with Sartorises during the 1930s, in time Faulkner found it necessary to abandon the Sartoris vehicle and re-fictionalize his family, this time as the McCaslin half of the McCaslin/Edmondses, a special creation with a far more complex family tree. Although that tree does not so neatly parallel his own genealogy as did that of the Sartorises, the McCaslins do parallel a singular fact not present in the former apocrypha but, as Joel Williamson has shown, present in the actual Falkner history, the fact of miscegenation and the culture that permitted and justified it. Faulkner casts parts of the McCaslin story in the Mississippi Delta country, the deepest of the Deep South, because it was in the singular and “foreign” country of the Delta that Faulkner himself had found a counterculture, like the R.A.F., New Orleans’ French Quarter, and Hollywood, that would serve as an antidote to the proprieties of Faulkner’s own Bible-based mother and Oxford home. Faulkner, in other words, had discovered those sites that were important simply because they were “away” and “other,” his shadow self, something as far from the white, middle-class identities of his growing up as he could get. (Obviously, however, he had not gotten very far “living into” this otherness since he was still vocalizing the racial vulgarities with which he was raised, and would continue using racially degrading phrases in unguarded moments in his own public speech for some time.) Faulkner’s interest in and use of the Delta repeated the ancient history he knew and used like perhaps no other author. From the publication of Sanctuary onward, literary scholarship has recognized, in John Crow Ransom’s words, “William Faulkner is Greek” (Blotner: 349). The Delta, however, precisely as the Kingdom of Cotton, bore the marks of Egypt it imposed on its own cultural history. The river had been envisioned as the Nile of the New World, the Delta an Egypt with Memphis to the immediate north. So, Faulkner engaged the “Egyptian” world of the planter through his own “Greek” sensibility, with its awareness of patterns of concealment and its exploration of the relation between spiritual and material realities. In short, Faulkner
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found the Delta offered a deeper understanding of behaviors and beliefs that were often unreadable by white eyes. The Delta provided Faulkner phenomena and patterns vital to his refiguration of his family’s and America’s history. Not least among these were the commissary and its expanded role in the Delta, giving Faulkner a kind of objective correlative for the material conditions under which first slaves then sharecroppers labored: the commissary, economic hub of the sharecropping system, its account ledgers summing up “the whole plantation in its mazed and intricate entirety” (Faulkner 1990c: 284–5; see also Cobb). Faulkner’s most direct appropriation of Delta materials is read in Go Down, Moses (1942), a novel in seven stories (see Kinney). Set partly in the hill country, partly in the Delta, it tells the story of Ike McCaslin’s coming-of-age only later to abdicate his responsibilities. The story shows Faulkner’s recognition of how much the history and institutions of his hill country owed to the Delta, and how exploring those connections would further reveal the power of his region’s ghosts. It was there that transportation first presaged the end of wilderness, and African American emergence ended the possibility of the behaviors long concealed in the commissary ledgers. Reality is counterpointed with what white eyes never notice and cannot see. One story, “Pantaloon in Black,” takes readers to the “barren [grave] plot,” marked off “by shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read” (Faulkner 1990c: 132). Its protagonist, Rider, is himself taken from blues and folk traditions. A white deputy sheriff misreading the black Rider’s love and grief parallels lawyer Gavin Steven’s incomprehension; in the final story, we see that Faulkner has been providing us emblems of generations of Southern white blindness to the curse of slavery, and the miscegenation it fostered, to the behaviors concealed in the ledgers of the commissaries, and to the sharecropping system and its evils. The ghosts, that is, included the system of color caste. Blyden Jackson saw Faulkner as asking, as Twain before him: “If slavery had not been the institution that accounted most for the ostracism of Negroes from American democracy, what institution had, and still did? … It was … color caste” (Fowler and Abadie 1987: 65). Bigotry, racism, and paternalism are half-hidden, half-concealed in the McCaslin plantation ledgers, just as in the stories that Ike McCaslin has heard that mythologized his history. They tell the story of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin’s incest and miscegenation (and possibly homoeroticism), acts that create a massive family with both black and white branches. Similarly, tucked away in the comic elements of “Fire in the Hearth” is first the tragedy of Zack Edmonds and Lucas Beauchamp’s estrangement over suspicions of miscegenation, here too constructed as incest, then the spectacle to which his menialization by the sharecrop system reduces even the dignified Lucas: the tomfoolery of his search for old Carothers McCaslin’s hidden gold coins. For the gold standard in tomfoolery, however, one looks to As I Lay Dying (1930). Faulkner followed the literary success and financial failure of The Sound and the Fury
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with what he termed his “tour de force.” He claimed to have written it with his tablet braced on the back of an upturned shovel during six weeks when he was on night shift at the power plant. If The Great Gatsby was America’s “Jazz Age” novel, As I Lay Dying has been noted as America’s first novel of the Great Depression (see Wadlington). Portrayed through fifty-nine separate monologues from fifteen different characters’ points of view, the Bundren family faces the task of fulfilling their promise to wife and mother Addie to bury her in Yoknapatawpha’s County seat, Jefferson, a task made formidable by washed-out bridges and rising flood waters and made problematic by the ulterior motives of each: for example, Dewey Dell, pregnant with a cotton-patch child, seeking an abortion; shiftless father Anse, a set of false teeth. It is nine days in the Mississippi heat before the un-embalmed corpse is laid to rest. Crossing the flooded river, in a scene of genuine pathos, the coffin and oldest son Cash’s carpentry tools have to be retrieved from the turbulent river. It may be the only time the family works together. Only middle son Jewel, offspring, as Pearl is Dimmesdale’s in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), of Addie’s secret affair with Rev. Whitfield, toils to see Addie’s wishes fulfilled. In the end, Dewey Dell fails to get an abortion, the “hair of the dog” turning out to be an ineffective abortifacient, Cash re-breaks a leg, and brooding son Darl, one of the revolt-against-the-village’s “sensitive young men,” is sent to the asylum in Jackson; but Anse does get his teeth and a new “Mrs” Bundren. Commentary is provided by neighbors watching or giving hospitality to the funeral “parade,” Dr. Peabody’s wry wit, youngest child Vardaman’s figures of speech, as in his famous sentence/chapter: “My mother is a fish” (Faulkner 1990b: 84), Cash’s final musing over what is sane and what not, and Faulkner’s own allusions to ancient myths of fertility set against the often ludicrous bumptiousness of the present scene (see Fowler and Abadie 1986). Darl and Jewel reflect the two dominant strains of American thought, transcendentalism and pragmatism, which had moved further and further apart, producing, as Van Wyck Brooks noted in his 1921 essay “The Literary Life in America,” a “lurching” to one side or the other: practical action with no reference to ideals, anemic idealism with no recourse to anything real. The true pathos, however, and Faulkner’s critique of the American Dream, concerns how to move out and up. American ideals suggested hard work and education. Yet among the Bundrens, nothing works except luck in a world where they dare not even finish the sentence: “The Lord giveth …” (Faulkner 1990b: 86). American myths suggested that perhaps the answer was in “making it new”: the new woman and her sexual freedom could find meaning where the straight laces of marriage and motherhood had failed. Yet, Addie Bundren dies having tried both custom and freedom and finding both wanting. American myths suggested we should stand tall, superior, alone, and conquer the land; in Faulkner, it is the absence of such figures or their fall, as with Sutpen in Absalom, that dominates the landscape. American myths championed respectability, Main Street, community values. In Faulkner, you get the Snopes (The Hamlet, 1940; The Mansion; The Town, 1957), their eerie resemblance to the planter nobility, and their sleazy fall to disgrace. In the sharecropping world that Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (1941) had pronounced
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just, you get Faulkner’s poignant characterization of Mink Snopes’s desperate poverty, Mink who would carry the scythe that in time kills his respectable brother Flem, with the help of a deaf, female communist; Flem a son of the soured Ab Snopes, distorted by his exclusion from society and the means of production, imprinted as vividly by his solitary banishment as was Hester in her scarlet adornment, Faulkner working old themes and making them new. The Heidelberg-educated Gavin Stevens fails; the sewing-machine salesman V. K. Ratliffe understands. Such ironies are sufficient to show the nature of Yoknapatawpha. Faulkner’s skepticism outdid even that of his forebears. Take that Sinclair Lewis, Teddy Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson; take that Twain, James, and the whole of the American Renaissance. “I could write a play like Hamlet if I wanted to” Faulkner told them in New Orleans (Blotner: 121)! Upon marrying the sweetheart of his youth, the divorced Estelle Oldham, Faulkner plunged himself into debt to purchase the house and property he christened Rowan Oak. Visiting recently renovated Rowan Oak, one begins to sense the presence of the ghosts that haunted the place’s history and its occupant. Explaining why he had not enjoyed a film that director Howard Hawks had taken him to, Faulkner once told Hawks, “I don’t like ghost stories.” Nevertheless, late in 1932, handing back to Hawks a script to which Hawks had assigned him with the new title he had given it, A Ghost Story, he would tell Hawks, “This is my idea of a ghost story” (Blotner: 313). There is good reason to see Faulkner as investing in his works his version of a ghost story: one that would at least help exorcise America’s ghosts by exposing their haunting power over his people and place, highlighting the dispossession of a displaced people: Americans, moderns, Everyman, the allegorically titled or unnamed characters in A Fable and Soldiers’ Pay (for example, Donald Mahon, pronounced Man), all who found a barrier rather than a threshold (Sutpen in Absalom), all the Rachels (for example, Mollie Beauchamp in Go Down, Moses) crying for their children. Readers always can find Faulkner working his way out of the perspectives inbred in him by his family history. “The music went on in the dusk; the dusk was peopled with ghosts of glamorous and old disastrous things. And if they were just glamorous enough, there would be a Sartoris in them, and then they were sure to be disastrous” (Faulkner 1974: 432). These works would stand, in Noel Polk’s phrase, as “Faulkner’s radical critique” of the sentimentalization of the past (Polk 1997: 40). The vehicle for that radical critique was his mythical county: Yoknapatawpha. Faulkner was more than his mythical Yoknapatawpha County (see Urgo). Numerous works take place outside its confines in which one sees the modernist experimentation with style and structure, the probing of psychological and political depths, the attention to issues of gender and sexuality – each a “signature” element (on the range of critical perspectives, see Peek and Hamblin). But, Yoknapatawpha is the heart of the Faulkner matter (see Blotner: 619). Shelby Foote, the late writer and authority on the Civil War, once claimed, contrary to the then prevailing opinion, that it was Hemingway who was the romantic and Faulkner who was the realist (Harrington and Abadie: 155). Neither notion is quite
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true. Faulkner wrote out of those sites where the romantic, mysterious, and uncanny touched the real, historical, and material world, where his myth of Yoknapatawpha apocryphally overlaid his postage stamp of native soil, and where his fiction could give equal and powerful attention to both. To that dynamic, he brought the sweep of the novelist and the perception of the poet to create, in his own words, “a keystone in the universe [that], if it were ever taken away, the universe itself would collapse” (Meriwether and Millgate: 255).
References and Further Reading Barth, J. Robert, ed. (1972). Religious Perspectives in Faulkner’s Fiction: Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. Notre Dame, I.N.: University of Notre Dame Press. Blotner, Joseph (1984). Faulkner: A Biography, rev. edn. New York: Random House. Brodsky, Louis Daniel and Hamblin, Robert W., eds. (1982–8). Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection, 5 vols. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Brooks, Van Wyck (1958). “The Literary Life in America” [1921], in America’s Coming-of-Age, pp. 163–83. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Cobb, James C. (1992). The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Cowley, Malcolm (1966). The Faulkner–Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944–1962. New York: Viking. Faulkner, William (1946). The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Random House. Faulkner, William (1950). Collected Stories. New York: Random House. Faulkner, William (1962). William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins. Boston: Little, Brown. Faulkner, William (1965). The Mansion [1959]. New York: Vintage. Faulkner, William (1966). Essays, Speeches and Public Letters by William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether. New York: Random House. Faulkner, William (1974). Flags in the Dust [1973], ed. Douglas Day. New York: Vintage. Faulkner, William (1985). Light in August [1932]. New York: Vintage.
Faulkner, William (1990a). Absalom, Absalom! [1936]. New York: Vintage. Faulkner, William (1990b). As I Lay Dying [1930]. New York: Vintage. Faulkner, William (1990c). Go Down, Moses. [1942]. New York: Vintage. Faulkner, William (1994). The Sound and the Fury [1929], ed. David Minter. New York: Norton. Fowler, Doreen and Abadie, Ann J., eds. (1986). Faulkner and Women. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Fowler, Doreen and Abadie, Ann J., eds. (1987). Faulkner and Race. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Glissant, Edouard (1999). Faulkner, Mississippi. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Godden, Richard (1997). Fictions of Labour: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, Richard (1994). The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Gussow, Adam (2002). Seems like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamblin, Robert W. and Peek, Charles A. (1999). A William Faulkner Encyclopedia. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Harrington, Evans and Abadie, Ann J., eds. (1977). The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Inge, M. Thomas, ed. (1999). Conversations with William Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Karl, Frederick. R. (1989). William Faulkner: American Writer. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
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Kawin, Bruce (1977). Faulkner and Film. New York: Ungar. Kinney, Arthur F. (1996). “Go Down, Moses”: The Miscegenation of Time. New York: Twayne. Meriwether, James B. and Millgate, Michael, eds. (1968). Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–1962. New York: Random House. Moreland, Richard, ed. (2007). A Companion to William Faulkner. Oxford: Blackwell. Parini, Jay (2004). One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: HarperCollins. Peek, Charles A. and Hamblin, Robert W., eds. (2004). A Companion to Faulkner Studies. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Phillips, Gene D. (1988). Fiction, Film, and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Polk, Noel (1996). Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Polk, Noel (1997). Outside the Southern Myth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Towner, Theresa M. and Carothers, James B. (2006). Reading Faulkner: Collected Stories. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Urgo, Joseph R. (1989). Faulkner’s Apocrypha: A Fable, Snopes, and the Spirit of Human Rebellion. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Wadlington, Warwick (1992). “As I Lay Dying”: Stories Out of Stories. New York: Twayne. Watson, James (1992). Thinking of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to his Mother and Father: 1918– 1925. New York: Norton. Watson, Jay (1993). Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. Williamson, Joel (1993). William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford University Press.
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H.D.’s Visionary Prose Rachel Connor
“I am swing swing between worlds,” declares Hermione Gart in Her (1984), “people, things exist in opposite dimension” (H.D. 1984: 25). So it was for H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) herself, an expatriate American who negotiated between the cultural reference points of Europe and the United States; a bisexual who was involved in intimacies with both men and women, sometimes simultaneously. Despite these apparent polarities, however, H.D.’s writing is underpinned by a strong impulse to close gaps, to forge connections between “people,” “things,” and “worlds.” For the female characters of her novels are questers who, like Midget in Paint It Today, seek to unite the material with the spiritual, searching for the link between “the morning and the evening star” and “the earth she [treads] on” (H.D. 1992b: 13). Given the range of intellectual interests with which H.D. engaged through her lifetime, it is clear that she was comfortable with shifting discourses and fields of knowledge. In the 1920s, she was immersed in avant-garde film, appearing in and editing short films. In the 1930s, she developed an interest in psychoanalysis, briefly attending sessions with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. During World War II, she became fascinated by spiritualism, frequenting séances and becoming a member of the Society for Psychic Research. This continuing negotiation between disciplines is reflected, too, in her playfulness with narrative form. H.D.’s “fiction” is never straightforwardly fictional but tends to flower within the cracks of conventional generic categories, somewhere between the modes of memoir, autobiography, and history. While this can prove challenging to the reader, H.D.’s writing prompts interesting questions about the problems of formal and fictional boundaries: what is history? What is memoir? What constitutes fiction itself? Underpinned by her diverse interests, H.D.’s fiction offers a fascinating window on twentieth-century cultural history. Yet, despite the eclecticism of form and content in her writing, she consistently returns to a single preoccupation: that of vision. Whether expressed through the moving image of the cinema or the hallucinatory image of the séance, visual metaphors cut like a plumb line through her writing.
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From the experimental essay poem of 1919, Notes on Thought and Vision (H.D. 1982) to descriptions of her Moravian upbringing in The Gift (1998) to accounts of séances in the still unpublished “Majic Ring” and “The Sword Went out to Sea,” vision forms the basis of spiritual quest in H.D.’s work, demonstrating her profound belief in the human need for mutual connection. In turn, these visionary experiences provide her readers – like Midget in Paint It Today – with the potential to open the “door to another world,” to “another state of emotional life or being” (1992b: 12). In 1911, “mossgrown, inbedded,” and stifled by the mores of provincial New England (H.D. 1984: 9), H.D. traveled from America to Europe. It was there that she began her writing life, publishing her first poem in 1912. As a newcomer to the intellectual and creative circles into which she was introduced by Ezra Pound, she must have struggled to find her place as an emergent woman writer. Working toward discovery of her poetic voice, while also defined as Pound’s muse (the two were briefly engaged to be married), H.D. would have been on the fringes of things, watching, learning, yet being herself continually watched. She captures this experience in her early novel Asphodel, a roman à clef which – along with the other autobiographically based novels Her and Paint It Today – forms part of the “Asphodel cycle,” written during the 1920s but remaining unpublished until later in the twentieth century. The female protagonist, named Hermione like the central character of Her, asks herself: “Was she a spectator then? Was she always to be looking, watching, seeing other people’s lives work out right?” (H.D. 1992a: 94). The novels of the Asphodel cycle are full of similar instances of characters looking and being looked at, and yet H.D. presents a model of looking which somehow evades the detached act of scrutiny. This is how Hermione of Her meets Fayne, the female lover-friend who changes her perception of the world: Across the table with its back to the slightly convex mirror, facing Her Gart and Jessie, was this thing that made the floor sink beneath her feet and the wall rise to infinity above her head. The wall and the floor were held together by long dramatic lines of curtain falling in straight pleated parallels. Answer the husky voice that speaks to you. Don’t look at the eyes that look at you. “A girl I want to see you.” The girl was seeing Her. (H.D. 1984: 52)
While this meeting with Fayne – who is framed as the “love object” by the falling pleats of curtains – appears to accentuate the place of vision in the mechanics of seduction and desire, for Hermione this moment brings about heightened spiritual and emotional awareness. From this point on, “parallelograms came almost with a click straight and she saw straight” (H.D. 1984: 128). It is as though, by seeing Fayne, Her can “see” the truth, not just about desire but about the damaging extent of her own ennui, her unsuitable engagement to her fiancé George, and the extent of her ambition to leave the confines of her restrictive family and provincial upbringing.
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That the novels written during the 1920s should be so preoccupied with spectatorship should come as no surprise, because it was during this decade that H.D. first became involved in cinema. She helped to establish a small independent film company named POOL Productions, financed by Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), an heiress who became an intimate of H.D.’s in 1919 and provided her with emotional and financial support for the rest of her life. In their work on film, the two women collaborated with Kenneth Macpherson, H.D.’s lover, whom Bryher had married as a smokescreen to prevent her family – wealthy, conventional, and socially well connected – from discovering her lesbian orientation. POOL began initially as a publishing venture, producing the quarterly journal Close Up (1927–33) but eventually branched into making short films, the best known of which, Borderline (1930), featured H.D. herself acting alongside the celebrated American musician Paul Robeson. Writing and editing Close Up, acting in and editing POOL’s films, H.D. was plunged into thinking cinematically, familiarizing herself with a range of techniques that translate directly to her prose fiction. The psychological explorations of the self that preoccupy the early novels – Her in particular – are conveyed through close-up focus on specific objects that evoke the cinematic close-up: “Her Gart peered far, adjusting so to speak some psychic lens, to follow that bird. She lost the bird, tried to focus one leaf to hold her on to all leaves” (H.D. 1984: 5). Her’s troubled psyche is represented throughout the novel by frequent shifts of focus, and by a fictional point of view that slides – like a camera – in and out of her consciousness. For H.D., Bryher, and Macpherson, Close Up was an emphatic celebration of European cinema. The journal was positioned as avant-garde and intellectual, pitting itself against the commercialism of the Hollywood film world (although it is evident from H.D.’s correspondence that she herself enjoyed the “industry gossip” of film stars, a paradox which questions H.D.’s positioning of herself as firmly in the camp of “high art”). Among POOL’s most beloved films were the Expressionist narratives of G. W. Pabst and F. W. Murnau; their dark sets, close framing of the subject and stylized use of light and shade strongly influenced the techniques of POOL’s own films. H.D.’s novel Nights, written in 1935 – a sinister, noir-ish story about the suicide of a troubled and passionate woman, Natalie – draws on similar techniques. The use of chiaroscuro (extreme contrast “lighting”) is evident when Natalie lies inert in bed, her eyes “wide open to parallelograms of shadow and light, in bars” on the ceiling (H.D. 1986: 42). Cinematic Expressionism directly influenced the development of noir, a more commercial film genre that emerged in Hollywood during the 1940s as a result of the influx of emigré directors from Europe during World War II. This cross-cultural dialogue, incidentally, demonstrates that there is a closer connection between “arthouse” cinema and popular film – and thus between “high art” and “popular culture” – than has previously been acknowledged. In the six years of Close Up’s distribution, H.D. wrote two poems about film, three theoretical essays, and eight reviews. What emerges from all of these writings is how cinema, for H.D., held a twofold fascination: on the one hand, it was something to be experienced privately, alone, in the dark. On the other, through the simultaneous
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spectatorship of moving images on a screen, it was an activity that could unite people. H.D.’s reviewing style was unorthodox and served, above all, to underline her own individualized experience of spectatorship. This is exemplified in her response in her 1927 review, “Conrad Veidt: The Student of Prague”: The music ought, it is evident, be making my heart spring but I don’t like student songs and these Heidelbergish melodies especially leave me frigid. There’s something wrong and I have seen those horses making that idiotic turn on the short grass at least eight times. What is it? I won’t stay any longer. (Donald et al.: 120)
These reviews are less appraisals of character and plot or the technical devices of the film under discussion, and more a meditation on spectatorship itself. H.D.’s use of the continuous present stresses the importance of the experiential, the process of reception rather than image as a product. We see this, too, in her review of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion and Death of a Saint (1928), which relates the story of the French martyr, Joan of Arc. H.D.’s first-hand knowledge of cinematography and editing techniques are evident in her discussion of Dreyer’s representation of Joan: “Do I have to be cut into slices by this inevitable pan-movement of the camera, those suave lines to left, up, to the right, back, all rhythmical with the remorseless rhythm of a scimitar?” (Donald et al.: 132). Yet it is the emotional response the film evokes, the close identification with Joan herself, that is the most striking aspect of this review: Do we need the Christ-nails driven in and drawn out, while Jeanne already numb and dead, gazes dead and numb at accuser and fumbles in her dazed hypnotized manner towards some solution of her claustrophobia? I am shut in here, I want to get out. I want to get out … [W]e are left pinned like some senseless animal, impaled as she is impaled by agony. (Donald et al.: 132)
Clearly, the martyred Joan of Arc – a passionate young woman, like the female characters of many of H.D.’s novels, a seeker after the truth – holds a special significance in her heart because she features, too, in Asphodel. While visiting the chief cultural sites in France, Hermione is prompted to a visionary moment in which she suffers the agonies that Joan of Arc herself experienced: she feels herself “caught,” “trapped” with “her armour, her panache and her glory and her pride” (H.D. 1992a: 9). As in H.D.’s review of Dreyer’s film, the tone of this passage enacts a continuous running commentary, as though Hermione were watching the progress of a moving image. At times, the narrative voice shifts to connect Hermione directly with the inner consciousness of Joan, addressing her directly. It is as though Hermione feels the curses of those who burned her alive, as though she herself were being burned as a witch, amidst the dense black smoke that “shrivels your blue wings” (H.D. 1992a: 9). In fact, this metaphor of witchcraft becomes central to the whole novel. George, the fiancé, declares that Hermione and Fayne “would have been burned in Salem for witches” (H D. 1992a: 50); they are visionaries whose relationship intensifies their visionary ability to “see.” And Hermione explicitly draws attention to the parallels
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between the demonization of Joan and the world’s lack of understanding of her own intense relationship with Fayne: “They would always trap them, bash their heads like broken flowers from their stalks, break them for seeing things, having ‘visions’ seeing things like she did and like Fayne Rabb” (H.D. 1992a: 9). There is a similar focus on the ways in which women “see” each other in Her. Looking into a “convex Victorian mirror” positioned above Fayne’s head (H.D. 1984: 51), Her is able to see Fayne with her eyes like “a pair of exactly matched star sapphires” (H.D. 1984: 60). Pivoting around a moment of spiritual connection, this encounter of seduction and desire is almost exactly opposed to Her’s embraces with George, which narrow, rather than broaden, Her’s sense of her own existence: “The ceiling came down, down. The ceiling became black, in a moment it would crush down, crushing Her and George Lowndes under a black metallic shutter. The ceiling was a sort of moveable shutter like some horrible torture thing out of Poe’s tales” (H.D. 1984: 173). Employing once again the vocabulary of the cinema – with the ceiling acting as a “shutter” or camera – the intimacy H.D. describes between Her and George is fundamentally sinister and claustrophobic. Critics have often interpreted such incidents as the expression of a lesbian aesthetic, or as a resistance to heterosexual models of desire (Friedman 1981, 1990; Laity 1989, and in H.D. 1992b). While H.D.’s texts certainly support such readings, tracing how vision functions in her writing consistently brings us back to the multiplicity of experience and desire of her characters. Active and passive, Hermione looks and is looked at, in her relationship with Fayne as well as with George. Her status as “object” (“crushed” by the ceiling and, through implication, by George) exists alongside the intense creative and emotional energy – referred to in Nights as “radium ray” (H.D. 1986: 27) – that is generated by her love for Fayne. It is the integrative experience of the physical body with the spiritual or emotional aspects of female desire that H.D.’s writing seeks to represent. Time and again, her texts return to instances of women sharing visions, looking at things together. Moving on, in the next section of the chapter, to explore how H.D.’s experiential (rather than passive) relationship to film influenced her understanding of the spiritual, we will see how crucial is this collaborative process to her representation of visionary experience. In 1919, after the traumatic birth of her daughter and near death from pneumonia, H.D. was recuperating with Bryher on the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall. Walking on the beach, she experienced a moment that she later called her “jellyfish experience,” in which she felt herself enclosed by a kind of “cap”: “like water, transparent, fluid, yet with definite body, contained in a definite space” (H.D. 1982: 19). In its similarity to the “transcendental eyeball” of Emerson’s “Nature” (1836), this experience connects her back to a tradition of transcendentalism and thus to her American cultural roots. Yet this instance of what she calls “womb vision” conveys a specifically female corporeal experience, one which reflects on creativity and on vision itself. It is for this reason that Notes on Thought and Vision has often been read as a kind of feminist manifesto. Like Mina Loy’s own “Feminist Manifesto” (1914), H.D.’s
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philosophical essay-memoir challenges the male-dominated literary avant-gardism of the time, which is exemplified by the modernist diatribes of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. The figure of the visionary – in particular of the female visionary – is not unfamiliar in the work of modernist writers. There are interesting resonances between H.D.’s work and that of other women writing in a British context: with Mary Butts, for example, and with Virginia Woolf, whose novel To the Lighthouse ends with the triumphant voice of the female artist Lily Briscoe, declaring “I have had my vision” (Woolf 1977: 192). Crucially, though, these characters tend to be lone mystics; in H.D.’s writing, it is the collective energy generated through seeing things together that both heightens spiritual experience and reinforces emotional intimacy with a partner. In this sense, the experience recorded in Notes on Thought and Vision has a far-reaching and fundamental influence on the development of H.D.’s prose. It presents vision as a collaborative act; it draws together two women in a psycho-spiritual, yet also highly sexualized, moment of intensity. This pattern was to be repeated time and again in H.D.’s writing, shaping her construction of female friendship and desire. As H.D. wrote later of the “jellyfish” vision, it was being with Bryher that “projected” the fantasy. In other words, Bryher’s role is far from passive; her presence helps both to create and to interpret the vision. In the later texts, Bryher’s collaboration in H.D.’s visionary experience becomes even more explicit: in Tribute to Freud, for example, which was written in 1934 while she was attending psychoanalytic sessions (notably paid for by Bryher) with Sigmund Freud. One of the central moments of Tribute is H.D.’s experience of the “writingon-the-wall,” which she perceived as a series of hieroglyphs and symbols of the Egyptian sun god. While H.D. sees the vision as a series of figures “projected” onto the wall in front of her, it is Bryher, standing next to her, who helps her sustain its intensity: “I can turn now [to Bryher] though I do not budge an inch or break the sustained crystal-gazing stare at the wall before me. I say to Bryher … ‘shall I stop? Shall I go on?’ Bryher says without hesitation, ‘Go on’ ” (H.D. 1956: 70). In cinematic terms, H.D. is acting both as Bryher’s “projectionist” and as a fellow member of the “audience.” Without Bryher, H.D. acknowledges, she would not have been able to “see”: “I knew this experience, this writing-on-the-wall before me … could not have been shared with anyone except the girl who stood so bravely there beside me … without her, I could not have gone on” (H.D. 1956: 72). If in Tribute to Freud, both women are connected – as in the cinema – by their experience of looking, in “Majic Ring” they are united through the performance of visionary trance. “Majic Ring” is a curious, abstruse text (still, unpublished, in the H.D. papers at Yale University), a memoir that documents yet also fictionalizes H.D.’s attendance at séances during World War II. Some of its most notable passages are the descriptions of the visions experienced by Delia (H.D.) and Gareth (Bryher) while alone in their darkened hotel bedroom. In a heightened, hallucinatory state, Delia begins to be “possessed” by a number of entities: a medicine man, a female mountain spirit, a Native American girl named “Minnie ha ha.” These visions flow
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before her, almost, she says, like past lives “thrown up on the screen of memory” (p. 167). During this experience, Delia metamorphoses from one character into another, simultaneously “narrating” the changes of identity she undergoes. “I must explain as well as impersonate,” she says (p. 163), as though providing the “soundtrack” to what Gareth is seeing, commentating in a way that is reminiscent of the film reviews she wrote in the 1920s. Returning again briefly to H.D.’s review of The Passion and Death of a Saint, we see that the notion of collectivity through spectatorship is at the heart of her conception of cinema. As part of that review, she comments on the diverse nature of the audience, in terms of age and social background, an audience consisting of “I and you and the baker’s boy beside me” and the whole social spectrum from a colonel right down to a “crocodile” of schoolgirls (Donald et al.: 131). Arguably, there is an idealistic skimming over of class differences, which serves to affirm H.D.’s own somewhat privileged, intellectualist position. Yet what is most striking about this review is its blatant enthusiasm for cinema’s potential to connect people, how the joint act of spectatorship potentially constructs or reinforces a kind of spiritual community. It is this notion of community achieved through vision that is at the heart of H.D.’s most “spiritual” text, The Gift, written during the same wartime context as “Majic Ring.” In The Gift, H.D. attempts to recapture the maternal heritage of her Moravian faith and the ideals of community that are fundamental to its organization. It mediates constantly between the narrative present of war-torn London and the past: that of H.D.’s own childhood in a Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the more distant past of the first of her pioneer ancestors to settle in America. This family history is traced through the experience of her maternal grandmother, Mamalie, who retells the story of the founding of the community in America and the role played by H.D.’s forefather, Christian. What becomes clear is that the “gift” of the title is twofold: it represents, first, Christian’s “gift” for interpretation of a deerskin scroll that narrates the encounter between the European settlers and the indigenous Native Americans; secondly, it signifies Mamalie’s abilities of memory and storytelling, her “psychic recall.” Mamalie’s memories are melded with those of the adult H.D. as she plunders her childhood for associations and memories. These memories take on a film-like quality where, to borrow a description from “Majic Ring,” “all the past is rolled and neatly filed and edited, like the endless store-room of film, waiting for the suitable moment to be projected and re-projected” (“Majic Ring”: 201). Through Christian’s spiritual and creative enlightenment, the legacy of the gift is revived. The text of The Gift itself becomes a journey towards the realization of a forgotten and buried inheritance and spiritual power. Through H.D.’s reconstructions of the memories of the child Hilda – often occurring in the midst of air raids, when she is comforted by Bryher’s presence – this gift is passed onto the reader, who must collaborate in its decoding and thus in the creation of its meaning. In this sense, the “gift” becomes the reader’s “legacy” as well as H.D.’s own, forging a connection that optimistically seeks to override the destruction of war.
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Visionary experience as an antidote to conflict also underpins Pilate’s Wife, a novel which H.D. first sketched in 1924, completed in 1929 but which was to remain unpublished until the very beginning of this millennium. A revisionist version of the passion and death of Christ, H.D. takes a marginal figure from biblical history – Pontius Pilate’s wife of the title – and gives her a central narrative. Discontented with the lack of meaning in her life, Veronica begins to visit a female sage – a “medium” figure named Mnevis – and through her becomes familiar with a new visionary prophet, the leader of a new religion: the Jesus figure of the novel. As in so many of her other texts, shared intimacy between the two female characters results in a transformative state of being. After being with Mnevis, Veronica experiences great passion: “fire ran through her veins and into her skull. The woman was perhaps, herself, an opiate. There was no comparison between what she felt for Mnevis and what she felt for these men” (H.D. 2000: 55). The spiritual connection Veronica experiences with Mnevis is set in opposition to the discourses of organized religion which H.D. deliberately moves to the fringes of the novel. Mnevis’ room is defined as a temple; in it, she experiences for Mnevis “a sort of clear-white passion … sister to sister, lover to lover” (H.D. 2000: 74). Recalling the intense female desire that is encoded in her collections of early poetry – Sea Garden, Hymen, and Heliodora – with its extensive use of the color white, H.D. hints toward the potentially subversive nature of Veronica’s relationship with Mnevis. More radical still, though, is the challenge she levels through the novel itself at the monolithic (and arguably masculinist) grand narrative of biblical history. Yet the implications of this are still non-conflictual. Veronica’s passion for, and spiritual connection with, Mnevis gives her the strength to act on her convictions: to work with others to liberate Jesus from the cross before his death, to hide him away and enable his escape. In this sense, as in The Gift, Veronica’s visionary experience results in optimism and healing, to a rewriting of destruction and war and, in the case of Pilate’s Wife, to an imagined revision to the events of the Bible and to the course of history itself. The image of the female visionary runs like a thread through H.D.’s work: from the representation of the adolescent “wee witches” in her early novels, to the metaphorical blindness of Julia Alton in Bid Me to Live when she “rejoic[es] like one blind who knows an inner light, a reality that the outer eye cannot grasp” (H.D. 1960: 162–3). In The Gift and in Pilate’s Wife this vision is transmitted in turn to the reader, in a legacy that enables the transformative power of change. For, if the visionary experience H.D. delineates in her novel is intimate and emotional, it is also scientific and inextricably linked to modern technological culture, through the communication with spirits tapped out like telegrams or received as though through radio transmitters in “Majic Ring” and “The Sword Went out to Sea” (the latter also uncollected and at Yale). “It is possible,” H.D. writes in Notes on Thought and Vision, “for two or three people with the right sort of receiving brains to turn the whole tide of human thought” (H.D. 1982: 27). The biblical resonances of this phrase are clear, echoing the words of Christ at the Last Supper when he promises salvation through collectivity and spiritual connection. For H.D., it is possible that people “could direct lightning
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flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead murky thought” (H.D. 1982: 27). Here is an apocalyptic vision that speaks to the crises of the current millennium: extensive family and social breakdown, global warming, exhaustion of the planet’s resources. H.D.’s vision is not of the end of the world, but of a world saved by the power of thought – a spiritual alternative to the global “grid,” a network of connection between the human beings that inhabit the same earth.
References and Further Reading Boughn, Michael (1993). H.D.: A Bibliography, 1905–1990. Charlottesville, V.A.: University Press of Virginia. Collecott, Diana (1999). H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connor, Rachel (2004). H.D. and the Image. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Donald, J., Friedberg, A., and Marcus, L., eds. (1998). Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism. London: Cassell. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau (1986). H.D.: The Career of that Struggle. Brighton: Harvester Press. Edmunds, Susan (1994). Out of Line: History, Psychoanalysis and Montage in H.D.’s Long Poems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Friedman, Susan Stanford (1981). Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Bloomington, I.N.: Indiana University Press. Friedman, Susan Stanford (1990). Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guest, Barbara (1984). Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and her World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. H.D. (1956). Tribute to Freud. New York: Pantheon.
H.D. (1960). Bid Me to Live: A Madrigal. New York: Dial. H.D. (1982). Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho, ed. Albert Gelpi. San Francisco: City Lights. H.D. (1983). Collected Poems 1912–1944, ed. Louis Martz. New York: New Directions. H.D. (1984). Her. London: Virago Press. H.D. (1986). Nights. New York: New Directions. H.D. (1992a). Asphodel, ed. Robert Spoo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. H.D. (1992b). Paint It Today, ed. Cassandra Laity. New York: New York University Press. H.D. (1998). The Gift, ed. Jane Augustine. Gainesville, F.L.: University of Florida Press. H.D. (2000). Pilate’s Wife, ed. Joan A. Burke. New York: New Directions. Laity, Cassandra (1989). “H.D. and Swinburne: Decadence and Modernist Women’s Writing,” Feminist Studies, 15 (3): 461–84. Taylor, Georgina (2001). H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913–1946. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Woolf, Virginia (1977). To the Lighthouse. London: Grafton.
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John Steinbeck Brian Railsback
John Ernst Steinbeck (1902–1968) was the embodiment of what fascinated him: paradox. One of the most beloved and harshly criticized U.S. authors, he began his life in California farm country and ended it in New York City; he loathed the hypocrisy of middle-class respectability and became a wealthy man; he feared fame and became famous; he wished to see the world from a scientific viewpoint but as an artist he could be both compassionate and highly subjective; he could write from the broadest perspective or the most intimate level or both at the same time; the majority of his work was set in the same general location (central California) but he aspired never to write in the same mode twice; and he loved his country passionately but criticized it rather brutally in the last book he wrote. John Steinbeck was highly creative, intellectually restless, a voracious reader who vacuumed up concepts from art, biology, history, literature, philosophy, physics, and zoology. In sum, he was a writer set up to be astoundingly misunderstood by the reviewers and critics who tried to tackle him as a subject.
Middle-Class Beginnings, Independence, and Poverty On February 27, 1902, John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, to Olive Hamilton Steinbeck and John Ernst Steinbeck. His mother had been a schoolteacher, and at the time of Steinbeck’s birth his father managed a flour mill. He was the third child, with two older sisters, Esther (born 1892) and Beth (born 1894), and a younger sister, Mary (born 1905). Throughout his childhood, Steinbeck spent much of his summer in the family cottage at Pacific Grove or at his Uncle Tom Hamilton’s ranch near King City. Otherwise, he lived at the Steinbeck home in Salinas. Thus, the middle-class life against which he would rebel was set in Salinas, his fascination with the sea and biology was set in Pacific Grove, and his regard for ranch life and the Hamiltons was set near King City.
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Books were important at home, where his parents and older sisters read to him. As a child, he was introduced to the Bible, which had a profound impact on his writing style. Other important early works included Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, the works of Romantic writers such as Walter Scott, the works of Shakespeare, and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. The latter work became an obsession in Steinbeck’s last years, as he strove unsuccessfully to complete a retelling of Arthurian legends with The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights (1976). In high school, Steinbeck was recognized by his teachers as a bright and promising student. However, Steinbeck was not a dedicated college student. In the fall of 1919, he started his fitful, lackluster academic career at Stanford University. In 1923, he enrolled for the summer at the Hopkins Marine Station, where he took a course in general zoology and learned through Professor C. V. Taylor the holistic view of nature that would become a major theme throughout most of his writing. In the winter of 1924, he took Harold Chapman Brown’s history of philosophy course; Brown advocated science as a road to truth and “cosmic integration,” synthesizing life and mind and physical matter; the emphasis on science and holistic thought further refined Steinbeck’s aesthetic. He took two courses with Edith Mirrielees, a creative writing teacher he admired, and published his first two stories in 1924, “Fingers of Cloud: A Satire on College Protervity” (February) and “Adventures in Arcademy: A Journey into the Ridiculous” (June) for The Stanford Spectator. In 1925, Steinbeck left Stanford without a degree and embarked on a restless year in which he worked at Lake Tahoe and then traveled to New York via the freighter, Katrina, which introduced him to Panama and the Caribbean scenes that inspired his first novel, Cup of Gold. In New York, he briefly found work as a journalist and then in construction (on Madison Square Garden); his stories were rejected by Robert M. McBride & Company. Depressed by his first New York experience, Steinbeck returned to California and took a caretaker job at a Lake Tahoe estate that allowed him to write without much interruption in 1926 and 1927. Using the pseudonym, “John Stern,” his first professional short-story publication was “The Gifts of Iban” in The Smoker’s Companion. He became acquainted with his friend Webster “Toby” Street’s play project, entitled “The Green Lady,” which inspired Steinbeck’s second novel, To a God Unknown. In 1929, Steinbeck was able to write full time with his father’s financial support. Cup of Gold was published by Robert M. McBride in August. He regretted his first novel, a romantic handling of the pirate Henry Morgan. The book received a small number of moderately favorable reviews but whatever chance the first novel might have had in terms of sales was wiped away with the stock market crash just two months after Cup’s publication. The year 1930 was an important one for Steinbeck and his development as a writer. He married Carol Henning Steinbeck at the beginning of the year and she helped him find a leaner, more realistic writing voice while providing shrewd editorial advice through his most productive period, the 1930s. He also met Edward F. Ricketts, marine biologist and proprietor of Pacific Biological Laboratory on Cannery Row in
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Monterey, California. Ricketts became an intellectual partner in Steinbeck’s holistic vision and led Steinbeck to important philosophical/scientific texts by W. C. Allee, Mark Briffault, and John Elof Boodin. Ricketts’ laboratory provided an intellectual and social haven for the young writer. Still, in 1930, there was little promise: To a God Unknown had not yet found a publisher and two novellas, “Murder at Full Moon” and “Dissonant Symphony,” would never be published. In 1931, one bright spot was Steinbeck’s move to McIntosh & Otis – his literary agents for the rest of his life. The Pastures of Heaven, Steinbeck’s first short-story cycle, was published by Brewer, Warren, and Putnam in October, 1932. Reviews, including one from The New York Times Book Review, were favorable but marginal book sales did nothing to relieve the Steinbecks’ poverty. During a particularly bleak time in his life, while he and Carol took care of Steinbeck’s ailing mother, Olive, the author worked on The Red Pony stories. Steinbeck’s second novel, To a God Unknown, an intriguing contemplation of myth and obsession influenced by his friend at the time, the famous mythologist Joseph Campbell, was published by Robert O. Ballou in September and again sales were lackluster. Reviewers found some power in Steinbeck’s descriptions but considered the book to be strange, at times overwritten, and artistically strained. Despite his continuing poverty, his mother’s death in February, 1934, and his father’s declining health, Steinbeck maintained a writing pace of 1,000 words a day. Tortilla Flat, his first comedic novel, was rejected by Ballou and Knopf, but found a place with Pascal Covici of Covici-Friede. Until he died, Pascal Covici edited Steinbeck’s books (most of them for Viking). Steinbeck became acquainted with the dismal migrant farm-worker problem in California, meeting with labor organizers, and began writing his strike novel, In Dubious Battle.
The Trial of Fame and Fortune Steinbeck’s father died in May, 1935. “In my struggle to be a writer,” Steinbeck wrote, “it was he who supported and backed me and explained me – not my mother” (Steinbeck 1969: 103). Ironically, Steinbeck’s faith in his son was finally fulfilled with the publication of Tortilla Flat: the book received positive reviews, sold well, and Paramount bought the movie rights for the princely Depression-era sum of $4,000. The next year, Covici-Friede published Steinbeck’s hard-hitting book about labor strife in California agriculture, In Dubious Battle. “I guess it is a brutal book,” Steinbeck wrote, “more brutal because there is no author’s moral point of view” (Steinbeck and Wallsten: 105). The book dramatizes ideas in his unpublished 1934 essay, “Argument of Phalanx,” in which violent mob/group mentality is explored. The novel was widely and favorably reviewed, and lifted Steinbeck’s reputation as a serious writer. Steinbeck wrote a series of articles for the San Francisco News (published together in an expanded version as Their Blood Is Strong in 1938). His research into the labor problem led him toward his first “big book”: The Grapes of Wrath.
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In 1937, Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck’s first experiment in the “play-novelette” (a novella that might be easily adapted to a play), was a great success. With Carol, Steinbeck made his first trip to Europe (once again traveling the seas by freighter), visiting Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Soviet Union. The Red Pony, a short-story cycle that many critics regard as the height of Steinbeck’s writing style, was published in a special limited edition by Covici-Friede. Of Mice and Men was adapted by Steinbeck and George S. Kaufman for the stage and had a successful run on Broadway, though the 1938 Broadway stage version of Tortilla Flat failed. In February and March of 1938 he traveled to California migrant camps with Life photographer Horace Bristol and was appalled by the poverty and despair that he witnessed. By the spring, he tried to satirize the labor problem with “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” but destroyed the manuscript. Viking published Steinbeck’s second shortstory collection, The Long Valley, to strong sales and good reviews. Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath from May 31 through October 26. The effort left him mentally and physically exhausted; worse, he was uncertain about the result: “I am sure of one thing – it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be” (Steinbeck 1989: 90). He dedicated the book to Tom Collins, a migrant camp manager who was in many ways his guide and consultant on the labor scene, a man “who lived it,” and to Carol, who “willed it.” Resisting pressure from Elizabeth Otis and Covici, Steinbeck did minimal revision to the manuscript and refused to alter the controversial ending (the scene when Rosasharn offers her breast to a starving man). The book was released in April to rave reviews and became the number one best-seller for 1939, while screen rights sold for the huge sum of $75,000. The author received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1940. However, the book was banned in places, and conservative elements in “Steinbeck country,” central California, were furious. Living at the Biddle ranch, a new home on forty-six acres complete with a swimming pool, Steinbeck became increasingly uncomfortable with all the trappings of “respectability”: fame, fortune, and his marriage. In Hollywood, he had an affair with the woman who would become his second wife: Gwyn Conger Steinbeck. Steinbeck returned to Ed Ricketts’ laboratory on Cannery Row (living with him for a week during one of his stormy separations from Carol), wishing to delve into a greater understanding of the world through biology, chemistry, and physics. He approved of the film versions of The Grapes of Wrath (directed by John Ford) and Of Mice and Men (directed by Lewis Milestone).
War and Troubled Times Throughout the winter of 1940 he prepared with Ricketts for a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California (or the Sea of Cortez). Leaving Monterey on March 11, the 76-foot Western Flyer, skippered by Tony Berry, stopped at various points in the Gulf to catalogue marine specimens and returned on April 20. The resulting book of the trip, published in 1941 with Steinbeck and Ricketts as co-authors, included a
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narrative largely written by Steinbeck that articulates his and Ed’s holistic view. Later, Steinbeck traveled again to Mexico to work with director Herbert Kline on a film involving the difficulty of introducing modern medical practice in a rural village (The Forgotten Village); the project resulted in a rare dispute between John and Ricketts. In 1941, Steinbeck worked fitfully on the Cortez manuscript and other projects. In April, he finally broke with Carol. He began his first residence in Manhattan, living briefly at the Bedford Hotel with Gwyn. The book version of The Forgotten Village was published (with 136 stills from the film); Steinbeck received polite reviews. He worked on his second “play-novelette”: The Moon Is Down. Pascal Covici and Viking were uncomfortable with the Sea of Cortez project as a work of non-fiction and an expensive production with the narrative and catalogue of invertebrates. But the pet project of the publisher’s star writer came out in December to generally enthusiastic reviews and the holistic, biological current of Steinbeck’s work was recognized. The Moon Is Down, Steinbeck’s allegorical tale about occupied Europe, was published in March, 1942, with the Broadway play opening in April. Moon generated mixed reviews – with some finding it a masterpiece and others deciding it to be melodramatic and pretentious. Steinbeck’s next publication, a propaganda piece personally assigned to him by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was Bombs Away, The Story of a Bomber Team, which received better reviews than Moon, his more serious war effort. The film version of Tortilla Flat was finally completed and released. In March, 1943, Steinbeck divorced Carol and married Gwyn; the Steinbecks lived in a Manhattan apartment. In the summer, he worked as a war correspondent for the Herald Tribune, traveling to the front in North Africa and Italy. Breaking the rules as a correspondent, he participated in an operation on the Italian island of Ventotene, under the command of the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Though his correspondence was on a personal level and even humorous at times, he commented on what the reporter does not write up: “He might have seen … a small Italian girl in the street with her stomach blown out … an American soldier standing over a twitching body … dead mules … the wreckage of houses … red carts and the stalled vehicles of refugees who did not get away” (Steinbeck 1958: 116). He returned to New York in October, sick of the war, and began the manuscript for Cannery Row in November. In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime drama, Lifeboat, was released. Steinbeck, who worked on the screen treatment, was so angered by the changes made to his story – including slurs against organized labor and the conversion of his three-dimensional black character to a stock Negro stereotype – that he demanded to have his name removed from the film (he was not successful and received an Academy Award nomination for his work). His son, Thom Steinbeck, was born on August 2. Cannery Row was published in January, 1945, and received generally negative reviews. Looking for another Grapes of Wrath, reviewers were irritated by the strange plotting and unsavory, sentimentalized characters. Steinbeck’s sophisticated structure and plotting of the book, based on concepts in biology and physics, were completely overlooked. With even some of his old Cannery Row friends upset by the book, Steinbeck concluded he was not welcome in California. He returned to Manhattan.
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With Jack Wagner, he received another Academy Award nomination for his writing for the film, A Medal for Benny. His second son, John IV, was born June 12, 1946. With Gwyn and John IV both ill after the birth, and with Gwyn feeling her husband repressed her singing career, tension increased in the household. The Wayward Bus, Steinbeck’s allegorical novel about repressed sexuality and rampant commercialism, was published in February, 1947. Identified by reviewers as his first full-length novel since Grapes, some found it to be a triumph of unsentimental realism while others saw it as a disappointment. Steinbeck’s plans to travel to the Soviet Union with photographer Robert Capa were delayed when the balcony rail of his brownstone in Manhattan gave way and he fell, shattering his knee cap. The Pearl, Steinbeck’s tragic fable about the fate of a Mexican peasant who finds a pearl of great value, was published in November to generally positive reviews, some noting that he was at the top of his form. The film version of The Pearl, directed by Emilio Fernandez, was released the following year. A Russian Journal, with text by Steinbeck and one chapter and photographs by Robert Capa, was published in April, 1948; reviewers generally treated the book as a light effort and a simple, sometimes humorous look at the Soviet Union from one writer’s point of view. Already suffering from a faltering second marriage, Steinbeck was hit hard by the loss of his best friend and most important literary/intellectual influence. On May 7, 1948, Ed Ricketts was crossing train tracks in his car when he was hit by the Del Monte Express; Steinbeck rushed to see him but Ed died on May 11. Devastated by the loss of his friend, Steinbeck returned home to Manhattan to find that Gwyn wanted a divorce, telling him she had not loved him for years; the divorce was final in October. After some time in Mexico with Elia Kazan, working on the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (a film about Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata), Steinbeck stayed at the old family cottage in Pacific Grove, California, where he suffered from depression. He was, however, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1949, his fortunes turned around. The successful film version of The Red Pony was released. Recovering from depression, he met the woman who would become his third wife, Elaine Scott Steinbeck, in Carmel in May (she was married to the actor Zachary Scott and had one daughter by him, Waverly Scott). Steinbeck began work on “Everyman,” which would become his third “play-novelette,” Burning Bright. He returned to Manhattan and his relationship with Elaine, a former Broadway stage manager, strengthened.
Personal Stability and Artistic Decline Steinbeck continued to move away from his often compassionate but scientific handling of human problems (labor in In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, war in
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The Moon Is Down, man as social organism in Cannery Row, human sexuality in The Wayward Bus) toward a moral, even didactic, approach. His final run at the “playnovelette” was a modern morality play in an abstract, experimental form. It was produced as a book and Broadway play in October, 1950, and was reviewed as a courageous but failed experiment. After initial rage at the critics’ inability to understand what he was doing, he later admitted that it did not work well as a play. He moved on to his next “big book,” East of Eden. He married Elaine in New York on December 28, and by February, 1951, had taken up residence in Manhattan (spending the summer in Nantucket) while he worked on East of Eden at a pace of about 800 words a day. Viva Zapata!, based on Steinbeck’s most successful screenplay, was released to solid reviews in 1952. Of more importance to Steinbeck was the publication of East of Eden in September, 1952 – he dedicated what he considered his best novel to his editor, Pascal Covici. In almost biblical fashion, the sprawling novel – set across central California and three generations – considers the nature of good, evil, fate, and free will. Some reviewers praised his ambitious novel as a return to Grapes form, while others used the book to question Steinbeck’s literary merit entirely. The novel was a number one best-seller by November. The 1955 film version of East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean, was a hit. With his Broadway connections through Elaine, Steinbeck worked on “Bear Flag,” a musical comedy revisiting the humorous characters of Cannery Row. In June 1954, this effort was published as a novel, Sweet Thursday; most reviewers recognized it as a light work not to be taken seriously. Though Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein worked up the “Bear Flag” material into a Broadway musical, Pipe Dream failed and Steinbeck largely gave up writing for theater. Work on longer, sustained projects like East of Eden became more difficult for Steinbeck; artistically, he was increasingly restless. Traveling from Spain to Paris in 1955, Steinbeck suffered from a mild heart attack or stroke. He wrote a series of articles, translated into French, for Le Figaro and began writing articles as “Editor at Large” for Saturday Review. An important magazine publication in the March 1956 Atlantic was the short story, “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank,” which became the source for his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent. For the Louisville Courier-Journal, he covered the 1956 Democratic and Republican National Conventions and became friends with Adlai Stevenson, helping with some of the Democrat candidate’s speeches. He agreed to serve on a committee of President Eisenhower’s People to People Program, chaired by William Faulkner with other members including authors Edna Ferber, Donald Hall, Saul Bellow, and William Carlos Williams. For fun, Steinbeck wrote a political satire set in Paris, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, bolstered by his observation of the conventions while he was writing the book. His editor, Covici, and agent, Elizabeth Otis, did not like the project. The book, a farce about an American who finds he is in line to be the new king of France, was published in April 1957; reviewers treated it as light fare, with some finding the humor charming while others felt it was strained. Publications of this kind helped to invite harsh
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attacks against his reputation as an author, such as the one by prominent critic Alfred Kazin in The New York Times a year later. Further complicating his artistic output was Steinbeck’s rekindled interest in the Morte d’Arthur; he began research for his own modern retelling. In 1958, Steinbeck’s restlessness was manifested in continued travel. He went to Nassau with actor Burgess Meredith on a disorganized and failed expedition to find sunken treasure. Once There Was a War, a collection of his war reporting, was published in September; reviews ranged from noting the book was a collection of humorous and moving pieces to observing that it was like yesterday’s news and generally irrelevant. Working with Professor Eugene Vinaver, he traveled to England for more research on the Morte d’Arthur project. He spent eight months in 1959 with Elaine in a cottage near Bruton, Somerset, to intensify his Morte d’Arthur work and he considered this time the best of his life. However, when he returned to New York, he was depressed by his lack of progress on the book. He never completed it, though in 1976 what work he had done was edited and published as The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. Having spent much of the last half of the 1950s observing American politics and worrying over the way his sons were being raised by his ex-wife, Gwyn, the television quiz show scandals at the end of the decade intensified his fear that the U.S. suffered from moral decay. His mood was worsened by what appeared to be a minor stroke that he suffered in December, 1959.
Moral Outrage and Letting Go Early in 1960 Steinbeck set aside the Arthur project and, between March and July, drafted out his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent. Winter, set in New England, narrated in the first person, and intensely focused on the individual rather than the larger picture, was an artistic departure for Steinbeck. The novel was released in June, 1961; the reviews, mixed and often unfavorable, depressed Steinbeck. A favorable Newsweek review actually began, “Any critic knows it is no longer legal to praise John Steinbeck” (McElrath et al. 1996: 463). In September, 1960, to become reacquainted with his country and assert his physical and mental independence, he began his trek across the U.S. and back in a specially outfitted truck he named Rocinante, accompanied only by his French poodle, Charley. During part of the trip in Monterey, he was depressed by the tourism on Cannery Row and such things as the John Steinbeck Theatre. Throughout the next year he worked on his account of the trip, Travels with Charley in Search of America. While he was touring Europe (during which he suffered another minor stroke or heart attack), Travels with Charley was published in the summer of 1962 to favorable reviews; Edward Weeks of the Atlantic wrote, “This is a book to be read slowly for its savor, and one which, like Thoreau, will be quoted and measured by our own experience” (McElrath et al. 1996: 489).
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At home on October 25, 1962, Steinbeck learned that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. For Steinbeck, the announcement was a source of personal pleasure but also foreboding – he had observed the great prize could ruin a writer. The critical reaction to the award was negative, with questions raised as to why Steinbeck should win the award when other writers were more deserving. In his acceptance speech, Steinbeck made reference to “emasculated” critics, but spent most of his brief speech discussing the importance of the writer in the dangerous atomic age. The critical backlash from winning the Nobel and his waning physical strength made it impossible for him to finish another novel. As his examinations of American morality increased, Steinbeck became well acquainted with John F. Kennedy – attending the president’s inauguration and, at J.F.K.’s request, traveling on an exhausting two-month cultural exchange trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The assassination of Kennedy in November, 1963, shocked Steinbeck and Elaine. In December, the Steinbecks were invited to a private dinner with President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson; their relationship became warmer in Steinbeck’s remaining years. In August 1964, Thomas H. Guinzburg, the head of Viking, initiated a project in which Steinbeck would write captions for a collection of photographs taken from around the U.S. This inspired the author’s last writing streak and the captions blossomed into a series of essays that would become his last book published in his lifetime, America and Americans. Steinbeck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in September. On October 14, his editor, Pascal Covici, died; at the funeral, Steinbeck stated, “He demanded of me more than I had and thereby caused me to be more than I should have been without him” (Benson: 961). Though in 1965 Steinbeck saw America and Americans through (it would be published in October, 1966, to favorable reviews), his writing output continued to decline. Working at his summer home in Sag Harbor on Long Island, he tried to focus on a novel project, “A Piece of It Fell on My Tail” but made little progress. In November, he started a series of articles for Newsday that became known as “Letters to Alicia,” running off and on until May 1967. With his friendship with L.B.J. and his son John’s tour of duty in Vietnam, Steinbeck was immersed in the conflict. Continuing his work for Newsday in 1967, Steinbeck pushed himself mentally and physically to the limit during a six-week tour of Vietnam. As he identified with the American soldier in battle, his pieces in Newsday took on a hawkish feel with his loathing of anti-war activists. These articles irritated the leftist literary establishment, further damaging Steinbeck’s reputation among critics. However, by August 1967, he quietly reached the conclusion that the war could not be won. In Hong Kong after the Vietnam trip, Steinbeck suffered from a slipped disk while trying to help a Chinese worker. After a successful back operation in New York, Steinbeck was able to travel one last time on a trip to Grenada with Elaine. In 1968, the writer finally faced a final, steep decline. In May, he had a small stroke, followed by a heart attack in July. In August, he stayed at Sag Harbor but found he could no longer write, noting in one last unfinished letter, “my fingers have avoided the pencil
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as though it were an old and poisoned tool” (Steinbeck 1989: 861). He returned to his Manhattan home in November. As he struggled to breathe, needing oxygen at night, he told Elaine to prepare for his book sales to fall after his death, but time has proved he was wrong. He died on December 20. John Ernst Steinbeck’s ashes were buried in the Garden of Memories Cemetery in his home town, Salinas.
References and Further Reading Astro, Richard (1973). John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press. Beegel, Susan F., Shillinglaw, Susan, and Tiffney, Wesley N., Jr., eds. (1997). Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Benson, Jackson J. (1984). The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1988). John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2008). John Steinbeck: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. DeMott, Robert (1984). Steinbeck’s Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and Borrowed. New York: Garland. Fensch, Thomas, ed. (1988). Conversations with John Steinbeck. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lisca, Peter (1958). The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New York: H. Wolff. McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., Crisler, Jesse S., and Shillinglaw, Susan, eds. (1996). John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Millichap, Joseph (1983). Steinbeck and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar. Owens, Lewis (1985). John Steinbeck’s Re-vision of America. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press.
Owens, Lewis (1989). The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land. Boston: Twayne. Parini, Jay (1995). John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt. Railsback, Brian (1995). Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck. Moscow, I.N.: University of Idaho Press. Shillinglaw, Susan and Hearle, Kevin, eds. (2002). Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Steinbeck, Elaine and Wallsten, Robert, eds. (1975). Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, John (1958). Once There Was a War. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, John (1969). Journal of a Novel: The “East of Eden” Letters. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, John (1976). The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, ed. Chase Horton. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Steinbeck, John (1989). Working Days: The Journals of “The Grapes of Wrath,” ed. Robert DeMott. New York: Viking. Steinbeck, John (2002). America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, ed. Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson. New York: Viking. Wiener, Gary, ed. (1999). Readings on “The Grapes of Wrath.” Farmington Hills, M.I.: Greenhaven.
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Raymond Chandler Sean McCann
Raymond Chandler published seven detective novels during his lifetime, of which The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Long Goodbye (1953) remain the books for which he is best remembered. Yet, on the strength of this comparatively meager output, Chandler became one of the most influential American novelists of the twentieth century. His work fundamentally reshaped the potential of the detective story, revealing possibilities latent in the form that would be explored by countless followers among both literary artists and popular writers. His distinctive style meanwhile seeped thoroughly into the vernacular of American popular expression to become the definitive voice of his genre. His novels, which after disappointing initial neglect, won the esteem of serious literary critics and the enthusiastic devotion of millions of readers, remain among the rare works of modern literature to successfully bridge the divide between mass-market success and artistic credibility. As Chandler himself bragged with only slight exaggeration, his work took “a cheap, shoddy, and utterly lost kind of writing” and “made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about” (MacShane 1981: 48). Many of the qualities that brought Chandler that unusual influence can be glimpsed in a famous anecdote about the filming of his first novel. From its publication in 1939, The Big Sleep was renowned for its abstruse plot. In fact, Chandler had constructed the novel by “cannibalizing” from his own early work, grafting together several initially unrelated short stories that had been published in the pulp magazine Black Mask to create one, full-length novel. The result was a complex narrative whose vividly rendered episodes became more memorable than the overarching design of the novel’s plot. The story begins when Philip Marlowe is called to the home of aging oil millionaire General Sternwood, where the detective is hired to investigate the blackmail notes the general has received regarding the behavior of his two unruly daughters, Carmen and Vivian. In the ensuing narrative, Marlowe tracks the Sternwood girls’ trail through the seamy underside of Los Angeles, encountering pornographers, thieves, conmen, gold-diggers, gamblers, racketeers, and assassins – not to mention
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thuggish and ineffective police. Along the way, Marlowe witnesses a host of bodies pile up. By the time the story concludes, at least seven people have died as a result of the dangerous behavior of the Sternwood girls, and the detective himself has come to feel morally tainted by his experience. “Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” Marlowe concludes his narrative. When the director Howard Hawks decided to adapt The Big Sleep for Warner Brothers in 1946, one of the novel’s many deaths came to strike him as particularly odd. Early in the novel, Marlowe is called to observe the corpse of the Sternwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor, whose car has plunged mysteriously off the end of the Santa Monica pier. But the novel soon moves on from this scene, leaving the cause of the chauffeur’s death unresolved and never clearly connecting it to the story’s other events. Hawks, who himself had been drawn to Chandler’s novel by its “great scenes,” found that lack of explanation so confusing that he sent a telegram from the set asking Chandler who had killed the Sternwood’s chauffeur. Chandler’s famous answer came by return telegram: “NO IDEA” (Hiney: 163). That reply reflected the qualities of his work in which Chandler took the greatest pride – above all, his disdain for the narrative suspense emphasized by the conventional detective story and his preference for the richer subjects of “character and atmosphere” (MacShane 1981: 170). The subject of his fiction was not “whodunit,” Chandler commented, but “what the hell happened” (Hiney: 101). And the investigation of crime, he would always emphasize, was important less for the intricate conceptual puzzles it presented than for his protagonist’s meandering journeys through the landscape of Los Angeles. In the classic detective story, everything added up and every detail counted toward the revelation of the ultimate truth, a form Chandler despised for the way it turned the potentially interesting divagations of the narrative into mere “passagework” toward the story’s inevitable climax (Chandler 1988d: ix). His own novels, he claimed, were constructed on an opposed principle: that “the scene outranked the plot” (Chandler 1988d: vii). Each of his novels presents Philip Marlowe wandering through the byzantine world of Los Angeles where the detective falls into innumerable strange encounters, chance meetings, perilous mishaps, and inconclusive battles. Though every event aspires to be gripping or moving or engaging in its own right, few of them come to seem necessary elements in a tightly sewn design. To a certain extent, that baggy narrative method reflected Chandler’s background in the pulp magazines where he had begun his career as a mystery writer. Following in the footsteps of his renowned predecessor Dashiell Hammett, Chandler had honed his literary skills writing for the pulps in the 1930s, when the cheap, mass-produced magazines were an industry that employed the talents of hundreds of writers who churned out tales for a penny or two a word. “The demand,” Chandler later recalled, “was for constant action” (1988d: ix). Pulp editors needed a ready supply of fresh variations on the handful of stock stories they featured; pulp readers sought a continual supply of new tales of adventure and bravery; and pulp writers distinguished themselves by the brio with which they spun the conventions of their genres and the flair with which they invented new events to extend their stories. The pulp milieu’s most
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highly prized aesthetic gifts were thus not the overarching formal design that booklength publication favored – and that the Golden Age detective fiction typified by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers featured – but style, dash, and narrative fertility. To use the terms proposed by the critic Thomas Roberts, the basic features of pulp publishing encouraged an emphasis on the qualities of “texture” rather than of “structure.” Those were qualities, in turn, that ended up being particularly favorable to the new, “hard-boiled” style of crime fiction that Hammett pioneered in the mid-1920s and that Chandler eventually adapted a decade later. For the hard-boiled writers grouped around Hammett in the renowned pulp Black Mask, the detective story was important less for the conceptual puzzles it encouraged than for the opportunity it presented to explore the corruption and violence of the era’s newly emergent metropolis. Murder in this mode was seen not as the rare product of deviously brilliant scheming, but as the symptomatic feature of a disorderly society, and the detective was not a brilliant, ratiocinative mind in the style of Sherlock Holmes, but an urban warrior who used his wits and his arms to battle the forces of the criminal underworld. The approach was naturally suited to the profuse action of the pulp universe. Highlighting the extent to which pulp fiction’s sheer multiplicity undermined the artificial neatness of the classic detective story, the hard-boiled writers cast themselves as the stewards of a new, more realistic style of crime story – one where the sheer multifariousness of the violent city challenged the ordering hand of the detective. “The chief difference between the exceptionally knotty problem confronting the detective of fiction and that facing the real detective,” Hammett wrote, “is that in the former there is usually a paucity of clues, and in the latter altogether too many.” Putting the point a slightly different way, Hammett had proposed an apt handful of titles for his own first novel, in which the detective hero lets loose a tide of violence without ever bringing justice to the corrupt city he hopes to tame. Before hitting on the perfect name of Red Harvest (1929), Hammett suggested to his editors that the book might be called, after its central quality of violent profusion, “City of Death,” or “Murder Plus,” or “The Seventeenth Murder” (Johnson: 48, 71). In one sense, then, the disorder and violence of The Big Sleep merely continued in the best tradition of pulp fiction. Yet, Chandler was no ordinary pulp writer, even by comparison to predecessors like Hammett who shared his artistic ambitions, and what he made of the materials of pulp fiction was highly distinctive. He began his career in Black Mask in 1932 after having been fired from his job as an oil industry executive. He had arrived in Los Angeles, as an emigrant from Great Britain, almost twenty years earlier, and his fortunes had prospered and then plummeted along with those of the booming new city. During the twenties, as Los Angeles began its dramatic expansion and the local oil industry took off, Chandler’s intelligence, and the commercial training and social refinement he had gained with his public-school education, proved to be valuable qualities. They brought him rapid success and prestige in L.A.’s business community. But Chandler’s attainments were soon undermined by his disastrous drinking problem and by a wide streak of self-destructive anger. When the
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Great Depression ended the twenties’ boom, the once wealthy Chandler found himself friendless, out of work, and absent of career prospects. The world of pulp publishing beckoned to Chandler, then, because it was one of the few opportunities that remained open to him. But he was also drawn to pulp writing because, at the nadir of his own life, it allowed him the chance to resuscitate literary aspirations he had abandoned decades earlier. As a young man in Edwardian London, Chandler had hoped briefly to become a poet. He had composed dozens of competent, but derivative, late-romantic verses, full of visions of chaste love and mystic other worlds: The touch of lips too dear for mortal kisses, The light of eyes too soft for common days, The breath of jasmine born to faintly lighten The garden of ethereal estrays. (Freeman: 42)
Turning to the pulps years later, Chandler found that he could make use of the “arty and intellectual” tastes of his youth by joining them to the action of the hard-boiled crime tale where, disciplined by the narrative demands of the mystery story and tempered by experience, they took on a bite that had been missing from his poems (MacShane 1981: 151). Pulp writing for Chandler, in short, was not the stepping stone to literary sophistication that it had been for Hammett, who had rocketed through Black Mask as a brash young man and who treated the conventions of his genre with cool irony. It was rather the path a middle-aged failure took toward a chastened sense of redemption, and it encouraged Chandler to create a style of detective fiction that was built around the qualities highlighted in the conclusion to The Big Sleep – yearning, loneliness, despair, resignation. In effect, Chandler turned the detective story into a covert variety of romantic poetry. He had discovered in pulp fiction, he later reported, “a fascinating new language” and aimed to see whether it might “acquire the power to say things which are usually only said with a literary air” (MacShane 1981: 43). The effort is evident in nearly every feature of his transformed version of the detective story. But it may be most apparent in the way Chandler refashioned the image of the detective, turning the hard-bitten, tough-talking hero of pulp fiction into a barely concealed romantic hero. The Black Mask school of the crime story had popularized an aggressive, plebian version of the detective – a man whose verbal and physical prowess allowed him to outwit and humble his rivals. Hammett, in turn, had refined the form, narrating his stories in a sleekly stripped-down prose that foregrounded the detective’s disturbing moral neutrality. Hammett’s was a narrative style that, as Chandler remarked, “had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill.” In response, Chandler’s own version of the hard-boiled story would lean in the opposite direction, emphasizing the detective’s dignity and nobility and placing those qualities in conflict with a fallen world. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself
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mean,” Chandler remarked, in perhaps his most oft-quoted lines, “He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor” (Chandler 1988c: 15, 18). Every feature of Chandler’s fiction turned on that determination to redeem the man of honor from the ugly weathering of the modern world. In his outward features, Chandler’s hero remains a forceful version of the hard-boiled detective – cynical, tough, quick with a gun or a wisecrack, insubordinate to his betters, indifferent to the law, and ruthless toward his criminal enemies. Vivian Sternwood accuses him of being “one of those dark deadly men with no more feelings than a butcher has for slaughtered meat.” Indeed, the greater part of each Chandler novel is taken up by scenes of physical conflict or, more often, of verbal confrontation in which Philip Marlowe contests some opponent who wishes to humiliate or deceive him, and in almost every case the detective uses his wit to best his opponents, forcing their composure to crack while he retains his own cool demeanor. To, Vivian’s accusation that he is a butcher, Marlowe replies, for example: “Thanks, lady. You’re no English muffin yourself” (Chandler 1992a: 149). Predictably, the exchange leaves her off-balance. But to such scenes of public confrontation, Chandler added a concealed dimension that had been previously absent from the hard-boiled protagonist – the intimation, in effect, of a resonant “image beyond a distant hill.” Although such hidden depths are invisible to characters like Vivian, indeed to nearly all the figures who share Marlowe’s world, they are fully evident to the reader, who is aware of the detective’s pained awareness of “the justice we dream of, but don’t find” (Chandler 1988b: 137). From this vantage, the detective is not merely a combatant, but, as the name Marlowe is meant to suggest (an earlier incarnation was called Mallory), a courtly knight who pursues unlikely quests through the corrupt world of the modern city. Marlowe himself underlines the analogy in the opening passage of The Big Sleep when he observes the stained glass panel above the entrance to the Sternwood mansion. The glass shows: a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. (Chandler 1988b: 3–4)
Marlowe, of course, is our own knight in dark armor, the noble man concealed by his forbidding carapace, and the adventures he undergoes in this and subsequent novels will all be organized around the courtly premise concisely hinted at in this scene. The Los Angeles through which he travels is at once the ordinary world of the modern city, and at the same time an eerie, almost supernatural landscape that recreates the terrain of the medieval romance. When Marlowe battles gangsters, falls into the clutches of quack spiritualists, finds himself tempted by alluring beauties, scales
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the ramparts of gambling palaces and office suites, he all but directly recreates the adventures of the courtly knight who battles evil and resists temptation in his pursuit of the grail. Indeed, despite the apparently disorganized plot of the novel, this opening image from The Big Sleep turns out to predict the course of the narrative with remarkable accuracy. Marlowe will be invited into the Sternwood household, and he will be charged with the rescue of the Sternwood girls – one of whom, the nubile and predatory Carmen – will appear repeatedly in states of imprisonment and undress. Even the fact that Marlowe envisions himself aiding a less successful fellow knight turns out to foreshadow key developments in the novel. For, as Marlowe reveals in the book’s climactic scene, he has been preceded in his efforts by a fellow quester, Vivian’s missing husband, Rusty Regan. As a minor character points out, Regan shared with Marlowe “the soldier’s eye,” but he made the mistake of becoming “sociable” with the Sternwood girls – for which he has paid the ultimate price (Chandler 1992a: 215). Murdered by the feral Carmen, Regan has been left to rot in an abandoned oil sump by her sister Vivian. The Big Sleep, in short, is an ironic quest romance, in which the nobility of the hero’s character is highlighted by the unworthiness of the ladies and lord he serves. That women like Carmen and Vivian Sternwood are not visions of ideal and chaste beauty, but rather forces of sexual corruption who destroy or damage the men who love them, accounts for the main pathos that runs through all Chandler’s fiction: in the world of the modern city, good men like Rusty Regan are ruined or compromised, and the beautiful and ideal is inevitably weathered. Though Marlowe just barely resists the fate to which Regan has succumbed, he is helpless to rescue the Sternwood girls from their moral corruption or to restore their father, the novel’s ailing king, to health. Marlowe himself draws the central moral. Alone in his solitary apartment, having just refused Vivian’s sexual attention and not yet aware that he is about to be propositioned by her naked younger sister, Marlowe looks down at a chessboard and remarks, “Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights” (Chandler 1992a: 156). Chandler would return to versions of that observation time and again. In story after story, he undergoes noble, yet inevitably doomed attempts to preserve a heroic ideal to which the basic features of modern society appear fundamentally hostile. In Farewell, My Lovely, he strives futilely to save the great-hearted dreamer and ex-con Moose Malloy, who is too naïve to realize that the beautiful woman to whom he has pledged his devotion is treacherous and conniving. In The Lady in the Lake (1943) he witnesses the moral destruction of a perfume executive, given the amazing name Derace Kingsley, a would-be noble, but weak man who is brought low by not one, but two selfish and destructive women. In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe discovers a beautiful woman who seems worthy of his devotion (a “dream … unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color”: Chandler 1992b: 90), only to find that she is a maddened killer who has been driven to insane violence by her realization that honor cannot survive in the modern world. In each case, treacherous women symbolize the cruel features of a selfish and decadent society, and the detective-hero who strives
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mightily to contest or control their power is ultimately hopeless to change the world they typify. The premise informing these novels is one enlivened by distaste and still more by sexual revulsion. The only women who escape the detective’s disgust are impossibly chaste figures, like Mona Mars of The Big Sleep, who wears her hair “clipped short all over, like a boy” and who bestows a regal kiss on the detective-hero that feels to him “like ice” (Chandler 1992a: 194, 198). And, yet, despite the simple vision of social decline and social corruption that provides his basic narrative framework, Chandler is able to use that vision to provide an unusually vivid rendition of the contemporary world through which the detective moves. Transformed into a moral landscape, the features of contemporary Los Angeles become a darkly luminous world whose culverts and byways glow with luminous, yet obscure portent. Not only secluded mansions and luxurious flats, but office lobbies, boardinghouses, housing developments, lowrent apartment buildings, dance halls, amusement piers, and cheap hotels – the transient spaces of the metropolis to which our attention is rarely turned – become key passages as the detective traverses the city, tying its disparate features into a resonant, if not wholly coherent map. More subtly still, in the tales of decline and fall to which he obsessively returns, Chandler provides a powerful narrative lens for interpreting the history of the city. The oil sump where Rusty Regan is buried encapsulates the boom and decline of L.A.’s oil industry and the transformation of the city by the automobile. The doomed Moose Malloy, whose love affair falters as Central Avenue in Watts begins to become an African American neighborhood, captures the continued growth and transformation of the city in the era when Southern migrants were flooding into California. The madwoman of The Long Goodbye presides over an upscale real-estate development that allegorizes the suburban transformation of southern California after World War II. If Chandler’s fiction was morally simplistic, in other words, it was socially complex and historically and emotionally sensitive. In fact, that sensitivity probably does more to explain the enduring appeal of Chandler’s fiction than either Philip Marlowe’s aggressive competence or his unlikely nobility. For, in addition to being a skilled combatant and a courtly hero, Chandler’s detective is still more importantly a man of feeling upon whom the world makes piercing impressions. Unlike earlier detectives, who puzzled over clues or outwitted their enemies, Philip Marlowe works mainly by responding emotionally and aesthetically to the world he encounters. At one point in The Big Sleep, Marlowe responds to the district attorney’s mistaken theory of one of the novel’s murders by pointing out that the explanation is “physically possible,” but “morally impossible” because it misjudges the character of a suspect (Chandler 1992a: 109). His explanation is typical of the judgments made by Chandler’s detective. They depend less on his analytic or investigatory powers than on his moral intuitions and his infallible knowledge of character. He feels his way through his cases. The readers who return to Chandler’s novel come back for the intensity with which Marlowe registers those acutely sensitive reactions. They are particularly evident in the famously exaggerated similes that make up the most distinctive feature of
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Chandler’s style – for example, the renowned description of the garishly dressed ex-con Moose Malloy, who shows up on Los Angeles’s Central Avenue looking “about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food” (Chandler 1988a: 3). Such figures emphasize the detective’s intensely literary responsiveness to the world he perceives, a feature that makes him resemble a surrealist poet or an impressionist writer in the mode of Stephen Crane. But the same emphasis on the detective’s poetic sensibility is apparent in more subtle passages of description as well. In Farewell, My Lovely, for example, Marlowe visits an elderly drunk who briefly departs the room. His reaction to her departure tells us nearly everything we need to know about her character: I heard her fumbling steps going into the back part of the house. The poinsettia shoots tap-tapped dully against the front wall. The clothes line creaked vaguely at the side of the house. The ice cream peddler went by ringing his bell. The big new handsome radio in the corner whispered of dancing and love with a deep soft throbbing note like the catch in a torch singer’s voice. (Chandler 1988a: 19)
These are the sorts of reactions Marlowe expands upon when he is alone, and they consistently speak of the emotions evoked in this passage – of loneliness and failure and a fading desire for a better world: Across the street a bingo parlor was going full blast and beside it a couple of sailors with girls were coming out of a photographer’s shop where they had probably been having their photos taken riding on camels. The voice of the hot dog merchant split the dusk like an axe. A big blue bus blared down the street to the little circle where the street car used to turn on a turntable. I walked that way. After a while there was a faint smell of ocean. Not very much, but as if they had kept this much just to remind people this had once been a clear open beach where the waves came in and creamed and the wind blew and you could smell something beside hot fat and cold sweat. (Chandler 1988a: 143)
Chandler referred to the kind of prose he wrote in passages such as this as “peripheral writing,” and he regarded it as the major achievement of his work (MacShane 1981: 307). Where his hard-boiled predecessors had valued the loosely structured nature of pulp fiction for the way it appeared to create an especially realistic portrait of urban crime, Chandler appreciated it still more because it enabled him to include sub rosa snatches of romantic poetry. What did not fit the tight designs of the conventionally plotted detective story was not the violence and disorder that Hammett emphasized, but rather the richness of the detective’s sensibility and the idealist promise – the “image beyond a distant hill” – that his sensibility, if just barely, preserved. “My theory,” he wrote, was that the readers of pulp fiction: just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action … The things they really cared about, that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that
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a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing he thought about was death. (MacShane 1981: 115)
It is worth noting that the death of Owen Taylor fits this premise perfectly. Though, in 1946, Chandler claimed not to have known who killed the chauffeur, it is unlikely that he was telling the truth. For, in fact, the novel provides a perfectly clear, if not very memorable answer. Owen, who was in love with Carmen Sternwood and who murders to try to protect her name, has killed himself when he discovers the depth of her moral corruption. His end is thus, at one and the same time, part of the pattern of destruction that radiates around the Sternwood girls and merely an incidental death – and one that, since it plays no major part in the novel’s more suspenseful events, readers who are distracted by the search for plots and schemes might well overlook. In fact, Chandler warns us of this danger in the narrative itself. At the scene of Taylor’s death, Marlowe is accompanied by Bernie Ohls, an upright investigator for the district attorney and Marlowe’s only friend. Ohls first questions the policemen in command at the scene, whereupon an arrogant plain-clothes man declares, on shaky evidence, that Taylor must have died by murder. But then, noticing a nearby mechanic, who has driven down to the wreck to attach the chains that drag it free, Ohls asks the man his opinion. “The man … looked flattered. He grinned. ‘I say suicide, Mac. None of my business, but you ask me, I say suicide.’ ” He then proceeds to lay out a long menu of evidence to justify his interpretation, earning him the investigator’s generous approbation: “Ohls said: ‘You got eyes, buddy’ ” (Chandler 1992a: 48). Summed up in this moment is a little allegory of Chandler’s vision of the detective story. Arrogant and distracted officials miss the important facts, but attentive readers who are not distracted by melodramatic theories, and who are willing to dive into the wreck, recognize the truth. Indeed, as Ohls underscores when he praises the observant mechanic, such sensitive observers establish a fragile brotherhood among themselves that is the only contrast to the general pattern of cruelty and destruction that Chandler’s fiction otherwise depicts. The moment is passed over briefly. But that is Chandler’s point. True perception and real dignity exist only on the periphery of a world distracted by cheap fantasy and false glamour. Only the temporary fellowship of decent man and sympathetic readers can preserve it.
References and Further Reading Anderson, John (2009). Raymond Chandler. London: Hamish Hamilton. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. (1973). Chandler before Marlowe. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press.
Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. (1976). The Blue Dahlia: A Screenplay. Carbondale, I.L.: Southern Illinois University Press. Bruccoli, Matthew (1979). Raymond Chandler: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University
Raymond Chandler of Pittsburgh Press. Chandler, Raymond (1988a). Farewell, My Lovely [1940]. New York: Vintage. Chandler, Raymond (1988b). The High Window [1942]. New York: Vintage. Chandler, Raymond (1988c). The Simple Art of Murder [1950]. New York: Vintage. Chandler, Raymond (1988d). Trouble Is My Business [1950]. New York: Vintage. Chandler, Raymond (1992a). The Big Sleep [1939]. New York: Vintage. Chandler, Raymond (1992b). The Long Goodbye [1953]. New York: Vintage. Chandler, Raymond (1995a). Later Novels and Other Writings. New York: Library of America. Chandler, Raymond (1995b). Stories and Early Novels. New York: Library of America. Clark, Al (1982). Raymond Chandler in Hollywood. New York: Proteus. Freeman, Judith (2007). The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. New York: Pantheon. Gardiner, Dorothy and Walker, K. S., eds. (1962). Chandler Speaking. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
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Gross, Miriam, ed. (1977). The World of Chandler. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hiney, Tom (1997). Raymond Chandler: A Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly. Hiney, Tom and MacShane, Frank, eds. (2002). The Raymond Chandler Papers. New York: Grove. Johnson, Diane (1985). Dashiell Hammett: A Life. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Luhr, William (1982). Raymond Chandler and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar. MacShane, Frank (1976a). The Life of Raymond Chandler. New York: Dutton. MacShane, Frank, ed. (1976b). The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler. New York: Ecco. MacShane, Frank, ed. (1981). Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. New York: Columbia University Press. Phillips, Gene D. (2000). Creatures of Darkness. Lexington, K.Y.: University Press of Kentucky. Widdicombe, Toby (2000). A Reader’s Guide to Raymond Chandler. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Wolfe, Peter (1985). Something More than Night. Bowling Green, O.H.: BGU Popular Press.
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Richard Wright Tara T. Green
Born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, to working-class parents, Richard Wright (1908–1960) died a world-renowned author in Paris. His writing career was rooted in his observations of Christian practices, the black poor, gender roles, and failed politics, which he was exposed to as an impressionable black boy, reared in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era of segregation. Wright’s father, a Mississippi field-worker, made attempts to escape a life of grueling labor when he moved the family to Memphis, Tennessee, but the five-year-old Wright, his younger brother, and mother found themselves abandoned by the father who went to live with another woman. Wright delved into his memories of his childhood when he wrote and published, Black Boy (1945), an autobiographical account of his life from early childhood until his arrival in Chicago. According to Wright, his father also chose not to provide any financial support for the family he had left. In Black Boy, he uses hunger as a symbol for his paternal loss: “As the days slid past the image of my father became associated with my pangs of hunger, and whenever I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness” (Wright 1998: 18). Through his autobiographical persona, Wright also describes feeling “dread” with regard to the instability that he and his brother faced. His mother was unable to care for herself and her sons, and the results were traumatizing. Wright describes his mother leaving them at an orphanage, retrieving them with Wright’s promise to ask his father for monetary support, fighting with neighborhood boys in order to make his way to the grocery store, and often starving for want of food and need of a father. Surely, one of the more significant moments that Wright describes in Black Boy is asking his father for money. Wright’s artistry emerges in the scene that includes a blazing fire in the background; and in the foreground, he presents the boy Richard, his desperate mother, a “strange woman,” and his laughing father. The father’s response to his son’s presence is to offer him a nickel, thereby rebuffing his son’s needs – requests for physical sustenance and emotional nurturing. Through Wright’s intense description of his complex relationship with his father, Black Boy illustrates Wright’s
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ability to combine personal experiences with social and political commentary. One theme that emerges is Wright’s criticism of the segregated South and the impact that racism has on the health (mental and physical) and stability (economic and social) of black families. For much of his childhood, Wright lived in the home of his devout Seventh Day Adventist maternal grandmother, Margaret Bolden. She was determined that her grandson would follow the teachings and beliefs of her Christian denomination, including no work on Saturdays and pork dietary restrictions. The boy found these restrictions difficult and they remained at odds, according to Wright in Black Boy, because of his rejection of her religion. Wright would explain his reasoning in one of his later essays, “I rejected that religion [Christianity] and would reject any religion which prescribes for me an inferior position in life; I reject that tradition and any tradition which proscribes my humanity” (Wright 1995b: 55). Although Wright rejected religion, the fiery sermons and metaphorical biblical stories he heard as a child, from his parents as well as his grandmother, fed his budding imagination and proved to have a great impact on his work. In 1926, Wright left his mother in the care of his grandmother and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he boarded with a family, including a daughter whom he refers to as Bess in Black Boy. Bess’s mother “offers” her as a wife, if Richard is willing to “tame her”, but the young Richard is repulsed by the mother’s proposal to a young man whom she hardly knows. Wright judges these women harshly. Mrs. Moss’s insistence that he has a “good Christian heart” is ironic, since he rejects Christianity. Influenced by his mother’s illness and his grandmother’s strict religious beliefs, Wright often presents Christianity as a character flaw. Mrs. Moss appears weakened, as she is willing to trust her daughter with a complete stranger based on a mere “feeling.” What is further disturbing about this scene is the daughter’s willingness to go along with her mother’s idea. Wright portrays himself in Black Boy as a man in pursuit of intellectual engagements. In his quest for intellectual and social freedom, Wright convinces a Memphis Jewish man to loan him his library card so that he can access books. Armed with the knowledge that he gains from these readings, he uses the money he saves to leave Memphis and to relocate in Chicago where he begins his writing career. Wright’s engagement with the John Reed Club of Chicago allows him to develop his writing abilities. It also introduces him to the Communist Party, which he joins. According to Barbara Foley, “the Chicago John Reed Club, included among its various functions the goal of ‘assist[ing] and developing (through cooperation with the Workers Cultural Federation and other revolutionary organizations) workerwriters and worker-artists’ ” (Foley: 91). The Party attracted many African Americans with its anti-racist message. More specifically, the Communist Party’s appeal to the proletariat included blacks, but black Americans certainly had other reasons for wanting to join the Communist movement. Historian Robin Kelley observes that “the Communist publications carried articles describing the struggles in Africa and the Caribbean” (Kelley: 94). Furthermore, Communist organizers created Marxists
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– learned individuals who attended ten-week courses at the Worker Schools where they became knowledgeable about socialism and other political issues (Kelley: 94–5). Finally, some were also required to travel to other countries where they received freedom unparalleled in America. Although Wright shared the black American members’ feeling of acceptance, his informal education made him feel isolated from the black Communists. In Wright’s view, these Communists could only regurgitate what they had been told by the Communist leaders; they did not question the restraints placed on them and went along willingly and passively with the power structure. Wright’s desire was to get the Communist message to blacks in a way that they could understand, without criticizing their religious beliefs: “That was not the way to destroy people’s outworn beliefs” (Wright 1998: 350). Later, Wright’s mother unknowingly played a part in influencing Wright’s appeal to black Christians, a technique he develops in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). At one point, Wright describes how she enters his room and picks up a copy of the New Masses, a Communist magazine featuring creative writing and news stories. On the cover, she sees a cartoon of a raggedly dressed man with bulging eyes surrounded by a group of women, men, and children “waving clubs, stones, and pitchforks.” Wright saw the cover “with my mother standing at my side, lending me her eyes” (1998: 376). Through his mother’s point of view, Wright is able to see how the violent nature of the cartoon could be offensive to Christians who might be attracted to the Party’s sermon-like rhetoric and its system of organized ideas. He concludes, “My mother’s face showed disgust and moral loathing. She was a gentle woman. Her ideal was Christ upon the cross. How could I tell her to march in the streets, chanting, singing” (1998: 376). To be effective, the Party had to adjust its approach. Wright’s break from the Party involved the Party’s failure to address the needs of black people as well as his resistance to intellectual control. Neither Wright’s desire to write nor his acceptance of Stalin’s doctrines would make him susceptible to the intellectual limits that were imposed by the Northern Communists. In fact, they reminded him of the white men at the optical company in Memphis who threatened to kill him when he asked to be trained to make glasses. According to Wright, “It was inconceivable to me, though bred in the lap of Southern hate, that a man could not have his say. I had spent a third of my life traveling from the place of my birth to the North just to talk freely, to escape the pressure of fear” (1998: 405). Wright’s separation from the Party had much to do with his inability to be “mastered” like the words he put on paper. Initially, when Wright was asked to attend a Communist meeting, he professed: “I don’t want to be organized” (1998: 371). Thus, his break from the Party is seen through the paradigm of his childhood experiences with Jim Crow and religion. For Wright, organized systems of beliefs – religion and the Communist Party – were ways both to control and to master their believers. By the time Wright began to resist Communist organization, he had already written Uncle Tom’s Children. He admits that after he was forcefully removed from the Communist group at the May Day parade, he no longer had a desire to carry the Communist message to his people:
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I remembered the stories I had written, the stories in which I had assigned a role of honor and glory to the Communist party and I was glad that they were down in black and white, were finished. For I knew in my heart that I would never be able to feel with that simple sharpness about life … never again make so total a commitment of life. (1998: 451)
Wright’s fiction reflects the excitement stirred by Communism to disenfranchised blacks of the South. In 1930, the Communist Party began to organize Southern blacks, like those in Uncle Tom’s Children. The Party’s 1930 resolution addressed the differences between the needs of Southern and Northern blacks. While the Northern blacks sought “integration and assimilation,” the demand for “self-determination – political power, control over the economy, and the right to secede from the United States” – was initiated in the South (Kelley: 13). This initiative appealed to many Southern blacks, especially those who had “Southern rural roots, limited education, and were unskilled or skilled laborers. [Many were also] active in their respective churches and some … participated in local gospel quartets” (Kelley: 25). Two of Wright’s short stories, “Bright and Morning Star” and “Fire and Cloud” (1938) focus on Southern Party activities. These earlier works of fiction prove his ability to integrate historical fact with literary artistry as a means to critique an aspect of American society. Wright’s popularity began to emerge with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Children. In fact, with a letter of recommendation from Eleanor Roosevelt, who had also written a positive review of the collection, Wright received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Yet, Wright states in “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” (1940) that he was not pleased with reviews of the work. The result was to produce the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, of his novel Native Son (1940). Bigger is a twenty-year-old black male from the South Side of Chicago who is the eldest son in a family consisting of his mother, brother, and younger sister. The family lives in a one-room apartment and relies on Bigger, who has a history with local law enforcement, to bare the brunt of caring for the family. Bigger accepts a job as a chauffeur with the prestigious Dalton family, but before the night is over Mary Dalton dies. Bigger, in his attempt to profit from her death, issues a ransom note, kills his girlfriend to conceal his fraud, and tries to frame Mary’s Communist boyfriend, Jan. Bigger is arrested, tried, and convicted by novel’s end. After his career began to blossom, Wright married in 1939, divorced and remarried in 1941. Wright moved his family to Paris in 1946, undoubtedly to engage the intellectual literary and philosophical movements that were burgeoning there; and, most certainly, to escape the racism of America, which made it difficult for him and his wife, a white woman, to live peacefully. Wright published three novels, four works of non-fiction, and a collection of short stories while in Paris, though some other work written during this time was published posthumously. One of the most intensely complex works is The Outsider (1953), a novel about Cross Damon, a black father and husband who is able to change his identity when he finds out that the authorities have named him among the people who died in a train accident. Seeing that he may have an opportunity to leave his estranged wife, needy mother, and
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threatening mistress behind, he flees Chicago and begins a new life under an assumed name in New York. While there, he murders two people and has an affair with the wife of a Communist. Though he thinks that he can outsmart the investigators, another “outsider,” the district attorney, becomes fascinated with him and works to uncover the identity of Cross, masquerading as Lionel Lane, and to learn more about his psyche. A diverse writer, Wright also published a novel that focused exclusively on white characters. Savage Holiday (1954) focuses on a white religious man, Erskine Fowler, who becomes obsessed with his promiscuous white female neighbor. During the course of the novel, he accidentally kills the woman’s young son and eventually, in a psychotic fit, kills her as well. The novel reveals Wright’s interest in psychoanalysis to understand relationships between mothers and sons. Few scholars have published an analysis of this novel, which has been largely dismissed because it is not characteristic of Wright’s depictions of black life. Further, his attention to classic Freudian psychoanalysis by a writer known for his fiction was, to some, a disappointment; Claudia Tate dedicated a chapter of her book, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, to examining the novel. In the last novel published before his death, The Long Dream (1958), a father attempts to foster his son’s transition into manhood in Mississippi. The novel centers on the relationship between Fish and his father Tyree, a corrupt mortician who also owns a brothel and a club. Though Tyree is married to Emma, a Christian woman, he has affairs with other women. Eventually, as a result of his dealings with local city officials, Tyree is killed, leaving his teenage son in charge of all of his business affairs. After Fish is arrested for allegedly raping a white woman (a ploy by police to extract incriminating information from him that may get them into trouble), Fish, while out on bail, leaves the corrupt black community and his father’s legacy and heads for France. Wright scholars have focused on the various subjects that have been prevalent in his work. I divide the major themes prominent in Wright’s fiction into the following subcategories; notably there is some overlap: Communism, religion, women, masculinity, and existentialism. Communism, as earlier noted, was a major part of Wright’s life during his early career as a writer, and it remained at the foundation of his beliefs throughout his life. Several critics examine his motives for joining the Party and the influences that decision had on his writing. Herbert Leibowitz notes that the Party “promised to redress injustices, to find jobs, bread and shelter for the needy of all races, and to foster an ethical cause … But [Wright] had another motive … The party seemed prepared to encourage his writing talents” (Gates and Appiah: 347). Although his literary career was launched as a result of his affiliation with the Communist Party, Wright, according to Harold McCarthy, “joined the Communist Party for all the wrong reasons” (Macksey and Moorer: 71). However, some critics note the positive impact of his affiliation. Alan Wald asserts that Richard Wright and others “proclaimed their
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fiction to be explicitly within Marxist culture, and accordingly built a body of literary criticism that contemplated the centerpiece of their fiction” (Wald: 2). His first collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, makes blatant references to Communists as being helpful in the fight for freedom in the South. In particular, “Fire and Cloud” introduces Communist sympathizers who want to work with the town’s leading black pastor to organize a march against hunger. They offer a solution – one that brings together blacks and whites – to combat the racism of white governmental leaders, represented by the town’s mayor, who would rather not meet the needs of all of the town’s citizens. Perhaps the work that stands out the most in Wright’s body of fiction is “Bright and Morning Star.” The story features an older black heroine, a mother, who also sympathizes with the Communist Party. She infiltrates the racists who have taken her son hostage and, using her unique position as his mother, she smuggles in a gun and uses it as she plans. In both of these stories, Wright does not strip the older blacks of their religious beliefs, but he uses the tradition of religion as a form of active liberation and combines it with the activism that he believed could make a difference for blacks. As Wright began to question the sincerity of Communists, his fiction also reflected his ambivalence. Bigger Thomas of Native Son receives the support of Jan, the white man whom he tries to frame for Mary’s murder, and Max, the Communist lawyer who represents his interests at the inquisition. Max is the only white man who spends a considerable amount of time learning about Bigger; and, in turn, Bigger begins to learn more about himself as a black man in America. Max’s inquiry of Bigger gives the young black man a voice that was previously stifled by society, and, at times, his own family. However, questions linger. Does Max see him as a person or simply as a cause? Further, does Max empower Bigger or does Max give him yet another identity that Bigger simply accepts? Critics, such as Dan McCall, have found Max’s final speech to be a rhetorical “soapbox” designed to “reach mass movements” (McCall: 53). Keneth Kinnamon offers a reason why Wright makes the decision to have Bigger represented by a white man: “As a Communist, Max can articulate a Marxist analysis of Bigger’s situation which clearly derives from Wright’s own conceptual analysis of the effects of racism on the Bigger type” (Gates and Appiah: 114). Wright addresses what motivated his development of Bigger and Max’s role in his essay, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born.” Nearly all of Wright’s short stories, and certainly all of his longer fictional works, include Christian references. Edward Margolies examines Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children and Eight Men (1961). He argues that the characters in “Down by the Riverside,” “Fire and Cloud,” and “Bright and Morning Star” arrive at their sense of realization “by applying basic Christian principles to the situations in which they find themselves” (Gates and Appiah: 76). Other critics, such as Tim Caron and John Lowe, have written about Wright’s intermingling of biblical references, including names and themes, to develop his own fiction and to offer social critiques. Since 1976, feminist scholars have been critical of the women in Wright’s fiction as stereotyped. Sherley Anne Williams, for example, notes that the black mothers in
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Wright’s “Long Black Song” (1946), Native Son, The Outsider, and Black Boy are “ineffectual in the face of poverty and racism” as a result of their sole reliance on their religious beliefs (Williams: 72). Nagueyalti Warren describes the women as amounting to “castrating mothers; whorish, morally depraved lovers; hysterical, weeping black girls” (Warren: 60). She notes further, “all of Wright’s women … are Mothers or Whores.” These immoral women include Bessie Smith of Native Son, Dot of The Outsider, and Gladys of The Long Dream. At times, his attention to Christianity and his depiction of women has been the focus of many critics. Maria Mootry argues that religion is one of the “anodynes” used to “narcotize [the] intelligent, questioning spirit” of women in Lawd Today (1963), Black Boy, and Native Son (Macksey and Moorer: 119). Finally, Trudier Harris observes that Mrs. Thomas uses her “God and … religion as a way to keep black men humble and confined to the places assigned to them by larger society” (Kinnamon: 65). In Wright’s earlier short story, “Long Black Song,” biblical references and the characterization of women overlap, opening the door for black feminist critiques. Sarah, the wife of Silas in “Long Black Song,” who has sex with a traveling salesman, is a mother, and her story is complex. Nagueyalti Warren describes her as “the paragon of amoral sensuality and mindless stupidity” (Warren: 69). Such views were challenged by Joyce Ann Joyce who describes Sarah as “the moral consciousness that illuminates the insanity of a racist society which confines all forms of human behavior within narrow, emotionally stultifying limits” (Joyce: 380). Cheryl Higashida also observes that Sarah’s “experiences of desire and domesticity enable her to critique Silas’s petit bourgeois values and the racial violence that sustains them” (Higashida: 407). In “Long Black Song”, Wright brings his readers to rural living. Sarah, when we meet her, is alone on a farm awaiting the arrival of her husband who has gone into town to sell his cotton. Sarah has no one to communicate with but her baby daughter, Ruth. When her husband returns, he makes it clear that he sees their possessions – the land, the house, the money – as his. He sees her as his as well. Sarah, an African American woman, is in a unique position in the rural South. She marries a man who owns his own land as opposed to laboring as a field-worker or tenant farmer. It would seem that she does not have to work outside the home, though that would not have been uncommon. However, she is not respected by her husband who at one point tells her to go out into the barn in order for him to whip her. Enter the nameless white salesman. He begins by calling her “Aunty,” he enters her home uninvited on more than one occasion during his visit, and when he is done having sex with her – an act that he actively pursues – he reduces the price of the gramophone. Sarah’s characterization impresses upon readers the necessity of looking at not only the individual, but also society. What choices did this African American woman have in relation to the expectations imposed upon her by her husband? The white man? What compelled her to marry Silas, when she was still clearly attracted to Tom? What impact did living on the farm and not in the town have on her and her husband? Sarah’s status as wife, as a mother, as a black woman, and as a woman reliant on her husband make her a metaphor for the powerlessness that blacks in general experienced
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in the Jim Crow South as well as the lingering abject desire for freedom. By the end of the story, as a result of Sarah’s sexual interaction with the salesman – an unmistakable symbol of white capitalism and dominant power – her husband escapes the dangers of the South through his violent but arguably heroic death. While a great deal of attention has been given to Wright’s female characters, the majority of Wright’s fiction focuses on black men, many of whom are sons, fathers, or both. According to Abdul R. JanMohamed, “the inability or unwillingness of the father to protect him from racial assault leads to an adamant negative association between the father and black culture in general” (JanMohamed: 144). Their position, in relation to their family structure, plays a prominent role in what choices they make in their lives and why. Several of Wright’s novels focus on black men who struggle with paternal feelings. The first of these is Bigger Thomas of Native Son. Like Wright, Bigger’s family relies heavily on him to assume the role as provider in his father’s absence, the result of his murder in the South. Bigger sees this responsibility as a burden. Wright sets the stage for Bigger’s angst by immediately introducing readers to his blighted life. Within the first few paragraphs, we learn that the three-member family lives in a one-room apartment which they share with a rat. In her desperation to get her son to take a job with a white liberal family, Bigger’s mother tells her son, “sometimes I wonder why I birthed you” (Wright 1993a: 6). He replies by telling her that she perhaps should not have done. Her desire to define his masculinity as primary provider where he is her son and not her husband is a conflict that is rooted in her need not to buckle under the weight of poverty. The result of the absent father in Wright’s life is often expressed through patricide in his fiction. Unlike Wright, Bigger’s father was murdered in the South resulting from a racial conflict. The circumstances of the man’s death absolve him of his guilt – he did not mean to be absent, but circumstances beyond his control occurred. Wright’s moment of forgiveness in Black Boy, where he holds the Jim Crow South as a co-conspirator in contributing to his father’s absence, is represented in Wright’s decision to literally kill the father in Native Son. Wright would repeat patricide in subsequent novels as well. Both Cross Damon of The Outsider and Fishbelly of The Long Dream lose their fathers to death. Most critical attention in regard to his father and son relationships has been focused on The Long Dream. In particular, Elizabeth Yukins argues, “Tyree Tucker plays a formative role in developing Fishbelly’s consciousness and in shaping the central themes of the novel: embattled masculinity, the economics of racialized patriarchy, and the sexual psychology of racism” (Yukins: 747). The theme of father and son relationships in Wright’s work should be further explored. The Outsider also reflects Wright’s interest in existentialism. By 1953, not only had Wright abandoned his affiliation with the Communist Party, but in 1946, he moved to France and adopted existentialist beliefs. Literary critics have done extensive studies on the relationship between Wright and French existentialists, such as Camus, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Michel Fabre, who informs readers that The Outsider was
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planned and begun before Wright’s first trip to Paris and his acquaintance with French existentialism, argues that The Outsider is patterned after Camus’s The Stranger (1942, English trans. 1946) and influenced by Sartre and de Beauvoir. On the other hand, Harold McCarthy argues, “Although The Outsider has been frequently regarded as an existentialist novel … The Outsider bears at its deepest level the hallmark of Wright’s compulsion to shape society in accordance with some ideal conception of social justice” (Macksey and Moorer: 77). His interest in establishing social justice for marginalized people was most certainly a major concern of Wright. Ultimately, Wright was a man with interests that were global, and any of his political and/or philosophical leanings were based on his curiosity about the citizens of the world. It was this curiosity that led him to live in France, to visit other parts of Europe, and to write about his observations of Spain and the Gold Coast (later named Ghana). These experiences were undoubtedly inspired by his growth as an intellectual and his willingness to try to understand himself in relation to people of international cultures. In sum, Wright’s body of work represents the talents of a man who persisted in his quest to “know” and who resisted any possibility of mental confinement.
References and Further Reading Bloom, Harold, ed. (1991a). Richard Wright: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1991b). Richard Wright’s “Native Son”: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House. Butler, Robert J. (1995). The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Caron, Timothy (2000). Struggles over the World: Race and Religion in O’Connor, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright. Macon, G.A.: Mercer University Press. Fabre, Michel (1973). The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzan. New York: William Morrow. Fabre, Michel and Kinnamon, Keneth, eds. (1993). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Foley, Barbara (1993). Radical Representations: Politics and Form in the United States Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Gates, Henry Louis and Appiah, K. A., eds. (1993). Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad.
Higashida, Cheryl (2003). “Aunt Sue’s Children: Re-viewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism,” American Literature, 7(2): 395–426. JanMohamed, Abdul R. (2005). The Death-BoundSubject: Richard Wright’s Archeology of Death. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Joyce, Joyce Ann (1994). Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Kelley, Robin (1990). Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. (1990). New Essays on Richard Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, John (1995). “Wright Writing Reading: Narrative Strategies in Uncle Tom’s Children,” in Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, ed. Gerald Kennedy, pp. 52–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCall, Dan (1969). The Example of Richard Wright. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.
Richard Wright Macksey, Richard and Moorer, Frank E., eds. (1984). Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Rowley, Hazel (2001). Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt. Tate, Claudia (1998). Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocol of the Race. New York: Oxford University Press. Wald, Alan M. (1994). Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. New York: Verso. Ward, Jerry, Jr. and Butler, Robert, eds. (2008). The Richard Wright Encyclopedia. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Warnes, Andrew (2006). Richard Wright’s “Native Son”. London: Routledge. Warren, Nagueyalti (1988). “Black Girls and Native Sons: Female Images in Selected Works by Richard Wright,” in Richard Wright: Myths and Realities, ed. James Trotman, pp. 59–77. New York: Garland. Williams, Sherley Anne (1982). “Papa Dick and Sister-Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright,” in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminine Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischman, pp. 63–82. Boston: G. K. Hall. Wright, Richard (1954). Savage Holiday. Jackson: Banner.
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Wright, Richard (1957). Pagan Spain. New York: Harper and Bros. Wright, Richard (1958). The Long Dream. New York: Harper and Row. Wright, Richard (1993a). Native Son [1940], ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Harper Perennial. Wright, Richard (1993b). The Outsider [1953], ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Harper Perennial. Wright, Richard (1993c). Uncle Tom’s Children [1938], ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Harper Perennial. Wright, Richard (1994). “Blueprint for Negro Literature,” in Within the Circle, ed. Angelyn Mitchell, pp. 97–106. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Wright, Richard (1995a). Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos [1954]. New York: Harper Perennial. Wright, Richard (1995b). White Man, Listen! [1957]. New York: Harper Perennial. Wright, Richard (1998). Black Boy [1945], ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Harper Perennial. Yukins, Elizabeth (2003). “The Business of Patriarchy: Black Paternity and Illegitimate Economies in Richard Wright’s The Long Dream,” Modern Fiction Studies, 49 (4): 746–79.
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Ralph Ellison Rachel Farebrother
Few writers have provoked such an array of diverging critical responses as Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man was published in 1952 to wide acclaim, winning the National Book Award in 1953. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, Ellison faced intense criticism from the Black Arts Movement because of his apparently apolitical stance. Since Ellison refused to articulate explicit political commentary in his writing or to conform to a narrowly defined “black” aesthetic, he was perceived to be insufficiently radical. That said, Larry Neal, a co-founder of the Black Arts Movement with Amiri Baraka, later reconsidered his position in “Ellison’s Zoot Suit” (1970), an extraordinary essay that lauds Ellison’s pioneering commitment to black vernacular cultural traditions. In the final years of his life, Ellison even became “an icon of blandly affirmative Emersonian individualism” (Posnock: 2). Ellison’s fluctuating critical reputation confirms Darwin T. Turner’s contention that “[a] problem for Afro-American writers is that invariably those who become well-known are condemned or praised for nonaesthetic reasons” (Turner: xx). Throughout his career, Ellison’s consistent refusal to become a political spokesman provoked censure from African Americans and whites alike. Yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss him as a “politically disengaged mandarin” (Posnock: 1). In fact, Ellison obsessively confirmed his commitment to America’s unfulfilled democratic principles, identifying a contradiction between pluralist rhetoric and the realities of racial discrimination. He could certainly be accused of adopting the role of cheerleader for an idealized democratic nationalism, but his sophisticated attention to “how American democracy, aesthetics and politics are entangled” warrants sustained scrutiny (Posnock: 1). With this in mind, this chapter will address tensions that animate Ellison’s writing, especially in relation to the thorny question of the relationship between politics and literary activity. For the most part, my focus will be Invisible Man and Ellison’s two influential essay collections, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986).
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Invisible Man Nowhere are such tensions more apparent than in Ellison’s landmark novel Invisible Man. Generally speaking, the novel accords with the conventions of a bildungsroman. It charts the development of Ellison’s anonymous African American protagonist from a blind faith in racial uplift toward clear-sighted awareness of the extent to which racial stereotypes have governed his experiences. In a searing critique of American hypocrisy, Ellison disgorges the racism that underpins political, economic, and social life. It is no coincidence that this psychological journey toward self-knowledge is paralleled with literal travel from the South to the black metropolis of Harlem, and even a symbolic movement downward into the unconscious. Notice, for example, recurring spatial motifs of “plunging,” burial, hiding, and falling, which isolate aspects of American culture that remain unacknowledged, or invisible, in dominant historical accounts. In the course of a narrative that follows the contours of Ellison’s own journey from Oklahoma, where he grew up, to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute and New York, Ellison turns his satirical gaze upon institutions that claim to foster racial equality. His damning portrait of a black school in the South, loosely modeled on Tuskegee, exposes morally bankrupt leadership in Dr. Bledsoe’s pledge to “have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning” in order to maintain his position as college president (Ellison 1965: 120). Invisible Man, of course, climaxes with a sharp critique of the Brotherhood – a thinly veiled attack on the racism and inflexibility of the Communist Party – which abandons its commitment to the dispossessed when it sacrifices African American interests to score points in a propaganda war. The central metaphor of invisibility is crucial to any assessment of Ellison’s politics. With his famous opening line, “I am an invisible man,” Ellison attends to the psychological impact of racial discrimination upon African Americans and white Americans (p. 7). He is centrally concerned with what has been termed the racializing gaze, the failure of white Americans to recognize African Americans as autonomous human subjects. As a consequence of cultural and social codes that reinforce their power at every turn, white Americans, in Ellison’s probing historical chronicle, perceive African Americans through a prism of cultural stereotypes. Significantly, the ironic gesture of illuminating invisibility is underlined by Ellison’s formal patterning of the narrative. In particular, Invisible Man is book-ended by speeches, in which the narrator talks directly to readers, offering a devastating analysis of racial dynamics in the United States. Such framing introduces an unresolved tension between the narrator’s account of his development from blindness to self-knowledge, and his “ironic, down-home voice,” which Ellison later described “as being as irreverent as a honky-tonk trumpet blasting through a performance, say, of Britten’s War Requiem” (Ellison 2003: 481–2). Surprisingly, this novel does not proceed according to a narrative logic of reversal, countering invisibility with visibility. Instead, Ellison carves out limited spaces for
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resistance from within such discourses, drawing attention, with characteristic irony, to the subversive advantage that marginalization can afford. Like a trickster, Invisible Man turns invisibility against itself. In one act of “sabotage” (Ellison 1965: 10), he “illuminate[s] the blackness of [his] invisibility,” siphoning off enough electricity to illuminate 1,369 light bulbs in his underground “hole” without paying a cent (p. 15). A more sustained analogy is pursued between invisibility and jazz music in the prologue, when the narrator smokes marijuana and listens to Louis Armstrong’s performance of “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue.” Equating invisibility with Armstrong’s celebrated improvisatory skill emphasizes the subversive possibilities opened up by working within a tradition. As Paul Anderson explains, “[Armstrong’s] vastly influential approach to syncopation and to swinging a tune included the prying open of phrasing, and even thrilling gaps between his own melodic phrasing, the accompanists’ rhythmic support, and the listener’s expectation of hearing the familiar melody played ‘straight’ ” (Anderson: 286). In short, Armstrong’s ability to remake familiar songs depends upon sophisticated engagement with existing musical structures. In a mode of perception analogous to W. E. B. Du Bois’ metaphor of “double consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he appropriates recognizable elements but turns them inside out to create something unexpected. For Ellison, invisibility is comparable to improvisation because African Americans can manipulate white expectations to create productive alternatives to dominant structures. This is best illustrated by Invisible Man’s formulation of “slipping into the breaks.” A break, of course, is a moment in a jazz piece when the accompaniment falls silent, making space for a soloist to improvise freely. In Ellison’s formulation, such breaks unsettle rigid concepts of time, creating a fluid, unpredictable rhythmic structure that departs from the conventions of western classical music. The implication is that African Americans’ position inside American cultural and social traditions creates the potential for subversion of those same structures. Ellison’s emphasis upon invisibility’s precarious doubleness challenges a binary logic that formulates concepts of identity through opposition. When Invisible Man announces his “compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white” (Ellison 1965: 15), Ellison implies a critique of what Edward Said has termed “identitarian consciousness” whereby individuals are defined according to rigid categories of identity such as black and white (Said: 330). For Ellison, a strategy of appropriation and reversal runs the risk of perpetuating binaries that reinforce asymmetrical relationships of domination and subordination. Instead, moments of subversion featured in Invisible Man are always contingent, marked by ambivalence and fragility. Since such an argument can easily be confused with political quietism, it is worth pausing to consider the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who makes a comparable point with reference to postcolonial writing in his celebrated essay “The Muse of History” (1974). He concludes that a revolutionary literature, defined in diametric opposition to the colonizer, will inevitably remain trapped within the parameters of a colonialist mindset: “by openly fighting tradition we perpetuate it” (Walcott: 370). Walcott’s
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essay offers a suggestive interpretive framework for reading Invisible Man, not least because it establishes a connection between Ellison’s challenge to programmatic politics, and his incorporation of cultural allusions from various sources into the fabric of his fiction. Why such allusions are so important to any attempt to assess Ellison’s cultural politics is something to which I shall return. With its sharp analysis of the politics of history, Walcott’s essay also brings into focus another aspect of the trope of invisibility: Ellison’s sustained critique of historical narratives, which have been told according to the values of a dominant white culture. Invisible Man’s “new analytical way of listening to music” becomes the template for an alternative history that plunges below the surface, attending to “unheard sounds” and marginalized “voices” (Ellison 1965: 11). Such counter-histories take multiple forms in the novel. For a start, the narrator is moved to make his first public speech by the eviction of an old African American couple in Harlem. In this case, it is the couple’s material possessions, a “jumble” of artifacts strewn across the sidewalk, that prompts Invisible Man’s awareness of a collective African American consciousness. Elsewhere, this quest for alternatives to the deterministic view of history espoused by the Brotherhood is figured as a surreal burrowing into the unconscious. Excavation of Invisible Man’s individual consciousness carries considerable weight because it becomes a means of exploring African American cultural memory. In the prologue, for instance, the narrator “descend[s]” the “depths” of Armstrong’s music, undertaking a kind of archaeological dig of the African American psyche (p. 11). Significantly, his Dantesque journey into an “underworld of sound” (p. 14) challenges “whitewashed” histories by exposing racial mixing in America. Such attention to uneasy realities that are at odds with democratic rhetoric is paired with a sustained exploration of the interracial (and international) quality of America’s pluralist culture. For the narrator, “an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco” lies beneath Armstrong’s “Black and Blue,” reminding readers of the dynamism born of intercultural exchange in America (p. 11). Highlighting that American art is produced through interaction between supposedly discrete groups, Ellison develops an inclusive vision, which recognizes that African Americans have been a shaping influence upon the national culture. Ellison, of course, reiterated this point over and again in such essays as “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (1970). Notwithstanding his emphasis upon the need to reconstruct dominant historical narratives, Ellison remains attentive to both the possibilities and limitations of alternative histories. Consequently, it is significant that he maximizes the ambiguity surrounding images of “plunging.” At times, plunging is fraught with the danger of self-obliteration. After a fight with Ras the Exhorter, for instance, the Brotherhood youth leader Tod Clifton confesses that he can see why “a man has to plunge outside history” (Ellison 1965: 305). Later, when Clifton leaves the Brotherhood, he fails to find a constructive identity outside racial structures of domination; instead, he dies at the hands of a white policeman after delivering a troubling, ambivalent performance with “Sambo, the dancing paper doll” (p. 355).
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At other times, “plunging” below the surface, with its abandonment of received ideas and perspectives, “enables the novel’s narrator to see differently” and “one sees the political potential in temporal disorientation” (Yukins: 1251). On the New York subway, for instance, he undergoes an epiphany, which encourages him to rewrite historical narratives, making room for subaltern voices. An encounter with zoot-suited “men out of time” (Ellison 1965: 355), whose lives go unrecorded by historians, prompts his intention to bring them into the “groove of history” (p. 357). He suddenly realizes that these boys, with their stylized zoot-suits and “their heavy heel plates clicking remote, cryptic messages” (p. 356), might be “the saviours, the true leaders … [t]he stewards of something uncomfortable” (p. 355). The genuinely transformative potential of Invisible Man’s revelation is underlined by a descriptive vocabulary derived from jazz, which marks improvisation as a truly democratic impulse, heralded in the rhythm of everyday objects as well as the blare of trumpets. In this context, Ellison’s phrase “the groove of history” (p. 357) becomes particularly suggestive. Even though such wording underlines the subversive potential of Ellison’s, and the narrator’s, act of writing, it is difficult to miss the irony that Invisible Man’s mechanical image seems to repeat the very determinism that he is trying to escape. Allusion to blues recordings, however, forestalls interpretation of the “groove” as a wholly deterministic track; instead, we are reminded that, in the blues, repetition is the basis for elastic, creative individual performances. A number of Ellison’s essays characterize American history as a discourse haunted by the repressed reality of its failure to live up to democratic ideals. Attention to the unacknowledged role of black slave labor in the creation of an American prosperity, which was, in W. E. B. Du Bois’ words, “built upon a groan,” was not a new thing (Du Bois: 102). But Ellison managed to distil into memorable set pieces, and metaphors, his theory that African American cultural sources have played an unacknowledged role in shaping “mainstream” American culture. To take only one example, Invisible Man is employed to produce “pure,” Optic White paint, destined for the Washington monuments. In an image that encapsulates official whitewashing of America’s mixed culture, the narrator creates white paint “that’ll cover just about anything” by adding ten drops of black dope to the mix (Ellison 1965: 164). In a similar vein, Ellison writes in “The World and the Jug” (1964), “whatever the efficacy of segregation as a sociopolitical arrangement, it has been far from absolute on the level of culture” (Ellison 2003: 163). Such analysis of American pluralism helps explain Ellison’s formal choices in Invisible Man, which tend to emphasize “the true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness” (Ellison 2003: 109). Any reader of Invisible Man cannot fail to notice that Ellison deploys a variety of stylistic registers to create jarring discordances and unexpected harmonies. There is a critical tradition stemming back to the Marxist critic Irving Howe, which has interpreted Ellison’s investment in Euro-American literary tradition as a failure of political will. Such criticism, however, overlooks Ellison’s challenging orchestration of cultural dissonance through his formal choices, which allows him to comment, albeit obliquely, on the failures of American democracy.
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Invisible Man can certainly be interpreted as a groundbreaking example of what Henry Louis Gates has called the “speakerly” tradition of African American writing (Gates: xxv). Ellison draws inspiration from African American folklore, blues, and jazz, incorporating black oral and musical expression into the literary domain. Above all, this allows him to abandon protest fiction in favor of a blues sensibility, which he described so memorably in an admiring review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) as a mode that can “at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit” (Ellison 2003: 143). At the same time, Invisible Man is punctuated with allusions to, and revisions of, the writings of Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Herman Melville, to name just a few. In one of the most sophisticated accounts of Ellison’s active engagement with the American canon, Alan Nadel describes Invisible Man as “a novel employing richly allusive modernist techniques that refer to major works of the American canon in contexts that impel reinterpretation” (Nadel: 149). Such a strategy of adaptation could be likened to Henry Louis Gates’s theory of “signifying,” or repetition “with signal difference” (Gates: xxiv), but Ellison lays emphasis upon the hybridity of American cultural identity. It is worth pausing here for a moment to assess the political possibilities of Ellison’s tapestry of allusions to African American and Euro-American cultural traditions in Invisible Man. A tight weave of cultural references hardly amounts to a detailed political program. Yet, Ellison juxtaposes a variety of cultural referents to articulate a kind of politics that proceeds by suggestion. A number of critics have likened such techniques of juxtaposition and stylistic incongruity to the improvisational patterns of jazz. More recently, Sara Blair and Elizabeth Yukins have identified other models for Ellison’s politics of form in visual art, specifically photography and Cubist art. Of particular relevance is Ellison’s introduction for a catalogue of Romare Bearden’s collages, which describes Bearden’s indirect approach, his orchestration of interplay between collage fragments “to make the unseen manifest” (Ellison 2003: 695–6). It is not difficult to find examples of such indirection in Invisible Man. John S. Wright, for instance, analyzes Ellison’s sequenced allusions to a “procession of leaders” including Frederick Douglass, Joe Louis, and Paul Robeson (Wright: 108). Contrary to the customary interpretation of Ellison’s distance from an evolving “black dissident sensibility,” Wright convincingly demonstrates that, taken together, such references initiate “a quest for a new kind of leadership” (Wright: 81, 82).
Ellison and Richard Wright An alternative point of entry to such questions is to assess the impact of Ellison’s relationship with other African American writers, especially Richard Wright. After leaving Tuskegee to try his luck in New York in 1936, Ellison struck up a “literary friendship” with Wright, which has been likened to such important partnerships as
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that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald (Posnock: 25). With Wright as his mentor, Ellison undertook his “literary novitiate” at the offices of the New Challenge (Wright: 202); he witnessed the evolution of Native Son (1940), soon to be canonized as the definitive “black” novel of the 1940s, “as it came out of the typewriter” (Ellison 2003: 73). Association with Wright, of course, brought Ellison into the orbit of the black Communist Party. Lawrence Jackson’s biography has done much to locate Ellison’s emergence as a writer against the backdrop of his involvement with the Communist Party. Although never a card-carrying member, Ellison’s serious commitment to Marxism in these years is captured in the pages of The Negro Quarterly, a short-lived journal he edited with the African American radical Angelo Herndon from 1942 to 1943. Of more lasting significance was Ellison’s immersion in leftist intellectual networks, which, as Alan Wald has shown, became “principal venues in which many Black writers came together to formulate ideas, share writings, make contacts” (Wald: 267). It is hardly surprising that Ellison’s participation in such networks in the late 1930s and early 1940s has received little critical attention until recently. In such essays as “The World and the Jug” and “Remembering Richard Wright” (1971), Ellison carefully distanced himself from secular politics and Wright’s “ideological” writing, which never lost sight of the revolutionary potential of the word. Ellison’s most powerful declaration of his literary differences from Wright is “The World and the Jug,” written in response to Irving Howe’s “Black Boys and Native Sons” (1963), an essay that identified “clenched militancy” (Ellison 2003: 157) as the only appropriate stance for African American writers. Ellison warned that such prescriptions would hamper individual expression, forcing writers to conform to a blueprint that regarded African Americans not as human beings but as “an abstract embodiment of living hell” (2003: 159). Above all, Ellison criticized social realism for its neglect of a tradition of resistance embodied by vernacular cultures that had their roots in slavery. Without discounting such differences of politics and philosophy, it is also important to address points of contact between these two writers. As a result of Ellison’s ungracious attacks on Wright, it has almost become a matter of routine to read Invisible Man as a parody of Native Son, a repudiation of its techniques and approaches. In the final analysis, however, Ellison shared more with Wright than he was willing to acknowledge. For a start, Ellison’s commentaries on Wright in the 1960s and 1970s lack serious discussion of the melding of African American vernacular traditions with Euro-American literary styles such as the Gothic that gave Native Son its distinctive shape. Given Arnold Rampersad’s controversial claim that Wright and Ellison’s enthusiasm for canonical Euro-American literature was fundamental to their success in the literary marketplace, this critical failure is, at the very least, intriguing (Rampersad: 97). It is also worth remembering that Wright’s autobiography Black Boy inspired Ellison’s famous definition of the blues as “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger
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its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (Ellison 2003: 129).
Juneteenth Another set of ethical questions is raised by Juneteenth, a reconstructed fragment of the 2,000 page manuscript that Ellison had been working on for forty years, which was published in 1999. When he died in 1994, Ellison left no instructions about “how his work should be published, or even that it should be published at all” (Young: 163). At the request of Ellison’s wife, Fanny, however, Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, undertook the daunting task of culling a coherent novel from published excerpts of Ellison’s work-in-progress and his manuscripts. For those familiar with Ellison’s essays, Juneteenth treads a well-known path. Plot remains secondary to a showcasing of African American folk materials, most notably in the sermon that Daddy Hickman delivers to celebrate Juneteenth, the day, two months after the end of the Civil War, when the slaves of Texas finally learned of their freedom. Secondly, the novel reads as an allegory of American history, with a notable emphasis upon America’s repression of its long-standing dependence upon African Americans. With a nod to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), the narrative focuses on the deathbed conversations (spoken and unspoken) between Adam Sunraider, a racist senator, who is dying after an attempted assassination on him in the Senate, and Sunraider’s adopted father, an old African American preacher called Daddy Hickman. Hickman raised the boy, then known as Bliss, within the black community until he ran away to become, first, a filmmaker obsessed by the interplay of black and white on the screen, and then, a politician. Inevitably, much of the critical commentary on Juneteenth has looked for an explanation of Ellison’s failure to publish a second novel. In spite of its uneven tone, this published fragment, which includes some suggestive set pieces, offers few obvious answers to such questions. Instead, the most compelling critical discussions of Juneteenth have wondered what is at stake in Callahan’s adept transformation of the unfinished manuscripts into a largely coherent narrative. A serious assessment of Callahan’s editorial choices, his selections and juxtapositions, will only be possible once a scholarly edition of Juneteenth has been published. In the meantime, John Young has raised searching questions about Callahan’s decision to smooth over “the truly fragmentary nature of the manuscripts and their subject, race in America” (Young: 167). For Young, Callahan’s editorial acts, especially his insertion of the title and chapter headings, must be situated within the context of a publishing industry, which has “consistently maintained distinct racial categories in which literature marked as black can be produced and consumed” (Young: 33). For a writer vitally alert to contradictions that animate race in America, especially the dynamic interplay between shadow and act, past and present, it seems fitting that Ellison’s writings, finished and unfinished, should remain “acquainted with ambivalence” (Ellison 1965: 13), without offering any easy answers.
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Anderson, Paul Allen (2005). “Ralph Ellison on Lyricism and Swing,” American Literary History, 17(2): 280–306. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1996). The Souls of Black Folk [1903]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ellison, Ralph (1965). Invisible Man [1952]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ellison, Ralph (1999). Juneteenth, ed. John F. Callahan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ellison, Ralph (2003). The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library. Ellison, Ralph (2009). Three Days before the Shooting. New York: Random House. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988). The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Lawrence (2002). Ralph Ellison: Emergence of a Genius. New York: John Wiley. Nadel, Alan (2004). “The Integrated Literary Tradition”, in A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison, ed. Steven C. Tracy, pp. 171–205. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Posnock, Ross, ed. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampersad, Arnold (2007). Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Vintage.
Said, Edward W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Stephens, Gregory (1999). On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Darwin T. (1971). In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and their Search for Identity. Carbondale, I.L.: Southern Illinois University Press. Walcott, Derek (1995). “The Muse of History” [1974], in The Post-colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, pp. 370–4. London: Routledge. Wald, Alan M. (2002). Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Century-Left. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Wright, John S. (2006). Shadowing Ralph Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Young, John K. (2006). Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Yukins, Elizabeth (2004). “An ‘Artful Juxtaposition on the Page’: Memory, Perception, and Cubist Technique in Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth,” Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association, 119 (5): 1247–63.
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James Baldwin D. Quentin Miller
The prolific James Baldwin published roughly the same amount of fiction and nonfiction in his lifetime, as well as two plays and two collections of poetry. In the preface to his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Baldwin stated his life and career goals with simple eloquence: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer” (Baldwin 1955: 9). Baldwin pleased his critics and readers, at times, for being more than a good writer: some considered him a great writer, the spokesman for a generation, a visionary, a prophet. Toward the end of his career, his talents and achievements were questioned as his readership declined and his critics accused him of losing his powers, becoming bitter, or being out of touch. The question of his status as a “good writer” has much to do with his goal of being an “honest man,” for despite the praise or scorn readers may heap on Baldwin’s writings, few dare to accuse him of losing his commitment to honesty. His relentless struggle against the forces that would obscure honesty may have been the key factor in determining his literary success. Marked by an unusual frankness about sexuality and race, charged with the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Bible, informed by a deep understanding of history, of music, and of literature, James Baldwin’s fiction is as rich, challenging, and energetic as that of nearly any other twentieth-century American author. The circumstances of his youth did not project this type of success. Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, the oldest of nine children. He grew up very poor in a community that deteriorated visibly in the first decade of his life. Organized religion was as much a part of Harlem in those days as jazz, leftist politics, and street protests. For many Harlemites, religion was the only promise of salvation. Baldwin’s stepfather, David Baldwin, was a preacher who had followed the Great Migration north from his home in New Orleans in the 1920s. His mother, Emma Berdis Jones, also moved north from Maryland. James never knew his biological father, and his relationship with his stepfather was contentious. Yet Baldwin himself became a preacher when he turned fourteen after undergoing a religious conversion similar to the one that John Grimes, the protagonist of his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953),
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experiences. Before he was twenty, Baldwin had left not only the ministry, but also the church, and this painful decision energizes much of his early fiction. The church was just enough to “start him on his way” (Baldwin 1963: 24). Baldwin’s journey was not only out of the church, but out of Harlem, and eventually, out of the country. Baldwin followed the lead of many famous American writers and spent his formative years in Paris. His writing career began after he graduated from high school in 1942 and left the church at the same time. After a few years of working odd jobs in Greenwich Village, Baldwin began reviewing books, and in 1948 he published his first essay and his first short story, “Previous Condition.” He entered into his career in earnest, but with a conflicted sense of his identity and his mission. His early attempts to become a writer were linked not only to his leaving the church and Harlem, but also to his desire to escape the oppression of American racism. The incident that led to his expatriation, which he retold many times in many forms, occurred when a waitress in New Jersey refused to serve him because he was black. He claimed that he wanted to kill her, and he hurled a glass at her, barely escaping an angry mob afterward. His murderous anger could only tear him apart or land him in jail, so he left his native country. He would come to realize in Paris that racism was going to follow him. He went from Paris to a village in Switzerland, Loéche-les-Bains, where the whiteness of the people and the whiteness of the snow made him all the more visible. There he wrote the essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) and completed Go Tell It on the Mountain. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951) – his celebrated and controversial essays on Richard Wright and Harriet Beecher Stowe – Baldwin had criticized novels that look at American racism through the lenses of Marxism and abolitionism, respectively, and thus fail to plumb the depths of African American experience. He had set himself the difficult task of addressing the complexities and difficulties of black American life without making the same mistakes that he felt Wright and Stowe had made. Go Tell It on the Mountain takes an unusual form, with the coming-of-age story of fourteen-year-old John Grimes framing the stories of John’s aunt, stepfather, mother, and biological father. These stories reveal the truth behind the exterior of what John sees: all of the pious elders of the church were once young rebels who left their homes. All of them experienced hope and disillusionment. All were, in fact, rejected by their parents and sought, in their own way, to define themselves outside the safety of home, despite hostile and alienating surroundings. But the relationship between John’s experience and these other stories is far from neat or easily definable. If he is becoming aware of his own familial history, it is unconscious, for he has not actually heard the stories that we read. These stories have somehow created him, yet through his violent conversion to Christian belief, he does not feel a loving connection to his parents and aunt, but rather the murderous power to kill his stepfather Gabriel. It is a difficult birth not just into the church, but into maturity, and the powerful sense of individuality he feels will presumably enable him to strike off on his own eventually. In the eyes of the faithful in the novel, John has arrived; but in the eyes of the reader and in his own eyes, John has only begun his journey.
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A key development in John’s conversion is the approval of Brother Elisha, a boy somewhat older than John who has already been saved, and who playfully wrestles with John before encouraging him to think about his soul. John is clearly attracted to Elisha, and many readers have interpreted the attraction as sexual. Elisha kisses John on the last page of the novel, and though it is described as “a holy kiss,” it is also charged with the sexual tension that has existed between them throughout the novel. Readers would probably not have been tempted to interpret John’s attraction to Elisha as physical had it not been for the publication of Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), which took on the taboo subject of homosexuality in such an honest way that publishers were afraid of it. Although Baldwin examines homosexuality thoroughly in Giovanni’s Room, the novel is really about something broader: the refusal to accept oneself, which leads to the impossibility of loving another. Baldwin spent much of his career arguing about labels, and would never accept being called “gay,” though he did not deny that he loved many men as well as some women. Yet Giovanni’s Room is widely considered Baldwin’s “gay novel,” perhaps because it was so unusual in 1956 to read fiction about homosexuality described so candidly, or perhaps because the narrator David’s homosexual love affairs pointedly frame the dilemma of the novel. Just as John Grimes was a classic protagonist of a coming-of-age novel, David is a classic protagonist of a modern existential novel, caught between the macho vision of masculinity projected by his father and his own attractions toward men. He becomes someone who is afraid to act on his own desires, and his self-hatred leads to the destruction of everyone who comes close to him. In contrast to Baldwin’s other novels, Giovanni’s Room is pointedly not about race or racism; virtually all of the characters are white. Baldwin again attempts to create a deeply affecting psychological narrative about the importance of facing reality, and about the responsibility of the individual to care for others, in his most famous short story, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), published the year after Giovanni’s Room. These works of fiction are strikingly similar in theme, yet “Sonny’s Blues” does not deal with homosexuality. Baldwin was developing a humanistic message that would be his enduring theme, and it had to do with the tremendous difficulties of love. In Giovanni’s Room, the impediments to love stem from David’s attempts to seek safety, to avoid suffering, and to believe that love should be clean and tidy. The narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” is similarly deluded, and his attempt to escape reality takes the form of judgment: he believes that leading an upright, middle-class existence will allow him to avoid suffering. “Sonny’s Blues” is the first contact most readers have with Baldwin’s work, and it stands at the center of his career in many senses. Sonny tells his brother, “Everybody tries not to [suffer]. You’re just hung up on the way some people try – it’s not your way!” (Baldwin 1965: 133, italics in original). The message could apply to David in Giovanni’s Room or to John Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Yet Baldwin’s message was about to have a different, more political and racially charged context on the eve of the turbulent 1960s. The American South was on fire. The civil rights movement
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had begun and it needed guidance. Baldwin had to come home from Europe to fulfill the role of spokesman. In 1957, Baldwin journeyed to the South to witness first-hand how the promise of America was failing, and to provide hope for its renewal. Baldwin’s purpose in “Sonny’s Blues” was to expose the human failure to listen, and in his essays of the same period he compounds that message by revealing the failure to see. This message is specifically true with regard to American myths about African Americans; in “A Fly in Buttermilk” (1961, originally published as “The Hard Kind of Courage,” 1958), he writes that segregation in the South “has worked brilliantly” in that “it has allowed white people, with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation, only the Negro they wished to see” (Baldwin 1961: 85). Here Baldwin attempts to reveal reality and to do away with the mythology that would keep us safe and secure, but his essays on the South are pressed by urgency. The difference has to do with the courage “to look reality in the face” (p. 99), especially if that reality is unpleasant, or something we do not want to accept. This concept can be applied to the last short story Baldwin ever published, “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), which gave the title to his only collection of stories. It is a vicious story filtered through the viewpoint of a racist white sheriff named Jesse whose manhood ritual had been to witness the lynching and castration of a black man. The reader’s ability to hate Jesse is tempered (if only slightly) by pity; as a child he was friendly with a black boy, but his parents separated them and forced him to witness a ritual lynching and castration. Jesse is sick and poisoned, and his racism has been instilled in him not only by his parents, but by the whole segregated racist society around him. He cannot have sex with his wife without imagining the lynching scene. Baldwin illustrates the connection between sexual violence and racism in this stomach-turning parable. The trajectory of Baldwin’s writing clearly changed as a result of his involvement in the civil rights movement and his witnessing of the racial violence of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet he did not stay in the American South, or even in America, for long. His two novels of the 1960s were written partially in Istanbul, and his tendency to travel out of the country is evident in both novels, which are even more expansive than his 1950s’ novels. Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) are notable departures for Baldwin. They are sprawling novels that range over time and space in a way that his earlier works do not. They are less crafted novels, fraught with intensity and confusion, involving large casts of characters. Baldwin’s readers had to revise their expectations if they were to follow these challenging books. Many were not willing to do so, and although Another Country was successful in terms of sales, its publication marked a turning point in Baldwin’s reputation, especially as a novelist. The following year saw Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine (May 17, 1963), the week of the Birmingham riots. The Time article downplayed Baldwin’s novels in favor of discussing his essays and his powers as a public speaker. There is a critical trend to appreciate Baldwin as either an essayist or a fiction writer, and in the years following the publication of The Fire Next Time (1963), a non-fiction bestseller, his
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reputation as an essayist was clearly greater. This was a matter of great disappointment to Baldwin, not only because he worked long and hard on his novels, but because he did not want his modes of writing to be seen as separate. Although its reviews were uneven, Another Country pleased many readers and critics in 1962, and it remains one of Baldwin’s greatest literary achievements in terms of its daring experimentation and its engagement with human despair, American identity, and the complexity of sexual and racial relationships. It begins with the final, desperate days of Rufus Scott, a despondent black New Yorker who has been damaged and marginalized by society. He has no outlet for the bitterness and poison that fills him, though he attempts to eradicate it through an abusive, misogynistic relationship with a Southern white woman. When he realizes the futility of this attempt either to love or to hate, Rufus feels that he has no alternative but to commit suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. It is difficult to name with certainty the protagonist of Another Country, whereas his two earlier novels centered around single characters. Even the title is ambiguous, for the novel begins and ends in America with a relatively brief episode in France near the novel’s center. Yet the title suggests the theme of the book, which is largely about the willingness to cross boundaries, or to inhabit a place outside our safe homes. Much like Baldwin’s life, the novel crosses invisible borders between uptown and downtown Manhattan, between men and women, between black and white Americans, between North and South, and between Europe and America. Like Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone explores nearly all of the themes associated with Baldwin’s work: the conflicted role of the artist, the tense relationship between brothers, the church’s oppression and possibilities for redemption, the difficulty of self-acceptance, and the inability of contemporary America to deal with its race problems. The novel is the story of Leo Proudhammer, a stage and film actor of great renown who suffers a heart attack and who uses his convalescence to reflect upon his life. Like Another Country, Tell Me has no conventional center and no contrived shape. It is simply Leo’s story, and it is about nothing less than the struggle to survive. Love is both the reward for this struggle and the cause of it. Leo struggles throughout his narrative to understand the consequences of love, whether from friends, male and female lovers, family, or the public. He is a victim in the sense that he occasionally loses control of his life and is forced to be what others want him to be. He is exhausted by everyone’s demands, and his doctor warns him that if he does not take care of himself he will suffer another heart attack. Baldwin was clearly projecting a side of himself in the character of Leo. In the 1960s, a public figure like Baldwin was constantly called upon to speak, to act, and to perform. It would be natural to want to retreat, or to collapse. After his collapse, Leo helps himself to recuperate by telling his story. From the public’s perspective, his story illustrates the classic rags-to-riches theme, made more poignant because he grew up poor and black. In the novel’s final pages, a white character holds him up as an example of how anyone of any race can succeed in America. Leo grows angry and silent, but he knows he must respond; he
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says, “You can’t imagine my life, and I won’t discuss it … Negroes of this country are treated as none of you would dream of treating a dog or a cat” (Baldwin 1968: 358). Leo (like Baldwin) tells his story on his own terms in his own way. He is tired of role-playing for others and of being used as an example of one issue or another. Baldwin’s aesthetic captured a kind of dense realism as a way of fulfilling his original goal of honesty. Leo is thus impossible to categorize. He has suffered racial discrimination at the hands of ignorant rural folks, police, and well-intentioned white liberals, yet it would be reductive to call him a victim. He sleeps with men and women, white and black, yet would resist any label about his sexual or racial preferences. In short, he is an actor who is impossible to typecast, and he attempts to be comfortable with that status. Yet there is a sense that he is occasionally lost, that he does not fit in anywhere. In the novel’s final line, he finds himself “standing in the wings again, waiting for my cue.” There is something a little unsettling about this conclusion, for it implies that Leo is still being controlled by others. Baldwin’s non-fiction of the 1960s was increasingly concerned with the incarceration of black men, and he treated the idea fictionally in If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), a novel markedly different from Baldwin’s earlier work in its vernacular voice. Tish Rivers, the novel’s narrator, is a streetwise nineteen-year-old black girl, a character type virtually absent from Baldwin’s previous novels. Echoing Baldwin’s situation with Tony Maynard, a friend accused of murder whom Baldwin publicly defended for years, Tish and her family are motivated by the need to prove the innocence of her boyfriend Fonny, who has been wrongfully charged with rape. If Beale Street Could Talk was yet another departure for Baldwin, a marked contrast to his first two novels about spiritual experience and the paralysis of a homosexual American in Paris. Baldwin’s attention had turned to injustice on the street. The title refers to the street in Memphis where the blues were born, but the novel takes place in New York. It is yet another blues story, and its joy and pain are evident throughout. Fonny is an artist, a sculptor, and this vocation demands his time and attention. Yet he does not neglect Tish. Thus, the fact that he is not there for her during her time of greatest need – her pregnancy – is an example of how society’s unreasonable forces can weaken the sacred bond of human love. And that is the subject of this version of Baldwin’s blues. Though he remained, in his words, a “transatlantic commuter” from the late 1960s until his death in 1987, Baldwin accepted a couple of American college teaching posts in the years surrounding the publication of his final novel, Just Above My Head (1979). He was still very much a public figure, but he found the time to write his longest novel despite his other projects and public appearances and despite his deteriorating health. The novel begins with tragedy, the premature death of gospel singer Arthur Montana. Arthur’s story is narrated by his brother Hall, and their relationship is reminiscent of earlier brothers in Baldwin’s fiction: Sonny and the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” and Leo and Caleb in Tell Me. Just Above My Head has a huge cast of characters and covers the range of Baldwin’s travels, from New York to Europe to the American South. As in Beale Street, the novel showcases the tremendous need for strong,
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functional families as supports for the individual. Yet among all of these familiar Baldwin motifs is the central struggle of Hall, the narrator who is a witness to his brother’s life. He says, as he introduces the final section of the book, “You have sensed my fatigue and my panic, certainly, if you have followed me until now, and you can guess how terrified I am to be approaching the end of my story” (Baldwin 1979: 497). This fatigue, panic, and terror are the price of the honesty that Baldwin had sought when he became a writer. Hall achieves clarity and understanding through his narrative. It is the same emotion revealed at the end of all of Baldwin’s novels: the struggle to confront despair and to understand tragedy cannot erase them, but it can make life more bearable. Baldwin died in southern France in 1987 from cancer of the esophagus. His death was marked by a tremendous celebration of his life at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and celebrations thereafter have focused on his literary achievements and his wisdom. There has been a resurgence in recent years of Baldwin studies, with an ever-increasing number of books devoted to his life and works. Although there is always debate over what Baldwin should be remembered for, there is no doubt that he will be remembered as one of the most important American writers of the latter twentieth century, and there is certainly no doubt that he achieved the goal that he set for himself at the beginning of his career: to be an honest man and a good writer.
References and Further Reading Baldwin, James (1955). Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon. Baldwin, James (1961). Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial. Baldwin, James (1992). The Fire Next Time [1963]. New York: Vintage. Baldwin, James (1965). Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dial. Baldwin, James (1968). Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. New York: Dial. Baldwin, James (1979). Just Above My Head. New York: Dial. Baldwin, James (1998a). Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America. Baldwin, James (1998b). Early Novels and Stories, ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America. Balfour, Lawrie (2001). The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). James Baldwin: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Bobia, Rosa (1998). The Critical Reception of James Baldwin in France, 2nd edn. New York: Grove/ Atlantic. Campbell, James (1991). Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Penguin. Chametzky, Jules, ed. (1989). Black Writers Redefine the Struggle: A Tribute to James Baldwin. Amherst, M.A.: University of Massachusetts Press. Field, Douglas, ed. (2009). The Oxford Historical Companion to James Baldwin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Trudier (1985). Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin. Knoxville, T.N.: University of Tennessee Press. Harris, Trudier, ed. (1999). New Essays on “Go Tell It on the Mountain”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, Lovalerie and Scott, Lynn Orilla, eds. (2006). James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative
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Critical and Theoretical Essays. New York: Macmillan. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. (1974). James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Leeming, David (1994). James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. McBride, Dwight A., ed. (1999). James Baldwin Now. New York: New York University Press. Miller, D. Quentin, ed. (2000). Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Nelson, Emmanuel S. (1991). “Critical Deviance: Homophobia and the Reception of James Baldwin’s Fiction,” Journal of American Culture, 14 (3): 91–6. Porter, Horace (1989). Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, C.T.: Wesleyan University Press. Pratt, Louis H. (1978). James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne. Scott, Lynn Orilla (2002). James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing, M.I.: Michigan State University Press.
Shin, Andrew and Johnson, Barbara (1998). “Beneath the Black Aesthetic: James Baldwin’s Primer of Black American Masculinity,” African American Review, 32 (2): 247–61. Standley, Fred L. and Burt, Nancy V., eds. (1988). Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall. Standley, Fred L. and Pratt, Louis H., eds. (1989). Conversations with James Baldwin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin (1980). James Baldwin. New York: Frederick Ungar. Troupe, Quincy, ed. (1989). James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster. Weatherby, W. J. (1989). James Baldwin: The Artist on Fire. New York: Dell. Zaborowska, Magdalena (2009). James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
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Vladimir Nabokov Barbara Wyllie
Vladimir Nabokov came to America in May 1940. He was forty-one. This was the second time in his life he had been forced to flee political persecution. In 1919, he had escaped from Russia with his family under the fire of Red Army guns. Over the next twenty years, he was to become a leading figure of the Russian emigration in Europe. A celebrated poet and novelist based in Berlin, he published three collections of poems, over forty stories and nine novels, had three plays commissioned and staged, and wrote sketches for the theater and cabaret, as well as synopses for film. He was also one of a few Russian writers whose audience extended beyond the émigré community, having secured translation deals with German, French, and British publishers. His name even reverberated, if only faintly, across the Atlantic. Hollywood director, Lewis Milestone, approached him for film ideas during the early 1930s, and in 1935 he was featured in The New York Times Book Review. In 1937, he was prompted to produce his own new translation of Camera Obscura – Laughter in the Dark – after a U.S. publisher bought the rights, and he reworked the novel from scratch, this time with an American audience, and Hollywood particularly, in mind. Now he found himself in New York City with his Jewish wife, Véra, their young son, Dmitri, and a contract to teach a creative writing course at Stanford University the next summer. By the end of the following decade, he had become one of America’s most famous authors. Although his arrival in the United States was very much a matter of accident, Nabokov always insisted that this was where he knew he would eventually end up. From the moment he set foot in America, he felt at home. Nabokov’s only demand of the world was that it allow him to live and think and create freely. In America, that “cultured and exceedingly diverse country” (Field 1987: 235), he found this freedom, along with his “best readers,” “minds,” he said, that were “closest” to his. He categorized himself “as an American writer raised in Russia,” declaring, albeit rather obtusely, that he was as “American as April in Arizona” (Nabokov 1973: 10, 192, 98).
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Soon after landing in New York, Nabokov met and befriended the influential writer and critic Edmund Wilson who played a key role in introducing him to the American literary scene. He began writing for the New Republic and the Atlantic Monthly, which printed over a dozen of his stories and poems. Nabokov’s first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was published in 1941 by James Laughlin, who went on to commission new translations of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev, and a book on Gogol. In 1944, The New Yorker offered Nabokov a lucrative and longrunning serialization deal. This was to include his 1956 novel, Pnin, for which Nabokov was hailed as “one of the subtlest, funniest, and most moving writers in the United States today” (Boyd 1993: 307). By the end of the 1940s, Nabokov had published his first novel written in America, Bend Sinister (1947), a volume of short stories, his autobiography, and begun work on the book that was to transform him from a barely known Russian émigré writer into one of the most infamous names in postwar western literature. Lolita first appeared in France in 1955. Nabokov spent the next three years trying to secure a publishing deal in the U.S., but its controversial subject matter meant that publishers were reluctant to be associated with it for fear that they might be prosecuted on the grounds of obscenity. In the meantime, Lolita’s clandestine notoriety grew exponentially across Europe and in Britain, such that when it finally appeared in America in 1958 it became the publishing phenomenon of the decade, the first book since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) to sell 100,000 copies in three weeks. Stanley Kubrick bought the film rights, and his extensively revised version of Nabokov’s screenplay was premiered in New York in 1962. Meanwhile, Nabokov had already left for Switzerland, settling into a penthouse suite at the Montreux Palace Hotel, where he was to stay until his death in 1977. During the last two decades of his life, Nabokov translated, adapted, and published all his Russian work, translated Lolita into Russian, completed a three-volume annotated translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, revised his autobiography, and published a further four novels, Pale Fire (1962), Ada (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974), leaving a final, incomplete manuscript, The Original of Laura (2009). Nabokov refused to perceive his state of permanent exile as negative. The disruption of perpetual statelessness he transformed into a positive dynamic that aligned him with the greatest Russian novelists, particularly his hero, Pushkin. He saw the loss of his homeland as “a break in [his] destiny” which served to stimulate and enrich his creative imagination (Nabokov 1999: 195), commenting that “had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all” (Nabokov 1973: 100). Like his childhood fascination with a remote corner of his family’s estate they called “America,” the distance that lay between Nabokov and his adopted home at the end of his life made it a more potent inspirational force. It is no coincidence, therefore, that his last novels were all set in America – or, at least, identifiable versions of it – and were to continue to feature American, or Americanized, protagonists.
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The distinctive characteristics of a Nabokov work are evident from his earliest fiction. Densely allusive, it displays a formidable erudition in Russian and European art, history, science, philosophy, and, particularly, literature, ranging from Pushkin to Bely, Chateaubriand to Flaubert, Shakespeare to Brooke. Key themes of memory, the imagination, and the patterning of fate are introduced in his first Russian novel, Mary (1926; 1970), which details the trauma of cultural alienation and loss – of a homeland and first love – themes which formed the basis of an artistic philosophy preoccupied with combating the regressive forces of time and mortality. Themes of exploration and discovery are central to Glory (1930; 1971) and Nabokov’s greatest Russian work, The Gift (1937–8, 1952; 1963). Entrapment – physical, spiritual, emotional, and psychological – underpins the destructive triangular liaisons of King, Queen, Knave (1928; 1968), Laughter in the Dark (1931; 1938), Lolita, and Ada, whilst the protagonists of Invitation to a Beheading (1935–6; 1959) and Bend Sinister suffer torture and incarceration in the face of arbitrary social and political dictates. More discreet yet no less compelling human dilemmas are dramatized by the chess-master Luzhin of The Defense (1929–30; 1964), Pnin, and Hugh Person in Transparent Things, whilst the protagonists of The Eye (1930; 1965), Despair (1934; 1966), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Look at the Harlequins! grapple with problems of identity to the point of insanity. The theme of identity also extends into Nabokov’s treatment of the role of the author/narrator. Many of his protagonists are granted narrative authority, yet their texts are designed to distort and obfuscate, to obliterate any possibility of objective interpretation. At the same time, however, Nabokov’s omniscient presence is always discernible, embedded in textual clues or discreet Hitchcockian appearances, or else communicated through phantom apparitions – Lucette in Ada or Hazel Shade in Pale Fire, for example – which introduces a moral and artistic integrity antithetical to these unscrupulous, although often highly persuasive, dominant narrative voices. Much of Nabokov’s late work – and indeed, aspects of his pre-American fiction – demonstrates elements of postmodernism, not simply in its resistance to closure, but also in its antagonistic relationship with the reader, its refusal to offer up easy solutions, its sophisticated deployment of artistic and cultural tropes and its foregrounding of artifice, or what Robert Scholes defines as “fabulation.” Scholes focuses on the more positive aspects of postmodernism – its “extraordinary delight in design,” its emphasis on fictiveness, on a “less realistic and more artistic kind of narrative” and the “highest premium” it places on “art and joy” (Scholes: 10, 12). “A great writer is always a great enchanter,” Nabokov argued (Nabokov 1982: 5). “All worthwhile art” must demonstrate “originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity” (Nabokov 1990: 161). A work of fiction must convey a balanced, coherent, and convincing world in which realism (a term which Nabokov always placed in inverted commas) is confined and relative only to that world. Character, settings, plot are all, necessarily, a product of “intricate enchantment and deception.” Meanwhile, Nabokov’s cryptic riddles, initially identified by critics as nothing more than barren, intellectual games, draw the reader’s attention away from the text’s “realistic” surface. “The unravelling of a riddle,” Nabokov argued:
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is the purest and most basic act of the human mind. All thematic lines … are gradually brought together, are seen to interweave or converge, in a subtle but natural form of contact which is as much a function of art, as it is a discoverable process in the evolution of a personal destiny. (Nabokov 1999: 95, 250)
The pursuit of a solution, therefore, is a key element in this process of discovery. All that it requires from the reader is an attentiveness to the patterns of specific details – from anything as apparently mundane as a pencil or a bowler hat to an eloquent play on words – and suddenly those details are revealed as the novel’s “nerves,” the “subliminal coordinates” and “secret points” that may perhaps finally reveal what lies at its heart (Nabokov 1995: 316). Central to this pursuit of solutions is the theme of the “other world” (potustoronnost), which “saturates everything he wrote” (Alexandrov: 567). From his earliest work, Nabokov demonstrates an abiding preoccupation with alternate temporal and spatial dimensions that transcend mortal earthly existence. These can take the form of tangible parallel worlds, such as Ada’s Terra – the mysterious sister planet to Van and Ada’s “anachronistic” and fantastic Antiterra (Nabokov 1963: 122) – or the boundless realm inhabited by R. and his fellow spirits in Transparent Things. The creatures from these worlds are often manifested as spirits, angels, and demons (“Wingstroke,” 1924; 1995; “The Vane Sisters,” 1959; Ada, Transparent Things), their presence signaled by a recurring detail, color or motif – the series of fires in Transparent Things, the butterflies and moths in Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Pale Fire, and Ada, or the squirrel in Pnin, for example. Elsewhere, the “other world” is implied by the merest of impressions, the shifting lights and colors produced by a rainbow, a piece of stained glass, or a neon sign (The Gift, Lolita, “The Vane Sisters”), or by distortive reflective surfaces – mirrors, windows, puddles of water (Bend Sinister, Transparent Things) – or merely the subtlest disturbance of the air, anything, in fact, that disrupts the protagonist’s perceptual expectations and creates the possibility of catching a glimpse, or else simply experiencing a fleeting sensation of, this parallel universe. Access to the perceptual and temporal liberation promised by these alternate dimensions is largely limited to a privileged elite – to artists, writers, and poets. Fyodor, the hero of The Gift, for example, is a writer, and is acutely conscious of the “other world” that, he says, “surrounds us always.” “In our earthly house,” he explains, “windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks” (Nabokov 1981: 282–3). Similarly, Cincinnatus C., who starts to write during his incarceration, is suddenly conscious of a “chink in the air” through which he can slide, passing invisibly, if only momentarily, into a parallel dimension (Nabokov 1963: 120–1). Many of Nabokov’s compromised protagonists are driven by a desire to achieve a similar kind of ascendant, immortal state, either by assuming the guise of an artist – Despair’s Hermann Karlovich, Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, and Ada’s Van Veen are all writing some form of memoir – or by fixing their aspirations on an idealized figure – Smurov on his alter ego (The Eye), Hermann Karlovich on his perceived “double” Felix, Albinus on Margot (Laughter in the Dark),
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Humbert on Lolita, or V. on his dead brother, Sebastian Knight. Yet this often proves to be a highly risky strategy, initiating a gradual erosion and denial of self that ultimately jeopardizes their very existence. In a lecture written for his Stanford course in 1941, Nabokov describes the “spiritual thrill” of creativity. Consisting of three stages, the first is a fusion of past and present captured in a “radiant second,” initiated by a chance impression that triggers a vivid recollection. “The inspiration of genius,” Nabokov explains, “adds a third ingredient”: it is the past and the present and the future … that come together in a sudden flash; thus the entire circle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist. It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away with the nonego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner – who is already dancing in the open. (Nabokov 1982: 377–8)
This combination is reminiscent of Ada’s tower or Vadim’s triple harlequin, both of which also serve the key function of negating time, whilst the image of the freed prisoner distinctly echoes Cincinnatus C.’s escape at the end of Invitation to a Beheading. Intriguingly, it also closely parallels Emerson’s experience of transcendence described in his seminal 1836 essay, “Nature”: “Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed in the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God” (Emerson: 39). Among the American writers he read, Nabokov particularly admired Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville (Nabokov 1973: 64). Beyond the veiled allusion to Emerson in his introduction to Bend Sinister (Toker: 177), there are instances across Nabokov’s American and Russian work that imply a deeper level of engagement, scenes that nevertheless resist simple interpretation through a typically Nabokovian process of subversion and involution. The narrator of “The Vane Sisters,” for example, experiences a state of “raw awareness” generated by the spirits of Cynthia and Sybil Vane, which “[transforms] the whole of [his] being into one big eyeball rolling in the world’s socket” (Nabokov 2001: 619), yet remains oblivious to its significance. In The Eye, Smurov’s spectral alter ego is reduced to “nothing but a big, slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye” (Nabokov 1992: 103), but this is merely another stage in his elaborate mock self-destruction. The narrator of Pnin, on the other hand, resists the allure of corporeal dissolution, preferring, like many of Nabokov’s protagonists, to guard his “tender ego”: One of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is the space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. (Nabokov 1960: 17)
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It is Krug in Bend Sinister who most keenly articulates this resistance to divestment in his inability to reconcile the uncertainties inherent in two intransigent, antithetical possible scenarios – “either the instantaneous gaining of perfect knowledge” or “absolute nothingness, nichto” (Nabokov 1990: 175). Nevertheless, Nabokov comes closest to resolving these questions in Transparent Things, in which “the crude anguish of physical death” is replaced by a “mysterious mental manoeuvre” that allows Hugh simply to “pass from one state of being to another” (Nabokov 1972: 104). Butterflies, Nabokov’s other major passion, appear throughout his fiction, serving as a key motif signaling the presence of the dead (the Red Admiral in Pale Fire, for example), but they are also inextricably linked with notions of transformation and metamorphosis, even enacting, through the processes of their life-cycle, what Nabokov described as “instalments” of the “serial soul” (Nabokov 1982: 377). The moth that appears in Cincinnatus C.’s cell at the end of Invitation to a Beheading represents the promise of escape, whilst the giant moth that hatches at the end of the story “Christmas” (1925; 1976) suggests the soul of a dead boy moving out of and into a new realm. Similarly, the moth that “bombinates” at Krug’s window in Bend Sinister is explicitly identified by Nabokov as the “rosy” soul of his dead wife, Olga (Nabokov 1990: xix). Nabokov deploys these motifs in such a way that they never become fixed or reductive. Through recurrence they accumulate meaning and yet they do not behave consistently, and the signals they give are not always benign. In Ada, the moths that ping against the lamp at an Ardis dinner party have a hellish quality, and the squirrel that pesters Pnin at every moment of potential crisis offers no comfort, but haunts him like an ominous shadow, a kind of physical manifestation of the shadow behind Pnin’s heart that threatens his very life. The intentions of this “democracy of ghosts” that “[attends] to the destinies of the quick” (Nabokov 1960: 113) are, nevertheless, ambiguous and the consequences of their presence uncertain. In Transparent Things, Hugh’s “umbral companion” (Nabokov 1972: 98) and the benevolent spirits that watch over their baffled charge have no power to prevent him from making a series of disastrous and ultimately fatal choices, whilst the Vane sisters discreetly infiltrate the narrator’s consciousness to seemingly futile ends. The narrator is left with no greater understanding or awareness of his role in their destinies, but, instead, simply a nagging sense of unease. His skepticism renders him blind to the deliberate clues that betray their presence – melting ice and the shadow cast by a parking meter – contained, ironically, in an acrostic buried in the final paragraph of his own narrative. The acrostic serves as a clever device that not only establishes incontrovertible evidence of the sisters’ phantom interference, but also reveals the story’s multi-layered narrative structure, introducing a parallel authorial presence (i.e., Nabokov’s) which is insightful and privileged, far superior to the narrator’s limited, earthbound perspective. Meanwhile, the fictional editor of Lolita, the “suave” John Ray, assures his readers that even though all the story’s protagonists, including its narrator, are dead, “no ghosts walk” (Nabokov 1995: 311, 4). Despite the richly detailed portrayal of Lolita’s America, the novel can also be read as a deliberately calculated grand deception, the revelation of which demands a shift in perspective, transforming it into a kind of
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inverse “other world,” akin to Ada’s Antiterra. It is plain that the narrative is deeply compromised by Humbert’s corrupted agenda. He is anxious to present himself as a victim of uncontrollable desires, a romantic hero falsely accused, a fugitive, a wronged innocent seeking revenge, a poet whose sole motivation is to immortalize the object of his love. Set against this, Lolita herself appears, like her name, as a haze, something indistinct, elusive, only palpable through Humbert’s profoundly unreliable, solipsistic depiction of her. The narrative’s all-pervasive grayness amplifies the sense that this is an insubstantial, ethereal dream-world, which in turn suggests the presence of a distinct and overarching authorial perspective – an undermining force that is seeking to expose the capricious cynicism of Humbert’s rapturous and tragic tale. Lolita offers an unsurpassed evocation of America, that “lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” (Nabokov 1995: 176), with its child heroine steeped in and molded by all the familiar elements of postwar popular culture, and yet there are many ways in which the novel engages with the American psyche beyond mere character and setting. In his self-dramatization, Humbert deliberately emulates the archetypal American hero – the “hard, isolate, stoic killer” that is the “essential American soul” (Lawrence: 68), or the fugitives and pioneers featured in the Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid which Nabokov read as a child. There are also more contemporary echoes, in the tough and alienated heroes of prewar hard-boiled detective fiction that inspired and informed the doomed figures of American film noir, or even the absurdly ineffectual heroes of screwball comedy who, like their noir counterparts, find themselves rendered powerless by the arch manipulations of a scheming female (Wyllie, 2003). The confessional aspect of Humbert’s narrative also resonates with the “bravura versions of the great speech” that are Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) or Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), in which the poet’s “rapture” “entices,” “touches,” and “seduces” his audience (Ford: 57), whilst its surreal quality distinctly echoes the shadowy realm at “one remove further from the actual,” glimpsed by Hawthorne in the moonlit shadows of a mirror (Hawthorne 2007: 31), or the “atmosphere of strange enchantment” that haunts his uncanny fictive worlds (Hawthorne 1978: 2). Throughout his narrative, Humbert makes explicit allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, and specifically his poem “Annabel Lee,” in his attempt to create an artistic premise that will legitimize his relationship with Lolita. Poe’s presence has far wider-reaching implications, however, establishing Nabokov’s close alignment with an American literary tradition that extends from Emerson and Hawthorne to Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, and Pynchon. Humbert’s purpose is highly ambivalent, demonstrating equal impulses to “dominate and exploit” the object of his desire, and to achieve transformation and transcendence through his idealization of it (Pifer: 149). This latent antagonism is reminiscent of Poe’s description of the artistic impulse, which he described as a “thirst” for the unattainable, like the “desire of the moth for the star,” countered by an impatient need to “grasp now wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys” (Poe 1984: 893–4). In foregrounding this tension between “aspiration” and “deprivation” (Tanner: 171), and by emphasizing the impossibility of the dream and the devastating potential of its pursuit, Nabokov taps into the heart of the American dilemma, qualifying Lolita as his Great American Novel.
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Nabokov’s place in American fiction is defined by more than the impact of Lolita, however. His trickster narrators, for example, are closely aligned to the principal figures of America’s “confidence culture” – Poe’s diddler, Melville’s Confidence Man, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Bellow’s Augie March (Tanner: 89). In more recent works – Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) or Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance (1992) – the tradition seems to coalesce with peculiarly Nabokovian concerns, whilst his continued citation by writers, artists, and filmmakers as a major influence attests to the abiding pertinence of the major preoccupations of his art to the contemporary American condition.
References and Further Reading Alexandrov, Vladimir E., ed. (1995). The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Garland. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1991a). Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1991b). Vladimir Nabokov: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Boyd, Brian (1993). Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. London: Vintage. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1987). Selected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Field, Andrew (1987). VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. London: Macdonald. Ford, Boris, ed. (1988). The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 9: American Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1978). The Blithedale Romance, ed. Seymour Gross and Rosalie Murphy. New York: Norton. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (2007). The Scarlet Letter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Juliar, Michael (1986). Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography. New York: Taylor and Francis. Lawrence, D. H. (1971). Studies in Classic American Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nabokov, Vladimir (1960). Pnin [1956]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nabokov, Vladimir (1963). Invitation to a Beheading. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nabokov, Vladimir (1972). Transparent Things. New York: Vintage. Nabokov, Vladimir (1973). Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw Hill.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1974). Lolita: A Screenplay. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nabokov, Vladimir (1981). The Gift. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nabokov, Vladimir (1982). Lectures on Literature. San Diego, C.A.: Harcourt. Nabokov, Vladimir (1990). Bend Sinister. New York: Vintage. Nabokov, Vladimir (1992). The Eye. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nabokov, Vladimir (1995). The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nabokov, Vladimir (1999). Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Everyman’s Library. Nabokov, Vladimir (2001). Collected Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pifer, Ellen, ed. (2003). Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poe, Edgar Allen (1984). Essays and Reviews. New York: Library of America. Scholes, Robert (1967). The Fabulators. New York: Oxford University Press. Schuman, Samuel (1979). Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall. Tanner, Tony (2000). The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toker, Leona (1989). Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Wyllie, Barbara (2003). Nabokov at the Movies: Film Perspectives in Fiction. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.
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Norman Mailer Michael K. Glenday
Beginning with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), there was much throughout Norman Mailer’s writing to suggest that death, its influences and meanings, was a dominant preoccupation. As his nation moved toward a radical redefinition of its relationship with itself and the wider world in the period following World War II, Mailer expressed those mutations in a body of work that exemplified and influenced that crucial period of flux. Both The Naked and the Dead and his second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), had also taken the true measure of humanity’s readiness to engage in international conflict in the mid-twentieth century. Faced by the awesome march of ideological power, be it Stalinism, fascism, or totalitarianism, Mailer’s early fiction saw that civilized responses and heroic challenges would not long survive. The success of The Naked and the Dead derives partly from the clarity with which Mailer personifies the American military so as to embody the narrative’s ideological drama, for it is a deeply political text, its politics personified in the struggles between the liberal Lieutenant Hearn, the sadofascistic General Cummings, and the similarly drawn Sergeant Croft. Although the narrative sees Hearn effectively assassinated by Croft, both Croft and Cummings are themselves victims of the novel’s real enemy, the military bureaucracy, an early and potent version of the totalitarianism which Mailer would eventually see as endemic within American society. The American army is presented as a microcosm of the reactionary forces that the democracies would face unless an intensified liberal alternative was forthcoming. In the face of the juggernaut of totalitarian power, the efforts of individuals to achieve their aspirations end in defeat, crushed by systemic functionalism. In these terms, the novel’s plot is decidedly anti-heroic, predicting that the political future belongs not to self-involved ideologues like Major General Cummings but rather to the system’s slaves, time-serving bureaucrats like Major Dalleson. In his first novel, the concern is therefore not primarily historical, but rather a critique of this coming world, a prefiguration of “the crises of the post-war United
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States” (Leigh: 7). In the immediate shadow of the Holocaust, Mailer’s first novel presents totalitarianism as a deadly political organism, fatal in its effect upon creative individualism. The Naked and the Dead is finally a war novel without conventional heroes, and, as Norman Podhoretz recognized, “is animated by a vision of the world that neither calls forth heroic activity nor values the qualities of courage, daring, and will that make for the expansion of the human spirit” (Lucid: 67). In his next novel, Barbary Shore, that spirit is but a darkening ember in the bleak postwar landscape of political reaction. Barbary Shore was widely dismissed by critics as an erratic failure, and something of a non-sequitur coming after the themes and panoramic social reach of its predecessor, yet there are valid reasons for understanding the novel as an important key to Mailer’s development as a novelist of ideas, particularly political ideas. “Few people who like my work have read it, yet much of my later writing cannot be understood without a glimpse of the odd shadow and theme-maddened light Barbary Shore casts before it” (Mailer 1961: 91–2). This was as true then as now, when we can look back over his completed life’s work and see, for instance, that in his final novels, Harlot’s Ghost (1991) and The Castle in the Forest (2007), as in Barbary Shore, there is a continuing stress upon espionage and subversion. D.T., the narrator of Castle, is characterized literally as a diabolical spymaster, while Harlot’s Ghost is also primarily concerned with agents, double-agents, and the pathologies of spying. These concerns are the furthest extension of a theme first traced in the character of secret policeman Leroy Hollingsworth, who is but one personification of the related ambience of spying, masquerade, and betrayal which afflicts all who live in the Brooklyn rooming-house of Barbary Shore, itself symbolizing the psychosocial malaise already present in the Cold War world beyond its walls. Published only six years after the end of World War II, the novel’s ethics confront the void left after the catastrophe of that conflict. With the touchstones of order and civilized values decimated, the shores of Barbary are open for the likes of Hollingsworth to take possession. Mailer’s narrator, Michael Lovett, is a fugitive who fears imminent apocalypse. In his sense of radical dismay, he is very much Mailer’s spokesman in the 1950s, as cut loose from the past yet without future coordinates, he laments: “if I fled down the alley which led from that rooming house, it was only to enter another, and then another. I am obliged to wait for the signs which tell me I must move on again” (Mailer 1963a: 311). In The Deer Park (1955), Mailer’s setting is Desert D’Or, a version of mid-century Palm Springs, California. As in both of his previous novels, he gives us here another microcosm of corrupt American society. The mise-en-scène is announced in the epigraph, taken from Mouffle D’Angerville’s Vie privée de Louis XV, which describes the king’s libidinal playground, the deer park itself, where innocents are introduced to “depravity, debauchery and all the vices.” “The Deer Park is a small, sour book with flashes of macabre wit” (Lennon 1986: 53), wrote George Steiner in his review of the novel, alluding to the central character of Marion Faye who, like Cummings, Croft, and Hollingsworth, is yet another instance of what Richard Poirier called “the truth
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that perversity and power” were what interested Mailer (Poirier 1972: 37). Once again, Mailer chose a first-person narrator; once again, he introduces himself as an orphan; again, he bears the scars of war, both psychic and physical (this time made impotent); and yet again he emerges as a curiously attenuated figure who comes to Desert D’Or, as Lovett to the Brooklyn rooming-house, adrift on the postwar currents, without much idea of a future except that, again like Lovett, he has a wish to become a novelist. The story told by this narrator, Sergius O’Shaugnessy, is of his relationships with Hollywood’s beautiful and damned, most memorably, Marion Faye, the one character who seems an authentic, if odious, creation, for if Desert D’Or is a deer park for debauchees, Faye is its doyen. There is certainly a clear connection between salient aspects of Faye’s personality and the heroes of Mailer’s next two novels, An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), though Mailer would wait a full decade before writing the first of these in 1965. To read An American Dream after The Deer Park is to experience the sure sense of a writer in confident possession of a new style, one which would serve Mailer well throughout the 1960s. This style – energetic, full of connections, confident – had been forming itself in his non-fiction and essays, in Advertisements for Myself (1959) and The Presidential Papers (1963). Mailer developed this style to good effect in An American Dream, where his first-person hero, Steve Rojack, is established from the start as a very strong presence in the narrative. While both Lovett and O’Shaugnessy were often little more than narrative devices tending towards selfeffacement, in An American Dream we are quickly provided with a cognitive map of Rojack’s mind. The novel’s opening chapter has a good deal to say about the formation of that mind: the traumas of war, the media life, the society marriage that Rojack will shortly terminate by strangling his wife to death. Above all, though, Rojack’s is the voice to express Mailer’s bold effects, the voice of an American for whom the American Dream of power, fame, riches, has no further meaning. By the mid-1960s, Mailer had certainly become one of the most dominant voices of the decade, and in An American Dream, he exploits his celebrity, or rather the celebrity of his ideas, in a way never previously available to the modern novelist. For the audiences of the mid-1960s – many of whom would have been familiar with the Mailer of Advertisements, the Mailer who helped to create and was a creature of the new media-hunger, who refused to be pigeonholed, his views aired in Playboy and The New York Times or in front of four thousand in Chicago where he debated with right-wing guru William F. Buckley, Jr. on the politics of reaction in American society – Mailer’s ideas were a part of an emerging mass consciousness. He vigorously exploited the cultural revolution of the period which saw old-time divisions of highand low-brow begin to disintegrate. When An American Dream was released into this climate, it became a text of potent and manifold appeal. After continuing exposure in a national magazine (Esquire) where it was serialized, the novel in book form immediately sold 50,000 copies and put Mailer back in the best-seller lists for the first time since The Naked and the Dead. An American Dream is not primarily a novel closed in on a singular identity, but rather one that dramatized the national mood. Rojack’s
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allusion to John F. Kennedy in the novel’s opening paragraph shows immediately that Mailer intended this narrative to be as prodigally explicit about its connections to American public life as his previous two novels had been reticent: I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and had just been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz. (Mailer 1965: 9)
Mailer was himself even more explicit about the connections between An American Dream and the assassination of Kennedy, telling us in Cannibals and Christians (1967) that “less than eight weeks before the assassination, work was begun on An American Dream. The name of the formal villain in that novel comes up on the first page. It is Kelly – Barney Oswald Kelly” (Mailer 1967: 16). It is obvious that for Mailer his novel was to be seen as having had a profound, even uncanny connectedness to the tragic events in Dallas, and Rojack’s was indeed one of the first voices to sound the national nerves, An American Dream the first striking instance of a post-Kennedy moral surrealism in the American novel. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) is yet another extraordinary extension of this genre, a novel that defers explicit reference to the war until its minimal citation in the very last lines. He wrote the novel during his most prolific decade, in five months (May– September 1966) and it is one of his briefest. Interviewed at the time of its publication, he spoke of its informing vision as one dealing with the pathological American push to destroy Vietnam: “we’re destroying God’s work, not man’s work but God’s work. And at the same time we’re pretending to be the deliverers of civilization. So I’d have to say we are psychotic” (Lennon 1988: 114). Certainly, the majority of the novel’s critics have acknowledged the extent to which, in both style and subject matter, it exposes the sublimated neuroses responsible for the bellicose strain in 1960s’ America. Although set in the Alaskan wilderness, a setting about to be disturbed by Texas huntsmen with their helicopters and techno-weaponry, the novel is mounted upon an allegorical frame. As the defenseless wild animals are mutilated by this firepower, the narrative’s allegorical coordinates seem straightforward. Why Are We in Vietnam? remains a nonpareil landmark of obscenity in the history of fiction written by major American novelists. Here, as elsewhere in Mailer’s fiction (one thinks particularly of the connection between fascism and obscenity in Hollingsworth of Barbary Shore), this obscenity is, however, mobilized as a critique of depravity and inhumanity. The narrating voices of Why Are We in Vietnam? show Mailer’s willingness to condemn the decreative mentality that is responsible for the obscenity of Vietnam, and in an age which seemed incapable of making such discriminations, his use of obscenity became a vital political act, an effort to stimulate a moral vision in atrophied eyes. It would be a further fifteen years before Mailer would publish his next novel, Ancient Evenings (1983). During those years he was busy consolidating his reputation
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both as a creative journalist and as a biographer of exceptional achievement in such works as Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) and The Executioner’s Song (1979), with the latter winning Mailer’s second Pulitzer Prize. He remained one of the most energetic contributors to the accelerating revision of American values, most famously perhaps in his response to Kate Millett’s feminist attack upon him in her book Sexual Politics (1970). His published reply, The Prisoner of Sex (1971), was yet another extension of his literary range being part polemic, part self-study, part literary criticism. Throughout these prolific years, Mailer certainly justified Robert Lowell’s description of him as the “best journalist in America” (Mailer 1968: 21–2), while at the same time raising doubts about his exhaustion as a writer of fiction. Yet, as far back as 1964, he had begun to promise delivery of a novel of the highest quality, one that would establish him without question as a literary artist of the first rank. Ancient Evenings was finally published in the spring of 1983. By May of that year, it was showing as sixth on The New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for a further fifteen weeks. It was the author’s prediction that the novel would “get the best and worst reviews” (Bragg: 19) received by any of his books, and, indeed, its reviews ranged from the mocking and vicious to others which saw it as a formidable achievement, a work of unique vision and quality. Though criticized for over-writing in both Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost, in the former the length of the novel is necessary “to give a sense of the pace of ancient Egypt”, as Mailer saw it (Lennon 1988: 299). Indeed, no extract can possibly do justice to the magnificent cumulative effects of his imagery in many places in this novel, where he demonstrates his reach as a truly imaginative writer after a decade of inspiring journalism. The novel is, in Harold Bloom’s words, nothing if not an “extravagant invention” (Bloom: 200). This is very much more than an historical novel, and to say that its setting is that of Egypt’s New Kingdom in its nineteenth and twentieth dynasties (1570–1090 b.c.) is to simplify Mailer’s complex narrative approach, which comprises a magical enterprise of memory, telepathy, and what can only be called supernatural cognition, emanating from Menenhetet II, an Egyptian nobleman. Having been murdered at the age of twenty-one, his narrative makes Ancient Evenings perhaps the longest ghost story ever told, for his is a consciousness on the cusp between death and reincarnation. Mailer’s intentions were both original and far-reaching, to create, as he put it, “a new psychology, a new consciousness … I was trying to write of these matters from the perspective of those times” (Lennon 1988: 300), while in a personal interview in 1993 he stated that, in Ancient Evenings, he was “trying to write a novel that would exist in the past and have no relations to the present.” His narrative succeeds in situating the reader as an intimate insider of the courts of two pharaohs, Ramses II and Ramses IX, while also having us occupy, with the Ka of Menenhetet II, a transcendent position of terrifying detachment. Egyptian culture furnished him with a model of a world permeated by sacred myth, with a unity of belief and an accepted metaphorical chain leading from the phenomenal to the spiritual. Mailer had always seen America as tragically thwarted and self-divided in its cultural development, its
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history showing a fatal split between “two rivers” so that “there was nothing in our growth which was organic” (Mailer 1967: 42), but his vision of Egypt in the reign of Ramses II is one of wholeness and harmony. In The Presidential Papers, he lamented that to live in the contemporary United States was to live in a “rootless moral wilderness” (Mailer 1963b: 95), but in this novel he succeeded in representing the cultural antithesis of that condition, for Menenhetet II eventually understands that “there is no loneliness … that is worse than being ignorant of the worth of your soul” (Mailer 1983: 706). The integrity of this worldview must have come as a release from the burdens of addressing America’s cynicism throughout the 1970s. For Mailer’s critique of his country is rooted very largely in his attack upon its secularism; his often-voiced contempt for “technologyland” is not so much Luddite as evangelical in origin. In America, the 1970s were, however, characterized by a sense of intellectual exhaustion, by ideological demoralization and spiritual unease. For Mailer, the possibility of realizing that “revolution in the consciousness of our time” must have seemed increasingly remote. His eighth novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), was another book he produced in a rush, and Mailer subsequently acknowledged that it was probably his weakest novel. He fashions a wildly Baroque plot and an atmosphere so thoroughly noir with its fogs, headless corpses, and pervasive sleaze as to suggest a thorough burlesque. There is an unembarrassed willingness to take on a racy pulp style and thereby prove a point to those who had condemned his previous novel for what they saw as its gratuitous length. If Tough Guys Don’t Dance showed many signs of being a rushed job, no one would accuse Mailer of rushing through Harlot’s Ghost (1991), seven years in the writing. In a personal interview on the novel’s publication, he described it as one concerned with the C.I.A. as a prime instance of Cold War realpolitik: Over and over and over again in our history there were places where the Cold War could have been defused, and we failed to do it … during all of this the C.I.A. was our ideological arm, and I thought it was worth doing a book in great detail about how those people worked because you know it’s always fun to do a novel when you essentially respect the people you’re writing about, but they’re engaged in the wrong activity.
His reference here recalls the ambiguous portrait of both Croft and Cummings in The Naked and the Dead. Yet Mailer in his own words was for much of his life a “left conservative” (Mailer 1968: 124), and obsessed by the Establishment ever since he attended Harvard. The novel’s genre is at least partly that of an history novel, a genre Mailer seems to have understood as conferring a kind of political neutrality upon the narrative: “there is nothing I can do about these events any more. I have the detachment of the past. You get angry and strident when you can change something. Here I just thought I should try to understand them” (Stothard: 16). Harlot’s Ghost did not set out to be, then, a critique of the C.I.A., and, indeed, Mailer’s attitude to that organization appeared to be one of observational detachment. He seemed determined
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to play down his earlier belief that “the C.I.A. was the most sinister organization we have … and my novel became a comedy of manners” (Spencer: 20). This latter description is a key to the author’s approach to his subject, for it is style rather than political substance that fascinates him here. It is the Ivy League W.A.S.P.s, with their inbred feel for protocol and caste, who rule Mailer’s blue-blooded C.I.A. Thus, if Hugh Montague, alias “Harlot,” has all the hauteur of a C.I.A. patriarch, so his godson and eventual cuckolder, the novel’s narrator Herrick “Harry” Hubbard, finds that his life in “the Company” is in large part an education in social standing. The novel’s title owes a debt to Balzac, and also echoes the title of an earlier essay by Mailer. His attraction to the C.I.A. as a subject had its first extended consideration in the essay “A Harlot High and Low” (1976): Whores and political agents made a fair association for Balzac. The harlot, after all, inhabited the world of as if. You paid your money and the harlot acted for a little while … as if she loved you, and that was a more mysterious proposition than one would think, for it is always mysterious to play a role. It is equal in a sense to living under cover. (Mailer 1982: 159)
The prostituting of the self in the service of an ideological client, and the professional embrace of a perilous make-believe, are only two of the links that struck Mailer in his choice of a title for the novel. Beyond this, the novel takes as a core theme the issue of identity, already a generic motif in novels of espionage, and for long one of Normal Mailer’s bailiwicks. One has only to consider the manifold identities unfolding throughout Ancient Evenings or the interrogation of identity in An American Dream or The Castle in the Forest to see that agents, double-agents, and the pathology of the spy can easily be accommodated within a lifelong concern, and Mailer acknowledged the autobiographical roots of this theme: I have an umbilical connection to Harlot’s Ghost because … I had my identity forcibly changed at the age of 25, when I went from being an unknown writer to a public writer in a month … so I’ve always been fascinated with spies and actors and people who take on roles that are not their own and then take on that role more than they might like to. (Spencer: 21)
For a writer of Mailer’s ambition, the C.I.A. offered a commensurate subject, its influence vast and all-pervasive. In “A Harlot High and Low,” he evokes a vision which would encompass all intelligence so that “there was no natural end to the topics the C.I.A. could legitimately interest itself in” (Mailer 1982: 161). To know the C.I.A. would be to know America, its interstices and arteries, to know a system serviced by a polymath elite. Their special appeal to Mailer, however, lay not in any charismatic esprit de corps, but rather in their unique existential experience transcending self and identity: in this regard, if no other, the C.I.A. agent would embody a superhuman mentality capable of efficient function in a divided postwar world.
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If Mailer’s final years did not follow through on the promise “to be continued,” which are the final words of Harlot’s Ghost, they were nothing if not productive, seeing the publication of a biography, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, as well as Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (both 1995), a vast exhaustive narrative history of Lee Harvey Oswald, which Mailer described as “a special species of nonfiction that can be put under the rubric of mystery”, and The Gospel According to the Son (1997). His final novel, however, would be The Castle in the Forest (2007), an exploration of Hitler’s ancestry. This book reiterates Mailer’s Manichean ethic and his devil-narrator, D.T., acknowledges that Dostoevsky’s prediction has come to pass. Humanity has, indeed, destroyed “the idea of God” and now, instead of the ancient two-way struggle between angels and devils for human souls, in the modern world of Mailer’s imagining there are three separate armies: the Divine, the Satanic, and a third contestant comprising the mutations of a newly independent, aggressively self-serving humanity, now emboldened by modern technological zeal and efficiency. Hitler’s father – whose story comprises by far the largest portion of the novel as a whole – is himself a product of this new reality. With his thrusting will – and his faithful priapic “Hound” – and under the banner of an arrogant self-determination, he is proud of his “disbelief in the near presence of God and the Devil.” Without a doubt, Mailer’s new novel means us to see that it is exactly such disbelief that makes room for the triumph of the Devil over the soul of his own son Adolf. For men like Hitler’s father, the gamble on transcendence is too risky to be left to an unsupervised divinity and no longer seems worth the odds. Instead, “as he was ready to explain over a stein of beer, he placed his faith in the solid and intelligent processes of dependable forms of government” – namely, the Emperor Franz Joseph. Alois Hitler is sure that he can find the divine will there, provided, of course, that “such will was exercised by scrupulous officials like himself” (Mailer 2007: 47). The Castle in the Forest concludes Mailer’s lifelong exploration of power systems. In his later years, as he acknowledged in The Spooky Art (2003), he came to find a certain congruence between C.I.A. operatives and the actions of the novelist. Both were, in their respective spheres, intelligence agents tracking lines of power.
References and Further Reading Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Modern Critical Views: Norman Mailer. New York: Chelsea House. Bragg, Melvyn (1983). “Mailer Takes on the Pharaohs,” The Sunday Times Magazine (June 5): 18–19. Leigh, Nigel (1990). Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lennon, J. Michael, ed. (1986). Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Lennon, J. Michael, ed. (1988). Conversations with Norman Mailer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lucid, Robert F., ed. (1971). Norman Mailer: The Man and his Work. Boston: Little, Brown. Mailer, Norman (1961). Advertisements for Myself [1959]. London: André Deutsch. Mailer, Norman (1963a). Barbary Shore [1951]. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
Norman Mailer Mailer, Norman (1963b). The Presidential Papers. New York: G. P. Putnam. Mailer, Norman (1965). An American Dream. London: André Deutsch. Mailer, Norman (1967). Cannibals and Christians. London: André Deutsch. Mailer, Norman (1968). The Armies of the Night. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Mailer, Norman (1982). Pieces and Pontifications. London: New English Library. Mailer, Norman (1983). Ancient Evenings. Boston: Little, Brown. Mailer, Norman (2007). The Castle in the Forest. London: Little, Brown.
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Manso, Peter (1985). Mailer: His Life and Times. New York: Viking. Mills, Hilary (1982). Mailer: A Biography. New York: Random House. Poirier, Richard (1972). Mailer. London: Fontana. Rollyson, Carl E. (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House. Rollyson, Carl E. (2008). Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic. LaVerne, T.N.: iUniverse. Spencer, Scott (1991). “The Old Man and the Novel,” Guardian (October 5): 20. Stothard, Peter (1991). “Soft Spots in a Tough Guise,” The Times Saturday Review (October 12): 16.
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William S. Burroughs Davis Schneiderman
While all manner of critical and popular positions have been imposed upon American author William S. Burroughs, very few have stuck for the general public beyond a general sense of Burroughs as popular cult figure. Like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939), or Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) – the 1959 text that catapulted him to literary celebrity – is a book perhaps more owned than actually read. For the casual enthusiast, this is the state of affairs for much of Burroughs’ writing: his celebrity eclipses the work, and there is no shortage of salacious details to power the former. Burroughs was for large periods of his life a drug user, most notoriously heroin, but certainly scores of others, from the mundane marijuana to the exotic South American hallucinogenic vine called yagé (see The Yage Letters, 1963). Even more scandalous, Burroughs fatally shot his common law wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City in September, 1951 – and escaped legal punishment for it. Upon his return to the United States in the 1970s, Burroughs also assumed a pop-culture position perhaps unrivaled by any of his authorial peers. His large body of work brought us the terms “heavy metal” and “Steely Dan”; he read from Naked Lunch in a 1981 episode of Saturday Night Live; he appeared in ads for Nike and collaborated with artists such as Keith Haring and Robert Rauschenberg. As biographer Barry Miles notes, “It was the idea of Burroughs that appealed … This Burroughs was the man who saw the abyss and came back to report on it …” (Miles: 1). Accordingly, Burroughs is remembered by many members of the intelligentsia and glitterati as dinner partner for the likes of Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger; as collaborator with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain; and, at the end of his life, as a figure in the U2 video for “The Last Night on Earth” (1997). Burroughs has been a model for the political and social left – witness to the violence of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention; long-time friend of poet-activist Allen Ginsberg; drug-champion to a generation of heroin users, or, more likely, suburban kids entranced by the aesthetic possibilities of opiate use. Burroughs has been a
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lodestar for a type of “don’t tread on me” libertarian right: he was a gun and weaponry enthusiast, born into the St. Louis privileged class, homosexual in a roguish manner considerably at odds with the prevailing agenda of the queer movement (see Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs, 2001), and, at various times, a virulent opponent of women and of the god-fearing “shits” who oppose the underworld characters (“Johnsons”) that populate his work.
Biography Despite the impressive volume of his corpus, Burroughs did not seriously begin his writing career until his mid-thirties. Born February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, William Seward Burroughs was the paternal grandson of the inventor of the modern adding machine in the 1880s, and, through the maternal line, a nephew of public relations pioneer “Poison” Ivy Lee. Burroughs’ family was well off, but not as wealthy as generally thought. Stultified by St. Louis school life, Burroughs, in 1929, was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School, New Mexico, in order to toughen up (the school later became the site of the U.S. government’s Manhattan Project). He studied English literature at Harvard in the mid-1930s, and, briefly, medicine at the University of Vienna. While gay, he was married twice (the first, platonically, to help a German Jewish woman escape the Nazis). He studied psychology at Columbia and anthropology at Harvard in the late 1930s, and was also rejected several times by branches of the military. He worked as an exterminator in Chicago (1942–3), a job that inspired sections of his future writing, and eventually landed back in New York City from 1943 to 1946. This period began his association with the nascent Beat Generation – particularly Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg – a literary affiliation he eventually transcended. He began his first narcotic addiction, and was also arrested as a material witness in the killing of his boyhood friend Dave Kammerer. After subsequent drug and legal troubles, Burroughs moved to Texas where he operated as a farmer, both cotton and marijuana, at two different Texas locations, with his second wife, Joan Vollmer. Burroughs’ only child, William S. Burroughs, Jr., was born in Texas in 1947. The family moved to New Orleans in 1948, and to Mexico City in 1949 to flee a drug warrant. He wrote his first novel Junkie (later Junky) in Mexico City (1950–2), took the first of two South American trips in 1951 and, upon his return, shot Vollmer, on September 6, 1951, in a game of “William Tell.” He moved to a series of overseas expatriate locations: Tangier, Morocco (1954–7, 1963, respectively), Paris (1958–60), and London (on and off through the early 1970s) before returning permanently to the United States, first in New York (1974–81, with periods in Boulder, CO) and, eventually, to Lawrence, Kansas for his remaining years (1981–97). With the publication of his first novel Junky in 1953, Burroughs continued as a professional writer, although for many fans and critics alike, it is the death of
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Vollmer in 1951 that provides a mythopoetic origin point for his writing, which increasingly models insurgency against all manner of modern control systems: “So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out” (Burroughs 1987a: xxii). It is precisely these types of sensational episode, bound with his drug mythology and the literary success of Naked Lunch in particular, that create a character, ideology, and mythos of grand countercultural proportions. While the Vollmer shooting was of certain importance and sadness for Burroughs, this claim, like many stories of Burroughs’ creations, is modified by the historical record.
Works Burroughs’ artistic works cover an impressive array of genres, and to think of Burroughs as merely a writer of later twentieth-century postmodern novels is to overlook his other less-known multimedia and small press works. Nonetheless, Burroughs is best known to readers because of his novels, and those novels that remain the most readily available benefit from stable publishers and broad distribution. In this class are his so-called major works, grouped here according to popular critical accounting: (1) His initial books of semi-autobiographical often letter-generated material: Junky, Queer (drafted in 1952–3, but ultimately published with almost one-quarter newer material 1985), The Yage Letters, and The Naked Lunch; (2) the Cut-Up/Nova trilogy: The Soft Machine (three versions: 1961, 1966, 1968), The Ticket that Exploded (two versions: 1962, 1967), and Nova Express (1964); (3) the transitional period and “return” to narrative: The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971) and affiliated texts of the period, including the short-story collection Exterminator! (1973); and (4) the almost careercapping Red Night Trilogy: Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987). There have been other minor works from his major publishers, including outtakes from the writing of Naked Lunch, called Interzone (1989), and a collection of posthumous diary entries, Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000). Beyond this stand literally dozens of less-easily available minor texts (many from his small magazine and small press publications), including the collaborative Minutes to Go (1960), and works such as APO-33 (1965, 1966), Time (1965), Ali’s Smile (1971), Cobblestone Gardens (1976), and Tornado Alley (1989), among numerous others. A number of small press “experiments” were collected as The Burroughs File (1984), and assorted essays appear as The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985). There are several interview and transcription texts: With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (1981), Conversations with William S. Burroughs (1999), and the massive, often repetitive, but ultimately interesting, Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs: 1960–1997 (2000). Finally, there is an important collection of epistolary, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945 to 1959 (1993), and significant revised
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versions of previous texts: Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” (2003), Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (2004), and The Yage Letters Redux (2006), the first and third edited by Oliver Harris. This latter group are notable for a movement in Burroughs studies toward genetic accounts – that is, how the historical texts were formed at the intersection point of prose, economics, and distribution – and they call into dramatic question attempts even to preliminarily locate a Burroughs canon of works (such as in the previous paragraphs). Many Burroughs texts remain uncollected and unavailable, including a wonderful series of full pages in Jeff Nuttall’s 1960s’ My Own Mag, and numerous one-offs, broadsheets, and small press texts. These smaller publications are further marginalized by the fact that they often present Burroughs’ more avant-garde literary techniques, cut-ups, fold-ins, pictorial representations of a pre-linguistic state, which, taken together, articulate a meeting point of new technology (the so-called “mimeograph revolution” that allowed the proliferation of these publications) and the critique of media control that was so often the subject of the cut-up texts. Even so, it is tempting for readers to gravitate toward works that are in novel form. Readers often discover “recognition” in prose sections that provide a narrative basis for understanding. Accordingly, recommendations for an introduction to Burroughs – for the non-initiated – would often cover Junky or Queer, suggesting the reader work his or her way “up” to Naked Lunch and the Cut-Up/Nova trilogy. Accordingly, criticism of even the more “difficult” texts after Queer often focuses little on the actual cut-ups, and instead attempts to “decipher” the narrative segments that punctuate the radical language games. A typical example of the play of narrative and cut-up is from the revised version of The Ticket that Exploded (1967). The section “do you love me?” begins with, “The young monk led Bradly to a cubicle – On a stone tablet was a tape recorder – The monk switched on the recorder and sounds of lovemaking filled the room – …” Shortly thereafter, the cut-up sections begin, sounds of “Love” from a “sick picture planet”: “Do you love me? – But i exploded in cosmic laughter – Old acquaintance be forgot? – Oh darling, just a photograph? – Mary i love you i do do you know i love you though?” (Burroughs 1992: 43–4), and so on. Burroughs’ critique of linearity in the standard reading and writing process remains unassimilated by most readers even a half-century after his most radical works. The Cut-Up/Nova Trilogy is often “summarized” as the story of the Nova Mob, a gang of intergalactic criminal controllers intent on destroying planet Earth, and their opposites, the Nova Police, a band of counter-insurgents who seek the destruction of the Nova Mob through the scientific manipulation of word and image. Naked Lunch is often labeled a story about drug addiction, but this is wildly simplistic and ignores the origins of much of the text. As recent scholarship, particularly from Oliver Harris, has demonstrated, Naked Lunch is not understandable as a traditional novel because it is not, in any current way of thinking, a novel at all: rather, it is a mix of epistolary segments from Burroughs’ letters (often to unrequited partner, Allen Ginsberg) restructured, through an extremely complicated material history, into a number of various forms that over the years have become a number of versions of the book we
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now call Naked Lunch. It is not one book, but many, and Burroughs, if we are to understand his importance at all, is not one author, but many.
Early Period Burroughs’ paintings, audio experiments (see Call Me Burroughs, 1965), video/film (including important collaborations with British filmmaker Anthony Balch), and his literary innovations (cut-ups, fold-ins, three-column formats, routines, scrapbooks, and so on) suggest the breadth of his interests and make explicit the key aspect of his work: collaboration. Burroughs’ partnerships were of several kinds, and of differing power relations: his first mature attempt at writing – and the first appearance of the iconic Dr. Benway character – was produced with childhood friend Kells Elvins in 1938. Although Burroughs would not take up writing with seriousness again for over a decade, Elvins was simply the first to play the role of catalyst and receptacle that Burroughs’ process so desperately required. Published in 1953 under the pseudonym William Lee, Junky recounts in hardboiled, first-person narration the escapades of Lee, scouring the hovels of underworld New York in a constant attempt to score drugs. Burroughs’ follow-up novel Queer, suppressed from publication, is relatively straightforward in narrative arc: William Lee, presumably off junk, living with his wife in Mexico City in order to evade a drug charge in the U.S., spends his withdrawal period wandering about the local watering holes, fearful of his re-emerging sexual urges, which now re-established his inability to sexually connect with other males. Uncomfortable instances of rejection haunt the novel (“Lee in the position of a detestably insistent queer …”; Burroughs 1987a: 9), and, as its most important feature, Queer further develops a method of one-way communication: the routine, a relatively self-contained excursus that shoots off from the “story” as such – and so begins his rejection, or at least suspicion, of conventional narrative technique. Routines can run in length from a few words to pages, as in where Lee keeps speaking (“At the headwaters of the Zambesi, I ran into an old Dutch trader” (Burroughs 1987a: 67), even when his subjects leave the room. The Yage Letters, a short text exploring Burroughs’ travels to South America in search of the telepathicdrug-vine yagé, paradoxically does not start out as letters, as Harris notes in his essential study William S. Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (2003), but, rather, finds its content inserted into the epistolary form.
Naked Lunch Naked Lunch gained notoriety for several reasons beyond the text, most notably the suppression of excerpts slated for publication in the winter 1958 edition of The Chicago Review and the eventual obscenity trial of the 1962 American edition from Grove Press, leading to a win on appeal in Boston. The most pervasive textual reading, and one that
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reinforces the book’s hipster appeal, is realistic: William Lee, the novel’s “main” character, quits drugs and so engages in a series of withdrawal hallucinations. This reading remains surprising, given that the text directly encodes its suspicions of any narrative explanation. Readers often look to the “Atrophied Preface” section at the close of the novel to “explain” or contextualize elements such as the Mugwumps (creatures secreting an addictive milk); Dr. Benway’s “Reconditioning Center”; the famous routines such as the carny-story of “The Talking Asshole”; the explicit blue movie hanging scenes starring John, Mark, and Mary; the absorption (“schlupping”) of the District Supervisor by Bradley the Buyer, ad infinitum. After these, the “Atrophied Preface” appears to offer understandable explanatory material: “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing … I am a recording instrument … I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity’ ” (Burroughs 2001: 200). Nonetheless, there is ample evidence to suggest that these statements are no more reliable textual markers than the aleatory images or “mosaics” that populate the text.
Cut-Ups and Wild Boys Burroughs’ “mosaic” structures – presumably images arranged by the author to produce a de-realizing effect – lead directly into the next major period: a constellation of writing techniques most easily labeled under the umbrella of “cut-ups” – producing what would later become the popular magnetic poetry. Burroughs threw himself into the practice with wild abandon, producing numerous small press pieces, and the major works of the period: the so-called Cut-Up/Nova trilogy, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express. Along with Naked Lunch, these remain his most “difficult” books. Cut-ups provided an explicit random factor for Burroughs’ use – a way to manipulate the control machine that he increasingly saw as limiting personal freedoms in the postwar world. The cosmology of Nova Criminals developed from this period integrated conspiratorial elements of Scientology, the twelfth-century hashish cult of Hassan I Sabbah, the research of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, and the use of the drug apomorphine (used to cure heroin addiction) as a way to break from control addiction. The random element of Burroughs’ cut-ups generates “meaning” in a variety of non-conventional ways, including metonymic significance: by using metonymy – the coding of meaning through unrelated juxtaposition – the cut-ups provide an accrued system of insider information that comes to assume the significance of the text. Key phrases from the trilogy include “break through in grey room” and “retaking the universe,” which, through their juxtapositions with unaffiliated cut-up and narrative sections of text, come to assume deep significance in the Nova cosmology, becoming tropes that extend beyond dictionary meaning. Burroughs’ trilogy thereby combined a strident polemical and didactic voice with an extraordinarily complex and challenging textual experience, by turns poetic, shocking, repetitive, and disturbing.
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A transitional period follows the trilogy, best characterized by the 1971 The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, and its less well-known counterpart, Port of Saints (1973, rev. edn. 1980). In these texts, cut-ups become merely one of the arrows in Burroughs’ architectural quiver, which begin to articulate alternate political, sexual, and social structures as a way of disrupting elements of control.
Later Works By the late 1970s, Burroughs has returned to New York City and is being feted by the tastemakers of the New York underground. James Grauerholz, his long-time assistant, also enters Burroughs’ life in New York (1974), and, with a deft hand, arranges his business and personal affairs for the rest of Burroughs’ career. Particularly, it is Grauerholz who assists Burroughs in his most problematic area: editing. Burroughs’ characteristic editorial haphazardness in many ways gelled productively with the deliberately anti-narrative techniques of his earlier periods. Yet, with his next and final major series of works, the Red Night Trilogy (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands), the novels required a more considered organizational style. Thematically linked across its landscapes of alternate post-conquest South American civilizations, pirates, the American Wild West, the development of modern weaponry, and the phony immortality of Egyptian mythology, the Red Night texts find Burroughs in a late-career flowering. The novels still contain no shortage of boyfocused sex and pulp detective and science fiction elements. The closing moment of The Western Lands, particularly, finds Burroughs at, if not his most personal, then his most apparently heartfelt: “The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words the end of what can be done with words” (Burroughs 1987b: 258). As Miles notes in William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, this sense of career closure was “only marred by the appearance of subsequent books” (Miles: 235). Burroughs lived and produced well beyond this last major trilogy, and his last decade saw the release of a smaller new text, Ghost of Chance (1995), expanding on the Captain Mission character featured prominently in Cities of the Red Night; as well as a number of minor collections including My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995). Significantly, it was the 1980s and 1990s, particularly after the death of his friend and collaborator, the artist Brion Gysin, that saw a full public flowering of Burroughs’ visual art. Most notable are his “shotgun paintings” – cans of paint burst by the gunshot onto wood targets, then often treated with newspaper articles, images, silhouettes, and so on. Burroughs was no stranger to visual art, preparing a Gysininfluenced calligraphic wrapper for the 1959 Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch; preparing numerous scrapbooks and photographic layouts, among other visual methods. Of course, in his word juxtapositions of the cut-up period (including a three-column newspaper-like method) and his hieroglyphic arrangements in texts such as Ah Pook is Here (1979), Burroughs approaches an explicitly pictorial
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sensibility. This visual program dovetails with the semiotic: to release the word and image from its chains of conventional, controlled meaning – and so it is no surprise that his shotgun art, with its explosive resonance of theme and technology, brought Burroughs a new type of notoriety and success in his later career. Burroughs continued his various pursuits into his last years, notably providing the libretto (Tom Waits wrote the music) for the Robert Wilson opera, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets (1989), and overseeing his vast catalogue, with Grauerholz, until his death on August 1, 1997. Together, Burroughs’ production can be taken in their many repeated themes and episodes as part of one long self-reflexive corpus. His work, in both its media theory and its cut-up practice (epitomized in The Third Mind, 1978, with Brion Gysin; The Job, 1969; and Electronic Revolution, 1970), startlingly anticipates the immersive media experience of the digital age. Burroughs creates an intertextual cosmology intent on rejecting the position of the author as autonomous creator, and transforming the “creator” of art into a simultaneous agent of, and insurgent against, external forces of control. Readers might do well to think of the Burroughs corpus as a world rendered on the scale of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, except created, often explicitly, with the material substance of our own. Burroughs’ work remains incapable of easy assimilation into the canon of other “safe” postmodern works, and, for many readers, remains still quite shocking. All of this is to suggest that Burroughs remains a cipher, an aggressive repository for the condition of his most important target: the reader.
References and Further Reading Burroughs, William S. (1984). The Burroughs File. San Francisco: City Lights. Burroughs, William S. (1987a). Queer [1985]. New York: Viking Penguin. Burroughs, William S. (1987b). The Western Lands. New York: Viking Penguin. Burroughs, William S. (1992). The Ticket that Exploded [1967], 2nd edn. New York: Grove. Burroughs, William S. (1993a). The Adding Machine: Selected Essays [1985]. New York: Arcade. Burroughs, William S. (1993b). The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, ed. Oliver Harris. New York: Viking. Burroughs, William S. (1995). My Education: A Book of Dreams. New York: Viking. Burroughs, William S. (1996). With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker [1981], ed. Victor Bockris. New York: St. Martin’s.
Burroughs, William S. (1998). Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, eds. James Grauerholz and I. Silverberg. New York: Grove. Burroughs, William S. (1999). Conversations with William S. Burroughs, ed. Allen Hibbard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Burroughs, William S. (2000). Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1997, ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Cambridge, M.A.: M.I.T. Press. Burroughs, William S. (2001). Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, eds. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles. New York: Grove. Burroughs, William S. (2003). Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk,” ed. Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin. Burroughs, William S., with Ginsberg, Allen (2006). The Yage Letters Redux, ed. Oliver Harris. San Francisco: City Lights.
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Burroughs, William S., with Gysin, Brion (1978). The Third Mind. New York: Seaver Books/ Viking. Burroughs, William S., with Gysin, B., Beiles, S., and Corso, G. (1960). Minutes to Go. Paris: Two Cities. Burroughs, William S., with Odier, Daniel (1989). The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs [1969, rev. edn., New York: Grove, 1974]. New York: Penguin. Goodman, Michael B. (1975). William S. Burroughs: An Annotated Bibliography of his Works and Criticism. New York: Garland. Harris, Oliver (2003). William S. Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale, I.L.: Southern Illinois University Press. Johnson, Rob (2006). The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. College Station, T.X.: A&M. Lydenberg, Robin (1987). Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Lydenberg, Robin and Skerl, Jennie (1991). William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical
Reception, 1959–1989. Carbondale, I.L.: Southern Illinois University Press. Miles, Barry (1993). William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, a Portrait. New York: Hyperion. Morgan, Ted (1988). Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt. Mottram, Eric (1977). The Algebra of Need. London: Marion Boyars. Murphy, Timothy S. (1997). Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press. Russell, Jamie (2001). Queer Burroughs. London: Palgrave. Schneiderman, Davis and Walsh, Philip (2004). Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto. Skerl, Jennie (1985). William S. Burroughs. Boston: Twayne. Sobiezek, Robert A. (1996) Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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Saul Bellow Michael Austin
Most critics and scholars have agreed to call Saul Bellow one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American literature – a writer whose power and influence in his time rivaled that of Hemingway and Faulkner in theirs – though few agree on exactly why this is so. Bellow’s literary output was modest; throughout his career, he published only two or three books a decade, and only ten full-length novels in a literary career spanning nearly sixty years. No single work of Bellow’s can be singled out as the cornerstone of his reputation, and various critics have put forth every one of Bellow’s novels published between 1953 and 1975 – The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), and Humboldt’s Gift (1975) – as the greatest work of his career. But Bellow’s reputation ultimately rests on the totality and the duration of his work from 1944, when he published his first novel at the age of 29, to 2000, when, at the age of 85, he published his final novel, Ravelstein, to wide critical acclaim. Solomon Bellows (he would later drop the final “s”) was born on June 19, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec. His parents had emigrated from Russia to Canada two years earlier because of the persecution they endured as Jews. Nine years later, the Bellows moved to Chicago, where Bellow encountered the vibrant cross-section of American life that would be the basis of much of his fiction: the unbridled capitalism of the stock yards and the commodity exchange, the criminal anarchy of Al Capone, and the progressive radicalism of the Wobblies. Bellow himself would later recall that the Chicago of his youth was a testing ground for new ideas and practice. After graduating from high school, Bellow attended both the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, receiving his degree in anthropology from Northwestern in 1937. In college, Bellow read voraciously in philosophy and literature. Though he briefly pursued graduate study in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, he decided to become a writer in 1938, shortly after marrying fellow Chicago intellectual Anita Goshkin. At this time, during the height of the Great Depression, aspiring writers in Chicago could obtain a modest salary through the Writers Project of the Works
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Progress Administration (WPA) – a New Deal program that created public-sector jobs as a remedy for rampant unemployment. Bellow – along with such soon-to-be famous contemporaries as Nelson Algren, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Richard Wright – worked on makeshift writing projects for a salary of twenty-four dollars a week. In the meantime, he honed his own writing skills and published several stories in the Partisan Review, an influential literary journal, before publishing his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. Dangling Man lacks most of the qualities that would later make Bellow famous. Its basic plot – the story of a Canadian immigrant, known only as “Joseph,” who has been drafted into the army but prevented from reporting for duty because of his citizenship status – is largely autobiographical. But this scenario only provides the framework for the philosophical musings that make up most of the novel and which focus on Joseph’s ambiguous position within American society. He exists outside and in between the social institutions that humans use to define themselves. Bellow’s existential musings in Dangling Man show the unmistakable influence of the books that he was reading at the time: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), Rilke’s Journal of My Other Self (1910), Kafka’s The Trial (1925), and Camus’ The Stranger (1942). Bellow cited these influences throughout his career and acknowledged that Dangling Man was largely an apprenticeship novel from which he learned how (and how not) to craft a story. Bellow’s second novel, The Victim (1947), was a continuation of the apprenticeship. It is a more original novel, largely because of its strong Jewish plot element. The title refers equally to the novel’s two principal characters: Asa Leventhal, a Jewish copyeditor working in New York, and Kirby Allbee, a gentile, who blames Leventhal for causing him to lose his job in retaliation for an earlier anti-Semitic remark. Through the course of the novel, Albee insinuates himself further and further into Leventhal’s life before trying to kill his reluctant host, and himself, by releasing gas from an oven into Leventhal’s apartment – an act that echoes details of the Holocaust that were just becoming known in 1947. Though Bellow never conceded that he was a “Jewish writer,” The Victim has often been seen as one of the most profoundly Jewish Englishlanguage novels of the first half of the century and helped to establish Bellow’s reputation as one of America’s first important chroniclers of the Jewish experience. While juggling a series of short-term teaching appointments and writing fellowships, Bellow wrote his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March, which was published in 1953. Augie March, the novel’s first-person narrator and title character, is unlike anything that had ever been seen in American literature. For inspiration, Bellow draws on the tradition of the picaresque novel, whose exemplars include Don Quixote, Moll Flanders, and Tom Jones. But Augie March is a distinctly American, distinctly Chicagoan hero – full of the optimism of the young country and the enthusiasm of the “city of big shoulders.” Augie’s adventures do not follow any distinct or controlled pattern. In contrast to Bellow’s earlier, tightly controlled narratives, The Adventures of Augie March rambles in and out of multiple plotlines, mixing them promiscuously with the narrator’s own vernacular-laden philosophical observations.
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This is the first of Bellow’s novels to adopt the stylistic innovations that would become his signature traits: loose to non-existent plots, well-drawn characters, highly stylized prose, abundant philosophical digressions, and a penchant for finding humor where most people would find only tragedy. Whereas Bellow’s first two novels imitated European modernist writings, The Adventure of Augie March issued a challenge to them. Here, he does not invent a story to showcase tragedy, angst, or ennui; he simply follows his young, Chicago-born hero through a series of jobs, adventures, schemes, and disappointments. Nothing about Augie’s life seems to warrant the exuberant optimism he always displays, but he displays it nonetheless, sure that his big break is just around the corner. By the end of the novel, most readers realize that this optimism is itself capable of infusing Augie’s life with all of the meaning that he needs to get by. Bellow’s next major work, the novella Seize the Day (1956), is an even more emphatic – if less specific – challenge to the despair of modernist literature. Seize the Day follows the hapless schlemiel Tommy Wilhelm through the course of a single morning, during which Tommy, who is teetering on the brink of financial ruin and unable to convince his uncaring father to help him, is conned out of his last $700 by a phony psychologist who claims to have a “scientific” method for speculating on the commodities market. With no reason at all to be happy, Tommy wanders around aimlessly until he comes to the funeral of a complete stranger and begins to cry uncontrollably. But the tears are those of redemption, rather than self-pity. Somehow – and Bellow is very unclear about how this works – Tommy makes a connection to himself, or the dead person, or the fellow funeral goers, or the universe generally that carries him to “the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need” (Bellow 1956: 118). During the time that Bellow was achieving long-sought critical success, his marriage to Anita was breaking up. In 1956, he married his second wife, Sondra Tschacbasov, and continued teaching and writing. His next novel, Henderson the Rain King (1959), would once again take him in a completely new direction. The novel’s hero, Eugene Henderson, is perhaps Bellow’s most self-consciously satirical creation. Henderson shares both his initials and many of his tough-guy attributes with Ernest Hemingway, whose tight, economic prose style and action-oriented characters were as far away from Bellow as any American writer of the day. Spurred on by the internal cry of “I want,” Henderson travels from New England to Africa, where he meets a remarkable tribal chief who shows him how to be a “be-er” rather than a “becomer.” In the process of telling Henderson’s story, Bellow pokes fun at Hemingway, macho travel writing, American arrogance and naïveté, novels of self-discovery, and, ultimately, the absurd-but-wonderful human quest for higher truth. Henderson the Rain King solidified Bellow’s position as a major American novelist, and, in 1962, he was offered a permanent position with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He moved to Chicago with his third wife, Susan Glassman, whom he had married a year earlier, and remained affiliated with the University of Chicago for the next thirty years. The break-up of Bellow’s second
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marriage provided the raw materials for his next novel, Herzog (1964). The novel’s hero, Moses Herzog, is a professor of Romantic literature who has recently lost his wife to his best friend. But while Bellow writes novels about his personal tragedies, Herzog only writes letters – long, ponderous letters to, among others, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and God. Though Herzog never sends these letters, they do give him the opportunity to try to situate his personal life within the political, religious, and philosophical contexts that consume his professional life. Very little of what we usually call a “plot” happens in Herzog; it is simply a novel about being Moses Herzog. As the narrator states near the beginning of the novel, “I have to be that man; there is no one else to do it” (Bellow 1964: 67). Herzog became a best-seller and provided Bellow with the financial success that had always eluded him. Also in 1964, largely because of Bellow’s own extra-marital affairs, Bellow and Susan began divorce proceedings that would drag on for years. But his personal failures were offset again and again by his professional triumphs. The success of Herzog allowed him to compile several earlier short stories, along with some new ones, into a well-received collection entitled Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories (1968). His next novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), also sold well and won Bellow an unprecedented third National Book Award for Fiction (both The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog won the award as well). In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow returns to Judiasm as a central theme. Mr. Artur Sammler is a Holocaust survivor living in New York City trying to come to terms with the moral and cultural decay of America in the late 1960s. Like most of Bellow’s heroes, Sammler becomes a vehicle for Bellow’s philosophical observations and social critiques, which, by the early 1970s, had shifted significantly to the right. As an eyewitness to the horrors of a genuine fascist regime, Sammler viewed the protest culture of America in the late 1960s as childish and profane. Both the threadbare plot and the long philosophical digressions of Mr. Sammler’s Planet highlight the author’s disappointment with what has become of the once intellectually vibrant American left. Like many of his fictional characters, Bellow continued to believe – despite substantial evidence to the contrary – that he would eventually find happiness in marriage. In 1974, he married his fourth wife, a brilliant Romanian mathematician named Alexandra Tulcea, a woman who was almost as accomplished in her field as Bellow was in his. By this time, too, Bellow was regularly being described as America’s preeminent living writer. He had won an impressive collection of national and international prizes, yet two eluded him: the annual Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Bellow’s next novel, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), would bring him both awards and establish him as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Humboldt’s Gift is one of Bellow’s most plot-driven novels. It is also one of his most personal. The novel’s narrator is a middle-aged writer named Charlie Citrine who has (unlike Bellow at this time) managed to win the Pulitzer Prize twice: once for biography and once for drama. Nonetheless, Citrine suffers from most of the afflictions of
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a typical Bellow protagonist: he has gone through a financially ruinous divorce, he has a difficult time connecting with other people, and he is unable to write anything meaningful. Citrine is also haunted by the figure of his late friend and mentor, Von Humboldt Fleischer, a talented poet who was never able to reproduce his early success and who died in poverty after battling alcoholism and drug addiction for years. Bellow based the character of Humboldt on the American poet, Delmore Schwartz, whom he had befriended before Schwartz’s death in 1966. Bellow saw Schwartz’s ultimate fate – rejection, obscurity, disillusionment, and, finally, insanity – as a cautionary tale for writers and other artists trying to negotiate the pitfalls of a world in which the value of everything is determined by its price in the marketplace. Ironically, though, it is the commodification of art – in the form of a posthumously discovered movie scenario – that ultimately saves Citrine and constitutes the “gift” named in the title. Humboldt’s Gift won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to his receipt of the Nobel Prize later that year. Generally, the Nobel Prize in Literature is given at the end of a long and distinguished literary career, and Saul Bellow’s body of work thirty-two years after the publication of Dangling Man, certainly qualified. But Bellow in 1976 had nearly as many productive years ahead of him, and he wrote and published more during the 1980s than in any other decade of his career. Bellow’s first novel after the Nobel Prize, The Dean’s December (1982), is perhaps the most overtly political, and least comic, of all of his creations. The novel itself gives a fictional account of Bellow’s trip to Romania in 1978 to care for Alexandra’s dying mother. Albert Corde, the novel’s protagonist, is the dean of students at a large, unnamed university in Chicago. As a dean, he has run afoul of the left-wing elements of his campus by supporting the prosecution of an African American man charged with killing a white student. In Bucharest, Corde experiences the end result of the left-wing ideologies that he battles in Chicago: mindless bureaucracy, urban decay, enforced opinions, denial of individuality, and, ultimately, the fascism of the left. The Dean’s December was an early salvo in the culture wars that engulfed colleges and universities in the 1980s and 1990s. Five years after its publication, Bellow would write the foreword to one of the most controversial books to come out of that movement: Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Bloom, a classically trained political scientist, became Bellow’s colleague on the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought in 1976. The two frequently taught courses together, and Bloom’s brand of cultural conservatism – which was based on classical ideals rather than the puritan impulses at the center of most social conservatism – appealed to the author of such similarly conservative works as Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December. It was at Bellow’s suggestion that the cash-strapped Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind, which went on to become a runaway best-seller and identify both Bloom and Bellow as spokesmen for the cultural right. Another aspect of Bloom’s influence on Bellow can be seen in nearly all of his postNobel writing. The classical text most important to Bloom was Plato’s Symposium, a series of speeches by Socrates and his companions about love and erotic attachment.
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Bloom’s final, posthumously published book, Love and Friendship (1992), is an extended meditation upon the deep human need for attachment: to causes, to ideas, and, most importantly, to other people. Bellow takes this same idea as the central theme of More Die of Heartbreak (1987), his comic follow-up to The Dean’s December. More Die of Heartbreak narrates the romantic exploits of two men: Kenneth Trachtenberg, an obscure professor of Russian literature, and his uncle, Benn Crader, a world-famous botanist. Both men have spent their adult lives in unfulfilling relationships with needy, irrational women. They persist in these relationships because they have a deep and desperate need for emotional connection that they cannot fulfill themselves. Kenneth, Ben, and all of the women they relate with, are partial beings seeking, but never finding, spiritual wholeness – an image drawn from Aristophanes’ famous speech in Symposium (which Bellow quotes from directly in More Die of Heartbreak) and central to almost all of Bloom’s work. What the two male protagonists of More Die of Heartbreak cannot find in their sexual relationships with women, however, they do find in their non-sexual friendship with each other. In 1986, as Bellow was completing his tribute to male friendship in a world of unpredictable women, his fourth wife, as if on cue, divorced him. In 1989, he married his fifth wife, a thirty-one-year-old graduate student named Janis Freedman. That same year, he published two substantial novellas – A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection – that revisit situations and themes from his earlier works. A Theft tells the story of a wealthy socialite, Clara Velde, who dismisses her housekeeper when an expensive ring turns up missing from her Manhattan apartment. When the ring is returned, Clara experiences the same sort of catharsis that Tommy Wilhelm has at the end of Seize the Day: she breaks into a fit of uncontrollable weeping when she realizes that her maid treated her with kindness and secured the ring’s return. The second novella, The Bellarosa Connection, joins The Victim and Mr. Sammler’s Planet as Bellow’s third major Jewish-themed work of fiction (joining his non-fiction memoir, To Jerusalem and Back, published in 1976). Like Artur Sammler, Harry Fonstein is a Holocaust survivor. Unlike Sammler, however, Fonstein was never interned in a concentration camp. Rather, he was rescued in a secret operation funded by the Broadway producer Billy Rose. The Bellarosa Connection narrates the multiple attempts of Fonstein and his wife to meet and thank Rose, who refuses to acknowledge their existence or his own heroic efforts to smuggle them out of Europe. The unnamed narrator of The Bellarosa Connection pieces together the story of the Fonsteins and Billy Rose thirty years after the events in the story occurred; in the process, Bellow analyzes the role of both memory and denial in the way that American Jews have responded to the horrors of the Holocaust. Bellow used the novella format once more in 1997 for one of his last works of fiction: The Actual (1997), the story of a man named Harry Trellman’s life-long attachment to a woman, Amy Wustrin, who he dated briefly in high school. Forty years after their first meeting, Trellman proposes (successfully) to Amy and, we presume, lives happily ever after. Like nearly every male character in the Bellow canon, Harry Trellman has had a life full of turbulent, unfulfilling relationships with women.
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Unlike most other Bellow characters, however, Trellman actually finds the soul-mate that he spends most of his life seeking – proving that it is at least possible to find spiritual completion through erotic attachment, even if it comes at the end of a lifetime of failures. Bellow himself appears to have experienced his happiest marriage at the end of his life. He remained married to Janis from 1989 until his death in 2005. In 1999, he had a daughter with Janis, Naomi Rose Bellow, at the age of 84. In 2000, at the age of 85, Bellow published Ravelstein, his first full-length novel since 1987 and the final creative work of his sixty-year career. Ravelstein’s narrator, Chick, is even more autobiographical than most other Bellow characters, and Chick’s memories of his friend, Abe Ravelstein, give a thinly veiled account of Bellow’s own friendship with Alan Bloom. Ravelstein achieved immediate notoriety because it revealed Bloom’s homosexuality and the fact that he died of AIDS – open secrets in the University of Chicago community that came as unwelcome news to the many American conservatives who considered Bloom an intellectual hero. But Bellow treats Ravelstein/Bloom’s homosexuality only in passing. His larger purpose in the novel is to paint a picture of the manic, compulsive, cantankerous, and brilliant man who was his friend. Throughout the novel, Chick’s remembrances keep circling back to Ravelstein’s readings of Plato and his classical theories of love and friendship. The relationship between Chick and Ravelstein becomes an example of this “marriage of true minds,” a relationship that is based on intellectual companionship that becomes a kind of erotic fulfillment with no element of physical contact. The great tragedy of the novel – itself worthy of the talents of Sophocles or Euripides – is that the same erotic longings that make Ravelstein great also – when expressed through sexual encounters – bring about his downfall. Though Chick ultimately finds Ravelstein’s life tragic, he does not find it without meaning. The imperfect, yet intense, relationship that Ravelstein chronicles is itself an example of two people forging significance out of the intersection of their lives rather than giving in to the forces poised to overwhelm them. In one way or another, all of Bellow’s characters are in the same position: they are messy, broken, unfaithful, imperfect human beings in a world that seems indifferent to their sufferings. Yet they are invariably optimists, if cautious ones, who go from one relationship to another trying to find something, or someone, to satisfy an inner longing that they are only vaguely aware of themselves. Most of Bellow’s early characters – Augie March, Eugene Henderson, Tommy Wilhelm, and Moses Herzog – manage to discover only the barest glimpse of the significance that they crave. Later characters – Kenneth Trachtenberg, Clara Velde, Harry Trellman, and even Abe Ravelstein – come much closer to their goal. But none of them ever gives up the search or surrenders to what Herzog calls “the void” of nihilism and despair. In his career as a writer, Bellow encountered dozens of literary and intellectual movements that he saw as nihilistic and dehumanizing: fascism, Marxism, modernism, postmodernism, Freudianism, existentialism, consumerism, puritanism, and political-correctness. In the fashion of a good Chicago bareknuckle street-fighter, he took on all comers, and, in the process, became one of the defining forces of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century.
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Atlas, James (2000). Bellow: A Biography. New York: Random House. Bellow, Saul (1956). Seize the Day. New York: Viking. Bellow, Saul (1964). Herzog. New York: Viking. Bellow, Saul (1994). It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future. New York: Viking. Bellow, Saul (2001). Collected Stories, ed. Janis Freedman Bellow. New York: Viking. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Saul Bellow: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Bradbury, Malcolm (1982). Saul Bellow. London: Methuen. Clayton, John (1968). Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. Bloomington, I.N.: Indiana University Press. Cronin, Gloria and Bach, Gerhard, eds. (2000). Small Planets: Saul Bellow as Short Fiction Writer. East Lansing, M.I.: Michigan State University Press. Cronin, Gloria and Hall, Blaine (1987). Saul Bellow: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland. Cronin, Gloria and Siegel, Ben, eds. (1994). Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Dutton, Robert R. (1971). Saul Bellow. New York: Twayne. Field, Leslie and Guzlowski, John Z. (1979). “Criticism of Saul Bellow: A Selected Checklist,” Modern Fiction Studies, 25 (1): 149–71.
Fuchs, Daniel (1985). Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Harris, Mark (1982). Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. Miller, Ruth (1991). Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s. Nault, Marianne (1997). Saul Bellow: His Works and his Critics. An Annotated International Bibliography. New York: Garland. Newman, Judie (1984). Saul Bellow and History. London: Macmillan. Noreen, Robert G. (1978). Saul Bellow: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall. Opdahl, Keith M. (1967). The Novels of Saul Bellow. University Park, P.A.: Pennsylvania State University Press. Pifer, Ellen (1990). Saul Bellow against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Porter, M. Gilbert (1974). Whence the Power? The Artistry and Humanity of Saul Bellow. Columbia, M.O.: University of Missouri Press. Rovit, Earl (1967). Saul Bellow. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press. Scheer-Schäzler, Brigitte (1972). Saul Bellow. New York: Frederick Ungar. Sokoloff, B. A. and Posner, Mark (1976). Saul Bellow: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Folcroft, P. A.: Folcroft Library Editions. Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed. (1979). Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall.
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Gore Vidal Heather Neilson
In relation to Gore Vidal’s place in American culture, that most over-used of adjectives – unique – is for once appropriate. In a career spanning more than sixty years, he has written prolifically in several genres: the essay, the novel, the stage play, the television play, the short story, the pamphlet, and the memoir. Vidal’s media appearances have also made him a familiar figure in the United States and beyond. For more than a superficial understanding of this extraordinary figure, some familiarity with all the interrelated facets of his life and work – his writing, his work in film and television, his politics, his friendship and his feuds – is required. He was the son of Eugene Vidal, who was Franklin Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce and a significant participant in the start of the aviation industry. Through his father, Vidal knew Amelia Earhart, to whom he pays homage in the novel Kalki (1978) and the autobiographical essay “On Flying” (1985). His maternal grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, the first senator from Oklahoma. Blinded as the result of two childhood accidents, the senator relied on his grandson for some years to read to him, and Vidal was thereby well educated in the major works of history, political science, and classical literature. In adolescence, Eugene Vidal, Jr. renamed himself Gore Vidal. After divorcing Vidal’s father, his mother, Nina, married Hugh D. Auchincloss. When that marriage ended, Auchincloss married Janet Bouvier, the mother of the future wife of John F. Kennedy. Vidal was thus born into a milieu of privilege; however, as several commentators have observed, there is an apparent incongruity between his patrician background and manner and the politics that he professes. He has consistently advocated such measures as: the taxing of corporations; a reduction of the defense budget; an increase in spending on education; the availability of free and equal time on television for all political candidates; and the cessation of American interference in the affairs of other countries. As Dennis Altman notes, “Vidal places himself on the left, but his novels rarely deal with the world as seen by those who are at all underprivileged. His characters are largely those people who take servants for granted, not those who serve” (Altman: 85).
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Vidal has frequently lamented what he perceives to be the poor quality of political debate – and politicians – in the United States. He himself ran for political office twice: as Democratic candidate for the 29th Congressional District in New York in 1960, and for the nomination of Democratic candidate for senator from California in 1982. In both instances, he was defeated with a respectably sizeable vote. The last six months of the latter campaign were filmed by Gary Conklin for his documentary, Gore Vidal: The Man who Said No (1982). Between 1970 and 1972, Vidal was cochairman of the People’s Party. He has explained his formal attempts to enter politics as follows: My grandfather at one point thought he might have been president, and once you get that in the family, the family never gets over it. That was the unfinished business of his life … I would be his political heir. That’s what I wanted too. Unfortunately – or fortunately, as the case may be – I was a writer. (Ruas: 61)
A number of Vidal’s novels feature characters who are potentially able politicians but whose desire for political power is thwarted, and who must exert influence by alternative means. In Creation (1981), the philosopher Confucius – one of Vidal’s favorite characters in his fiction – appropriates the role of self-appointed educator of his fellow citizens, rather as Vidal in his own way has done. Explaining why he writes historical fiction, Vidal has said that “I’m trying to give them the past that their educational system and their culture don’t give them … If we had a proper educational system, I wouldn’t have to write these books” (Neilson: 54). Vidal’s service in the American army during World War II is a source of pride to him: “That’s what we did in those days; we did not go off to the Texas Air Force and hide” (Peabody and Ebersole: 178). On the other hand, he has consistently objected to the apparent eagerness of American leaders to engage in war. His criticism of the administration of George W. Bush has been particularly vociferous, as exemplified by Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney–Bush Junta and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to be So Hated, both published in 2002. Vidal’s television persona is generally sardonic, recently tending to the irascible; however, in a rare public moment of unqualified enthusiasm, he declared that he was “thrilled” by the election of the first African American president of the United States (interview with David Dimbleby, B.B.C. television, November 5, 2008). Vidal’s first novel, Williwaw (1946), was based on his own experience of serving in the Aleutians. In a Yellow Wood followed in 1947. With his third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), Vidal attracted lasting notoriety by unsensationally depicting an ordinary American youth’s discovery of his own homosexuality. A Season of Comfort (1949) is overtly based on Vidal’s own childhood. Dark Green, Bright Red (1950) is set in a revolutionary South American country, and The Judgment of Paris (1952) in postwar Europe. A Search for the King (1950) is an adaptation of a legend, originating in the thirteenth-century Chronicle of Rheims, of the troubadour Blondel’s search for the captive Richard Plantagenet. In the eighth novel, Messiah (1954), a
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telegenic undertaker’s assistant, who wants to reassure his fellow citizens that death is not to be feared, ironically becomes the martyred figurehead of a world-wide cult of death. In the early 1950s, Vidal also wrote light fictions under the pseudonyms of Edgar Box, Katherine Everard, and Cameron Kay. In 1954, for financial reasons, he turned to writing for film, television, and the stage. Of his television plays written during this period, Visit to a Small Planet was one of the most successful, subsequently being adapted for Broadway and then made into a film starring Jerry Lewis (1960). The most enduring of his theatrical plays may well be The Best Man, which premiered in 1960, was made into a film starring Henry Fonda (1964), and enjoyed a triumphant revival on Broadway in 2000, with Chris Noth and the late Spalding Gray in the lead roles. The play is set during a political convention, in which an intellectual and ethical politician and an unscrupulous right-wing rival vie for the endorsement of the party’s influential former president. In an ironic twist at the end, the former hands the nomination to a relatively unknown but manifestly decent third candidate, who he realizes is in fact “the best man.” In cinema, in 1959 alone, three films to which Vidal contributed were released: Ben-Hur; Suddenly, Last Summer (based on his friend Tennessee Williams’s play); and an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat. In 1964, Vidal returned successfully to the novel form with the publication of Julian, his first best-seller since The City and the Pillar. Set in the fourth century a.d., the novel sympathetically depicts the last pagan Roman emperor, who attempted unsuccessfully to arrest the rise of Christianity, and who was killed at the age of thirty-two. Vidal’s often-stated detestation of religions based on belief in a “sky-god” is concisely expressed in the essay “Monotheism and its Discontents” (1992). Immune himself to the religious impulse, Vidal has nevertheless explored in several novels the human need to create deities. Messiah allegorically evokes the corporatization of Christianity; Creation engages with the various religions and philosophies developed across the world in the fifth century b.c.; and Kalki portrays a Vietnam veteran who believes himself to be the tenth avatar of the god Vishnu, whose function is to destroy the present, decadent world and create it anew. The provocative Live from Golgotha (1992), narrated by Saint Timothy, first bishop of Ephesus, is set in the year 96 a.d. Vidal has tended to categorize his novels either as “inventions” or “reflections upon history.” An apocalyptic vision pervades all the “inventions” from Messiah onward. In 1968, Vidal produced another notorious “invention” – Myra Breckinridge – narrated by a transsexual who is obsessed with 1940s’ movies and the need for population control. To some extent, her preoccupations are shared by her creator. The influence of cinema pervades all of Vidal’s work; Screening History (1992) is something of a prelude to his autobiographies, being a personal meditation on the influence of the medium. Although he favors governmental control in the public sector and freedom in private matters, Vidal has expressed strong concern about global overpopulation. As with much of Vidal’s writing, Myra Breckinridge can be read on several levels. Readers might miss Vidal’s sly engagement with classic texts such as Apuleius’ The
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Golden Ass, and the book’s serious underlying message about cultural heritage. In the sequel, Myron (1974), Myra and her preoperative self wage an internecine war for control over their shared body. Duluth (1984) satirizes postmodern theories of literature, and features aliens from outer space who eventually succeed in conquering the planet. In The Smithsonian Institution (1998), a thirteen-year-old boy known only as “T,” travels back in time from 1939 to try to prevent Woodrow Wilson from involving the United States in World War I. The premise is that, if there had been no Great War, there would have been no Third Reich and therefore no World War II. Things, of course, go wrong, and the boy will be killed in battle. Dennis Altman has predicted that Vidal’s novels about American history will comprise his “greatest contribution to American literature; were he to win the Nobel Prize for literature it would be for these …” (Altman: 33). In order of publication, these are Washington, D.C (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), and The Golden Age (2000). Chronologically, in terms of subject matter, the sequence is: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, The Golden Age, and Washington, D.C. Through these “Narratives of Empire,” as they were collectively entitled in 2000, Vidal interweaves the fictional Sanford family, descended from Aaron Burr, into his depictions of the major events and players in American politics. As Altman astutely remarks, “Vidal’s histories construct a persuasive narrative of the United States as a country that, soon after winning independence in the name of self-government, abandoned the original principles of the Founding Fathers to pursue a policy of imperial expansion” (Altman: 48). This argument is epitomized in Empire, which is set in the period from 1898 to 1908. The main focal character is John Hay, Secretary of State to Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Although Vidal’s views on American foreign policy might be described as “isolationist” (a term he dislikes), his portrayal of Hay – an enthusiastic advocate of American expansionism and author of what came to be known as the “Open Door Policy” – is one of the most favorable of his characterizations of historical figures. Henry Adams and Henry James, both acknowledged models for Vidal’s own writing, are also significant participants in Empire. The trope of politics as a form of theater recurs throughout the “Narratives of Empire.” Through Burr, Vidal suggests that Aaron Burr, who served as Thomas Jefferson’s first Vice-President but who has been characterized in posterity as a traitor, would have made a fine President. Vidal’s Lincoln is both an astute creator of his own public image and a tragic character of Shakespearean proportions. The politicians of 1876 – epitomized by the vivid Speaker of the House, James G. Blaine – are histrionic figures in a public life which veers from melodrama to farce. Empire depicts the struggle between politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt and newspapermen such as William Randolph Hearst for control of public opinion. In Hollywood, the power of the newspapers is diminished, in turn, as the motion picture industry expands. In Washington, D.C., which covers the period from 1937 to 1952, the politician has evolved into the creature of film and television. Although Vidal personally liked
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John F. Kennedy, he critiqued what he perceived as the Kennedy family’s dynastic ambitions both in Washington, D.C., in which he satirized the construction of a Kennedyesque senator’s career, and more directly in the essay entitled “The Holy Family,” published in the same year. The last book in the series, The Golden Age, revisits the same period. In this, however, he focused more directly upon historical figures, most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he portrays as having deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. It is impossible to convey the sheer range of Vidal’s essays, several of which should ideally be read in conjunction with the novels. “President and Mrs. U. S. Grant” (1975) anticipates 1876, published the following year. “Theodore Roosevelt: American Sissy” (1981) complements Empire. “Lincoln, Lincoln and the Priests of Academe” (1988) is Vidal’s firm response to a few historians who criticized his novel about the revered president – he has always strongly defended his meticulous research for the historical fictions, often informing potential critics that he does not employ research assistants. Many of Vidal’s essays have evolved from book reviews, most often for The New York Review of Books. The most substantial collection is United States: Essays 1952–1992 (1993), which won the National Book Award in 1993. It consists of one hundred and fourteen essays, divided into three sections: “State of the Art” (mainly literary criticism); “State of the Union” (political writings); and “State of Being” (more personal reflections). This has since been supplemented by The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2001 (2002) and other publications. Potentially the most controversial essay of Vidal’s career has been “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” first published in Vanity Fair in 2001. McVeigh had been executed in June 2001 for the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. McVeigh had written to Vidal from prison after reading an article which Vidal had written about the Bill of Rights. The two then began corresponding, and McVeigh asked that Vidal be present at his execution. Vidal was unable to attend, and the two never met in real life, although Edmund White’s play Terre Haute, first performed in 2006, portrays characters based on Vidal and McVeigh meeting four times in the prisoner’s final days. Whilst Vidal explicitly never condoned McVeigh’s killing of innocent people, he aroused animosity by seeking to understand why McVeigh had acted as he did, instead of simply condemning him. Some of Vidal’s essays have been “repackaged” a number of times over the past decade or so. Twenty-four essays are included in The Essential Gore Vidal, edited by Vidal’s biographer Fred Kaplan (1999). Eleven of the best of his political essays were republished in Imperial America (2004). The Selected Essays, chosen and edited by Vidal’s literary executor, Jay Parini, appeared in 2007, comprising twenty-one previously published pieces. As there is some overlap between these and other recent publications, the potential buyer is advised to check the various contents pages. Marcie Frank has suggested that, “Those who embrace Vidal as an exemplary intellectual tend to foreground his essays and historical novels. However, I propose that his survival as an intellectual has depended on his negotiation of the shift between print and electronic modes of publicity …” (Frank: 15). For over forty years, Vidal
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has adroitly engaged with film media, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. He has appeared on television for decades in several guises: as talk-show host (briefly in 1963); as a regular guest-star on the sit-com Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; and as political commentator and interviewee. In 1972, Vidal briefly appeared, as himself, in Fellini’s Roma. Between 1992 and 2002, he performed in several commercial films. His most substantial roles were in Bob Roberts (1992), written and directed by Tim Robbins, and Gattaca (1997), written and directed by Andrew Niccol. In the former, Vidal played an honorable liberal senator from Pennsylvania, and, in the latter, the villainous director of an aerospace corporation of the future. He had cameo roles in With Honors (1994), as a Harvard law professor; Shadow Conspiracy (1997), as a corrupt congressman; and Igby Goes Down (2002), written and directed by his nephew Burr Steers, in an uncredited role as a school headmaster. Frank makes the valid point that all Vidal’s performances, including his film roles, are “extended cameos: in them, Vidal is always recognizable as himself” (Frank: 14). Perhaps defensively, Vidal has always cultivated a public persona of aloofness. He is an acknowledged master of the aphorism, in the Wildean mode, his comments calculated to shock and amuse with their apparent callousness. His alleged response to news of the death of Truman Capote – that it was “a good career move” – is well known. Early in Palimpsest (1995), he airily disposes of his unmaternal mother with the comment that “Like most dedicated drinkers, she could not spare the time to go to the movies” (Vidal 1995: 18). Vidal famously never shies away from combat – the role of gentleman pugilist is evidently important in his self-image, as is that of truthtelling “correctionist.” Probably the best-known of his contretemps was broadcast live on A.B.C. television in 1968, when he and William F. Buckley, Jr. were commentating on the Democratic National Convention. The insults which they exchanged were compounded in subsequently published essays. Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire magazine for libel, and the matter was settled out of court some years later. As Dennis Altman has noted, however, Vidal is a man of “more compassion than he likes to admit” (Altman: 27). Notwithstanding his often-quoted statement that “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little inside,” he has maintained numerous close friendships over many years, his intimates including the late Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Claire Bloom, and Susan Sarandon. Long committed to confounding the pruriently inquisitive, Vidal appeared unenthusiastic about the prospect of writing a memoir for much of his life. He had incorporated autobiographical material in some of his fiction – in A Season of Comfort, in Two Sisters (1970), and, to some extent, in Messiah and Washington, D.C.; however, Palimpsest – released in the United States to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of his birth – was surprising in its candor. He may have been partly motivated to write the memoir by his frustration that the late Walter Clemons, contracted to write the official biography, failed to produce it. It was subsequently written by Fred Kaplan. Not least, Palimpsest fulfilled one of the traditional purposes of the genre, the laying to rest of ghosts.
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The City and the Pillar was dedicated “To J. T.” In Palimpsest, Vidal revealed for the first time the profound influence that Jimmie Trimble, his boyhood friend and sometime lover, has exerted in his life. By then engaged to be married, Jimmie was killed at Iwo Jima in 1945. The Smithsonian Institution – in which the early death of “T” cannot be prevented – provides a moving coda to the evocation of Jimmie in the memoir. Vidal has always fiercely resisted such labels as “homosexual” or “bisexual,” arguing that these adjectives describe acts, not people. In one sentence in the memoir, he casually made the most unexpected disclosure of all, namely that his relationship with Howard Austen, his constant companion since the early 1950s, was never a sexual one. The finest writing in the sequel, Point to Point Navigation (2006), is Vidal’s account of Howard’s last illness and death in 2003. Better recognized for his acerbic wit, Vidal has always had a rare – probably underestimated – talent for the elegiac, and here its expression is authentic. Apart from this, however, Point to Point Navigation is neither as substantial nor as coherently structured as the previous volume. Palimpsest covered the first forty years of Vidal’s life. Rather than cover the next forty years, Point to Point Navigation tends to revisit characters and episodes already described in Palimpsest. Although a great deal has been written about Vidal’s work, until the past few years there were fewer extended critiques than might have been expected, particularly if one considers how much more has been published about his late friend and rival, Norman Mailer. In 1985, Vidal told the present writer that he knew of no doctoral theses on his work having been undertaken in the United States, although he was aware of several that had been written in Italy and the Soviet Union. “Peter Ustinov … said that Russia’s leading clown has a doctorate in American literature, and I was the subject” (Neilson: 53–4). There are probably several reasons for the relative paucity of critical attention devoted to Vidal for much of his career. Altman remarks that: “The United States has enormous tolerance for self-criticism, but only when it ultimately reaffirms the American Dream” (Altman: 80). Vidal’s reception in the United States has been further complicated by the fact that for much of his adult life he lived for half of each year in Italy. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in the scholarly attention being paid to Vidal’s whole oeuvre. In 2005, the year in which he turned eighty, several important volumes were published by Stephen Harris; Dennis Altman; and Marcie Frank, together with a new selection of Vidal’s interviews (Peabody and Ebersole). A reviewer of Imperial America reflected in 2004 that: “Vidal may be in tune with the zeitgeist again because his polemical writing resembles the new blogger punditry: conversational, tart, fervent, digressive, susceptible to idiosyncratic theories but capable of worthwhile provocations” (Altman: 99). Arguably, it is not just Vidal’s combative style but also his opinions that have become fashionable. A literary critic, Harris focuses on the genre of the historical novel, with chapters on Burr and 1876. His book is written for an academic readership. For the general reader, Altman’s and Frank’s books are both recommended because of the originality and range of their respective approaches. Altman brings the perspective of a political
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scientist to bear on Vidal’s life and work, and Frank that of cultural studies. Both insightfully analyze the complex nature of Vidal’s celebrity, as well as the significance of his life’s work within the context of American culture. Now in his eighty-fourth year, Vidal is apparently aiming to complete one more novel – about the Mexican-American war of 1846–8. Inevitably, the subject of his legacy is being raised more often. In 1984, Vidal expressed the opinion that he would be remembered, “if at all as a writer … for Myra Breckinridge, Myron and Kalki” (Ruas: 62–3). When asked in 2007 on Canadian television which book he would like to be remembered for, however, he named Creation, a magisterial novel which – although set two and a half millennia ago – is eerily pertinent to our own interesting times (interview with George Stromboulopoulos, The Hour, C.B.C. television, June 7, 2007). The present writer presumes to anticipate that Vidal will eventually be most valued for some of his novels, such as Burr, Julian, and Creation, for his acerbic wit, and for his moral courage in the lifelong defense of the values in which he believed.
References and Further Reading Altman, Dennis (2005). Gore Vidal’s America. Cambridge: Polity Press. Baker, Susan and Gibson, Curtis S. (1997). Gore Vidal: A Critical Companion. Westport, C.T. Greenwood. Behrendt, Jorg (2002). Homosexuality in the Work of Gore Vidal. Studies in North American History, Politics and Society, vol. 19. Hamburg: Lit Verlag. Dick, Bernard F. (1974). The Apostate Angel: A Critical Study of Gore Vidal. New York: Random House. Frank, Marcie (2005). How to be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Harris, Stephen (2005). Gore Vidal’s Historical Novels and the Shaping of the American Political Consciousness. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen. Joshi, S. T. (2007). Gore Vidal: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Lanham, M.D.: Scarecrow. Kaplan, Fred, ed. (1999a). The Essential Gore Vidal. New York: Random House. Kaplan, Fred (1999b). Gore Vidal: A Biography. London: Bloomsbury. Kiernan, Robert F. (1982). Gore Vidal. New York: Frederick Ungar. Neilson, Heather (1987). “Encountering Gore Vidal,” Antithesis, 1 (2): 41–57.
Parini, Jay, ed. (1992). Gore Vidal: Writer against the Grain. New York: Columbia University Press. Peabody, Richard and Ebersole, Lucinda, eds. (2005). Conversations with Gore Vidal. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ruas, Charles (1984). Conversations with American Writers. London: Quartet. Stanton, Robert J., ed. (1978). Gore Vidal: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall. Stanton, Robert J. and Vidal, Gore, eds. (1980). Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal. Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart. Vidal, Gore (1995). Palimpsest: A Memoir. London: André Deutsch. Vidal, Gore (2004). Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Vidal, Gore (2007). Selected Essays, ed. Jay Parini. London: Abacus. White, Edmund (2007). Terre Haute. London: Methuen. White, Ray Lewis (1968). Gore Vidal. New York: Twayne.
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Joseph Heller David M. Craig
With his darkly comic masterpiece, Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller provided a conceptual lens and defining metaphor – Catch-22 – for his readers to understand Cold War-era America. He also created the work against which his six subsequent novels were judged and (somewhat unfairly) found lacking. For Yossarian, Heller’s bombardier protagonist, Catch-22 means that his desire to stop flying combat missions is proof of his sanity and necessitates that he must keep flying them. For readers, the logic and the rhetorical patterns of Catch-22 fuel the novel’s most famous comic sequences – how Major Major can only be seen in his office when he is not there or how Milo Minderbinder can buy eggs on Malta for seven cents, sell them for five cents to his own mess halls, and yet still make a profit. For many readers in the 1960s and 1970s, the concept and the novel also helped to explain the dilemmas of the Vietnam War, bureaucratic absurdities, and the often contradictory demands of contemporary life. Now, thanks to the novel’s legacy and the brilliance of its title conception, many people who have never read the novel or heard of its author can use the phrase, thereby echoing Heller’s view of America. Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923, and grew up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York. Two events were seminal to the author: the death of his father when he was six years old, and his service as a bombardier in the Army Air Corps, especially his thirty-seventh combat mission during which a gunner in his plane was wounded. In Now and Then, his 1998 memoir, Heller recounts or, more accurately, resists recounting the effect that his father’s death had on him. He realized the importance of this event in 1979 while undergoing psychoanalysis. The realization occurs when Heller tells his analyst about a recurrent nightmare in which a stranger comes into his childhood bedroom in Coney Island. In the dream, he felt compelled to cry out for help, but “the words would swell in my paralyzed throat and take form as gibberish” (Heller 1998: 217). Heller recognized the dream as the manifestation of his search for himself “as a fatherless Coney Island child” (p. 222) and gained a new and unexpected lens on his fiction, most notably the role that death plays,
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particularly that of children. The penultimate chapter of each of his novels, with the exception of the posthumous Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man (2000), includes a death that illuminates its meaning. The novels themselves emerge as acts of comic defiance against the inevitability of mortality that these deaths proclaim, as if voicing the words that Heller was unable to utter in his dreams. On August 15, 1944, Heller’s squadron bombed a railroad bridge over the Rhône at Avignon in France. This incident provides the basis for the famous Avignon mission from Catch-22 in which Snowden is killed. In notes Heller later made about the mission, he records: “Man wounded in the leg. Wohlstein and Moon killed.” Heller says that the elaborate details in the novel correspond “perhaps ninety percent to what I did experience. I did have a co-pilot go berserk and grab the control. The earphones did pull out. I did think that I was dying for what seemed like thirty minutes but what was actually three-hundredths of a second. When I did plug my earphones in, there was a guy sobbing on the intercom, ‘Help the bombardier,’ but the gunner was only shot in the leg’ ” (Heller 1973: 357). In Closing Time, Heller’s 1994 sequel to Catch-22, Sammy Singer, speaking for Heller, says of the Avignon mission: “it gave me an episode, something dramatic to talk about, and something to make me remember the war was real” (Heller 1994: 366). Much of Heller’s fiction has its genesis in the intense awareness of personal mortality that occurred over Avignon. His work explicates the significance of this realization and constitutes his protest against mortality. Yossarian, the great comic protagonist of Catch-22 and Closing Time, embodies life, his fears and appetites providing a counterforce to death and mortality. Near the opening of the novel, he vows “to live forever or die in the attempt” (Heller 1961: 29). In large part, the rest of the novel recounts the defiant struggle that produces “each day another dangerous mission against mortality” (p. 174). As a bombardier in the 256th Bombing Squadron stationed in Italy, Yossarian finds that the threats to his life come from both enemy fire and his own commanders and colleagues, who sacrifice others’ lives to secure their own advancement. “They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly. “No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried. “Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked. “They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.” “And what difference does that make?” (Heller 1961: 16)
Over the course of the novel, most of Yossarian’s friends do die as a result of the increasing number of missions that these commanders and Catch-22 requires them to fly. As if these threats were not enough, Yossarian must also worry about the immanence of mortality: “there were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheathes and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain” (p. 171). Given such threats, no wonder Yossarian flees to the hospital whenever possible. There he can combat both threats by inventing imaginary illnesses to confound his doctors and amuse himself. He can also satisfy his appetites. He finds love (“It was
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love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him,” as the novel famously opens), rest, good food, amusement, and sex. Even the challenges of hospital life become occasions in which Yossarian can satisfy his appetites. When, for example, army psychiatrist Major Sanderson wants to test Yossarian’s sanity, he leads the doctor on a comic romp in which everything reminds his patient of either sex or fish. When Sanderson wants to show him ink blots, Yossarian tells him that there is no need for the doctor to trouble himself because all of them remind him of sex. As if to demonstrate the point, he transforms the ascetic Nurse Duckett into a warm and responsive lover. Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer for the 256th and entrepreneurial mastermind behind M & M Enterprises, is the symbolic counterpart to Yossarian. A consummate capitalist, Milo has a single drive, to make a profit. He subordinates all else to this imperative. Earnest, well-meaning, humorless, and without appetites except for making money, Milo believes that a contract is a contract, even if it requires bombing a bridge at Orvieto for the Americans and defending it for the Germans. More darkly, when his syndicate is on the verge of collapse because of a poorly considered Egyptian cotton deal, Milo bombs his own base on Pianosa in order to restore credit to his balance sheet, leaving in his wake fuel stocks, ordinance dumps, and B-25 bombers in flames and the “wounded … screaming everywhere” (p. 252). For Heller, Milo embodies the self-deceptive motivations inherent in capitalism and, as Hannah Arendt so famously documents in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the banality of evil. Lest readers miss the evil that Milo represents, Heller casts him as a Satan figure in the tree-of-life scene, tempting Yossarian with chocolate-coated Egyptian cotton: “Give it a chance, will you? It can’t be that bad. Is it really that bad?” (p. 256). Milo genuinely disapproves of immoral behavior and does not mean to tempt Yossarian with something that would hurt him. He desires only to turn a profit on the Egyptian cotton on which he stands to lose a great deal. The tree-of-life episode concentrates the central issues of the novel: most crucially, how to live in a world governed by Catch-22. While Milo tempts him, Yossarian, unable to handle the guilt or the fear that his failure to save the dying Snowden has occasioned, stands naked in a tree, having stripped off his blood-soaked uniform from the Avignon mission. Only later, haunted by a dream in which a mysterious stranger stands by his bed, can Yossarian recollect and reflect upon the Avignon mission, Snowden’s death, and their aftermath. Yossarian’s dream mirrors the one that Heller recounted to his psychiatrist and relates to the death of his father. In recollection, Yossarian decodes the secret of Snowden’s viscera and announces a vision that undergirds all of Heller’s fiction: “Man was matter … Drop him out of a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like all other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage” (pp. 429–30). A latter-day Huckleberry Finn, Yossarian lights out for the Territories with Sweden serving as refuge from Milo, capitalism, and the war. Before Catch-22, which appeared when Heller was thirty-eight, he had published only six stories, a sketch, and “Catch-18,” an excerpt from the novel. There was
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nothing that would predict the acclaim that Catch-22 would achieve or the way that his own life would change. While the reputation of the novel built slowly, by the late 1960s Heller was a renowned author and literary celebrity. He had done a screenplay, Sex and the Single Girl (1964); worked on the pilot for the television series McHale’s Navy; written the anti-war play We Bombed in New Haven (1968), which had an elevenweek run on Broadway; become friend and creative consultant to famed actor Tony Curtis; and established himself as a featured author on campuses and literary festivals. He had a reputation to live up to and readers to please. Thirteen years after Catch-22, Something Happened (1974) appeared, surprising both fans and critics with its darker tone, bathetic protagonist, and constricted narrative. Bob Slocum is no Yossarian – he worries about whether he will get the chance to deliver a three-minute speech at his company’s annual convention, luxuriates in sexual fantasies that he does not act upon, and broods upon a family that affords him no satisfaction. Most of all, Slocum searches for an event – the “something happened” of the title – that will illuminate his life. Whether sifting through his past or anticipating his future, he finds only portents of catastrophe: “something is wrong … Something bad is going to happen” (Heller 1974: 230). Caught between the traumas of the forgotten and the forecast, Slocum seeks explanations that he can never allow himself to find. After the antics of Catch-22, many readers agreed with Pearl K. Bell that Something Happened constituted “Heller’s Trial by Tedium” (1974). Probably inevitably, Catch-22 became the measuring rod by which Something Happened and the subsequent novels were judged. In a brilliant New York Times review, Heller’s friend, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, proposes a counterview to such critical assessments. For Vonnegut, the novel constitutes a myth or explanatory fiction for post-World War II America, or, as he puts it, “an epitaph for our era in the shorthand of history” (Vonnegut: 134). According to Vonnegut, this myth exposes the vulnerability and unhappiness of the families of World War II veterans. Alienated by their lives in corporate America, these veterans’ attempts to secure good jobs for themselves and secure happy lives for their families turn out to be self-defeating. The seminal lines of the novel illustrate Vonnegut’s contention: In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these hundred and twenty people is afraid … (Heller 1974: 13)
The Catch-22 of Something Happened is the cast of Slocum’s own mind. Slocum lards the novel with similar schemas and organizational charts – all of which enmesh him in a corporate ethos as deadly and inevitable as the Catch-22 of Heller’s first novel. In a deadly demonstration of this cast of mind, Heller makes his protagonist responsible for the wrenching death that concludes Something Happened, that of
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Slocum’s beloved son. The son has been struck by a car, and, in his frantic efforts to comfort his son, Slocum hugs him too tightly and accidentally suffocates him. Just as in Catch-22, Heller uses variations on his own frightening dream of the stranger as the narrative conduit to the death itself. The penultimate chapter, “My boy has stopped talking to me,” opens with alternative versions of the dream: the first in which the son dreams of being frightened and locked out of his parents’ room, and the second in which Slocum dreams of being locked out of his son’s room. As if reacting to the anxieties embodied in each dream, Slocum hugs and the son – as so often in Heller’s fiction – dies. But, unlike Yossarian, Slocum cannot re-examine the event, cannot decipher the truth of mortality it contains, and does want its story told. “Don’t tell my wife,” the chapter concludes, and the final one begins “Nobody knows what I’ve done.” Over the next fourteen years, Heller published three more novels – Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984), Picture This (1988) – and, together with his friend Speed Vogel, No Laughing Matter (1986), an account of his experience with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare and sometimes fatal form of paralysis. The pace of new material did little to satisfy Heller’s fans or critics, and with each novel the critical assessments became harsher and more dismissive. Over this period, the circumstances of Heller’s life changed dramatically. He gave up his job and decided to earn his living entirely by his writing (1975); he became estranged from his wife of thirty-six years (1981) and eventually divorced her (1984); he contracted Guillain-Barré and spent months in hospital (1981–2); and he fell in love with his nurse, Valerie Humphries, whom he later married (1987). Although neither Good as Gold nor God Knows is directly autobiographical, each reflects these changes and their accompanying tumult. Good as Gold recounts its protagonist Bruce Gold’s efforts to write a book on the American Jewish experience – a considerable challenge since he says that he does not “know what it is” (Heller 1979: 11). The novel divides into two parts, with half set in the Washington political world and the other half set in New York with Gold’s family and friends. The Washington half can be summarized in an epigraph that Heller takes from Bernard Malamud: “If you ever forget you are a Jew, a gentile will remind you.” The assorted Washington characters – Ralph Newsome, Andrea Conover, Pugh Biddle Conover, Harris Rosenblatt, the Governor – do lots of reminding, as Gold tries to secure a high government post for himself, ideally Secretary of State. In the other half of the novel, Gold, who wants to disavow his family, must be educated to its ways and values. Similarly, he must come to reflect upon and acknowledge his identity as a Jew. Just like the Washington scenes, the family ones expose Gold to his own pretensions and afford Heller the opportunity to construct the comic set-pieces that he so enjoyed writing. Again and again, Gold finds himself the butt of family jokes when he responds to his older brother Sid’s absurdities or his father’s insults. Taking himself and his aspirations too seriously, he cannot laugh at Sid’s outrageous propositions, such as what would happen to the water if the world were turned upside down. Like many of his comic predecessors, Gold must be taught to laugh by being exposed to his own comically rich and embarrassing foibles.
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Eventually, Sid’s unexpected death serves as the occasion to assess the significance of his own life and as the prompt for him to begin writing his book on the Jewish experience. Heller designs the novel so that the reader realizes Good as Gold is the book that Gold will write. In dramatizing the authorial process in this way, Heller wants his readers to attend to the way in which he constructs the novel. The most overt authorial intrusion occurs in Chapter VII, when the narrator complains about the difficulties his professor protagonist is causing him: “There was not much else to be done with him. I was putting him into bed a lot with Andrea and keeping his wife and children conveniently in the background” (p. 308). As the passage continues, the narrator summarizes the novel’s remaining action and provides a commentary about how Joseph Heller himself wrote about the Jewish experience. God Knows also displays Heller’s authorial self-consciousness. His narrator hero King David knows the biblical account of his life and assumes the reader does as well: “I don’t like to boast … but I honestly think I’ve got the best story in the Bible. Where’s the competition? Job? Forget him. Genesis? The cosmology is for kids …” (Heller 1984: 5). Although the plot closely tracks the David story, the novel wages Heller’s continuing war with mortality. The necessary ingredients for this installment were contained in the Bible, the deaths of David’s infant son by Bathsheba and of his rebellious son Absalom. Equally important, the Bible provided Heller with a portrait of an aged David, fully aware that his life is drawing to an end and that much that he has most deeply cared for has been lost. The author, who contracted Guillain-Barré halfway through writing the novel, had just the material for a novel with the ambitions of Catch-22 and Something Happened. As biblical character and compositional subject, David may be able to transcend death, but as purported author of God Knows, he cannot, especially when he is already dying of old age. The proximity of death renders his story, his text, as “a book of fate,” one in which the life spirit drains from him as inevitably as it has from Snowden. David’s cry – “I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life” (p. 9) – is more piercing than the “I’m cold” that the dying Snowden utters, but its meaning is the same: he is dying. His chill informs every page of the novel, and even the virgin Abishag, who is sent to his bed to warm and comfort him, cannot help. The act of authorship itself expends his life energy, occasions regrets and dissatisfactions, and propels him toward his death. In the dream vision ending, David throws a javelin at his youthful self. After Good as Gold and God Knows, Picture This marks a change of course. Less personal, the novel reads like a short course in western civilization. Particulars multiply as the narrator continually wanders from his ostensible subject, Rembrandt painting his masterpiece, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. But wherever the narrative goes, be it Periclean Athens or present-day America, the same story is told: human beings are talented self-deceivers who mythologize their history in order to protect themselves from painful truths. For Heller, the story of Cold War America had already occurred in ancient Greece and Rembrandt’s Holland. In each
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of these places, economic wealth and power bred tyranny, which masked itself as democracy and produced a constant state of war or imminent war. “Peace on earth,” the narrator observes, “would mean the end of civilization as we know it” (Heller 1988: 100). The darkening vision of Picture This necessitates a change in Heller’s narrative techniques. In different ways, each of his previous novels is about possibility. In each, he resists necessity, whether it is exemplified in the paradoxical logic of Catch-22 or by David’s mortality. There is always a Sweden in his novels, if only one constructed out of memory and desire. Not in Picture This. The novel confines the individual in western history, in much the same way that Oedipus is confined by his destiny. It is not that the characters lack choices, nor even that they are without hopes. Rather, like Oedipus, they find that their free choices lead them back into stories that have already been told and toward truths that they have consistently resisted. Unlike Oedipus, however, the characters of Picture This do not achieve knowledge of themselves and their situation, for as the narrator observes in the concluding chapter, “Mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow” (p. 350). Closing Time constitutes a summing up, Heller’s reflection upon Catch-22, and, to a lesser extent, his entire career. He confirms the dark thematic vision of Picture This. Drawing upon the Coney Island neighborhood in which he grew up and the experience of his friends, Heller argues that American capitalism transforms childhood delight into middle-aged malaise and converts vital urban neighborhoods into blighted cityscape. Yet, against a future that he conceives in apocalyptic terms, Heller holds out the power of the comic spirit, a spirit figured by the paunchy, white-haired, worldly worn, ethically compromised Yossarian. Changed as well as aged, he is no longer an anti-hero, but only a man, albeit one blessed with the hope that a comic vision affords. At novel’s end as nuclear missiles fly, Yossarian walks into the night in search of the woman he loves. Closing Time is also scathing satire depicting a country that has become the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower forecast and exposing what, to his mind, is the life-denying logic of capitalism. In this world, Milo Minderbinder returns and prospers, marketing his Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive SecondStrike Offensive Attack Bomber while knowing that it can fulfill none of its claims; the President of the United States (or the Little Prick as he likes to be called) flourishes politically by spending all his time playing video games; and another character, Harold Strangelove, succeeds because he has the best business card (“Second Influence Bought and Sold [also] Bombast on Demand”). In Heller’s joke, these characters are one-dimensional because they want to be one-dimensional. His point – the same one he made in Good as Gold – is that this outlook enables their political and economic power and prestige. If they were intelligent, humane, and thoughtful, they would fail. The nuclear attack that Yossarian walks into begins because the President cannot differentiate the country’s war-making machinery from the video games to which he is addicted.
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Closing Time and, subsequently, his memoir Now and Then reveal Joseph Heller as a preservationist, afraid that much that he values will be lost with the passing of the World War II generation. The novel’s three first-person narrators – Sammy Singer (endowed by Heller with aspects of his own personality and his own experiences), Lew Rabinowitz, and his wife Claire (based upon Heller’s friends Lew and Claire Berkman) – intersperse details from the Coney Island of Heller’s youth. Roller coasters such as the Thunderbolt and Cyclone, hotdogs, and the brass rings on the carousels are reconstituted as they exist in memory. Using letters that Lew Berkman wrote Claire, Heller recreates Lew’s wartime memories in Rabinowitz, and similarly recounts Berkman’s actual experience with Hodgkin’s disease. The tone of all three narrators is elegiac. Knee-action wheels, the two-cent bottle return, nickel hot dogs at Rosenberg’s delicatessen, The Bell Telephone Hour – all gone and with them the communal values and shared assumptions whose passing the novel commemorates and laments. Joseph Heller died on December 13, 1999, before Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man (2000) and its harsh reviews appeared. An otherwise forgettable novel, Portrait does shed light on the anxiety that shaped Heller’s career after the publication of Catch-22. The novel consists of a series of abortive openings to possible novels that aging novelist Eugene Pota tries to write, alternating with his efforts to find a subject that can provide a suitable capstone to his career. Like his creator, Pota is haunted by the reputation of his first landmark novel. “The singular fact about the creation of fiction,” writes Pota, speaking for Heller, “is that it does turn more, not less, difficult with seasoning and accomplishment” (Heller 2000: 20–1). Expecting to fail, Pota explains that he writes because he cannot think of another way to spend his time and quotes Beckett’s The Unnameable: “I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” (p. 21). And so did Heller himself over the thirty-eight years after the publication of Catch22, even while being asked again and again when he would write another novel as great. Sometimes, he would reply to such questions, “Who has?” Indeed. Catch-22 – a fixture on best novel lists, a lens on post-World War II America, and a great comic feast – will sustain and support Joseph Heller’s reputation as a major novelist for years to come.
References and Further Reading Bell, Pearl K. (1974). “Heller’s Trial by Tedium,” New Leader, October 28: 17–18. Bruccoli, Matthew J. and Bucker, Park (2002). Joseph Heller: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Craig, David M. (1997). Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Heller, Joseph (1961). Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Heller, Joseph (1968). We Bombed in New Haven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Heller, Joseph (1973). “On Translating Catch-22 into a Movie,” in A “Catch-22” Casebook, eds. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald. New York: Crowell. Heller, Joseph (1974). Something Happened. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Heller, Joseph (1979). Good as Gold. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Joseph Heller Heller, Joseph (1984). God Knows. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Heller, Joseph (1988). Picture This. New York: G. P. Putnam. Heller, Joseph (1994). Closing Time. New York: Simon and Schuster. Heller, Joseph (1998). Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Heller, Joseph (2000). The Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. New York: Simon and Schuster. Heller, Joseph, with Vogel, Speed (1986). No Laughing Matter. New York: G. P. Putnam. Merrill, Robert (1987). Joseph Heller. Boston: Twayne. Nagel, James, ed. (1984). Critical Essays on Joseph Heller. Boston: G. K. Hall.
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Pinsker, Sanford (2000). Understanding Joseph Heller. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Ruderman, Judith (1991). Joseph Heller. New York: Continuum. Seed, David (1989). The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. London: Macmillan. Sorkin, Adam, ed. (1993). Conversations with Joseph Heller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Vonnegut, Kurt (1981). Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. New York: Delacorte. Woodson, Jon (2001). A Study of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: Going around Twice. New York: Peter Lang.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jerome Klinkowitz
“I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too,” Kurt Vonnegut has admitted, “when I sound like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am” (Vonnegut 1981: 79). Such simplicity, especially in this plainly spoken manner, typifies the nature of his appeal. By 1981, when he published this statement in his essay collection, Palm Sunday, Vonnegut was established as a major novelist of his times. And those times were not distinguished for their simplicity or plain-spokenness. The postmodern aesthetic, based as it was on the deconstruction of traditional assumptions of order, could be a troubling one. And postmodern novels themselves had reveled in a style of experiment that not only challenged but often outraged treasured conventions. Slaughterhouse-Five, the author’s breakthrough novel in 1969, had shattered all the comfortably accepted notions of chronology, coherence, and suspension of disbelief that characterized fictive form for over a century – and had done so as part of a literary movement that seemed the height of sophistication. During this period, Vonnegut himself was accepted as a guru to disaffected youth, whose new generation was overturning social and political conventions. The reader trusts Vonnegut’s admission because of its candor, and the author trusts himself because of his honesty about who he is. For a world in which so many other presumed certainties had been overturned, Vonnegut’s stance was reassuring. Vonnegut was proud of his German American heritage, and published his first nine books with the “Junior” as part of his name. As a socially and culturally prominent family, the Vonneguts continued a lifestyle brought to Indiana by their freethinking German forebears. As the author likes to recall, his father designed an elegant home in which prominent people were entertained as guests and where the arts were an important part of their lives. His family’s social and economic status, however, took a turn for the worse with the onset of the Great Depression, although this was a time of cultural adventure for the young Vonnegut, who sought solace in the Laurel and Hardy movies at the 5-cent cinema or a funny program on the radio; in other words, from popular culture rather than from the higher arts. A further consequence of the
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Great Depression was that Kurt’s father became disenchanted with the arts and so Kurt, Jr. was sent to Cornell University for training as a biochemist. Here would be the author’s grounding that later caused him to be mislabeled as a science fiction writer. At the same time, however, he was enjoying the extracurricular activity of writing for, and helping edit, the student newspaper, an experience that had a more profound influence on the sometimes breezy, yet always succinctly entertaining, style of his fiction. Service as an infantryman in World War II intervened, during which he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, interned as a prisoner of war, and experienced the bombing of Dresden, Germany, on the night of February 13, 1945. After the war, he turned to journalism for a part-time living and to anthropology rather than hard science for study, pursuing (but not completing) a master’s degree at the University of Chicago while working as a pool reporter for the City News Bureau. He took employment as a publicist for the General Electric Corporation’s Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where his brother Bernard was already at work on the principle of seeding clouds with silver iodide to produce rain. Here Kurt spent days writing promotional copy and weekends working on short stories for the popular family magazines of the time, Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. These stories, collected in various combinations as Canary in a Cathouse (1961), Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), and Bagombo Snuff Box (1999), were written for an entirely different market from that of serious, novel-length fiction. But Vonnegut was pursuing the latter as well, to the point that, when Player Piano (1952) drew toward completion, he decided that a fiction writer’s income could support him, and he left Schenectady for Cape Cod. Although it had been the artistic ambience of Provincetown that had drawn him to the Cape, he quickly learned that the family-friendly environment of West Barnstable was a better place for his family. He set up shop in cozy Massachusetts as a short-story salesman, working at his trade like any other middle-class person. His daily adventures were typical: raising a family (which by 1957 totaled six children, after adopting three nephews who had been orphaned), buying and remodeling a house, and sharing a tight-knit, Eisenhower-era community existence. Player Piano had received some positive reviews and sold most of its small first printing, but did not make the impact required to launch a serious novelist’s career. As a dystopian satire of scientific progress, in which a disaffected manager, Dr. Paul Proteus, allies himself with a Luddite-style revolt led by a minister, Player Piano alienated the scientifically inclined audience most likely to read it. Yet times were threatening to change, and the first sign of this was that the great family magazines that had thrived on a huge weekly readership for over half a century were seeing their hold on the market weaken and then almost completely disappear. The culprit was television. As the magazines shrunk, fiction was the first casualty. Had Vonnegut wished to remain in the medium, he would have had to try writing television dramas (which he did for a brief time) or taking a job in advertising (which for part of one lean year provided income). Luckily, these changing times provided a new form for
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fiction writing: paperback originals. Whereas hardcover successes had been appearing in low-cost, soft-cover editions since the 1930s, only as the 1950s turned into the 1960s did a market for original novels in this format emerge. Popular subgenres were especially saleable, from science fiction and spy thrillers to rehearsals of such familiar themes as mass destruction (from world war) and changes of character (such as from rags to riches). Vonnegut made the transition thanks to a chance meeting with a paperback editor from the major mass-market house, Dell, who immediately offered him an advance on The Sirens of Titan (1959). As a professional, Kurt Vonnegut could easily fulfill the formal requirements for any style of popular novel: The Sirens of Titan did this for science fiction, Mother Night (1962) for espionage, Cat’s Cradle (1963) for apocalypse from the military use of science, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) for the reversal of economic roles. The first two appeared as paperback originals, while the last two were contracted as such but appeared as hardcovers when editorial commitments changed. None made him famous, but all were reprinted once he was, a clear indication that once again Vonnegut was writing ahead of his times. In each case, the subgeneric format is evident, but the author’s real interest lies elsewhere. For The Sirens of Titan, that interest lay once more in anthropological comparativism, this time couched in sardonic, sometimes bitter humor. The theme is human destiny, the action centered on an arranged invasion of Earth (by kidnapped Post characters presented as Martians) that prompts questions about whether destiny is human or divine. The novel’s answer is that it is neither, but rather a contrivance of intergalactic travelers for the most mundane purpose. The situation is this: a flying saucer pilot from distant Tralfamadore has been dispatched with a message to carry across the universe, but when his craft breaks down and is marooned on a moon of Saturn (the “Titan” of this novel’s title) he can send messages home but not receive them except through notations made on planet Earth, which he can observe through a telescope. Already the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s style have become set as it would begin appealing to readers of the 1960s and afterwards: short paragraphs, often just one sentence long, more typical of journalism than of serious fiction; the comparative natures of time and perspective, common to anthropology but a confusing idea to a culture still awaiting the new orientation of philosophic deconstruction; the irony that an advanced civilization from outer space would communicate in the same banalities as Earthlings; and, finally, the grim humor that so many centuries of human endeavor would have found their meaning in such minor purpose (the message that the Tralfamadorian conveys is no secret power or key to knowledge, but rather the simple sentiment, “Greetings”). By 1969, when Kurt Vonnegut would become one of the most famous writers of the new, rebellious times, such sentiments would seem appropriate. In 1959, however, they remained well ahead of cultural development, and so The Sirens of Titan was consigned to the market of passing entertainments. While not an immediate, largescale success, The Sirens of Titan did set Vonnegut’s course for the next decade. As the 1950s were his period of short-story writing for family magazines, the 1960s had him
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writing novels for the popular market, where, just as for Collier’s and the Post, an author’s identity was less important than a reputation for producing an acceptable product. It was Vonnegut’s great fortune, and a tribute to his grounding in science, anthropology, and journalism, that he was able to do such work in a manner that allowed him to develop as the important novelist he wanted to be. His experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden was a story he had wanted to tell since being repatriated, and what he had observed at the Research Laboratory and in the corporate structure of General Electric had given him added perspective on the nature of life, something as a talented writer he wished to address. What he knew about life so far filled the pages of Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and positioned him for his breakthrough to a serious reputation at the decade’s end with Slaughterhouse-Five. Mother Night lets a double-agent spy tell his story about Nazi Germany and postwar Israeli politics. The account exploits the irony of absurd displacements: of Nazi leaders not being monsters but everyday characters, Hitler as a fan of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and President Roosevelt as an aficionado of the spy’s virulently anti-Semitic propaganda broadcasts, which are, in fact, coded messages of German secrets. The agent himself, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., is the first of Vonnegut’s complex protagonists who find themselves pulled in so many contradictory directions that one wonders how a self can survive. His conclusion is a simple one: we are what we pretend to be, and hence should be very careful about the terms of that pretence. Cat’s Cradle risks even graver humor, encompassing not just the Holocaust and the widespread destruction of World War II, but the actual end of the world, a product of irresponsible scientific effort parading as unaffected innocence. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater also ends with an apocalypse – an economic one, in which the evil of concentrated wealth is dissipated so as to be harmless, but not before the supposedly transformative power of money is shown to be as illusory as the most hopeless fantasies of utopian science fiction writers. Following the publication of God Bless You. Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut’s career took several important turns. With his short-story markets now defunct and small advances for novels coming only at two-year intervals, he was obliged to find new supplements to his income. One lay in the writing of book reviews and feature essays, the other in university teaching. The period 1965–7 is notable for his success in both regards. For The New York Times Book Review, Life, Esquire, and other outlets, he began writing an especially engaging version of nonfiction prose that capitalized on his imaginative talents – imaginative enough that one of these pieces, a surprisingly witty review of the Random House Dictionary (collected in 1968 as part of Welcome to the Monkey House), was noticed by publisher Seymour Lawrence, who signed the author to a book contract for new work and the reprinting of his earlier novels and story collection. This interest from a major publisher of serious fiction coincided with Vonnegut’s two-year instructorship at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Here, for the first time, he was working in the company of other literary artists, helping bright students perfect their own fiction. In this context of self-conscious experiment,
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Vonnegut was encouraged to stretch the boundaries of convention even farther to produce not just his first novel for Seymour Lawrence, but his first work that would have large commercial and critical success. Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969 as opposition to the Vietnam War grew and the countercultural revolution approached its peak, was perfectly in tune with its times. The plot is ostensibly about World War II and the bombing of Dresden, which protagonist Billy Pilgrim experiences, but not as did Vonnegut; for Billy, the night of the firestorm itself remains a blank. But the novel’s more interesting action is set in the present time of 1968, a time in which Billy not only tries to understand past events in his life, but in which Kurt Vonnegut constructs this story as its author. Because it is 1968 and not the 1940s, World War II is viewed from a decidedly pacifist perspective. And because Vonnegut shows himself self-consciously writing the novel, there is no question of suspending disbelief, which would be hard to do anyway given the narrative’s fragmented nature. There is no conventional chronology here, nor any comfortable unities of space and action. In a psychological sense, scenes jump all over in tune with what might be considered Billy’s random attention. For science fiction advocates, Vonnegut calls the technique “time travelling,” in which Tralfamadorians (resurrected from The Sirens of Titan) teach Billy their own fluid and flexible nature of existing, whereby time is a stream to be entered and exited at various places. But when a Tralfamadorian tells Billy how this distant civilization shapes its novels, readers are given a structural analysis of the Kurt Vonnegut novel they are reading: Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out – in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams. “Exactly,” said the voice. “They are telegrams?” “There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at one time, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time. (Vonnegut 1969: 76)
Given physical limitations, no novel on Earth can be read this way. But by fragmenting his narrative in a way that allows no steady compilation of meaning, Vonnegut cultures a style of appreciation that holds understanding in suspension until the end, until the collage of elements can have its full effect and the novel can be grasped altogether. Like other American postmodernists of the time, including Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and Ronald Sukenick, Vonnegut had come to distrust the conventions of fiction that suggest the world is an orderly, consecutive affair. Indeed, he goes a step farther than other postmodernists in ascribing immediate social damage to such conventional fiction, which, in the case of previous war novels, had suggested
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that such conflict was heroic, rewarding, and grand. Slaughterhouse-Five would have none of that, and its appearance at the zenith of opposition to the Vietnam War and popular interest in postmodern fiction guaranteed it a place on best-seller lists and in critical canons. With this success, Seymour Lawrence reissued Vonnegut’s earlier work in Delacorte hardcover and Dell paperback editions, providing material for both a growing readership and a serious critical industry. The author himself proceeded with his writing, putting out a novel every two or three years, all of them best-sellers, plus a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) and five collections of essays: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974), Palm Sunday (1981), Fates Worse than Death (1991), God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999), and A Man without a Country (2005). The essays are particularly important. Written as they are in the style of the New Journalism (made famous by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and others, who use fictive techniques to flesh out and imaginatively personalize their reportage), they complement the way in which Vonnegut had begun personalizing his fiction by placing himself at the head of (if not always within) its action. Breakfast of Champions (1973) shows evidence of a writer aware of his audience, and signals a development from metaphor to discourse that has characterized the author’s work ever since. There are elements of his own background in the novel’s two main characters, the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout (an image of the shabby failure Vonnegut had feared he himself might become), and the automobile dealer Dwayne Hoover (making a career of a sideline Vonnegut had tried in desperation decades before when stories were not selling). Trout, expanded from his appearances in the author’s two previous novels, travels to Hoover’s city in the Midwest to be honored at a literary festival, something he considers ironic because his work has always been totally neglected. Hoover, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, reads one of Trout’s fictive narratives as a factual imperative addressed personally to him. The result, of course, is mayhem, but one that lets Trout expound upon the sometimes pathological nature of ideas, a notion that wins him a Nobel Prize – not in literature but in medicine. With Slapstick (1976), Vonnegut begins a series of novels, not so much centered on, as generated by social or political topics. Like most postmodern writers, his fiction is never “about” something, but seeks to be that something itself, an ideal Samuel Beckett found being approached in the very late work of James Joyce. Here Vonnegut presents the notion of artificially extended families as a more serviceable and effective manner of social welfare, the key to surviving in a not-too-distant world where governmental order has collapsed. Jailbird (1979) turns back to the past and present, in which Walter Starbuck, once a hopeful advocate of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal socioeconomic program, gets haplessly involved with the corruptions of President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which forces him to rethink his basis of human values. Deadeye Dick (1982) is driven by the effects of eurocentric heritage on American culture, to deleterious effect. Protagonist Rudy Waltz’s life is almost ruined by such treasures, which in his own hands become inadvertently lethal;
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only his own art, practiced in distinction to his parents’ influence, saves him. Galápagos (1985) begins with an international catastrophe as imminent as tomorrow, but reaches for its central action one million years into the future where, not just to survive but to live more happily, human beings have devolved into harmless beasts incapable of mischief. Bluebeard (1987) turns to aesthetics for its motivating force, as the abstract Expressionist painter Rabo Karabekian (borrowed from Breakfast of Champions, where his paintings had celebrated the awareness that distinguishes animate from inanimate) learns how the imaginative life of his action painting can embrace the representational without being subsumed by it. Hocus Pocus (1990) completes the author’s steady two decades of production as a famous writer by having a veteran of the Vietnam War, Eugene Debs Hartke, describe an America just eleven years in the future (the start of the third millennium, much anticipated throughout the 1990s). Historically fragmented, as was Karabekian’s in Bluebeard, Hartke’s memoir is, in similar manner, less of a surface upon which to represent than an arena within which to act. This formulation, first used as a critical explanation for the success of abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other first-generation abstract Expressionists of the 1940s, characterizes Vonnegut’s method in these last six novels as well. Social welfare, Watergate corruption, human devolution, and the rest are not so much subjects to be portrayed as they are occasions for the author to play with spatial juxtapositions of diverse material, inviting not just new perspectives but the reader’s participation in creating narrative sense. Timequake (1997) enhances this method by featuring it, not just as the writer’s own activity, but as the essence of the work itself. Not a novel per se but rather the autobiography of a novel, Timequake reprises its author’s struggle with completing a draft of it, being dissatisfied, and then examining the process of its failure as a way of bringing a new work into existence. The narrative’s subject parallels Vonnegut’s own, that of events from the previous ten years repeating themselves. This “timequake” of quasi-historical events coincides with the time the author has taken to write and then rehearse his displeasure with it. This way, Vonnegut can be both representational and self-consciously artistic, as his characters at one and the same time act credibly yet within the dictates of a script that must repeat itself. Most successfully, Kurt Vonnegut is able to be present as part of the action, exhibiting his personality in all its vernacular appeal as he struggles to reshape his work (already written once) as his characters work their way through ten years of their lives as already lived. What is different the second time around? Self-awareness, the very quality Rabo Karabekian’s art had celebrated as the essence of life. In 2005, Kurt Vonnegut made a surprising return to the best-seller lists with a work attracting more attention than anything he had written since Slaughterhouse-Five. As a collection of essays, A Man without a Country let him speak freely and directly. Yet this same personal candor had distinguished his fiction from the start, and since Slaughterhouse-Five had been an important element in each of his novels. The essays themselves are exceptionally personal, benefiting from the same stylistic manner the
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author had used to make his fiction so readable: short sentences, sometimes just one word long; short paragraphs, often of just a single sentence each; a self-reflective posture, in which the author responded to complexity by comparing it to his own befuddlement with a simpler issue, then finding a solution that works for both; and, above all, writing with a voice that readers feel they can trust. Yes, he is close to despair over how his country is being led, even more so than during the darkest days of opposition to the Vietnam War so many years before. The fact that he is a proud veteran himself (of World War II) makes him feel even worse for the soldiers facing duty in Iraq. “They are being treated, as I never was,” Vonnegut notes, “like toys a rich kid got for Christmas” (Vonnegut 2005: 72). This voice and the attitude behind it place Vonnegut in the literary tradition of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, and even more so in the company of such great public spokespersons as President Abraham Lincoln and humorist Will Rogers. His importance as a novelist has been to match this familiar voice with a similar candor taken in regard to fictive structure, in which any conventions that detract from the essential honesty of the project at hand are avoided as counterproductive. As a result, Kurt Vonnegut has become the great public novelist of his times. References and Further Reading Allen, William Rodney, ed. (1988). Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2001). Kurt Vonnegut: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Boon, Kevin A. (1997). Chaos Theory and the Interpretation of Literary Texts: The Case of Kurt Vonnegut. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen. Boon, Kevin A., ed. (2001). A Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Davis, Todd F. (2006). Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Klinkowitz, Jerome (1990). Slaughterhouse-Five. Boston: Twayne. Klinkowitz, Jerome (1998). Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Klinkowitz, Jerome (2004). The Vonnegut Effect. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Somer, John, eds. (1973). The Vonnegut Statement. New York: Delacorte. Leeds, Marc (1995). The Vonnegut Encyclopedia. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood.
Marvin, Thomas S. (2002). Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Merrill, Robert, ed. (1990). Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Boston: G. K. Hall. Mustazza, Leonard, ed. (1994). The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Pieratt, Asa B., Huffman-Klinkowitz, Julie, and Klinkowitz, Jerome (1987). Kurt Vonnegut: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Hamden, C.T.: Shoestring. Reed, Peter J. (1997). The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Reed, Peter J., and Leeds, Marc, eds. (1996). The Vonnegut Chronicles. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Vonnegut, Kurt (1959). The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell. Vonnegut, Kurt (1963). Cat’s Cradle. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Vonnegut, Kurt (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, Kurt (1981). Palm Sunday. New York: Delacorte. Vonnegut, Kurt (2005). A Man without a Country. New York: Seven Stories.
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Thomas Pynchon Ian Copestake
Enough is now known of Thomas Pynchon’s biography, and even his ancestry, to make a conventional summary of his life possible. Despite the relevance of such a biography, its availability obscures Pynchon’s own unique attitude to self-promotion, whereby, as the critic Tony Tanner noted, “no contemporary writer has achieved such fame and such anonymity at the same time” (Tanner: 12). To this day, he has never given an interview, and the only photograph of the author that has ever been made public shows him as a teenager. Reflective perhaps of nothing more than his own natural shyness and modesty (even his entry in the freshman register at Cornell University contains a blank space rather than a photograph), he has remained true to his desire to stay out of the public gaze despite having by 1973 published three novels – V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) – that confirmed his standing as one of the greatest and most challenging innovators in twentieth-century American fiction. Whereas Pynchon’s fiction brings the lives of the forgotten and the discarded into the foreground, the opposite impulse has dictated his attitude to the details of his own life. Born on May 8, 1937, in Long Island, New York, Pynchon’s highschool career was crowned in 1953 with an award for the highest average marks in the study of English. Despite his strength in this area, it was science that attracted him after he won a scholarship to attend Cornell University, and he enrolled in the Division of Engineering Physics. He interrupted his studies to join the navy, and when he returned to college in the autumn of 1957 he changed the focus of his degree, transferring to the College of Arts and Sciences and taking his degree in English. He continued to excel at this subject, but declined offers to take up graduate studies. During his period at Cornell, he joined the editorial staff of the university’s literary magazine, The Cornell Writer, and published his first short story there, “The Small Rain,” a month prior to his graduation in June 1959. Between 1959 and 1964, he published five more short stories in a variety of magazines, and
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the majority of these were later published together in Slow Learner: Early Stories (1984). After graduating, he lived in New York, but later took a job as an assistant technical writer for the Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington, until 1962. He then lived for a period in California and Mexico before the publication in 1963 of his first novel, V. One unintended by-product of the author’s anonymity and the international success of his writing is his amassing of a cult following among readers who crave information about him and revel in the rumor and counter-rumor which the paucity of detail generates. What also binds Pynchon to his readership is the perceived parallel between his non-public persona and the questioning of the nature or possibility of autonomy that looms large in his fiction. Pynchon is often seen to be a writer who speaks for those who have been ignored by official histories, who have opted out of society, or who have been disenfranchised by modern capitalist society. The conflict and complicity between the individual and the forces that create mass devastation is a topic of fascination for Pynchon. The main characters of his novels often find themselves part of a plot or scheme revealed by a series of connections or coincidences that combine to suggest the presence of controlling powers beneath the surface of everyday reality that can no longer be ignored. Pynchon’s first novel, V., opens on Christmas Eve, 1955, and introduces us to Benny Profane who, since his discharge from the navy, has been working as a roadlaborer or just “traveling, up and down the east coast like a yo-yo” (Pynchon 1995: 10). The novel initially follows Benny’s travails as he comically struggles against his own aimlessness and his feeling that he is at odds with the entire inanimate world. His clumsiness, however, results in accidental meetings with girls such as Rachel Owlglass, and through his reminiscences about her and her fetishistic love for her car, we meet her friends and members of the Whole Sick Crew. The main activity of this loosely connected group of aspiring artists and dropouts is to arrange parties at which they talk, argue, and fall out rather than create any meaningful art. Benny’s yo-yo existence along the periphery of this group is brought briefly to a halt in New York after he spends a day “shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street” (Pynchon 1995: 37). He awakes to be told of a job working in the sewers hunting alligators that have survived being flushed down toilets having first been bought as babies from Macy’s department store. Benny’s injection of purpose into his own life, however bizarre and short-lived, is nothing in comparison with that which drives the life of one of the guests of the Whole Sick Crew, Herbert Stencil, whose story we begin to learn, inevitably, at a party. As Herbert’s story unfolds, the focus of the novel gradually shifts away from the purposelessness embodied by Profane as attention is given through the figure of Stencil, and the layers of historical narratives that emanate from his own obsession, to a world which is all too full of meaning. Stencil explains that references in his late father’s private logbooks to a figure named only as “V.” provided him not only with an insight into his father’s role as a government agent in the employment of the British Empire, but provided a means out of his own aimlessness:
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His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to, if not vitality, then at least activity. Work, the chase – for it was V. he hunted, – far from being a means to glorify God and one’s own godliness (as the Puritans believe) was for Stencil grim, joyless; a conscious acceptance of the unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was there to track down. (Pynchon 1995: 55)
The sense of excessive importance attached to every connection he subsequently makes to V. is parodied by Stencil’s own act of referring to himself in the third person. The novel moves without much warning between stories relating to Profane’s meanderings, or that of his circle of friends, and Stencil’s historical imaginings of his father’s pursuit of V., which are seen through the eyes of a host of vividly realized characters and are set in locations such as Alexandria in Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century. These distinct narratives seem at times to merge, as when Profane’s experience hunting an alligator in the sewer leads him into a district of New York known as Fairing’s Parish. Profane relates the fantastical stories he has heard concerning the legend of Father Fairing and his Sainthood among the rats of his Parish as he took the work of conversion below street level and into the sewers. The legend tells of one rat, Veronica, with whom the Father falls in love and to whom he also refers in his journal as V. Near the end of the novel, when Stencil’s pursuit of his historical V. has led him and Profane all the way to Valletta in Malta, Fairing’s story resurfaces as he is shown to have lived in Malta before leaving for America. Stencil is left to reflect that “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic” (Pynchon 1995: 449). Here Pynchon, as he does in his next novel, frustrates the expectation of revelation. The stories from which V. is constructed vary widely in tone, employing farcical comedy as readily as extended sequences of chilling ennui. But the myriad styles and tones give a variety of expression to the novel’s central concerns as, again and again, the issue surfaces of the fate of the animate, and the human, in a world overrun by the inanimate. In the telling of Kurt Mondaugen’s story in particular, Pynchon’s novel considers nothing less than the nature of what it is to be human, as man constantly creates the inanimate and renders the human world dead through conflict. The dynamics of this misplaced energy are visible in the success story of the company Yoyodyne Inc. Stencil hears how the company moved from the manufacture of seemingly innocent animate objects, namely children’s toy gyroscopes, to the manufacture of gyrocompasses for use within missile guidance systems. Stencil then meets and listens to Kurt Mondaugen, a company engineer who had worked on the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets. As he relates his code-breaking activities between the wars in a German colony of South West Africa, his story reveals how the brutal realities he witnessed there wiped away all pretensions of belief in a “humanized history endowed with ‘reason’” (Pynchon 1995: 306), to the extent that Mondaugen is even witness to a movement in his own heart of acceptance of the inhumanity that is all around him. Later, in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), these rockets become central to Pynchon’s focus on the intersection of technology with the progressive annihilation of human agency. In V., the polarized narratives and worldviews of Profane and Stencil, one aimless,
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wandering, and random, the other an obsessive pursuer of leads and possible patterns, are human perspectives not yet overwhelmed by the connections and historical conspiracies they uncover. However, Pynchon’s next novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), builds on the fact that in V. the pursuit of meaning does not result in answers or revelations, but underlines the survival of a human yearning to confront the emptiness that remains. Pynchon’s 1966 novel is a short but dense book packed with allusions to the myriad explanations and revelations that occur as Oedipa Maas, a Californian housewife, takes on the task of executing the will of a former lover, Pierce Inverarity. She uncovers links between Pierce and the previously mentioned aerospace company, Yoyodyne Inc., which, in turn, bring her into contact with an underground communications network called the Tristero. The history of this network reveals it to have been an unofficial, secret postal service that has been in existence since the founding of the U.S. itself. The novel takes the form of a quest narrative as Oedipa investigates the workings of this organization and the alternative values its subversive existence seems to represent for her. As her obsession grows, the signs that point her to the existence of the Tristero turn the city around her into “hieroglyphic streets” (Pynchon 1979: 125), and she is unable to determine whether what she has uncovered is something to be feared or sought after or, indeed, if it exists at all: For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. (Pynchon 1979: 126)
The novel’s end brings Oedipa to a possible confrontation with the answer to all her questions regarding the identity of the Tristero as she attends an auction to see who will bid for a set of stamps, the lot 49 of the title. But the novel ends before any such final revelation takes place and Pynchon plays on his reader’s conventional novelistic expectations of closure. The use in the novel of absurd character names overloaded with suggestion is one of the many means Pynchon employs to parody humanity’s craving for signification, while the unresolved nature of the book’s quest also underlines man’s increasing vulnerability in an information and technological age that outruns our capacity, but not our desire, to comprehend it. The publication of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973 established the author’s place among the greatest writers of the century with a work that has been described as “both one of the great historical novels of our time and arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses” (Tanner: 75). The literary critic, Edward Mendelson, first established useful terms for beginning to summarize the nature of a book that sought to escape conventional categorization. In contrast to the slim novel that preceded it, Gravity’s Rainbow works on a grand scale, and Mendelson placed it in a lineage of “encyclopedic narratives” from Dante’s Commedia to Joyce’s Ulysses and, in an American tradition, Melville’s Moby-Dick. The critic links these works through their
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scale and ambition, describing them as attempts “to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge” (Levine and Leverenz: 162). The historical focus of Gravity’s Rainbow is World War II, and the book begins in London as the threat of the long-range V-2 rockets takes hold. We are introduced to an American G.I., Tyrone Slothrop, whose perverse relationship to these rockets is revealed when a map he keeps of his sexual experiences in the city is seen to correspond to, and to pre-empt by several days, the location of the rocket strikes on the British capital. Slothrop thus becomes the reluctant focus of attention for allied scientists eager to trace the nature of the rocket’s secrets and of the forces controlling those secrets. These abstract forces are often referred to, among other names, simply as “They,” and are seen as “embracing possibilities far far beyond Nazi Germany” (Pynchon 1975: 25). The convergence of destruction and death with Slothrop’s sexual urges is traced back to his own childhood experiences of Pavlovian conditioning which have resulted in the perversion of his procreative impulses by an unknown agency bent on destruction. The unveiling of this wider conspiracy prompts Slothrop’s ultimate disappearance from the novel through his own gradual disintegration. He slips into a realm of indeterminacy, called the Zone, which offers some form of respite from both the death impulse reigning in the world and the “stone determinacy of everything” (Pynchon 1975: 86), whereby life is no longer guided by nature’s balance of death and rebirth but is being brought forcibly to zero. Whereas Oedipa found a world of meanings opening up all around her that at least provided a way out of her sense of insulation from society, Gravity’s Rainbow offers a world of terrifying connections that makes a retreat into the Zone of indeterminacy and non-feeling a necessary but frightening form of release. The novel itself relies on indeterminacy in its form and style by breaking away from conventional expectations such as linear narrative progression, closure, or unity of narrative voice, that as readers we look for to make sense of a narrative and to frame it rationally. There is a suggestion at the book’s end, as another rocket is poised to strike the roof of a cinema, that the audience gathered there catch a glimpse on the screen not of the anticipated film but of “a film we have not learned to see,” and in myriad ways the novel’s formal idiosyncracies and difficulties emphasize Pynchon’s insistence that we question rational impositions of meaning and so open ourselves to the possibility of finding new means of defeating the death-drift of a culture and of rediscovering a “Soul in ev’ry stone” (Pynchon 1975: 760). Seventeen years passed before Pynchon published another novel. This silence was first broken by the publication of his collection of early-career short stories, Slow Learner: Early Stories (1984), but it was not until 1990 that his next novel, Vineland, appeared. Vineland is Pynchon’s summation of the political battles of the decade just ended, the 1980s, and to some extent reflects concerns he expressed in his introduction to Slow Learner where he declared a shift of his own sensibilities by stating that writing ought to be based not on abstractions but on “the life we all really live”
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(Pynchon 1985: 23). The concern with control is one such abstraction that dominated Gravity’s Rainbow, but in Vineland it gains contemporary focus as the novel centers on the actions of political power at a specific place and time, California in 1984, at the start of Ronald Reagan’s second term in office. The Orwellian significance of the date is also relevant given the novel’s concern with the continuing forms of control and surveillance exerted by government agents over the family and friends of Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie and 1960s’ political activist, who, at the novel’s opening, is under threat of losing his mental-disability benefits “unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away” (Pynchon 1990: 3). The connections between the counterculture of the 1960s and the emergent conservatism of America under Reagan in the 1980s, are intensified through the relationship the novel traces between Wheeler’s ex-wife, Frenesi Gates, and a government agent, Brock Vond. Frenesi had been co-opted from her counterculture past and installed in Vond’s Political Re-Education Program, and through the search of Zoyd and Frenesi’s daughter, Prairie, for her mother, the novel traces the fate of America’s idealistic heritage in the face, this time, of the challenge of “the whole Reagan program … – dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world” (Pynchon 1990: 265). Echoing the novel’s focus on contemporary reality (the book teems with popular culture references), there is also in Vineland a move away from indeterminism in style and form, that disruptive and unsettling feature of Pynchon’s writing that had defined his previous works as signature novels of postmodernism. Mason & Dixon, published seven years later in 1997, saw the author return to the epic scale and scope of his earlier work. His avowed commitment to depicting “the life we all really live” seemed to have been left behind with this fantastical rendering of eighteenth-century American history conveyed in a mock-archaic style complete with capitalized nouns. However, the tale is one in which the profound rifts in contemporary America, specifically racial and economic, find their echo in an Enlightenment rationalism devoted to the achievement of political unity through the dissemination of division, embodied in the novel by the controlling forces determining science’s role in the drawing of the Mason–Dixon line between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Extremes of absurdity and fantasy distance the novel from any simple categorization as a historical novel (historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin make cameo appearances alongside an eloquent mechanical duck, designed by Jacques de Vaucanson). Pynchon has throughout his body of work combined meticulous research into neglected aspects of history and embedded them within fantastical narratives. Here, that combination helps undermine the truth claims of the political forces dividing the globe according to their respective wills, and disturbs any settled notion of veracity other than that provided by the imagination. As in Gravity’s Rainbow, the work of the scientists surveying the line is shadowed by authorities that transcend mere governmental agencies. Behind the Royal Society and other prestigious institutions, forces are at work shaping international history, and are here overseeing the recent aftermath of the War of Independence and the birth
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of the American nation. Pynchon’s novel underlines the idealization that accompanies notions of America, from the past through to the present, and emphasizes the obscuring of history that results from overlaying fantasy and reality. In doing so, the novel connects both the past and the future with a dreamland of corrupted possibilities: Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? – in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ’tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen, – serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, – Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the NetWork of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, – winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair. (Pynchon 1997: 345)
In Pynchon’s first novel, V., Benny Profane’s failure to fit in with routine existence is registered by his physical proximity to the street, as his yo-yoing tendencies lead him repeatedly into the subterranean depths of a city’s subways or sewers. In Pynchon’s 2006 novel, Against the Day, it is the “day” of the title that the book’s many characters find themselves outside of, often through revelations that reveal reality to be a façade obscuring other vital modes of experience and possibility. The novel opens as the airship Inconvenience ascends into the sky carrying a group of boy adventurers, the Chums of Chance, as they head toward Chicago’s World Fair in 1894. The book continues in the form of a host of loosely interwoven narratives that pastiche popular literary genres, such as serialized adventures, spy and crime novels, and Westerns, shifting between these literary forms and the eras in which they were most prominent, and spanning an historical period from the end of the nineteenth century to World War I. As in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon is here interested in opening realms of imagined experience that even in fiction remain unmapped because we are too sensitized to convention to see beyond those frames, be they the linear passage of time or a conception of mathematics that sees nothing between the numbers: “The numbers of commerce were ‘rational’ – ratios of profit to loss, rates of exchange – but among the set of real numbers, those that remained in the spaces between – the ‘irrationals’ – outnumbered those simple quotients overwhelmingly” (Pynchon 2006: 732). Pynchon’s oeuvre has retained its links to roots that can be traced back through an American tradition of post-World War II novelistic experimentation, such as the works of William Gaddis, that gave much American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s its distinctive and challenging edge. Yet, as many critics have acknowledged, Pynchon’s continuing challenges to the reader, and his endlessly inventive play on the absurdities of existence in an overly rationalized and controlling universe, place
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him in a wider tradition of experimental and innovative fiction that evoke the very origins of the novel, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Cervante’s Don Quixote.
References and Further Reading Abbas, Niran, ed. (2003). Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Berressem, Hanjo (1993). Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Thomas Pynchon: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Copestake, Ian D., ed. (2003). American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Oxford: Peter Lang. Hinds, E. J. W., ed. (2005). The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon”: Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations. New York: Camden House. Hite, Molly (1983). Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus, O.H.: Ohio State University Press. Levine, George and Leverenz, David, eds. (1976). Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown. Mattesich, Stefan (2002). Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in Thomas Pynchon. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Mead, Clifford (1989). Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Material. Elmwood Park, I.L.: Dalkey Archive. Pynchon, Thomas (1975). Gravity’s Rainbow [1973]. London: Picador.
Pynchon, Thomas (1979). The Crying of Lot 49 [1966]. London: Picador. Pynchon, Thomas (1985). Slow Learner: Early Stories [1984]. London: Picador. Pynchon, Thomas (1990). Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown. Pynchon, Thomas (1995). V. [1963]. London: Jonathan Cape. Pynchon, Thomas (1997). Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt. Pynchon, Thomas (2006). Against the Day. New York: Penguin. Pynchon, Thomas, “San Narciso Community College: Thomas Pynchon Home Page” (available at: http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu) contains uncollected works. Schaub, Thomas H. (1981). Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Seed, David (1988). The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Slade, Joseph W. (1974). Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner. Smith, Shawn (2005). Pynchon and History. London: Routledge. Tanner, Tony (1982). Thomas Pynchon. London: Methuen. Witzling, David (2008). Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
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Ishmael Reed: American Iconoclast Darryl Dickson-Carr
Since the mid-1960s, essayist, novelist, editor, poet, and critic Ishmael Reed has published an exceptionally prodigious amount of writing and criticism focusing upon African American culture, American politics, multiculturalism, and popular culture in the United States and abroad. Reed’s novels – mostly written in a satirical mode – have attracted critical acclaim and controversy in nearly equal measure, as they challenge conventional narrative forms, popular political and cultural trends, and fashionable ideologies. Reed’s essays cover much of the same topical ground as his novels, employing a style that Reed has alternately likened to the rhythms of jazz music or to boxing. The same may be said of his poetry, which has been incorporated into two significant jazz recordings, Conjure: Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed (1995), by various artists, and For All We Know (2007), by the Ishmael Reed Quintet. The native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, has authored nine novels, five books of poetry, and three plays. Reed has also edited five anthologies, four compilations of his own essays, one retrospective of his career to date (The Reed Reader, 2000), and numerous compilations of his and other writers’ fiction, poetry, and essays. In 2008, he published Bigger than Boxing, on the boxer Muhammad Ali, about whom Reed had written in the past; Mixing It Up, a collection of essays on the news media; and Pow Wow (co-edited with Carla Blank), an anthology of short fiction by other writers. Reed currently lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Through his publishing ventures and essays, Reed has been instrumental in starting or furthering the careers of both new and established African American authors, including Al Young, Gloria Naylor, Edwidge Danticat, Toni Cade Bambara, Jill Nelson, Nelson George, Cecil Brown, Terry McMillan, John A. Williams, John Oliver Killens, Toni Morrison, and many others. All of these authors have either been published in Reed’s magazines, including The Yardbird Reader (1972–6), Y’Bird (1977), Quilt (1981), and Konch (1991–present), or have been the recipients of the American Book Award, which is bestowed by the Before Columbus Foundation, an organization that Reed co-founded in 1976 to promote and celebrate American writers of various
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cultural backgrounds. Reed has been a consistent advocate for a number of African American authors whose work has not gained as much notice as it might deserve, including Cecil Brown, John A. Williams, and John Oliver Killens; he also publishes Vines magazine (from 1999), which serves as an outlet for college students’ publications. In many respects, Reed has been an extremely important, if vastly underrated, force in shaping contemporary African American literature, despite the controversies that have erupted in the wake of his novels, essays, and public statements throughout his career. These controversies stem from Reed’s involvement in, and responses to, some of the major cultural movements from the 1960s to the present. His essays and novels have consistently indicted racism in the United States and abroad for its absurdities and hypocrisies, and for this Reed has attracted praise. Since the mid-1970s, however, Reed has also been a strident critic of the women’s movement, or, to be more specific, public intellectuals espousing various forms of radical feminism which Reed sees as being linked to the racism he decries. Reed has also charted and lampooned the rise of neo-conservatism in the 1980s, pointed out the blind spots and other flaws of American print and television media, and blasted numerous academic figures and institutions involved in or professing one of the aforementioned ideologies. Reed has also staunchly defended multiculturalism in education and the public sphere, advocated on behalf of unsung or forgotten black male authors, and been an avid chronicler and champion of Oakland, California, his home since 1979. Finally, Reed has been instrumental in urging reconsideration of such controversial figures as black journalist George S. Schuyler and educator Booker T. Washington. Reed’s criticisms of radical feminism, however, have drawn the most attention and ire; his strongest critics have applied the label “misogynist” to his work and to him personally for his treatment of women characters as well as for the intensity of his criticism of selected African American women writers and their associates in the women’s movement. Reed’s career demonstrates that he is an inveterate, dedicated iconoclast, a description that both implies and guarantees that he will frequently offend many. This same iconoclasm also means that Reed’s ideological positions on various issues often shift and are sometimes difficult to determine. He has been quite consistent, however, in defending the culture, literature, and lives of women and minorities, especially those of the African diaspora, from assaults by any figures who regard European cultures and histories as normative and all others as pathological. Reed labels the defenders of European cultural hegemony “monoculturalists,” to whom women and minorities are “criminals and brutes … in a constant state of belligerency. Savages.” For Reed, the “malice and cultural astigmatism” of monoculturalists will lead to their downfall, and has already “contributed to the United States’ warped perception of the world and of cultures at home” (Reed 1990: 73–4). In the 1980s and 1990s especially, Reed defended black male figures as different as Clarence Thomas, O. J. Simpson, and Rodney King from attacks that bear the imprimatur of racists and their stereotypes about black men and their sexuality, the same stereotypes that destroyed lives and careers since the beginning of chattel slavery. As Bruce Dick has summed up Reed’s
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career, the author “has received more critical attention than almost any other contemporary African American male writer” due to his “contentions and changing position as a black man in a traditionally hostile, racist environment” (Dick and Zemliansky: xix). Reed’s long-standing disagreements with Michele Wallace, Susan Brown Miller, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, and many others reflect Reed’s accusation that these critics and authors are complicit, even actively interested, in destroying the images and work of African American males, one of the tenets of American racism. These factors notwithstanding, it would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Reed’s body of work, particularly his early novels. Reed’s primary mode of writing, arguably, is satire, which ensures that he will court controversy and outrage. Reed, however, has often rejected attempts to assign a single label to his writing; as he says in an interview with Peter Nazareth, “[p]eople would like to dismiss [him] as a humorist or a satirist or a parodist. These are just a few techniques [he uses] in [his] work,” with no single technique used exclusively (Nazareth: 120). In that same interview, Reed states that he considers his work more comic than satirical. Reed’s works have drawn freely upon such genres as detective fiction, slave narratives, travel narratives, the Western, and the roman à clef for their plots. Ironically, this underscores Reed’s status as a satirist, as Menippean satire tends to cross generic boundaries as often and as easily as his novels. It might be more useful to place Reed’s oeuvre, especially his later novels and essays, in what Kathryn Hume broadly identifies as “diffused satire,” which combines fantasy with varying levels of emotional intensity on the part of the author or characters within the work (Hume: 320–1). Reed may also overstate the degree to which he has been dismissed specifically because he is a satirist. When he was denied a tenured position at the University of California, Berkeley, one faculty member infamously stated that Reed’s work compared poorly to authors who write in more “civilized” styles (Dick and Singh: 111). This assessment, tinged as it is with both racism and generic bias, represents a common misconception of satire’s purpose and functions. Naturally, Reed is not immune. His objections to labels notwithstanding, Reed’s success in writing in different aspects of the satirical mode has placed him in the ranks of the iconic American satirists Mark Twain, Nathanael West, and H. L. Mencken; Reed has expressed strong admiration for the latter two of this trio. He has also earned a number of awards and fellowships for his work, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1996), and was nominated in 1973 for two categories of the National Book Award: fiction (Mumbo Jumbo, 1972) and poetry (Chattanooga, 1973). Chattanooga was also nominated the same year for the Pulitzer Prize. His papers from 1964 to 1995 are now housed in the University of Delaware’s library. If Reed has been dismissed in some circles, he has earned the admiration of others. Reed started writing while attending Millard Fillmore College, the night-school component of the University of Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. He cites Nathanael West, H. L. Mencken, and James Baldwin, as some of the writers he read in his formative years living in Buffalo, where his family had moved from Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1960, Reed dropped out of college and began writing for The Empire Star,
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a “militant” newspaper published by an African American man who had fled the antiblack violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Reed’s discovery of this history, along with jazz, helped give focus to his literary ambitions, and in 1962 he moved to New York, where he encountered some of the leading literary and cultural figures of the period, including Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, and Malcolm X, among many others. With the help of Hughes in particular, Reed started writing his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967). Reed found difficult the attitudes of the New York literary establishment, as well as some of the rising stars of the Black Arts Movement of the mid-1960s. Soon after publication of The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Reed moved to Los Angeles, and soon thereafter obtained an appointment teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. Reed has steadfastly refused to accommodate prevalent notions of what an African American author should write about, both as a creative artist and as a cultural critic, especially when faced with criticism from the African American critical community. Reed considers the “average Afro-American” to be living “in an ideological cloud. What’s happening in New York and New England is a power struggle … over [white] liberal patronage among Afro-American writers and intellectuals” (Nazareth: 126). Mumbo Jumbo (1972) represents Reed’s largely satirical interpretation of this power struggle as it manifested itself in both the 1960s and during the Harlem Renaissance, including the effects it has had on African American life, art, and culture. Reed sees a reproduction of the monocultural impulse ingrained in western cultures in the Black Aesthetic’s developments in the early 1970s that threatens to curb intellectual, cultural, and artistic freedom. Although Reed was an advocate of the Black Aesthetic’s more inclusive approach to African American art, his novel reveals the extent to which this approach was being stifled by ideological orthodoxy. One of Reed’s key arguments is that African American radicals, like other revolutionaries before and since, are just as susceptible to the temptations of the society they struggle against, primarily because they are still very much part of those societies. Even if separatism is not a viable option, finding an aesthetic that allows for true artistic freedom is an excruciatingly slow and complex process. One ironic trope in Mumbo Jumbo concerns the practically inevitable ideological compromises that follow when African Americans in a new cultural phase try to find their place by seeking white patronage. This trope touches many characters, scenes, and actions within the text, which reveals the impossibility of isolating cultures in any nation, but especially one made up of as many ethnicities, religions, and outlooks as the United States, a nation whose foundations contain the blood and effort of innumerable groups. Through such characters as Abdul Sufi Hamid and Hinckle Von Vampton, Reed satirizes such ideological constructs as black nationalism and dualism in western thought as the cultural bases for racism. Mumbo Jumbo succeeds, in part, because the satirical spirit is not without some ambivalence. Though Reed satirizes black and white monocultural thinking, he also lends each at least a small degree of veracity, if only to demonstrate the ambivalence found within any culture. Reed has repeatedly expressed admiration for black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey as a visionary leader, one who
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upset the upholders of white supremacy, whether white or black, and was persecuted for his apostasy. His objection is to the idea that any single staid, immutable ideology is capable of resolving social problems; in fact, any such ideology is doomed to fail, since it does not allow for new input. In the place of monoculturalism, Reed substitutes his “Neo-HooDoo aesthetic,” modeled upon the syncretism of Vodun/Voodoo. “HooDoo” is one of the names for the religions people of African descent practice throughout the diaspora based upon West African religions, especially Yoruban forms. It combines the pantheons of gods and spirits, or loa, of these religions with the basic structure of Roman Catholicism; it also incorporates the mysticism and magical rites of both religions. The Vodun/ HooDoo pantheon is generally divided into two major categories: the Rada and Petro loa. The former are generally benevolent and warm; the latter are more mysterious, but may range from malevolent to the benevolent. The Petro loa include a number of tricksters, most prominently Legba Attibon, sometimes called Papa Legba or Papa LaBas; all are translations of the Yoruban trickster god Esu-elegbara into the terms of African diasporic peoples. In Zora Neale Hurston’s analysis of Haitian “VooDoo” mythology, Legba/LaBas is “the god of the gate” who holds “the way to all things … in his hands.” “Every service to whatever loa for whatever purpose,” therefore, “must be preceded by a service to Legba” (Hurston: 128). Papa LaBas serves a similar purpose in Mumbo Jumbo as its protagonist and practitioner of HooDoo. His goal in the novel is to help “Jes Grew” find its text. Jes Grew is a new loa and pandemic disease that causes its carriers to begin dancing, singing, and generally appreciating black folk culture. Reed takes the name of “Jes Grew” from a name James Weldon Johnson assigned to the earliest ragtime songs, which “jes’ grew,” in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) is a fantastic novel extending many of the motifs found in Mumbo Jumbo, as he uses the protagonist Ed Yellings to indict revolutionary groups of the Black Power era for their insincerity, violent rhetoric and tactics, and occasional criminal behavior. Papa LaBas reprises his role as a HooDoo detective trying to bring the anarchic advocates of Moochism/”Louisiana Red” – Reed’s euphemism for questionable ideologies and their followers – to mend their ways and return to the HooDoo aesthetic of anti-determinism that Reed generally advocates. Last Days is also the novel that brought a substantial degree of criticism from feminists, black and white alike, for its often mean-spirited lampooning and stereotyping of the contemporary women’s movement and its members. Flight to Canada (1976) is, after Mumbo Jumbo, perhaps Reed’s greatest and most celebrated achievement in fiction, a mix of fantasy, science fiction, and postmodern irreverence for generic boundaries and conventions. One of the many neo-slave narratives to be published since 1970, Flight to Canada is a direct response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s historic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose story, Reed demonstrates, was stolen from an African American. This act is Reed’s metaphor for the ways in which African Americans have seen their voices, ideas, and achievements appropriated, coopted, or stolen outright. The protagonist, Raven Quickskill, is a poet and ex-slave
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who seeks his own Canada, a metaphor for fleeting, and ultimately unreachable, freedom and justice. Over the course of the novel’s plot, Reed satirizes traditional readings of American history (especially the iconic place of Abraham Lincoln), Richard Nixon, literary critics, black nationalism, and even the protest strategies of the same slave narratives from which Reed draws his inspiration. Despite Reed’s objections to the label of being a “postmodern” writer, due to what he perceives as the lack of strong plots in postmodern fiction (Dick and Singh: 203), his novels in the 1970s provide excellent examples of both ironic revision and theories of postmodernism at work, insofar as they revise vast swathes of history using pastiche, parody, irony, and satire. Reed prefers the “Neo-HooDoo” label, as his work syncretizes the characters, cultures, and morals of the African diaspora, as well as “European … African, Native-American [and] Afro-American” influences (Martin 1984: 186). Via these figures, Reed’s early novels look past Western epistemologies to appreciate and adopt the social and ethical systems of the diaspora. This allows Reed to recover cultures that European monoculturalism has suppressed, thereby providing new and richly referential views of history and the world. Reed’s novels of the 1980s and 1990s, however, differ in slight, but noticeable ways in style and content from his earlier work. Reed is less concerned with inserting countless references to mythical and historical events and figures, and mounts attacks upon numerous threats in these works, generally fueled by Reed’s response to criticism of black nationalism, monoculturalism, and feminism – which Reed considers virtually synonymous in outlook – within Reed’s novels and essays. Reed has typically responded with equal vehemence in his novels, interviews, and essays of a particular moment to feminists and literary critics of different political stripes. While he is still clearly concerned with the problem of western ideas dominating American intellectual and cultural discourse, Reed’s later novels concentrate upon two general topics. First, Reed lambastes the rise of neo-conservatism – equated in at least one instance with neo-Nazism – in the 1980s and 1990s, and its effects on both national and cultural politics. Second, such novels as Reckless Eyeballing (1986) and Japanese by Spring (1993) expose the philosophical relativism and sloppy thinking that result when the concept of multiculturalism is misapplied by entrenched academics, whether malevolently or with unconscious ineptitude. These later works are products of what Reed calls the “writin’ is fightin’ ” phase of his career. The phrase comes from the title of one of Reed’s essay collections, which is, in turn, a quotation from boxer Muhammad Ali illustrating the potential of words to become weapons. As a result of this shift, the line between Reed’s polemical essays and his fiction became more blurred with each subsequent novel. Lengthy, biting diatribes against racists on the left and right, radical feminists, and monoculturalists could be found in both Reed’s novels and essays of this period. Although the novels concern matters that gained prominence specifically in the Reagan–Bush era, The Terrible Twos (1982) and its sequel The Terrible Threes (1989) comprise an extended, elaborate vision of American political conservatism and neo-conservatism that has dated uncannily well. In the novels’ contexts, the principles underlying American politics, most prominently
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capitalism and jingoism, find embodiment within characters who cynically understand what the American mainstream really wants and are relatively successful at satisfying those demands. Put simply, the American people and, by extension, their leaders are the equivalent of two-year-olds throwing tantrums when their most selfish desires are not immediately met. They are, therefore, in need of stern discipline. The metaphor of the two-year-old as representative of American political and social concerns continually resurfaces throughout the text, primarily through the presence of Dean Clift (a composite character based in part on Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, and whose name is taken from the 1950s’ matinee idols James Dean and Montgomery Clift), a former actor elected to the United States vice-presidency not for his non-existent political skills, but for his good looks. When the president, former general Walter Scott dies in office, Clift ascends to the presidency, where he finds himself acting as a figurehead controlled by the reactionary politicians and corporate moguls who bankrolled his election campaign, who enact the sinister “Operation Two Birds.” The wildly elaborate conspiracy is intended to consolidate power for a small elite of white males by convincing the American public that the “surps,” or surplus people (of color) are destroying both the country and the world (Boyer: 36). The Terrible Twos tracks the unraveling of this plot and the efforts of numerous characters to derail it; The Terrible Threes is the chronicle of the plotters’ attempts to hide the plot from the public, who were exposed to it at the end of the former novel. Indeed, for all of its dire, Orwellian warnings about the ability of oligarchs to undermine civil liberties, The Terrible Threes indicates that Reed’s embracing of the “writin’ is fightin’ ” philosophy has transformed his art to emphasize the importance of combating propaganda and monolithic thinking of any sort, for the sake of preserving intellectual, artistic, and personal freedoms. Reckless Eyeballing, which was published in the interim between the Terribles and Japanese by Spring, is another satirical extension of Reed’s discourses on American politics practiced in his essays and articles in Writin’ is Fightin’ (1990), and is easily his most controversial novel. Reed satirizes certain feminists as cynical, manipulative women, equally as enthralled by misanthropy and racist images of black men as the men they critique are enthralled by misogyny. Upon its publication, Reckless Eyeballing stoked an uproar and backlash against his work that continues through the present. The novel comprises the exploits of Ian Ball and Tremonisha Smarts, two black writers trying to court the favor of the feminists currently in vogue and in power. Their desire for fortune and fame lead them to assimilation and, consequently, the evisceration of their cultural backgrounds. The most galling part of this move is that Ball and Smarts are assimilating into an artistic world that is condescending toward them at best, and contemptuous at worst. Again, Reed issued similar warnings in previous novels, but here the enemy is not black nationalism; rather, it is the materialism of the black middle class in the post-civil rights era and the crass materialism of the 1980s that indirectly cause black art and culture to suffer. This is best expressed through Smarts, Reed’s thinly veiled caricature of Alice Walker and several other writers, who reveals that many of the critics who praised her play about abusive black men “took some of
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these characters and made them out to be all black men” and therefore used the characters as excuses “to hate all black men.” Through its updating of the problems of academic racism and intellectual cooptation for the 1990s, Japanese by Spring largely revises Reckless Eyeballing’s denunciation of intellectual monomania. It makes Reed’s ideology increasingly explicit via the introduction of Reed himself as a character, one who actively contributes invective material to the novel’s plot and discursive strategies. Reed confronts the reader with the same type of hard historical evidence that buoys his previous novels, but with a bolder purpose for his characters. Reed employs his principal characters as more transparent vehicles for some of his personal views, although they remain complicated and conflicted in their motives. Reed’s goals may be to make his personal views entirely lucid to a critical audience that has frequently attacked his satire, especially such incendiary novels as Reckless Eyeballing, as well as to engage the fighting posture through words that has defined his more recent work. Japanese by Spring represents Reed’s concatenation of the intensely fierce debates over the meaning of multiculturalism in United States academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, offering in novel form Reed’s vision of what a productive, transcendent multiculturalism should be, as opposed to what it has become in the face of American cynicism. The novel’s setting, fictional Jack London College in Oakland, California, is ultimately a microcosmic representation of American academia, in which established, nearly unquestioned, racist beliefs, coupled with a marked lack of moral courage and minimal intelligence, undergird some of the multicultural debates’ primary players. The solution to these debates is for the public at large to realize how mainstream American culture is always already multicultural. Via the character “Ishmael Reed,” Reed posits a multiculturalism that is neither faddish nor materialistic, which will help restore the integrity and strength of progressive racial and cultural politics. Since the publication of Japanese by Spring, Reed has concentrated almost exclusively on such enterprises as Konch magazine and on cultural, political, and literary criticism, as far as his published output is concerned. The style and content of Reed’s essays remain as provocative as ever, and may be easily recognized for their particular style. Reed’s iconoclasm seldom stands alone; it shares space nearly at all times with the author’s pedagogical spirit, which is determined to show that many myths arguing the supremacy of one culture or gender over another hide the fact that the putatively dominant culture was either once the inferior one, or that it has made active attempts to suppress and destroy all evidence that would undermine its case. In his aptly titled essay, “Airing Dirty Laundry,” for example, Reed takes issue with the misconception that drug addiction is a black problem exclusively. Reed’s essays invariably go on to cite various surveys and studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, that underscore the exaggeration, sloppy thinking, or pure fabrication involved in creating myths that damage or damn specific groups. No one, in Reed’s analyses, is sacred; he is as likely to denounce or respond critically to those who have supported his work as those who have criticized it, such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., whose work on Reed in Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey (1988) helped bring a new wave of scholarly
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interest to Reed’s work. However, Reed has also taken Gates to task for his argument that Reed and other black male writers are sexist, an argument that Reed avers came from a combination of hubris and pressure from feminists. Reed’s longstanding disagreements with feminists are matched only by his distrust of the New York intellectual scene, which has close links to the publishing industry and the system of awards and rewards that it comprises. Regardless of whether Reed’s criticisms and concerns are accurate, they have inarguably driven such interests as Konch and the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Awards, which publish and recognize writing that may not receive the attention it deserves due to unpopular or politically unfashionable ideas. Reed is mentioned or discussed in virtually every major book-length work on contemporary African American fiction published to date, and is routinely represented in general American anthologies published since the mid-1980s. In addition, his work has been collected several times over. Although he remains a vastly underrated figure in contemporary literature, Ishmael Reed has thoroughly established a reputation as one of the era’s most influential and provocative authors.
References and Further Reading Boyer, Jay (1993). Ishmael Reed. Boise: Boise State University Press. Callaloo (1994). “Special Section on Reed,” Callaloo, 17 (4). Dick, Bruce and Singh, Amritjit, eds. (1995). Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Dick, Bruce and Zemliansky, Pavel, eds. (1999). The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Fox, Robert Elliot (1987). Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Hume, Kathryn (2007). “Diffused Satire in Contemporary American Fiction,” Modern Philology, 105 (2): 300–25. Hurston, Zora Neale (1990). Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica [1937]. New York: Harper Collins. Jessee, Sharon A. (1986). “Ishmael Reed’s MultiCulture: The Production of Cultural Perspective,” MELUS, 13 (3/4): 5–14. Lindroth, James (1996). “Images of Subversion: Ishmael Reed and the HooDoo Trickster,” African American Review, 30 (2): 185–96.
Ludwig, Sami (1998). “Ishmael Reed’s Inductive Narratology of Detection,” African American Review, 32 (3): 435–44. McGee, Patrick (1997). Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin’s. Martin, Reginald (1984). “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 4 (2): 176–87. Martin, Reginald (1988). Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics. London: Macmillan. Nazareth, Peter (1982). “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Iowa Review, 13 (2): 117–30. Reed, Ishmael (1990). Writin’ is Fightin’. New York: Atheneum. Reed, Ishmael (2000). “Introduction,” In The Reed Reader, ed. Ishmael Reed, pp. xi–xxx. New York: Basic. Schmitz, Neil (1974). “Neo-HooDoo: The Experimental Fiction of Ishmael Reed,” Twentieth Century Literature, 20 (2): 126–40. Settle, Elizabeth A. and Settle, Thomas A. (1982). Ishmael Reed: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall. Williams, Dana A., ed. (2007). African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
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Joyce Carol Oates Gavin Cologne-Brookes
Overview It is hard to avoid reaching for hyperbolic metaphor to describe the sheer quantity of Joyce Carol Oates’s literary output. Those who come to know her work well, however, appreciate her variety, her immense insight, and the sustained quality of her writing. If her outpouring is indeed a torrent, then perhaps the reader should jump into a kayak, grip the oar, and plunge into the rapids. Or maybe the reader should ignore the torrent and merely map the terrain. Both approaches have their hazards. To immerse oneself in Oates’s fiction is to risk being overwhelmed. To survey is to approximate. But whether we approach Oates’s fictional world as canoeists or cartographers, we are better off admiring the exhilaration of change than seeking catch-up or encapsulation. If Oates’s fiction is, for her, an exercise in “Delirium and Detachment” (an essay title, 1995), that may be as true for the reader. A survey reveals the parameters if not the minutiae of her achievements but only immersion brings appreciation of the power of her gift. Her prose style requires close reading to reveal the full richness of her insight, and in the end, of course, it is this, not the immense output, that makes her a foremost twentieth-century American writer. Variety, yes; but within this multiplicity of insight, one scenario seems invariable. “The great American adventure has always been one of social ascension,” she writes. “Only the writer who has risen economically in America (in contrast to one born with money and privilege) can understand the fascinating, ever-dramatic class war in its infinite variety” (Cologne-Brookes 2006: 549). Pulling herself from relative poverty, Oates has produced depiction after depiction of individuals whose sense of identity is a complex mixture of social, emotional, and economic realities. Social ascension is a crucial element in the realization “that our identities as individuals are provisional” (Oates 1998: 2), and just as that drama of identity has shaped her life so – notably with regard to class and gender – it has been at the heart of her writing.
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Born in 1938 into a blue-collar family in Lockport, an upstate New York town on the Erie Canal between Buffalo and Rochester, Oates won a scholarship to Syracuse University. Before graduating, she co-won the 1959 Mademoiselle college fiction award for “In the Old World,” and published another story the same year. She then completed a master’s degree at Wisconsin before abandoning a Ph.D. at Rice to concentrate on fiction. She taught at the University of Detroit until 1967, the University of Windsor, Ontario, until 1978, and thereafter at Princeton. In this time, she has accrued a more extensive body of work than any of her contemporaries, and explored American society with unsurpassed breadth and detail. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes her as “a daemon from the depths” whose work alone would give a future archaeologist a rounded picture of her American era. She knows its virtues and its flaws and will “press where it hurts, hard” (Cologne-Brookes 2006: 545, 544). Oates’s dual role as writer and teacher – Joyce Carol Oates and Joyce Smith – is evident whether she writes about working-class individuals asserting their “life-ideal” in the face of economic realities (Oates 1988: 40), about the world of academia, or about twins and doubles. The latter is a favorite theme, particularly when writing under the pseudonym, Rosamond Smith, perhaps not least because Oates’s sister, born eighteen years later, shares her birthday. Her scrutiny of the mysteries of identity expresses itself largely in private dramas in early work, and in incisive social commentary in later work, but she has oscillated between introspection and social engagement throughout her career. For instance, she has always involved herself in the theater; her first performed play, The Sweet Enemy, was staged at the Actors’ Playhouse, New York, in 1965. “My exterior life, as it might be called,” she writes, “is an exact balance to my sometimes rapacious interior life; as the height of a tree is said to be balanced by its root system beneath the ground” (Cologne-Brookes 2006: 555). In the wake of the literary fiction that constitutes her major work, she has produced thrillers under the pseudonym Lauren Kelly as well as Rosamond Smith, novels for young adults and, along with the plays, a cascade of essays, reviews, and poetry. Moreover, she often dissolves boundaries between genres. She sees the fiction/nonfiction distinction as convenient rather than accurate (and connected with the provisional nature of identity). “The composing of fiction is not antithetical to ‘experience’ and certainly not an escape from experience,” she writes (Oates 1988: 24) – “it is experience.” Continuing a line of thought that runs through Nietzsche, William James, Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty, she propounds a radical aestheticism that makes little distinction between forms of writing since “language by its very nature tends to distort experience” and “writing is an art and art means artifice, the artificial” (Oates 1999b: 77). Her work, therefore, spills out of attempts to contain it. All labels and identities face challenge and change. Just as no one of her fictional works is quintessential, so no one piece feels autonomous, or limited to the form it has taken. She adapted her 1992 novella, Black Water, as an opera (writing the libretto), published “Slow” as a third-person story in The Assignation (1988) and as a monologue called “Slow Motion” in the collage play, “I Stand Before You Naked” in Twelve Plays (1991); presented “A
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Report to an Academy” as a one-act play in that same volume and as the final stanza of a poem of the same title (Invisible Woman, 1982), and rewrote her second novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), nearly forty years after its original appearance. “Not what is being said, but how,” she writes in “The Dream of the ‘Sacred Text.’ ” “For what is frequently given to us, what is inevitable. It is how that makes, or has the possibility of making, the text sacred” (Oates 1988: 42). With her characters, too, whatever their situation, their dramas are about how they act and react as they confabulate their own and others’ lives. As she says of Henry James, so one might say of her own work: her “main characters are artists, and the art they make is their own lives” (Oates 1974: 24). An Oates reader is an artist whose raw material is Oates’s writing.
The Sixties and Seventies While all Oates’s fiction shares thematic preoccupations, from her early to her later work there emerges a shift from what John Updike calls “projected anxieties” to a more relaxed, mature stance (Updike 1987: 119). The sixties’ fiction is also written mostly in a realist mode, while the seventies’ fiction becomes increasingly ambitious in range, leading to a pivotal period of radical experimentation into the early eighties, after which she returns to a postmodernist realism that constitutes the mature artistic voice that has established her as a pre-eminent commentator on American culture. Much of this early writing involves individuals prostituting mind or body to achieve their ambitions. Often their battles seem as much internal as external. Teenage Karen Herz’s relationship with thirty-year-old racing driver, Shar Rule, in With Shuddering Fall (1964) reads like a drama of the life- and death-instinct in an individual. Just as Shar races round a circuit of both empowerment and imprisonment, so each seems trapped in a claustrophobia based on self-centeredness. “The whole world is shrunk down to fit him – he carries it around in his head!” Shar’s manager tells Karen. “And this is true for you as well!” (p. 180). Shar dies on the track, while Karen survives the relationship, shuns self-pity, and determines to “retrieve her life” (p. 304). In A Garden of Earthly Delights, the daughter of itinerant fruit pickers seeks a better life through marriage to a landowner, but the novel again seems more a drama of the self than of society. Most convincing of these early novels is the National Book Awardwinning them (1969). Presented as a non-fictional narrative about one of Oates’s students, it shifts the focus from rural to urban deprivation. While her brother, Jules, experiences the Detroit riots, Maureen Wendall escapes poverty through marriage. The novel’s most enlightening moment comes when Maureen responds to a class on Madame Bovary by challenging Oates over the relevance of classic literature to Maureen’s life. Beyond her preoccupation with self-healing and self-creation, Oates was clearly contemplating the writer’s role, and her career trajectory. Other novels of the period include Expensive People (1968), about a suburban teenager who appears to have killed his own mother, and The Assassins: A Book of Hours
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(1975), about the siblings of a murdered senator. Oates’s most significant early seventies’ novel, Wonderland (1971), concerns the social rise and emotional alienation of a neurosurgeon, but also charts Oates’s intensifying exploration of consciousness. Calvin Bedient wrote early in Oates’s career of experiencing her novels “like a privileged sickness” (Bedient: 19). None fits that description better than Wonderland, which appeared just before a mental crisis Oates explains in (Woman) Writer (1988: 75) as a revelation that “the ‘I’, which doesn’t exist, is everything.” Perhaps as a consequence of this intellectual and emotional cul-de-sac, her next three novels find new artistic avenues. Do With Me What You Will (1973) uses almost baffling narrative complexity to describe Elena Howe’s escape from her oppressive husband. The swirling, antirealist Childwold (1976), about a girl from a poor family and a wealthy older man, elides distinctions between characters’ voices and between those of the characters and the author. Son of the Morning (1978), the story of self-styled preacher Nathan Vickery’s journey to spiritual and physical exhaustion, retains the painful intensity characteristic of Oates’s early fiction but again challenges viewpoint conventions. In sum, where Oates later makes specific use of this preoccupation with provisional identities, she seems here to be working toward some form of liberation. “With Wonderland,” she told Walter Clemons in 1972, “I came to the end of a phase in my life, though I didn’t know it. I want to move toward a more articulate moral position, not just dramatizing nightmarish problems but trying to show possible ways of transcending them” (Milazzo: 39). It would take her until the novels of the late eighties to achieve this. Oates’s short fiction, poetry, and so-called non-fiction of the sixties and seventies clarify her artistic journey through this time. Of the several story collections, beginning with By the Northgate (1963), most noteworthy are The Wheel of Love (1970), containing the much-anthologized story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” and Marriages and Infidelities (1972), with its rewrites of stories by Chekhov, Henry James, Kafka, and Joyce. A number of stories from these collections are reprinted in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1993). Selections from Oates’s four poetry volumes up to this point appear in Invisible Woman (1982). The most important essay collection in terms of understanding this fiction is New Heaven, New Earth (1974). Her statements there that “the mirror and never the window” is the stimulus for writers like James and Woolf (p. 127), but that “after the experiment of the mind’s dissection of itself, and its dissociation from the body, perhaps we are ready to rediscover the world” (p. 45), hint at the battles she fought with herself, and the writing goals she hoped to move toward.
The Eighties The novels of the eighties divide into two phases. The innovative novels of the early eighties include panoramic explorations of nineteenth-century America that provide a transition from the claustrophobic tendencies of her early fiction toward the
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expansiveness of her later writing. The late eighties show Oates’s hard-won vision mature into less opaque, less inward-looking, more pragmatic ends. While the years of Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984) end with the minor Solstice (1985, the latter titles both suggesting a turning point), My Heart Laid Bare (1998) is also characteristic of the period. Along with the unpublished The Crosswicks Horror, Oates envisaged it as part of a quintet. In contrast, Angel of Light (1981), a novel of contemporary politics, belongs in style and subject matter to her earlier writing. In Bellefleur, the breathless psyche exemplified by Nathan’s “torturous prayer” in Son of the Morning (1978: 283) gives way to a playful art, different in tone, scope, and language. Like its description of a projector, Bellefleur offers “reflections darting through reflections” (1980: 315). The story of a landowning family, it plays on the enmeshment of fact and imagination that constitutes our semi-illusory sense of history and lineage. Exposing itself as artifice, it equally reflects a culture whose claims of democracy encourage the exploitation of natural and human resources to build an unequal society. As the novel closes, family descendent Gideon flies above Bellefleur Manor before suicide-bombing it. His description of the Manor holds true for the novel and the society it depicts. “How oddly it had been constructed,” he thinks, “like a castle composed in a feverish sleep, when the imagination leapt over itself, mad to outdo itself, growing ever more frantic and greedy” (p. 553). Freedoms of all kinds are at the thematic heart of A Bloodsmoor Romance as the Zinn sisters escape from patriarchal discourses (especially their own father’s) and the restrictions endemic to nineteenth-century culture. The revisionist tone continues in Oates’s detective-genre parody, Mysteries of Winterthurn. Winterthurn invites readers to solve its mysteries, but is more Kafka than Conan Doyle. Allen Shepherd, for instance, suggests that its “undecidable stories” imply the “subversive proposition” that we may prefer mystery to “clarity” (Shepherd: 10). Its hero, Xavier Kilgarvan, discovers that language, rather than truth, shapes the worldview of the conventional detective. “Mysteries” may not be solvable, or solutions desirable, and “mysteries” themselves may be descriptive rather than actual. After writing My Heart Laid Bare (which dissolves the illusion of coherent “characters” even while portraying the Gilded Age with historical veracity), Oates began to revisit early experiences from the perspective of the intervening decades. These novels of artistic maturity revise realist conventions, and present characters renegotiating their life purpose. Marya, A Life (1986) is superficially autobiographical, but with ironic distance between author and protagonist. Despite her impoverished background, writer and academic Marya Knauer succeeds in a male-dominated environment, but scattered in the wake of her achievement is the debris of a personal life. “Whether Marya Knauer’s story is in any way my own ‘story,’ it became my story during the writing of the novel,” writes Oates. “It is my hope that, however obliquely and indirectly, it will strike chords in readers who, like Marya, choose finally not to accept the terms of their own betrayal” (Oates 1988: 378). To the extent that Marya’s provisional tragedy has been to live against a background of foreignness rather than
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intimacy, her counterpart in You Must Remember This (1987) is less Enid Stevick than her uncle and lover, Felix, an ex-boxer with no one to fight but himself. But the striking difference between the two novels is the detail with which Oates here brings to life the American fifties and the industrial setting of Port Oriskany. You Must Remember This integrates a drama of personal ambitions with one of cultural and national ambitions, and, unlike Oates’s earliest novels, this interaction is sustained throughout. Back in 1966, Oates wrote to Robert Phillips that her suburban friends “are floating on top of a complex society that unfortunately keeps shifting and changing” (quoted in Johnson, 1998: 137). American Appetites (1989) and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990) reflect this society, one through restless suburbanites, the other through those submerged in the society’s complexities. American Appetites contemplates the ironies involved in the lives of successful professionals in a university town reminiscent of Princeton. Ian McCullough kills his wife, Glynnis, in self-defense during a row over his friendship with Sigrid Hunt, whom Glynnis sees as beneath their social set. Because It Is Bitter explores 1960s’ working-class life in upstate New York, and a doomed interracial encounter between high-school basketball star, Jinx Fairchild, and Iris Courtney, a white girl who simultaneously watches her mother’s alcoholic descent. Like Sigrid, Courtney marries out of poverty into the professional classes. Both characters link Oates’s mature period with her earliest work, but she had by now become a chronicler who could convincingly incorporate such lives into her broader depiction of American society. As with the sixties and seventies, a range of writing in other genres interspersed these publications. Stories continued to appear individually and in collections, among them Last Days (1984), Raven’s Wing (1986), and The Assignation (1988). Following Three Plays (1980), several of Oates’s plays of the eighties appear in Twelve Plays (1991). Poetry of the eighties includes The Time Traveler (1989). The book-length essay On Boxing (1987) can be read as a companion to You Must Remember This, while (Woman) Writer (1988) contains significant reflections on Oates’s mature vision.
The Nineties into the Twenty-First Century Oates has continued to depict American culture, emphasizing social ascension, provisional identities, and now a sustained interest in “victims/survivors” (CologneBrookes 2006: 553). Although she has portrayed male victims as well as female victimizers – most disturbingly, Kathleen Hennessey in The Rise of Life on Earth (1991), a forerunner of psychopath Quentin P., in Zombie (1995) – often the victimizers are male and the victims/survivors female. Where once, Greg Johnson suggests, she perhaps concealed or evaded “her own early traumas,” she now felt able “to dramatize them more openly” (Johnson 1998: 334–5). At the same time, these deftly executed works of insight and compassion act as commentaries on a range of issues pertinent to our contemporary mindset and the possibilities for cultural change.
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Told from the viewpoint of intern Kelly Kelleher drowning in a submerged car from which a character identified only as The Senator has escaped, Black Water (1992) dramatizes issues generated by the death of Mary Jo Kopechne when Edward Kennedy’s car sank at Chappaquiddick. But it also reads as a prophetic commentary on the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, and the mores of not just an era but a culture. What I Lived For (1994) epitomizes Oates’s description of great literature as dealing with “the human soul caught in the stampede of time, unable to gauge the profundity of what passes over it” (quoted in Johnson 1998: 389). Where Thoreau’s phrase counsels simplification, Corky Corcoran’s creed is to complicate. He lives his last days like a cork in an ocean before finally being shot with his own gun. “Suicide can be murder,” he says. “Like murder, sometimes, is suicide” (p. 361). His life and death involve a kind of self-murder not just because he throws himself into the path of bullets his stepdaughter fires at a political associate, but also because he has lived the tragicomic antithesis of Thoreauvian wisdom. In contrast, the meliorism of We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) stems from Oates’s belief in an individual’s capacity to alter perspective and so the shape and impact of events. Youngest son, Judd Mulvaney, has to deal with the fact that family life always involves communal fiction. But out of the events that have led to the family meltdown – his sister Marianne’s date rape and his father’s inability to accept that he has failed to protect her – Judd determines to record the truth. In doing so, he learns the value of distinguishing between event and response. The next three novels deal with our tendency to demonize or deify others. The girls in Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993) build actual and perceived injustices into a group vision that demonizes men in general as (in screaming capitals) THE ENEMY. Broke Heart Blues (1999) centers on a high-school peer group who deify an outsider. John Reddy Heart’s status as a local icon begins when he arrives from Las Vegas. Found guilty of murdering one of his eccentric mother’s lovers, his return to school after prison but disappearance pre-graduation ensures his status, even years later, as the group’s “uncrowned king” (Oates 1999a: 212). The adult we see is so un-mythic as to render “John Reddy Heart” a collective fiction. In Blonde (2000), the posthumous narrator, Norma Jeane, is based on Marilyn Monroe, the quintessential American artist-of-the-self and artifice. Blonde thus continues the vein of social ascension and provisional identity found throughout Oates’s career, but also probes the cultural delusion of celebrity worship. Into the twenty-first century, Middle Age: A Romance (2001) shifts focus from deification of an image to influence by example. Adam Berendt dies an untimely death by drowning, but his friends’ recollections of his Socratic stance as questioner and reflector of their self-images continue to affect their lives, while also revealing him to be a version of the Oatesian author. Other novels of the new century are Beasts (2002), Rape: A Love Story (2002), The Tattooed Girl (2002), The Falls (2004), Missing Mom (2005), The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007), My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008), and two novels that, like Because It Is Bitter before them, reflect on black–white relations in contemporary America. I’ll Take You There (2002), and
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Black Girl/White Girl (2006) are both set on campuses and explore emerging identity and ethnic awareness even as they confront the ambiguities that prevent full knowledge of the self one is, or one makes, let alone of the selves one witnesses and constructs of others. Although the novels since Marya have largely belonged to “realism,” many of Oates’s stories, collected in Heat (1991), Haunted (1994), Will You Always Love Me? (1997), Unspeakable (1998), Faithless (2001), I Am No One You Know (2004), The Female of the Species (2006), The Museum of Dr. Moses (2007), and Wild Nights (2008), remain as experimental as her strangest early work. For Oates, it is the narrative voice that determines “realism”/”surrealism.” In the one, there is generally a point of view that is limited to what is known by the characters; in the other, a rather more floating or omnipresent narrative voice that isn’t merely generated by the world of the characters but would seem to have attached itself to that world from another, aerial perspective. (Cologne-Brookes 2006: 552)
Variety of approach (or how) remains one of Oates’s major characteristics as a writer, even while certain preoccupations (or what) have held sway from the beginning. If we include her books of essays, the most recent being Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (1999), The Faith of a Writer (2003), and Uncensored: Views and (Re)views (2005), it is clear that Oates writes in whatever form her moods or aims take, and has indeed become, as John Updike put it in a review of You Must Remember This, “America’s first woman of letters” (1987: 119).
References and Further Reading Comprehensive bibliographical information can be found on Randy Souther’s website on Joyce Carol Oates, Celestial Timepiece (http://jco.usfca. edu). Bedient, Calvin (1987). “Sleeping Beauty and the Love like Hatred,” in Joyce Carol Oates: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom, pp. 19–22. New York: Chelsea House. Bender, Eileen Teper (1987). Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence. Bloomington, I.N.: Indiana University Press. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1987). Joyce Carol Oates: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Cologne-Brookes, Gavin (2005). Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Cologne-Brookes, Gavin, ed. (2006). “Special Issue on Joyce Carol Oates,” Studies in the Novel, 38 (4).
Creighton, Joanne V. (1979). Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: Twayne. Creighton, Joanne V. (1992). Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. Boston: Twayne. Daly, Brenda O. (1996). Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Friedman, Ellen G. (1980). Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Ungar. Johnson, Greg (1987). Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Johnson, Greg (1994). Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne. Johnson, Greg (1998). Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton. Johnson, Greg (2006). Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations 1970–2006. Princeton: Ontario Review Press.
Joyce Carol Oates Milazzo, Lee, ed. (1989). Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Oates, Joyce Carol (1964). With Shuddering Fall. New York: Dutton. Oates, Joyce Carol (1974). New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature. New York: Vanguard. Oates, Joyce Carol (1978). Son of the Morning. New York: Dutton. Oates, Joyce Carol (1980). Bellefleur. New York: Dutton. Oates, Joyce Carol (1988). (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton. Oates, Joyce Carol (1994). What I Lived For. New York: Dutton. Oates, Joyce Carol (1995). “Delirium and Detachment: The Secret of Being a Writer,” The New Yorker, June 23–July 3: 134–7. Oates, Joyce Carol (1998). “Jail-Bait,” Guardian Saturday Review, 10 (October): 1–2.
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Oates, Joyce Carol (1999a). Broke Heart Blues. New York: Dutton. Oates, Joyce Carol (1999b). Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, Prose. New York: Plume. Oates, Joyce Carol (2006). High Lonesome: Selected Stories 1966–2006. New York: Ecco. Shepherd, A. G. (1987). “Faulknerian Antecedents to Joyce Carol Oates’s Mysteries of Winterthurn,” Notes on Contemporary Writing, 17 (5): 8–10. Updike, John (1987). “What You Deserve Is What You Get,” The New Yorker, December 28: 119–23. Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. (1979). Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall. Waller, G. F. (1979). Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Wesley, Marilyn C. (1993). Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates’s Fiction. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood.
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Philip Roth Timothy Parrish
In 1959, Philip Roth launched one of the most extraordinary careers of post-World War II American fiction with the publication of Goodbye, Columbus. This collection of fictions about assimilated American Jews earned Roth, at the age of twenty-four, his first National Book Award. It also earned him the antipathy of many Jewish readers who accused him of trivializing American Jewish experience in order to ingratiate himself with the gentile American literary establishment. Over forty years and thirty books later, Roth is no longer accused of being a self-hating Jewish author, but his career has evolved in response to the perception of cultural conflict that his early fiction provoked. Roth takes Jews for his subject but has insisted that he should be viewed as an American rather than as a Jewish writer. As he remarked in 1997, “If I’m not American, I’m nothing … That epithet American Jewish writer has no meaning. Jew is just another way of being American. There is no separation, not in America, not for me, not for my generation” (Shostak: 236). For Roth, the promise of being an American is the same as the promise of being a writer: the opportunity to create yourself in whatever form you can imagine. Yet, as often as Roth has asserted his identity as an American writer, his imagination has engaged itself with the conflicts his protagonists experience in their identities as Americans who are also Jews. His story, “Eli the Fanatic,” included in Goodbye, Columbus, eerily predicts the direction of much of his later fiction. The story centers on Eli Peck, a suburban lawyer with a history of nervous breakdowns, and his task to persuade a group of D.P.s, or Displaced Persons, from World War II to vacate the Jewish community where Eli and his fellow Jews have settled down as comfortably assimilated Americans. Concerned that “little kids with little yamalkahs chanting their Hebrew lessons on Coach House Road” (Roth 2005: 192) will upset their Christian neighbors, the suburban American Jews are anxious to confirm their own Americanness. Their collective fear focuses on a bearded man in a long, black coat who walks the streets wearing a Talmudic hat above swinging sidelocks. This man terrorizes the Jews of Woodenton because he seems to embody the kind of provincial, tribal history
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that these American Jews imagine that they have transcended. Roth’s satire suggests both that these assimilated Jews are anxious over being known as Jews and that, in the drama of cultural identity, one’s Jewishness will out – however much one tries to remove or hide it. Eli is a lawyer and his job is to find a legal remedy that will obligate the Holocaust refugees to remove themselves from the immediate vicinity of the community. As the story progresses, however, Eli finds himself identifying with the plight of those whom he is supposed to persuade to move. Eli rejects the role the community requires of him. He will not legally remove the refugees. Rather, he convinces the yeshiva’s director to persuade the man in the Talmudic hat to wear modern clothes. Eli suspects that if only this man would not walk through town dressed in garb that reminds everyone of their cultural past, then the assimilated Jews would experience less anxiety that their Christian neighbors will view them as they view the D.P.s. Eli’s gesture represents a comically compressed version of the historical process through which these Jews have become assimilated, suburban Americans. When Eli donates two of his own suits and a hat as well to the man in the Talmudic hat, Eli is startled to receive in turn the very suit and hat his gesture meant to efface. With this symbolic exchange of clothes, Roth makes Eli and the Hebrew teacher into doppelgängers of each another. One’s story is the necessary version of the other’s. Eli intuitively recognizes that his identity as American cannot efface his family history as a Jew. Thus, while his doppelgänger walks the streets in Eli’s clothes, Eli walks the streets in the Talmudic hat and long black coat. Moreover, when his son is born, Eli decides that he wants his son to see him in this suit and that someday he would make him wear it too. If Eli is described as feeling as if he were two people, that is because he is. Though Eli’s friends understand him to be having another nervous breakdown, the story seems to suggest that, despite Eli’s efforts to mask a pure Jewish identity, the Jew will out. One could say his gesture is one of respect – of piety – for something that he does not understand yet also knows to be a part of him. One also knows that Eli will not be taking the other’s place at the yeshiva. From this perspective, Eli is less recovering his true cultural identity than performing what an “authentic” identity might look and feel like. Eli’s atavistic transformation reminds the Jewish community that their communal identity is still embedded in a history that cannot be contained by the word “American.” As funny as it appears, Eli and his double are each Jews and as Jews they both share a past, dress it up however one likes. Eli wearing the Talmudic suit before his newborn son signals that he is being born into fatherhood and that he stands in for the line of Jewish fathers, or elders, his neighbors have forgotten or denied. That Roth’s work affirms the primacy of Jewish identity in American society was not evident to his early readers – or perhaps to Roth himself. His early stories provoked cries of outrage from rabbis even as they elicited the admiration of prominent literary critics such as Leslie Fielder, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin. Roth’s next two novels, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967) were not preoccupied with the question of Jewish American identity. When She Was Good, in fact, concerned
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Midwestern Protestants and recalled Theodore Dreiser more than it did Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud, the two Jewish American writers with whom Roth has been most frequently compared. That Roth was troubled by the controversy that his early work had caused among Jewish readers was confirmed by Roth in his 1988 autobiography, The Facts. There, Roth tells the story of how he became branded – the word is his – once and for all as a Jewish writer. Roth says his branding occurred at Yeshiva University while participating in a conference devoted to “The Crisis of Conscience in Minority Writers of Fiction.” Speaking to an audience of devout Jews, Roth stressed that the commonality of American experience is more important than its ethnic particularities. During the question-and-answer period, however, Roth found that his arguments had made no impression. Instead of a friendly exchange of contrasting intellectual positions, Roth understood himself to be under attack and saw his audience as his unforgiving judges. “Mr. Roth,” he was asked at one point, “would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?” (Roth 1988: 127). (Seventeen years later, Roth’s narrative alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, would be posed this same question in The Ghost Writer, 1979.) By the end of the evening, he was staring into “the faces of my jury” and confronting “the final verdict against me, as harsh a judgment as I hope to hear in this or any other world.” Roth left Yeshiva with a vow he would be unable to keep: “I’ll never write about Jews again,” he told his friends and himself (Roth 1988: 129). Nonetheless, from this point on, his most enduring fiction would explicitly confront the contradictions inherent in being a Jew who is also an American. Roth’s next novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), would prove to be his most combative – it also made him a national celebrity. Portnoy’s Complaint was a blasphemous and intentionally offensive account of being Jewish and male in America. Here Roth seemed intent to take on his antagonists’ assumptions directly and turn them inside out as his protagonist projects to the most outrageous degree every conceivable stereotype of American Jews. The novel’s protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, suffers an overprotective, unduly affectionate mother. His father’s story consists for the most part of his unsuccessful attempts to move his bowels, despite the persistent encouragement of Alex’s mother. Alex is a compulsive masturbator, and he understands this vice to be somehow a consequence of his childhood and his relationship with his family. He at one point inadvertently ejaculates into a piece of liver that the family, blissfully ignorant of Alex’s seasoning, later consumes for dinner. He uses his sister’s underwear as a fetishistic prop to stimulate his obsession. As an adult, he brings himself to sexual ecstasy while sitting next to a blonde woman on a bus. In Israel, surrounded by Jewish women, he finds himself impotent. To some readers, Roth seemed to portray American Jewishness as a kind of psychological social disease. Influential critic Irving Howe said that Portnoy confirmed that Roth’s harshest critics were, in fact, correct to dismiss him as a sell-out to (gentile) American approval. Howe lamented that Roth did not write within a rich literary tradition, and in effect declared Roth’s future works not worth reading. Roth, who would get his revenge on
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Howe in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), understood Portnoy to mark a creative breakthrough. For Roth, it destroyed any inhibitions he may have had about portraying Jewish identity after the negative reaction to his early stories, and predicted the experiments in postmodern narrative forms that would characterize the Zuckerman novels of the 1970s and 1980s. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s first authorial alter ego, first appeared in My Life as a Man (1974) as the alter ego of that novel’s protagonist, Peter Tarnopol. However, with the character’s reappearance in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman emerged as arguably the most important character in Roth’s fiction. First, in the grouping of novels called Zuckerman Bound, and then, later, in the novels known as the American Trilogy (American Pastoral [1997], I Married a Communist [1998], and The Human Stain [2000]), Zuckerman was the narrative device through which Roth explored to their limits questions of personal, cultural, and authorial identity. The Ghost Writer begins with Zuckerman’s pilgrimage to E. I. Lonoff, one of his literary heroes. What begins as the portrait of the artist turns into a sustained confrontation with the legacy of the Holocaust and its meaning for American Jews. Like his creator, Zuckerman has published stories about Jews that have enraged other Jews – in Zuckerman’s case, his family and his family’s friends. Yet, as Zuckerman reflects on Lonoff ’s career as a certain kind of Jewish writer, he comes to see that a writer is embedded in the history within which he invents himself. Zuckerman cannot defend himself against his angry Jewish readers without offering a vision of Jewish history that engages the concerns of his antagonists. In this sense, Roth’s Joycean argument that the writer’s first truth is to his own artistic vision becomes a way of recognizing how history is something that is, at the same time, both inherited and created. History is the process through which the artist finds himself in his work. Roth portrays this insight through Zuckerman’s recreation of the Anne Frank story. Also visiting Lonoff that weekend is one of Lonoff ’s students, Amy Bellette. Zuckerman overhears them talking and determines that Lonoff is having an affair with Amy and, moreover, that Amy is in fact Anne Frank, miraculously never martyred by Hitler. Zuckerman Americanizes Anne Frank, who is given the power by Zuckerman to be reinvented as something other than history’s victim. In so doing, Roth conveys how for some Jewish writers certain facts of history, in this case the slaughtering of six million Europeans because of their religious identity, are untellable. The silence of the dead is more eloquent than the inventions of the living. Yet, this silence also provides part of the context in which Zuckerman (and therefore Roth) knows himself as a Jewish writer. In the novella that concludes Zuckerman Bound, The Prague Orgy (1985), Zuckerman reverses Anne’s course and travels to Europe to recover the missing manuscripts of a Jewish writer slain during the Holocaust. He is invited to undertake this mission by his friend, Sisovsky, a Jewish writer harassed by the communist government. Attracting the unwelcome attention of the secret police, Zuckerman becomes a version of the oppressed Jewish writer that his freedom as an American has, to this point, spared him. Yet, by the end of the novella, when Zuckerman returns to America without
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the lost manuscript, he recognizes that he cannot truly trade places with either European writer – the contemporary one, Sisovsky, or the one killed in the Holocaust. Just as Zuckerman cannot truly tell “the real” Anne Frank’s story, neither can he recover the manuscripts. When Zuckerman goes to Eastern Europe to recover the stories of the Jewish writer killed in the Holocaust in The Prague Orgy, he literally trades places with the Eastern European writer, Sisovsky, who convinces Zuckerman to recover the manuscript. Zuckerman, like Roth, can only embrace the fate that made him an American writer. Moreover, Roth suggests that history can only be known through an act of imaginative recreation. This is not to deny the primacy of the past but to assert its fluidity through living memory. With The Counterlife (1986), Roth complicated the Zuckerman saga by resituating its preoccupations in the “authentic” homeland of the Jews, Israel. Here, in a distinctively postmodernist way, Roth questions whether one can ever fully possess one’s own identity. This time it is Nathan’s brother, Henry, who wonders to what extent that he, as an American, can be said to be “authentically” Jewish. He decides that to be true to his own history as a Jew, he must leave his assimilated American existence and move to Israel’s West Bank to live there as a Jew among other Jews. He explains to Nathan that listening to Israeli children chanting their school lesson in Hebrew prompted him to reflect on his Jewishness. He tells Nathan, “I am not just a Jew, I’m not also a Jew – I’m a Jew as deep as those Jews (Roth 1986: 61). Henry’s assertion of his Jewish identity is also a rejection of his American one. Like Roth’s Eli, Henry has chosen to affiliate himself with a historical identity truer than the one his American self disguises and distorts. Nathan, the confident American who happens to be Jewish, tries to persuade Henry to return to America, but he too struggles with his own version of Henry’s conflict. For Nathan, the question is not only one’s historical identity, but what it means to have a self. Thus, according to Nathan, if there is “an irreducible self, it is rather small, and may even be the root of all impersonation – the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate.” From this perspective, Henry’s claim to be an authentic Jew cannot entirely be separated from the possibility that he is only impersonating what an assimilated American Jew might think an authentic Jew would look like – again, a version of Eli. On the other hand, when Nathan bears the brunt of what he takes to be an anti-Semitic episode in a London restaurant, he realizes that being Jewish has a context other than one’s own conception of it. Thus, he tells his wife that even though he is not a practicing religious Jew, he would still have any sons of his circumcised if only to acknowledge that one is born into a particular history, whatever one’s subsequent efforts to reshape it and define it according to what one presumes is one’s own will. In Operation Shylock (1993), Roth’s imagination returns to Israel – only this time the protagonist is named Philip Roth and his task is to reclaim his identity which has been usurped by a dubious character also claiming to be Philip Roth. By giving the protagonist the same biographical identity as the author, Roth suggests that his very identity as a Jewish author is at stake in this novel. He stages his mastery as a
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Jewish American author and, by implication, even takes on the demeaning but centuries-defining stereotype of Jews perpetrated by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Roth goes to Jerusalem to confront his antagonist: another character named Philip Roth who has usurped the “true” Roth’s identity. This “other” Roth travels around Israel and advocates the controversial position that the country of Israel should be disbanded as a failed historical experiment, and the Jews should return to Europe as soon as possible. Pipik’s philosophy of “diasporism,” recommending a counter-Zionist return of Israeli land to the original countries, celebrates the Jew whose identity as a Jew depends on living in the diaspora – a position, ironically, that mirrors Roth’s frequent justification of himself as an American writer whose subject is Jews. Ironically, Pipik’s arguments threaten the identity of both Israel as a country and of Roth as an author. The playful suggestion is that to threaten one is to threaten the other, as if one is somehow a version of the other. Eventually, after successfully impersonating Pipik impersonating himself, Roth manages to dispel Pipik from the novel. Yet, Operation Shylock never actually refutes Pipik’s position. At worst, Pipik represents the terror of one whose identity is so dispersed that he has no self at all. Yet, Pipik becomes the medium by which Roth, who begins the work in a state of near suicidal depression, recovers his sense of himself as a Jewish American author. This renewed Roth, who would after Shylock write a series of well-received novels, does not believe that his Jewishness needs to be authenticated by any force other than his own personal history. Operation Shylock marked a decisive turn in Roth’s stance toward the influence of history. Subsequent Roth novels would not be so confident that history is merely the artist’s toy. In the Zuckerman novels that comprise the American Trilogy, history is decisively something the characters cannot shape – as Zuckerman did Anne Frank – according to the wishes of their personal desire. In Roth’s earlier Zuckerman books, Zuckerman battled against the limitations imposed upon the individual by tribal demands. In American Pastoral, Zuckerman as narrator identifies with an assimilated Jew, Swede Levov, whose assimilation into mainstream American culture is portrayed as a tragic fall rather than a comic success. American Pastoral marks a departure for Roth because it questions the American ideal of cultural assimilation. According to Zuckerman, Swede Levov is to inhabit the “American Pastoral” by being an American rather than a Jew who lives in America. Instead of idyllic bliss, Swede experiences “the counterpastoral,” what Zuckerman calls the “American berserk” and which he personifies as the social unrest of the sixties (Roth 1997: 86). The novel ultimately mourns what was lost when Jews, among other Americans, suffered their unique cultural identity to be sacrificed in order to become assimilated: the American Dream became the American Berserk. Zuckerman offers Swede’s story as a lament for the time during and after World War II when Swede, Zuckerman, and Philip Roth were simply boys who knew themselves only as American Jews among other American Jews. This point is underscored at the end of the novel through Zuckerman’s portrayal of Swede’s father’s skepticism concerning the wisdom of his Jewish son marrying a shiksa, a Catholic girl and former Miss America contestant. In retrospect, the father
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is the Cassandra-like figure whose true prophecy goes unheeded. His son’s “mixed” marriage inevitably results in family tragedy. The American Berserk of the past fifty years is also the context out of which The Human Stain’s Coleman Silk, arguably Roth’s most remarkable protagonist, emerges. Coleman is an African American who until his death successfully passes for white – passes, specifically, as a Jewish intellectual. In a way, he in an intellectual version of Swede Levov – except secretly black. At first glance, Coleman seems a return to Roth’s earlier heroes: he will let no one else define who or what he will be. Rather than suffer the prejudices of being “black,” he heroically decides to transcend others’ prejudice by becoming his own man. Coleman is also a version of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man – one whose “true” identity is invisible to everyone except him. Coleman achieves the success he seeks but he cannot share the success with his family. Roth thus structures the novel so as to undermine Coleman’s view of himself as the heroic individual. Where Coleman dies thinking that no one but his last lover knows his secret, he is resurrected by Zuckerman as the Rothian protagonist who could not transcend his family and thus his cultural history. Zuckerman learns the truth about Coleman’s story from his African American sister, Ernestine. At novel’s end, Zuckerman is to join Ernestine at the Silks’ Sunday family gathering as a version of Coleman. Zuckerman is not passing as African American, however, but is accepting, through Coleman’s failed example, his own identity as one of a group: a Jewish American who owes his identity not only to his marvelous capacity for self-invention but also to the history of Jews before him who made his story possible. Over the course of his long career, Roth has achieved the standing as one of American literature’s major authors. In 1995, Harold Bloom included more of Roth’s novels (six) in his Western Canon than he did works of any other American writer. His works are currently being collected in the Library of America series. He has won numerous honors, including two National Book Awards (1960, 1995), the National Book Critic’s Circle Award (1987, 1991), and the PEN/Faulkner Award (1993, 2000). In 2001, Time Magazine named Roth “America’s Best Novelist.” Roth’s continued work, however, suggests that any retrospective of his career remains premature. The Plot Against America (2004), Roth’s most overtly political book since Our Gang (1971), is an alternative history that re-imagines the United States’ entry into World War II. In this version, Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer, not Franklin Roosevelt, is elected president in 1940 and forges an alliance with Hitler. In addition to imagining how his own family might have responded to being persecuted by Nazis (albeit American ones), Roth’s novel was also read by many as a sly critique of the second Bush administration. Everyman (2005) explicitly confronted death with the clarity of vision that has marked all of Roth’s work. If Everyman’s unnamed protagonist is neither Nathan Zuckerman nor Philip Roth, his appetite for life makes him a recognizably Rothian hero, and his story is poignant because it requires his death. Roth’s next novel, Exit Ghost (2007), revisited the characters of The Ghost Writer. There, Roth dismisses Zuckerman into an ambiguous silence. Zuckerman’s creator, however, shows no sign of letting up and a new novel is currently in the press. One cannot imagine
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American literature without the animating influence of Philip Roth’s extraordinary body of work.
References and Further Reading Bloom, Harold (1995). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2003). Philip Roth: Modern Critical Views, rev. edn. New York: Chelsea House. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2004). Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint”: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House. Cooper, Alan (1996). Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Halio, Jay L. and Siegel, Ben, eds. (2005). Turning up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels. Newark, D.E.: University of Delaware Press. Lee, Herminone (1982). Philip Roth. London: Methuen. Parrish, Timothy, ed. (2006). The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Posnock, Ross (2006). Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Roth, Philip (1986). The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1988). The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Roth, Philip (1993). Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Simon and Schuster. Roth, Philip (1997). American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Roth, Philip (2005). Novels and Stories: 1959– 1962. New York: Library of America. Royal, Derek Parker, ed. (2005). Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. London: Praeger. Shostak, Debra (2004). Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press.
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The Fiction of John Updike: Timely and Timeless Brian Keener
In a career spanning the past fifty years, the prolific John Updike has published twenty-three novels and fifteen short-story collections and, at 76, shows no sign of slowing down. Updike’s unrivaled powers of observation and description, richness of theme and characterization, deft plotting, range of tone from low comedy to high seriousness, pervasive humor, uncanny ear for dialogue, and overall mastery of the novel and short-story forms have secured his place in the first rank of American fiction writers of any era. While early in Updike’s career, a critical point of view held that his brilliant style overshadowed his content, this criticism has long since been confuted. Now, the critical consensus celebrates both his gracefully radiant prose and his illuminating depiction of American life. In novels such as The Centaur (1963), the five novels that constitute the Rabbit series published every decade from 1960 through 2000, and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), as well as in short-story collections like Pigeon Feathers (1962) and Too Far to Go (1979), Updike unflinchingly surveys the human condition: faith and doubt; responsibility and freedom; the family and the individual; failure and success; love and sex; nostalgia and guilt; aging and death. Pondering the meaning of existence, he continually locates it within the context of ordinary life. In his memoir, SelfConsciousness (1989), he avers, “The first mystery that confronts us is ‘Why me?’ The next is ‘Why here?’ ” (Updike 1989b: 6). John Updike’s fiction poses these questions and seeks to answer them. This chapter focuses on eight novels at the heart of Updike’s fiction. In “One Big Interview” (in Picked-Up Pieces [1975]), Updike describes The Centaur, winner of the 1964 National Book Award, as his “truest book” (Updike 1975: 500). This poetic novel details three days in the life of George Caldwell, a beleaguered high-school teacher, and his teenage son, Peter, in 1947 Pennsylvania. Yet, The Centaur transcends realism. All of the characters have mythic correspondences: Caldwell is also Chiron, a virtuous centaur; the proud Peter, Prometheus; the domineering principal, Zimmerman, Zeus; and so on. Adding to the novel’s complexity, The Centaur alternates
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realistic and surrealistic passages, with the latter likely representing Peter’s dreams; moreover, it employs a split narration with Peter relating five of the nine chapters in the first person and the others told in the omniscient third person. This double narration conveys Peter’s ambivalent feelings toward his father: his fierce love for him but also his Oedipal rivalry. Given all this, The Centaur is Updike’s most puzzling work; at the same time, with its emphasis on tradition and learning, its focus on art and religion, and its breadth of vision encompassing evolution and the pagan and Christian worlds, it is his most profound. Perhaps accounting for this novel’s intensity is its autobiographical aspect. The teenage Updike was a student in the high school where his father taught and the novelist has described him as the inspiration for Caldwell: “For fifteen years I’d watched a normal good-doing Protestant man suffering in a kind of comic but real way” (Updike 1975: 500). Although this often zany novel contains a great deal of comedy (with Greek gods appearing as drunks and pretentious clergymen), the plights of father and son remain serious. The sensitive Peter observes his poorly paid father suffering the torments of unruly students and the overbearing “gods” of the town as well as the fear that he has cancer. Nevertheless, Peter marvels at his charismatic father’s appreciation of life: “Think about the earth. Don’t you love her?” (Updike 1963: 107). A key passage in the final chapter reveals the mundane as the path to the transcendent. Caldwell recalls as a youth passing a raucous saloon and feeling frightened by its “poisonous laughter” until his clergyman father reassures him that “All joy belongs to the Lord” (Updike 1963: 296). The wording of the passage echoes the 100th Psalm, but the revelation occurs not in a church but outside a rough bar with the imagery and rhythm paraphrased in the vernacular, concluding, hopefully: “Only goodness lives. But it does live” (Updike 1963: 297). Despite disappointments and frustrations, Caldwell gives significance to his life by living for others as a loving parent and dedicated teacher. With this faith, The Centaur provides the underpinning for Updike’s fiction. In conceiving The Centaur and Rabbit, Run (1960), the first book in the Rabbit series, Updike envisioned contrasting two approaches to life: the dutiful horse and the feckless rabbit. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the series’ eponymous hero and former local basketball star, is an everyman: the working-class, white American male of the second half of the twentieth century. His ordinariness, however, does not diminish his importance. Updike’s devoting of four novels to chronicling Rabbit’s life, as well as a postmortem novella, indicates the centrality of this series in his work. In addition, the first four novels depict the America of, respectively, the conformist 1950s, the tumultuous 1960s, the complacent 1970s, and the problematic 1980s, thereby providing a social history of the United States following the postwar 1940s of The Centaur. Afterward, “Rabbit Remembered” (2000) takes the series through the high-tech 1990s and into the new century as Rabbit’s son, Nelson, succeeds his father. Rabbit, Run, set in 1959, is the edgiest novel in the series and Updike’s use of the present tense heightens its sense of immediacy. Feeling trapped by a stale marriage
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and a dead-end job, the twenty-six-year-old Rabbit continually dodges his responsibilities. In turn, he deserts his wife, Janice, and his mistress, Ruth, each pregnant with his child, and his fecklessness results indirectly in Janice’s accidental drowning of their infant daughter. Rabbit, Run portrays a young man’s incipient comprehension of his place in life, but it will take Rabbit thirty years and four books to mature. Rabbit’s experiences intensify in Rabbit Redux (1971) as the larger world increasingly intrudes upon his personal life. While Rabbit, Run essentially confines itself to the parochial context of Rabbit’s home town, the teeming sequel, set in the turbulent year of 1969, highlights the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, including Vietnam, black militancy, the women’s liberation movement, space exploration, and the counterculture of protest, sexual freedom, and drug use. Like the country, Rabbit is ripe for change. No longer on the run, he has retreated into conformity and drudgery. The death of his daughter has left him devoid of hope and faith; moreover, he feels alienated by the turmoil in the news. The Latin word redux means “return to health,” and for Rabbit to become healthy, he must renew his life. When Janice leaves him for an affair with her co-worker, Charlie Stavros, Rabbit, in desperation, ventures into the terra incognita (for him) of an inner-city black bar. There he encounters Jill, a runaway teenager from an affluent background, and Skeeter, a black revolutionary and fugitive drug dealer. Soon, both move in with Rabbit and set about educating him about history and politics from a radical perspective. Ultimately, exposure to the bohemian Jill and the subversive Skeeter, as well as, among others, his worldly sister, Mim, broadens Rabbit’s outlook on life and increases his tolerance for diversity. As the shrewd Stavros observes, “Being crazy’s what keeps us alive” (Updike 1995: 702). For her part, Janice, exemplifying women’s struggle for equality, emerges from her husband’s shadow as her own person. Her evolvement, as well as the series’ portrayal of formidable characters like Ruth and Mim, is evidence that Updike, contrary to some criticism, does present women positively in his fiction. Rebirth, however, is not painless. Eventually, Rabbit loses his job, his house (firebombed by vigilante neighbors), and his surrogate daughter, Jill, killed in the fire. Moreover, Jill’s death ignites the long cold war between Rabbit and his son. Nevertheless, at novel’s end, the reconciled Rabbit and Janice are, for now at least, renewed. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit learns that success can be as problematic as failure. Thanks to his employment at his father-in-law’s Toyota dealership and timely investments in precious metals, Rabbit has become, if not rich, middle class. Yet, he remains uneasy. At forty-six, Rabbit is suffering a middle-age crisis, reflected in his obsession with Cindy Murkett, a much younger woman in his country club set. Moreover, there is the generational threat posed by Nelson, eager to quit college and enter the family business. Again, however, Rabbit’s willingness to chance new experiences proves enlightening, although, as usual, things do not turn out as expected. This time Rabbit’s renewal begins when he ventures outside the country for the first time on a vacation to the Caribbean. On this trip, his overriding goal is to bed the enticing Cindy, but events conspire so that he ends up with the plain Thelma Harrison instead.
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The evening, however, proves a revelation, for Rabbit bares his soul to Thelma and they achieve intimacy. From this experience, Rabbit recognizes that his desire for Cindy is unrealistic but that possibilities for greater freedom in his life do exist. In addition, Nelson’s marriage to his pregnant girlfriend, Pru, and his return to college remove this threat for now. Reassured, Rabbit summons the courage to move out of his mother-in-law’s gloomy house. For Rabbit, accepting his place in time has resulted in a granddaughter, his own home, and a richer appreciation of life. In the elegiac Rabbit at Rest (1990), set in 1989, Rabbit confronts aging, illness, and death. Exacerbating Rabbit’s anxiety is the unresolved conflict with Nelson that rages anew. Nelson, now the father of two children, has become a cocaine addict, and his irresponsibility threatens the well-being of the family. Eventually, Rabbit recognizes that his presence inhibits his son’s maturation and that his death would be “doing him a favor now” (Updike 1995: 1515). The conclusion echoes that of The Centaur with a father sacrificing himself for his son. Also, like The Centaur, it becomes clear that the central dynamic in the series is that between father and son. The 2000 novella, “Rabbit Remembered” (in Licks of Love), taking place at the turn of the new century, provides a coda for the series. Now it is the thirty-four-year-old Nelson who, with a broken marriage and frustrating career, endures a Rabbit-like life of quiet desperation. Moreover, he is haunted by his father’s ghost, symbolizing their still unresolved rivalry. Like Rabbit, Nelson matures by breaking out of his rut and facing up to his responsibilities. Finally, he musters the courage to leave his mother’s house; later, his confrontation with a menacing bully allows him to regain his family and exorcise Rabbit’s ghost. The happy ending of the series is punctuated by the wedding of Annabelle, Nelson’s long-lost sister and Rabbit’s daughter with Ruth. Reflecting his new role as his father’s successor, Nelson gives away the bride. That the series ends happily with a marriage, the traditional conclusion of comedy, indicates that the Rabbit novels depict essentially a comic perspective on life, with characters learning through trial and error their true place in the world. With Nelson’s maturation, Updike concludes the series by uniting his two central figures: the feckless rabbit has evolved into the responsible horse. With its detailed representation of everyday America, In the Beauty of the Lilies follows in the tradition of The Centaur and the Rabbit novels. Expanding his perspective to the entire twentieth century, against the backdrop of current events, Updike chronicles the shifting fortunes of the Wilmot family through four generations and across the nation. This ambitious sweep gives the novel an epic quality unmatched in his fiction. Furthermore, the tone differs vastly from that of The Centaur and the Rabbit books. Although In the Beauty of the Lilies contains humor, the mood, overall, is dark. A description of a main character, Teddy, fits Updike’s perspective: “still curious about the world but with never any hope of changing it” (Updike 1996: 407). The title and epigraph, from Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War anthem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” announce the novel’s preoccupation with two linked aspects of the American experience: a fervent Christianity and zealous idealism. As the twentieth century unfolds, however, America’s burgeoning fascination with popular
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culture, especially the movies, loosens the hold of traditional religion on the nation’s imagination; moreover, greed and class struggle undermine the American dream. These themes converge in the first chapter, “Clarence.” One day in 1910, the family patriarch, Reverend Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister in Paterson, New Jersey, “felt the last particles of his faith leave him” (Updike 1996: 5); meanwhile, a violent industrial strike polarizes the city, and movie pioneers D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford film a costume drama nearby. Clarence’s resignation from the ministry plunges the family into poverty and causes his son, Teddy, the second chapter’s title character, to renounce religion. Significantly, both Clarence and Teddy habitually escape grim reality by retreating to the sanctuary of movie theaters. Generally, the family’s fortunes mirror those of the nation. In the third chapter, “Essie/Alma,” Teddy’s daughter, Essie, achieves stardom in Hollywood, changing her name in the process to the more romantic Alma DeMott. Her hard-earned success reflects the country’s sense of purpose in World War II and its postwar prosperity. Unfortunately, Alma’s career demands and unstable personal life result in her neglecting the emotional needs of her only child, Clark (named after movie star Clark Gable). In the novel’s final chapter, “Clark/Esau/Slick,” the three names that Clark at different times comes to be known by suggest, as in the case with his mother, a national crisis of identity. Clark personifies modern America’s disaffected youth. Unable to find a niche in Hollywood, he drifts into aimless hedonism and a menial job at his uncle’s Colorado ski resort. In effect, the movies fail him as Christianity failed Clarence. Defeated, Clark falls in with a sinister apocalyptic cult controlled by a messianic madman named Jesse Smith. During a gun battle with the authorities, Smith orders the slaughter of the cult’s women and children, but Clark heroically saves most of them before he himself is killed. Although Clark repudiates (and kills) Smith, he apparently regains a belief in the scriptures that his great-grandfather had lost. Like Caldwell, Rabbit, and Nelson, Clark sacrifices himself for the succeeding generation. Nevertheless, the ending is troubling. Clark is murdered in a senseless shoot-out very different from the noble struggle Howe’s hymn envisions. Furthermore, the book’s last two words, “The children” (Updike 1996: 491), in their plaintive terseness bemoan the plight of these orphans in such a stormy world. Updike’s fiction comes full circle with Terrorist (2006). Although this post-9/11 thriller, centered on a terrorist plot to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel connecting New York City with New Jersey, constitutes a new genre for Updike, the realistic Terrorist belongs within the mainstream of his fiction. In fact, Terrorist, with its setting in a gritty inner-city high school and quotations from the Qur’ān instead of passages from Greek mythology, updates The Centaur. The teenage protagonist, Ahmad, in his arrogance, resembles the egocentric Peter; the world-weary Jewish faculty member, Jack Levy, who becomes a surrogate father to the boy, is another Caldwell. Moreover, an Oedipal rivalry exists as Ahmad resents Levy’s affair with his mother. At the book’s climax, Levy risks his life by talking Ahmad out of detonating his bomb. The teacher succeeds in saving numerous lives, including Ahmad, but Terrorist, like In the Beauty
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of the Lilies, ends ominously: “ ‘These devils,’ Ahmad thinks, ‘have taken away my God ’ ” (Updike 2006: 310). In Updike’s fiction, the world appears evermore problematic. Space permits only a brief noting of Updike’s other novels. Two of the early books take place in his boyhood rural Pennsylvania. In his first published novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the twenty-seven-year-old Updike impressionistically and unsentimentally presents the bleakness of old age with a central figure based on his grandfather. The concise Of the Farm (1965), in ways a sequel to The Centaur, orchestrates the complicated family relationships that ensue when a son returns with his second wife and young son for a weekend visit to his widowed mother’s farm. New England, where Updike relocated in 1957, becomes the setting for a number of novels set in suburbia. Updike’s 1968 bestseller, Couples, caused a sensation with its frank treatment of middle-class adultery; another tale of suburban adultery, Marry Me: A Romance (1976), teases the reader with two misleading endings before the actual conclusion becomes clear. Like Shakespeare, Updike draws upon myth, literature, and history for inspiration. The fanciful Brazil (1994) transposes the Tristan and Isolde legend to modern Brazil with a forbidden love affair between a black youth from the slums and an aristocratic white girl. As one critic observes, The Coup (1978) and The Witches of Eastwick (1984) have “affinities with romance and fairy tale” (Pritchard: 207). The Coup, Updike’s global novel, playfully depicts an imaginary African country and its deposed dictator, while satirizing the Cold War and providing a Nabokov-like tour of Middle America; The Witches of Eastwick contemplates female empowerment as Updike conjures a trio of modern witches enchanting seaside Rhode Island. The sequel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), returns the now elderly witches to the scene of the earlier novel some three decades later. Updike cleverly recasts Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romance, The Scarlet Letter (1850), into a trilogy of novels, each narrated by a modern version of the three principal characters. Dimmesdale becomes a disgraced minister undergoing rehabilitation for a sexual addiction in the bawdy A Month of Sundays (1975); Hester Prynne appears as a free spirit who leaves her New England family for an ashram in Arizona in his epistolary satire S. (1988); and, in a rich novel of ideas, Roger’s Version (1986), Updike creates an unsympathetic narrator, a sardonic professor of theology modeled on Roger Chillingworth, as an intellectually brilliant but cold-hearted Hawthornian villain. In Gertrude and Claudius (2000), Updike imagines a fictional prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. With sumptuous verisimilitude, he recreates the royal court of medieval Denmark and recounts the events leading up to the play’s beginning. Mischievously, the novel suggests that the tragedy could have been avoided if the headstrong Hamlet had left well enough alone. Revisionist history is evident also in Memories of the Ford Administration (1992). The title is comically ironic, for the historian narrator remembers hardly anything about Gerald Ford’s presidency but, instead, substitutes the biography of James Buchanan, the fifteenth president of the United States. In this (partly) historical novel, Updike concludes his apologia for the maligned Buchanan (also the subject of his only published play) with his customary faith in
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democracy: “no divinely appointed leader will save us, we must do it for ourselves” (Updike 1992: 352). And in the futuristic Toward the End of Time (1997), Updike explores the concept of parallel universes and projects a post-apocalyptic America of 2020. Here, as in later novels like Villages (2004), an elderly narrator reflects upon the course of his life. Since it is impossible to do justice here to Updike’s achievement in short fiction, a look at a few representative stories will have to give a sense of his range in this form. One of his earliest stories, “Pigeon Feathers,” complements The Centaur. The characters and setting are virtually identical, with a precocious teenage son, doting mother, and Caldwell-like father living in the countryside. One day, the son, David, reads a history that matter of factly denies Christ’s divinity. Shocked, the boy despairs. As in The Centaur, however, a mundane experience restores his faith. After completing the grisly chore of ridding the barn of invading pigeons, David marvels at the beauty and intricacy of these humble creatures’ feathers. The story ends triumphantly with David reassured “that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole creation by refusing to let David live forever” (Updike 2003: 33). The collection Too Far to Go recounts the courtship, marriage, and divorce of that quintessentially middle-class couple, Richard and Joan Maple. The final story, “Here Come the Maples,” details the divorce. With customary Updike irony, the events summon forth bittersweet memories for Richard of the couple’s meeting, dating, wedding, and honeymoon twenty years earlier. Poignantly, he recalls that after the wedding ceremony he had been too flustered to kiss his bride; equally flustered after the divorce, this time he inexplicably does kiss her. With this paradoxical kiss symbolizing the couple’s continuing mixed feelings toward each other, Updike deftly concludes his history of the Maples. Another collection of stories, the three volumes collected in The Complete Henry Bech (2001), chronicles the life and career of another Updike alter ego but one very different from Rabbit (and the prolific Updike): the Jewish writer, Henry Bech. As in the Maples stories, the Bech stories in effect constitute a novel. These stories are comic, as things never quite work out as Bech anticipates. In “Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author,” Bech repeatedly is forced to accept deflating reality. First, he impulsively visits a distant collector of his books, expecting to be greeted reverentially, only to learn that his unread works have been unceremoniously stored as an investment in a closet with those of other writers. Next, he weaves a fantasy that a woman in the audience at his readings is his soul mate, an embodiment of Edgar Allan Poe’s Lenore, but once again is disillusioned. Finally, a promising junket to a Caribbean island to sign copies of a special edition of one of his novels ends farcically when the exhausted Bech, suffering the ultimate writer’s block, is unable to write even his own name. Updike’s short stories typically dramatize the intricate nature of human relationships. In “Transaction” (1979), Updike links two of his fictional preoccupations: sex and mortality. When a middle-aged man impulsively hires a prostitute, the tone becomes comic as the self-conscious protagonist bumbles his way through the night.
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The mood, however, abruptly changes when he recognizes the next morning that the experience “made sex finite” (Updike 2003: 701) and thus serves as a rueful reminder of his own finiteness. This story exemplifies Updike’s ability to merge seamlessly the comic and the tragic in his fiction. Any study of Updike’s fiction should include at least a brief consideration of his artful prose. A description from Rabbit at Rest of a memory from childhood of a department store Christmas display serves as an example: “those otherworldly displays of circling trains and nodding dolls and twinkling stars in the corner windows as if God Himself put them there to light up the darkest time of the year” (Updike 1995: 1469). The imagery, wording, and rhythm succinctly evoke a child’s awe. The kinetic modifiers – “circling,” “nodding,” and “twinkling” – enhance the wonder of the scene; the three “ands” convey a youngster’s excitement. The adjective “otherworldly” connects, in a child’s mind, the glittering commercialization of Christmas with God’s providence, while the “twinkling stars” contrast the bright holiday with the wintry gloom. The criticism of Updike’s work is even more prolific than the writer himself and so, unfortunately, there is no room to cover it adequately here. Rather than omit so many insightful books and articles, I would instead direct readers to The John Updike Encyclopedia, by Jack DeBellis, which includes a comprehensive bibliography of the criticism as well as a full listing of Updike’s myriad publications. Another useful reference is the John Updike website updated on a regular basis by James Yerkes. Both sources are listed in “References and Further Reading” below. Also in this section, I have included Updike’s collections of essays and criticism. As a final word, Updike’s artful and enlightening fiction – displaying his genius for vividly depicting the external world and for articulating the complex inner life of thought, emotion, and mood – remains timely and timeless.
References and Further Reading Bloom, Harold, ed. (1987). John Updike: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2000). John Updike: Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers. New York: Chelsea House. DeBellis, Jack (2000). The John Updike Encyclopedia. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. DeBellis, Jack and Broomfield, Michael (2007). John Updike: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials, 1948–2007. New Castle, D.E.: Delaware Oak Knoll. Greiner, Donald J. (1984). John Updike’s Novels. Athens, O.H.: Ohio University Press. Keener, Brian (2005). John Updike’s Human Comedy. New York: Peter Lang.
Macnaughton, William R., ed. (1982). Critical Essays on John Updike. Boston: G. K. Hall. Miller, D. Quentin (2001). John Updike and the Cold War. Columbia, M.O.: University of Missouri Press. Newman, Judie (1998). John Updike. New York: St. Martin’s. Olster, Stacey, ed. (2006). The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plath, James, ed. (1994). Conversations with John Updike. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Pritchard, William H. (2000). John Updike: America’s Man of Letters. South Royalston, V.T.: Steerforth.
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Schiff, James A. (1998). John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne. Thorburn, David and Eiland, Howard, eds. (1979). John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Updike, John (1963). The Centaur. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1965). Assorted Prose. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1975). Picked-Up Pieces. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1983). Hugging the Shore. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1989a). Just Looking. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1989b). Self-Consciousness. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1991). Odd Jobs. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1992). Memories of the Ford Administration. New York: Knopf.
Updike, John (1995). Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1996). In the Beauty of the Lilies. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (1999). More Matter. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (2000). Licks of Love. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (2003). The Early Stories 1953–1975. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (2005). Still Looking. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (2006). Terrorist. New York: Knopf. Updike, John (2007). Due Considerations. New York: Knopf. Yerkes, James, ed. “John Updike website,”
[email protected].
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Maxine Hong Kingston Helena Grice
A major accomplishment of Asian American writing from the late 1970s to the early 1990s was the acceptance of a composite, reified “Asian American” identity. Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing sought to challenge conceptions of America which excluded Asians, and to draw attention to the histories, cultures, and racialization of Asian groups. Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular life-writers in the Asian American literary tradition. Just when Kingston’s identity-writing seemed to have peaked in the early 1980s, though, her new writing took a major redirection, not only redefining the world we might call “ethnic identity literature”, but also penetrating other genres. Her 1989 novel, Tripmaster Monkey, part postmodernist experimentation, part soulsearch, explored ethnicity and identity politics in the charged world of early 1960s’ San Francisco, and had plenty of action, and some of the slickest, wittiest dialogue to be found in the field. Kingston’s combination of journey narrative and beatnik story largely failed to please both critics and the reading public, however. Partly Kingston’s attempt was to break the rigid border demarcating “fiction” and “life-writing” in experimental and often provocative ways. As with The Woman Warrior, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) appears to have successfully catered to the critics with the identity themes they had come to expect, while at the same time departing from the thematic formula of ethnicity–immigration–identity–assimilation. The Fifth Book of Peace combines pacifist angst with a certain ethnic ennui. Dazzling sections of prose describing the burning of Kingston’s home to the ground are interspersed with a blend of ethnic soul-searching in a compelling first-person narrative.
The Woman Warrior The appearance of The Woman Warrior (1976) caused nothing less than a revolution in Asian American literary and feminist studies. It won several awards in its year of
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publication, and virtually guaranteed Kingston a place as the undisputed sovereign of Asian American writing. But its impact did not end there. Since 1976, The Woman Warrior has subsequently spawned a whole new subgenre of Asian American fiction: the fiction of “matrilineage”, or mother–daughter writing. This also coincided with a growth of interest in the mother–daughter relationship by mainstream feminist writers in the same year, 1976, when a series of seminal feminist publications appeared, including Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and as Experience and Jean Baker Miller’s Toward a New Psychology of Women. The treatment of gender identity in Kingston’s writing encompasses a whole series of boundary crossings: the contradictory and conflicting definitions of womanhood that a Chinese American woman is forced to confront and the complexities of gender identity for Chinese American women, given their exoticization by W.A.S.P. culture. Delineations of Asian American feminist writing almost always pinpoint the publication of The Woman Warrior as the pivotal moment in its maturation. It is for this reason, too, that Kingston’s later, and arguably more experimental, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) has been largely overlooked since it was not just overshadowed by Kingston’s life-writing volumes, but was also eclipsed by Amy Tan’s blockbuster The Joy Luck Club, which appeared that same year. Much of the critical debate surrounding Warrior has focused upon the book’s troubling generic status. Ostensibly a memoir – the subtitle is “Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts” – the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction, but it blends elements of several genres, including fiction, myth, auto/biography and memoir, in a manner that is not easily categorized. The Woman Warrior recounts the childhood experiences of a young girl, who is caught between her ancestral Chinese/Cantonese culture and the American culture of her upbringing in Stockton, California. Kingston juxtaposes and interweaves her adolescent perspective with a retrospective adult commentary upon her experiences. The text is split into five stories, each episode tracking Kingston’s theme of the development of the young girl into the inspirational figure of the woman warrior. Each section relates the story of a particular woman who is formative in the narrator’s life, and these maternal figures are both actual and mythical, ghostly and real presences in the young girl’s life. “You must not tell anyone,” Kingston’s mother cautions, before going on to recount the true story of Kingston’s aunt’s illegitimate pregnancy, shame, and eventual suicide. This “no name aunt” hovers as an absent presence throughout Kingston’s story, serving to reinforce the sense of an almost overwhelming burden of Chinese patriarchal culture on the women in the text, expanding to explore the debilitating effects of Chinese patriarchal culture upon women, a theme that is threaded throughout the text. The “no name aunt” became a victim of the Chinese village community that ostracized her after she became pregnant. Kingston makes her own use of her aunt’s tale: as a “story to grow up on,” she uses her aunt’s biography as an inspirational emancipatory narrative, preferring to view her aunt less as a failure, and more as a heroine who successfully wrought vengeance upon those who spurned and controlled her (Kingston 1977: 13). In this manner, the opening section demonstrates the young
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girl’s ability to sift through the cultural fragments that she inherits via her mother and to make use of them for her own purposes. The second section, “White Tigers,” introduces the no name woman’s counterpart in the text, the mythical and legendary character of Fa Mu Lan, or the woman warrior. The young girl’s dilemma is that she must decide whether to become a woman warrior, or a no-name woman, and thereby reconcile the two visions of her ancestral culture that she receives via these narratives. The young girl resolutely chooses to become a woman warrior. The Fa Mu Lan story is immediately offset by Kingston with her comment that “My American life has been such a disappointment” (p. 47). By connecting the young girl’s life to that of Fa Mu Lan, Kingston shifts the narrative perspective from a mythical mode focusing upon the woman warrior to that of her mother, Brave Orchid. It is at this point in the text that we see the Chinese American daughter struggling to reconcile the paradoxical versions of femininity and identity with which she is confronted via her mother’s stories and teachings. On the one hand, she is inured to hearing Chinese sayings such as “Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,” whilst, on the other hand, she listens to her mother “talking-story” about Fa Mu Lan (p. 48). Kingston’s solution, from the vantage point of adulthood, is her writing. The retribution that Kingston chooses to take is verbal. As she comments: “the reporting is the vengeance – not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words” (p. 53). “Shaman,” the third section, deals with Brave Orchid’s life. As a pioneering doctor and scholar in China, war medic, vanquisher of ghosts, emancipator of Chinese girl slaves, expert and adventurous cook, competent mother, and tireless laborer in her laundry in America, Brave Orchid herself functions as a model of female strength and accomplishment, and as an admirable survivor in her daughter’s imagination. As Kingston recounts the mythical woman warrior’s victories, so she distinguishes between her mother’s valiant deeds and her “slum grubby” existence as an immigrant in America (pp. 50, 52). The fourth section, “At the Western Palace,” continues the narrator’s exploration of her mother’s life, but shifts the focus to America. The final section, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” unites the previous sections, weaving together the narratives of mother and daughter, and explores the young girl’s inability to converse confidently in English, which is also linked to a crisis of selfhood. Maxine’s taciturnity is bound to her struggle to reconcile conflicting Chinese and American cultural inheritances. Her resolution is not to collapse these dualities and contradictions, but instead to accommodate them in all of their complexity, and this is highlighted in the final story that Maxine relates, that of the singing poetess, Ts’ai Yen (born in a.d. 175), the daughter of a scholar. She composed the long poem, “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” from which the final section of Kingston’s work takes its title, whilst held in captivity. As with her other uses of Chinese myths, Kingston has edited and changed this one to fit her purpose. The Ts’ai Yen story is narrated by both mother and daughter, as Kingston famously tells us: “The beginning is hers, the ending, mine” (p. 184). At this point, stories and identities merge, so that Kingston as daughter contributes to her mother’s text and vice versa.
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The overwhelming critical emphasis upon feminist themes in The Woman Warrior has not only excised from view its interdependency in theme and subject with its companion volume, China Men (1980), but has also obscured the central significance of the adolescent perspective in Maxine’s story, which is a quintessential coming-ofage narrative. The young Maxine rejects both the domestic confinement of home and the social constraints of her society, and also garners female role models, such as Fa Mu Lan, to aid her journey to mature womanhood. Some of the key scenes in The Woman Warrior also conform closely to common traits in adolescent girls’ stories. A notable example is the young girl’s struggle to reconcile conflicting maternal messages and to identify appropriate female role models who will bolster rather than batter the girl’s fledgling self-image. Maxine’s freedom and maturity comes via her imagination as she first dreams, then writes, her way to a strong, autonomous womanhood, a position in which she could combat oppression and victimization. She writes: “I ought to be able to set out confidently, march straight down our street, get going right now” (p. 50). It is also her mother who brokers this connection with a world of possibility. The signifying system of The Woman Warrior centers upon the female life cycle. Time in the text is measured by the “menarchal-parturition” (menstruation and childbirth) cycle, as the young Maxine tells her mother: “ ‘Time is not the same from place to place,’ I said unfeelingly. ‘There is only the eternal present, and biology’ ” (p. 98). The narrative can be tracked through parturition/birth (the no name aunt), the menarche (the no name aunt’s story is triggered by the young Maxine’s onset of menstruation), and the post-partum connectivity that develops through the narrative between mother and daughter. The narrative is replete with images of menstruation as a time of psychological as well as actual fertility, and is figured as a time for pensiveness: “I bled and thought about the people to be killed; I bled and thought about the people to be born” (p. 37). The parturient woman is presented as inhabiting a heightened state of female strength and possibility, as Fa Mu Lan declares: “Marriage and childbirth strengthen the swordswoman” (p. 49). Uterine (inter)connectivity maps onto psychological intimacy amongst the women of the text; Brave Orchid trained in gynecology and shamanism at the To Keung School of Midwifery, where she learned not just a profession but the life skill of independence; and Brave Orchid is at the center of the narrative as an actual and metaphorical midwife, reminding us that the term “midwife” itself carries the meaning of “the one who is with the mother.” The sexual life cycle thus functions as a structuring device, but is also figured as a dangerous process for the young adolescent facing her sexuality for the first time. The menarche is often paradoxically heralded as a start of sexual adulthood yet also carries with it connotations of entering new, perilous territory. The young Maxine is all too aware of this and knowingly remarks that “women at sex hazarded birth and hence lifetimes” (p. 14). The mode of narration in The Woman Warrior therefore has a kind of woman-to-woman intimacy, a telling and (re)telling that steps back and forth across the line that divides public and private, subjectivity and intersubjective liaison. Kingston conceives of this as an ethnic-specific mode, that of “talk-story.” We may
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also conceive of talk-story in The Woman Warrior as a form of feminist praxis or narration. The “talk-story” enables Kingston to gather together the divergent stories of female kith and kin under the umbrella of her own exploration of female selfhood and subjectivity. As “memoirs,” her narrative enables a loosely arranged and roughly assembled series of reminiscences and stories – talk-stories – to come together.
China Men Kingston refers to China as “a country I made up.” Her constant and principal focus in her life-writing has been the history of Chinese American immigration, concentrating on what it means to be Chinese American. In this exploration, Kingston assumes a degree of knowledge on the part of her readers about China and its history of engagement with the U.S., since China’s recent history is one of the determinants of her own parents’ emigration to America in the 1930s. The early years of Kingston’s life coincided with the last years of the Nationalist–Communist conflict in China and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The period of Communist consolidation and reform in the 1950s and early 1960s had a far-reaching, even devastating effect on much of China (Kingston’s family included), to which she refers repeatedly in both The Woman Warrior and China Men. It is clear that the Cultural Revolution also devastated her family. Kingston recalls that “the news from China has been confusing … I was nine years old when the letters made my parents, who are rocks, cry” (Kingston 1977: 50). The original title was not “China Men” but “Gold Mountain Heroes.” Kingston’s decision to call her first draft by this name was linked to her desire to tell her male and female ancestors’ stories separately, because, as she explained in her notes to the book (in the Bancroft Library at the University of California), “the woman warrior seemed to break itself away naturally from the rest of the chapters probably because of its strong female viewpoint. Some of the ‘hero’ chapters undermined this viewpoint.” Kingston’s division of these histories along gender lines actually reflects the emergence of each gender story: “This separation of the stories about the women and the stories about the men is an accurate artistic form for telling the history of Chinese Americans.” Her original title signals her intention to create a history of her Chinese American male ancestors that both mythologized and celebrated their arrival in America, and to commemorate their efforts to bond with their new land and country. Kingston tells this story in six roughly chronological chapters, which span the mid-nineteenth century (the first wave of Chinese American immigration and the immigrants’ role in the construction of the transcontinental railroad) to the mid-twentieth century (the conscription of soldiers for the Vietnam conflict). Each section connects with other sections via interlinking thematic preoccupations or characters that appear more than once. These chapters are then punctuated by a series of retold Chinese myths, an echo of the form of The Woman Warrior.
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The first story, “The Father from China,” is told from the young Maxine’s perspective, and tracks her struggle to discover her father’s history – specifically, the means by which he emigrated to the United States. Kingston’s second chapter shifts to Hawaii, where two great-grandfathers work on a sugar cane plantation, a common occupation for early Chinese immigrants to Hawaii. Kingston documents the hardships and the racism these men endured. “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” records the lives and livelihoods of the Chinese immigrants on the mainland in the 1850s and 1860s (the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869). The next section, “The Making of More Americans,” explicitly echoes the title of Gertrude Stein’s book, The Making of Americans (1925). The books have many parallels, including a focus upon the fortunes of immigrants. Kingston’s next historical section, “The American Father,” brings the story into the present of her own childhood, and the reminiscences she has of her own father, BaBa. The final piece chronicles Kingston’s brother’s experiences as a soldier conscripted in the Vietnam conflict, and thereby completes the text’s journey from the 1860s to the 1960s.
Tripmaster Monkey The predominant response to Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) was one of bemusement. Critics reacted badly to the frenetic pace and insistent, even incessant, narrative monologue of the central character, Wittman Ah Sing. Readers familiar with postmodern fiction will find many typical characteristics in Kingston’s novel: linguistic wordplay, free-form plot, self-reflexivity, narrative framing techniques, exhaustive intertextual references, a paranoid and skeptical perspective, the commodification of the past and of cultural artifacts, and parody and pastiche (the subtitle is “his fake book”). What especially marks out Kingston’s novel, though, is the sophisticated braiding of these quintessentially postmodernist techniques with a form of ethnic self-empowerment evident in Wittman’s agency and action. Tripmaster Monkey is also undoubtedly a novel of and about the 1960s. In a 1989 interview, Kingston said: “I wanted to write the story of the 60s” (Skenazy and Martin: 80). Tripmaster Monkey covers two months in 1963 in the life of young would-be beatnik, Chinese American graduate Wittman Ah Sing, but through a series of nine relatively unconnected episodes, Kingston manages to capture the mood and tone of the whole era, as well as providing a keyhole portrait of life for Wittman in the Berkeley–Bay Area locale. This is quite deliberate; the epigraph to the text reads: “This fiction is set in the 1960s, a time when some events appeared to occur months or even years anachronistically.” These nine episodes track Wittman’s literal journey through Berkeley and his metaphorical journey in search of his identity. Along the way, he encounters a series of characters, soul-mates, friends, and relatives. The opening episode, “Trippers and Askers,” introduces Wittman, who is wandering around a foggy San Francisco and pondering his existence. From the outset, Kingston establishes the importance of environment as the opening lines read: “Maybe it comes
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from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn – omen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omens – and not enough sun” (Kingston 1989: 1). As well as Wittman’s fondness for linguistic puns and his predilection for a slangy style of speech, which captures the style and tone of Berkeley hip-cool, his travels locate him firmly in a countercultural, alternative landscape. The novel is heavily steeped in the ideology of the 1960s’ counterculture: drug experimentation; the search for a higher creative consciousness through psychedelic states; the communal “trip festivals”; the sit-ins, the love-ins, the tune-ins, turn-ons, and drop-outs. Kingston’s imaginative evocation of images of the sixties is distinct. Two sections, “Twisters and Shouters” and “The Winners of the Party,” work as a diptych showcasing Wittman’s trip into his imagination, and Kingston stages a Burroughs-like drug trip where a group of party-goers describe their hallucinations, in an extended passage that stretches for nearly three pages without a break. Here, we also find a stage for the many discourses on identity that pepper the novel. In many ways, each episode, each encounter with a new character, is merely a fictional device to give Wittman someone to talk to. For talking is what Wittman does best, and does relentlessly, throughout this episode and others, so much so that it is hard for other characters to get a word in at all. Kingston couples references to Chinese classical books like Journey to the West with a sometimes dizzying blend of literary sources, including other Chinese and Western texts. Kingston has said that she wanted the figure of Wittman to be “made up of all that he knows, all that he has read” (Grice: 81). Cultural acquisition in the novel becomes the only currency of worth – “Got no money. Got no home, got story,” Wittman says (p. 191). Recurrent motifs also include simian imagery, and themes of exclusion, combat, and mobility. Wittman’s battle throughout the novel is against a matrix of injustices, including war, racism, commercial exploitation of the individual, state marginalization of the individual, and the erosion of civil liberties. How to fight oppression and racism is the question always on Wittman’s mind.
The Fifth Book of Peace Until 2003, it seemed that Kingston’s interest lay in war. References abound to the Chinese-British Opium War, the Chinese-Japanese War of 1894–5, the Korean War, World War II, and, of course, the Vietnam War. In reality, this reflects her desire to explore all possible avenues of peaceful activism in relation to a whole range of political themes, of which war, racism, gender inequality, and violence are only the most obvious. Kingston’s consistently politicized worldview and commitment to pacifism in all its forms constitutes a personal and writerly credo. Each of her books takes pacifism as a theme. In an interview with Diane Simmons, Kingston expressed her belief that stories are the conduit for passing on social responsibility (Simmons: 166). She thus had a very clear sense of her mandate in The Fifth Book of Peace. “If I could
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strongly write peace, I can cause an end to war,” she said in 1993. This is echoed in her call – not to arms, but to peace, at the end of the novel: “Children, everybody, here’s what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment” (Kingston 2003: 402). She has always adopted the perspective of the “dove critique” to the war in Vietnam. This view acknowledged the strategic importance of Vietnam in the Cold War political landscape of south-east Asia, but nevertheless insisted upon the fundamental immorality and brutality of the Vietnam War. Kingston’s personal interest in Buddhism is also central to the thematics of peace in The Fifth Book of Peace in its promotion of “non-attachment” to all things, and so is in fundamental conflict with the Cold War ideologies that prevailed during Kingston’s adolescence. The Fifth Book has four sections: Fire, Paper, Water, and Earth. “Fire” opens with the Oakland Fires of 1992; “Paper” describes Kingston’s search for the textual – paper – traces of the mythical “Books of Peace”; “Water” takes us to the Hawaiian Islands; and the final section, “Earth,” returns us to the Berkeley of the later 1990s and Kingston’s literal and metaphorical rebuilding of her life from the ashes of the fire. If this seems a rather complicated and schematic narrative structure, then this simply reflects Kingston’s desire to incorporate the process of reconstructing her lost novel, as well as the actual novel itself. In 1993, she explained: This new book is going to be very complicated. I’ve decided to leave in all the stuff about how to get into the thinking mind, the mind that can write … So this book enters a real nonfiction place, then it flies to a fiction place, and then it grounds us again in a nonfiction place. (Skenazy and Martin: 204)
The text is able to move quite easily between fiction and non-fiction modes. “Fire” opens with Kingston driving home from her father’s funeral in 1992 to find the entire hills of Berkeley in flames. The fires occurred coterminously with the first Gulf War, and Kingston’s narrative is heavily imbued with her simultaneous horror at the war and her disquiet at the bizarre coincidence of the fires starting at the same time: “God is showing us Iraq. It is wrong to kill, and refuse to look at what we’ve done” (Kingston 2003: 13). This then propels Kingston into the main project, which is threefold: to reconstruct her novel, to rebuild her life and home, and to help the veterans of war, past and present, locate peace. Each strand of Kingston’s endeavor braids together to form an all-consuming, multifaceted, search and struggle for peace.
Kingston’s Legacy In a passage late in The Woman Warrior, Kingston describes the ancient Chinese forbidden stitch, that knot so complex it blinds the embroiderer, and thus was outlawed. Kingston tells us that “If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw
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knotmaker” (Kingston 1977: 163). This oft-quoted analogy of the forbidden stitch has become a metaphor for the once forbidden creativity of Asian American women, as well as announcing a new era for the Asian American female artisan in Kingston’s wake. This era was recognized by the Chinese American activist and writer, Phoebe Eng: “The Woman Warrior gave young Asian American women a voice. It legitimized our issues. We learned in The Woman Warrior that each of us has the ability to fight when aggression is needed, and to create when life is good” (Eng: 6).
References and Further Reading Eng, Phoebe (1999). Warrior Lessons. New York: Pocket Books. Grice, Helena (2006). Maxine Hong Kingston. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Huntley, E. D. (2000). Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Kingston, Maxine Hong (1977). The Woman Warrior [1976]. London: Picador. Kingston, Maxine Hong (1981). China Men [1980]. London: Picador. Kingston, Maxine Hong (1989). Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. London: Picador. Kingston, Maxine Hong (2003). The Fifth Book of Peace. New York: Knopf. Madsen, Deborah (2001). Literary Masters: Maxine Hong Kingston. Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale.
Sabine, Maureen (2004). Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Simmons, Diane (1999). Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: Twayne. Skandera-Trombley, Laura E., ed. (1999). Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. Boston: G. K. Hall. Skenazy, Paul and Martin, Tera, eds. (1998). Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Wong, Say-Ling Cynthia (1998). Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press.
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“This is not a story to pass on”: Toni Morrison’s Historical Novels Describing a sense of optimistic modernity in 1920s’ New York City, and of new possibility for urban African Americans in particular, in Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) the narrator proclaims, “At last, at last, everything’s ahead … Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last” (Morrison 1993: 7). Much of the novel is devoted to capturing a period of excitement, opportunity, and forward-thinking as reflected in these lines, and yet the main thrust of Morrison’s fiction, including Jazz itself, moves in a different direction. Time and again, her novels return readers to national, communal, and personal pasts whether through an historical setting, the significance of memory to characters and narrative development or the figuration of journeys on which survivals and remains are recovered. History is never over for Morrison, it would appear, and there is no moving forward without due attention to “the sad stuff. The bad stuff” of the African American past. In 1989, the author spoke of a form of “national amnesia”, a willful forgetting with regard to slavery in the U.S., and of her wish to redress this through writing fiction such as Beloved (1987; Taylor-Guthrie: 257). She further explains: Slavery wasn’t in the literature at all … on moving from bondage into freedom which has been our goal, we got away from slavery and also from the slaves, there’s a difference. We have to re-inhabit those people … We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or it’s romanticized. This culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past. (Gilroy: 179)
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Since this commentary, there has been a proliferation of imaginative recoveries of the experiences and legacies of slavery, especially in what we might loosely term historical novels, as well as a critical refocusing on earlier literary representations that worked to undercut any such amnesia. Indeed, this recent impetus reveals the range of the preoccupation with negotiating a troubled and troubling past in African American writing. This section will explore how Morrison’s novels might be considered historical fiction, paying particular attention to the three texts sometimes collectively known as the trilogy, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise (1998). Prior to Beloved, a small cluster of mid-twentieth-century publications by African Americans combined a backdrop of national history, such as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the Harpers Ferry uprising of 1859, or the American Civil War, 1861–5, with a focus on the impact of this on individual lives and families. Beloved signaled the onset of more experimental approaches. Paul Gilroy observes, “The book is not a historical novel in the sense of Roots or Jubilee, but it deals directly with the power of history, the necessity of historical memory, the desire to forget the terrors of slavery and the impossibility of forgetting” (Gilroy: 179). By the late twentieth century, we find fiction that incorporates the history of slavery through time travel, the framed narration of an ex-slave’s memories, or a modern character embarking on an investigation that leads to the uncovering of a lost past, as in Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977). The term “neo-slave narrative” emerges during this period to give a name to such works and to indicate a significant relationship to the earlier eighteenth and nineteenth century autobiographies of fugitive and ex-slaves, often composed in support of the abolitionist cause. Morrison’s perhaps surprising decision to set Beloved, her slavery novel, in a narrative present of 1873–4 proves enabling in several ways. A focus on the lives of Sethe, her daughter Denver, and visiting old friend Paul D. post-emancipation allows the author to explore the experiences and suffering of slavery, still within living memory for most characters, but also its enduring and devastating after-effects. The reader is faced with African American existences haunted by the past in a move that invites reflection on how such histories might reach into and shape the realities and sensibilities of his or her own present day. Morrison’s effort to counter national amnesia operates in part by presenting the narrative perspectives of those who, to no avail, spend their lives in the “serious work of beating back the past” (Morrison 1988: 73). The tricky workings of memory are also formative in the construction of Beloved as, within the employment of multiple focalizers in a largely third-person narrative, processes of repression and recollection are reflected in the convoluted textual progression. An instructive example of this is offered early on in the novel when Sethe, and thus the reader, is confronted with unbidden memories of her past as a slave on a farm in Kentucky. Although she made her escape North to freedom eighteen years previously, she might be hurrying across a field … to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind … Then something. The
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plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path … and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes … there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream. (p. 6)
Here Morrison’s narrative presentation of interiority permits the reader to follow the intersections between Sethe’s present and past life, the associational patterns of memory and the unwanted resurgence of sites and scenes of trauma. In the wider novel, as the focus shifts between characters during current 1870s’ events, the incorporation of their memories, and sometimes the stories they share, builds up a complex picture of the experiences that have shaped them and their evolving relationships to each other. The narrative itself advances through cumulative revisitations of past occurrences, circumlocution (“circling the subject”), and a juxtaposition, and occasional synthesis, of multiple perspectives (p. 161). History with a capital H, which we might expect to frame an historical novel, does feature in Beloved. Paul D. recalls his involvement in the Civil War and mention is made of the Fugitive Slave Act and the 1856 Dred Scott case. Such historical referentiality, however, serves mainly to illuminate how the novel’s greater emphasis lies with the personal lives of “ordinary” ex-slaves. The original slave narratives also assumed this kind of individual focus yet the necessity of these autobiographies being representative in a particular way to further the abolitionist cause meant that “the interior life” was often marginalized, something that Morrison recognizes and seeks to rectify in her present day “literary archaeology” (Morrison 1995: 90). Beloved takes as its starting-point the famous story of Margaret Garner, a fugitive who committed infanticide in the face of a forced return into slavery. Using this historical figure, but not feeling bound to the facts as recorded, Morrison imagines a life for her and her family with special attention to her inner struggles. A key element of the novel that departs from the conventions of historical fiction, and from a grounding of the plot in a perceived “real” sequence of events, is the introduction of the ghostly figure of Beloved. There are strong suggestions that this eponymous character is Sethe’s daughter returned from the dead to seek succor from her mother. She can also be identified as an important mechanism for revealing the way in which ex-slaves are haunted by their pasts and must confront and negotiate them in order to go forward. Beloved’s mysterious provenance and uncanny manner and memory further Morrison’s use of her as we find a kind of layering of time periods in parts of the narrative focalized through or voiced by her. So, not only does Beloved appear to remember her infant years with Sethe (which would have been during the 1850s), she also describes conditions and experiences akin to those of a Middle Passage (an Atlantic crossing to the Americas aboard a cramped slave ship, such transportation being banned along with slave trading in 1808), and recalls a point of origin that could be Africa. The suggestiveness and ambiguity of Beloved’s nature and past thus enable Morrison to incorporate wider historical resonances within the purported time frame of the narrative present and standard memory.
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In Jazz, Morrison selects another period of significance for African Americans and sets up a dynamic interplay between past and present. Living during the Roaring Twenties, Jazz Age, or Harlem Renaissance, whilst lyrical evocations of street music permeate the narrative, the protagonists Joe and Violet Trace have little awareness of occupying an “era” later known for its cultural vibrancy and African American creativity as well as for the decadent lifestyles of the socially privileged. This again reflects a recognition of “small” rather than grand narratives of the past. As with Beloved, Jazz is not limited to one time frame, and employs sophisticated narrative shifts to affirm the necessity of facing and coming to terms with a history involving trauma. Whilst the promise of the modern Northern city may be one of self-determination and freedom, suggesting that the past can be left behind, this expectation is undermined as the stories of Joe and Violet unfold. In 1906, the Traces had joined in what became known as the Great Migration of African Americans Northward during the post-Reconstruction era. Yet their rejection of economic disempowerment and racial oppression in rural Virginia for liberty, transformation, and “future thoughts” in New York City is problematized as memories of eviction, violence, and parental desertion in the South resurface and their Northern lives are disrupted by intrigue, loss, and alienation (Morrison 1993: 7). The narrative itself enacts a complicated pattern of spatial-temporal movements as the focalized perspectives of Joe and Violet recollect formative “downhome” experiences, and the unusual narrator, in the sixth and seventh sections of the novel, shifts to the nineteenth-century Southern story of a mixed-race character named Golden Gray. Threads of connection link this “mulatto plot” of the 1870s, in which Gray sets out to track down his ex-slave father, to the Virginian childhoods and families of both of the Traces. This Southern interlude thus ensures a framing of present desire and lack in the context of a past involving slavery, as well as expanding the historical reach of Jazz beyond Joe and Violet’s own early twentieth-century memories. The characters’ reconciliation at the end of the novel is the result of meshing legacies of the South and the past with the aspirations of the North and the present, and the reader too must assimilate the temporal layers of the narrative, so realizing the nullity of claims of post-historicity. Whilst the Traces’ hopes on relocating North in Jazz partially echo the idealism of the American Dream of a new start, a clean slate, another aspect of such a national myth is explored in the Westward trajectory, following the movement of earlier pioneer settlers, found in Paradise. Having set novels during Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance, in the final part of her trilogy Morrison employs a narrative present of the civil rights era. Here the focus is “the one all-black town worth the pain,” a community who have migrated West twice, once to escape racial discrimination and then subsequently to avoid dispersal and integration (Morrison 1998a: 5). Inspired by an old newspaper advertisement, Morrison attempts to recover the history of the all-black towns of Oklahoma. Paradise’s handling of relationships to the past follows a new direction, however, as the threat in this case is not forgetting but the
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“powerful memories” of the leading townsfolk of Ruby which fix a monolithic discourse of shared experience that does not allow for variation and curtails meaningful engagement with a future (p. 13). The resultant conflicts and communal tensions are framed by the U.S. war in Vietnam and key moments in the civil rights and Black Power struggle. Once more, Morrison’s narrative offers multiple focalizers and an accumulation of memories, mostly of the post-emancipation period. Here we do not find African Americans trying to beat back the past but, “deafened by the roar of its own history,” the town’s promotion of one prescriptive version of it, resulting in the consolidation of patriarchy and justification of isolationism and ethnic absolutism, both of which seek to eradicate difference (p. 306). In this historical novel, both through her plot and her dialogic narrative method, the author advocates pluralistic and evolving approaches to the past in order to avoid replicating structures of marginalization and find constructive ways forward.
“Like a room that he lived in”: Place, Community, and Home Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) opens with a nostalgic reflection on change: “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighbourhood … It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom” (Morrison 1998c: 3). Enunciated from an, in some respects, impoverished “now,” this passage introduces the former community in which the rest of the novel, centered on girlhood and womanhood friends Sula Peace and Nel Wright, is set. The lament for a lost neighborhood charts a tale of displacement and “development,” yet also establishes a schema in which familiarity, shared spaces, closeness to the natural world, and memory are valued above all else (see the entire first page of Sula for a richer account). It thus offers a helpful starting-point for considering the importance of place, community, and home in Morrison’s depiction of African American life. Sometimes figured through symbolic households, sometimes in regional associations or environmental affinities, this preoccupation with sites of belonging, too, intersects with concerns of gender and class. In most of Morrison’s novels, belonging is related to a family home or a feeling of community nurtured in the face of racial hostility and discrimination. Introducing the term “homeplace,” the theorist bell hooks celebrates a longstanding form of resistance, of “making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world” (hooks: 42). This form of “homeplace,” of private or neighborhood affirmation for African Americans, or its telling lack, runs through the fiction. For example, in Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), the tragic plight of Pecola Breedlove, a little black girl who, despising her own appearance and existence, longs for blue eyes, can be ascertained from the portrait of her family home: “Festering
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together in … the box of peeling gray” where the “furniture had aged without ever having become familiar” and there were “no memories to be cherished” (Morrison 1990: 24–6). The contrast of this with the household of the resilient narrator, Claudia MacTeer, “old, cold” yet filled with song and “Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup,” effectively establishes a value system and technique that recur in later writing (pp. 5–7). Not only is the dominant racial ideal promoted by the children’s primer text that frames the narrative defetishized (“Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy”; p. 1), but hollow class aspirations are also unpicked through the juxtaposition of the hard-up but nurturing MacTeer home and the repressive, bourgeois, “colored” dwelling of Louis Junior and his mother Geraldine. Similarly, in Sula Eva Peace’s accommodating “woolly house … where all sorts of people dropped in” is contrasted with the atmosphere of “oppressive neatness” and respectability in Helene Wright’s, contributing to the characterization of the two protagonists and suggesting that social mobility may not be conducive to carving out homeplace (Morrison 1998c: 29). In Song of Solomon, belonging is related to regionalism and ancestry as well as figured through symbolically opposed households. On a journey from his Michigan home to the rural backwaters of Pennsylvania and then Virginia, the deracinated and socially privileged protagonist, Milkman Dead, learns the value of family and community connection, recovering the lost history of his forebears and coming to appreciate intimacy with the earth and others in the South. His deficiency and subsequent fulfillment is prefigured by the two households of his urban childhood, the sterile, affluent family home, “more prison than palace,” and the unregulated, caring, sunny residence of his renegade Aunt Pilate (Morrison 1998b: 10). It is she who he eventually recognizes as giving him, “like a room that he lived in, a place where he belonged” (p. 210). Whilst Milkman’s storyline offers an idealizing view of community, the pressures of group identity are sometimes shown to be destructive. Sethe is isolated from her neighbors for her nonconformity in Beloved, Sula’s difference means she becomes a scapegoat for the Bottom as an adult, and Guitar’s allegiance to his people turns distorted and dangerous in Song of Solomon. Love (2003) may celebrate the 1930s’ and 1940s’ heydays of Bill Cosey’s holiday resort where moneyed African Americans chose to relax and dance together, “the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast,” yet the novel’s depiction of sites of belonging is more stratified and complicated than this success and apparent affirmation might indicate, for local blacks may work but not spend their leisure time at the exclusive hotel (Morrison 2003: 6). Perhaps the most critical consideration of community is found in Ruby’s separatist rejection of the outside world in Paradise. Here Morrison also emphasizes the oppressive nature of the town’s patriarchal rule which seeks to bring unity and security through policing “lively, free … females” (Morrison 1998a: 308). Yet the narrative incorporates the stories of the women of Ruby and the Convent, so disrupting dominant male discourses of town life and offering alternative versions of communal sharing and support. Morrison’s fiction may harbor nostalgic visions of the simpler pleasures of the lost settlement of Up Beach, “the smell of clean driftwood
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burning … the picture the moon turned those … cabins into,” now replaced by the cheap government houses of Oceanside, “built as a gesture” not to last, in Love, but her wider engagements with community and homeplace are invariably more complex (Morrison 2003: 39).
“Language … designed for their play”: Voice, Tradition, and Experimentation Morrison believes “the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time” (Morrison 1985: 345). Her own writing achieves this goal with a key factor in its beauty being her distinctive employment of forms drawn from the African American cultural tradition and of language and voice. Like the Harlemites in Jazz, she handles wordage as an “intricate, malleable toy designed for [her] play” (Morrison 1993: 33). A range of narrative techniques are used across her fiction, with innovative implementation of focalization within third-person narration being a favorite. Taking Love as an example, most of the novel is relayed in the third person, moving between the perspectives of Heed and Christine, Sandler and Vida, Romen and Junior. Yet the work’s tone and moral register is set by the inclusion of another first-person speaker, the “singsong” voice of L., passing comment on the rest of the action and enhancing the plot’s mystery elements (Morrison 2003: 63). L.’s italicized articulations also introduce a warm colloquialism less evident in the third-person narrative (for instance, “I never did learn what really happened at the dance, but my mother didn’t knit me”), helping to create a spoken quality (p. 140). The attempt to translate some of the characteristics of oral heritage and African American music into writing presents another significant aspect of Morrison’s fiction. Music pervades the novels from Mrs. MacTeer’s singing in The Bluest Eye, the folk lyrics that provide the key to a lost family history in Song of Solomon and Paul D.’s work-songs in Beloved, to the blues and jazz strains that fill the streets in Jazz. It is in Jazz that we also find the most explicit attempt to inform the shape and sequence of the narrative with musical structures. The apparently improvisatory central narrator who offers repetition with revision, the dialogue between the end and beginning of each chapter that resembles call-and-response patterns, and solo interjections, such as Joe’s voicing, that suggest a live group creative process, all recall elements of African American spiritual, blues, and jazz music. A rich tradition of storytelling is also drawn upon; characters engage in verbal play and swap tales with each other; for example, the barbershop practices witnessed by Milkman in Song of Solomon or Thérése’s passing on of the myth of the blind horsemen in Tar Baby (1981). But, in addition, the folk story of Brer Rabbit and the Tarbaby offers a kind of template for the whole of Morrison’s fourth novel, informing the roles that characters occupy, potential plot outcomes, and sometimes language (“Lickety-lickety-lickety-split”; Morrison 1997: 309). Throughout her fiction, the author excels at creating distinct voices, often
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featuring vernacular inflections, and the impression of orality (consider the opening line of Jazz, “Sth, I know that woman,” or the very first quotation of this chapter) and intermittently drawing on sermons and biblical phraseology (Paradise providing good examples of this influence). It is Morrison’s synthesis of such heritages in complex formal literary experimentation that enables her political aesthetics.
References and Further Reading Andrews, William L. and McKay, N. Y., eds. (1999). Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1990). Toni Morrison: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1999). Modern Critical Interpretations: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House. Fultz, Lucille (2003). Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Gates, Henry Louis and Appiah, K. A., eds. (1993). Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad. Gilroy, Paul (1993). “Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture, pp. 175–82. London: Serpent’s Tail. Grewal, Gurleen (1998). Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Grice, Helena, Hepworth, Candida, Lauret, Maria, et al. (2001). Beginning Ethnic American Literatures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. hooks, bell (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston, M.A.: Southend. Kolmerten, Carol A., Ross, Stephen M., and Wittenberg, Judith Bryant, eds. (1997). Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. McKay, Nellie, ed. (1988). Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall. Matus, Jill (1998). Toni Morrison (Contemporary World Writers). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Middleton, David L., ed. (1997). Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. New York: Garland. Modern Fiction Studies (1994). “Special Issue on Toni Morrison,” 39 (3 & 4).
Modern Fiction Studies (2006). “Special Issue on Toni Morrison,” 52 (2). Morrison, Toni (1985). “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers: Arguments and Essays, ed. Mari Evans, pp. 339–45. London: Pluto Press. Morrison, Toni (1988). Beloved [1987]. London: Picador. Morrison, Toni (1990). The Bluest Eye [1970]. London: Picador. Morrison, Toni (1993). Jazz [1992]. London: Picador. Morrison, Toni (1995). “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser, pp. 85–102. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Morrison, Toni (1997). Tar Baby [1981]. London: Vintage. Morrison, Toni (1998a). Paradise. London: Chatto and Windus. Morrison, Toni (1998b). Song of Solomon [1977]. London: Vintage. Morrison, Toni (1998c). Sula [1973]. London: Vintage. Morrison, Toni (2003). Love. London: Chatto and Windus. Page, Philip (1995). Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Peach, Linden, ed. (1998). New Casebooks: Toni Morrison. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Plasa, Carl (1998). Toni Morrison: “Beloved”: Critical Guide. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Valerie, ed. (1995). New Essays on “Song of Solomon.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, Barbara H., ed. (1998). Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” New York: G. K. Hall.
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Studies in the Literary Imagination (1998). “Special Issue on Toni Morrison,” 32 (2). Tally, Justine, ed. (2007). Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. (1994). Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Weinstein, Philip M. (1996). What Else but Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison. New York: Columbia University Press.
47
Alice Walker Maria Lauret
She is a visionary writer: novelist, essayist, activist, womanist, poet, and – as she sees it – medium, who wants to tell the stories of the world. Chiefly known for her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel The Color Purple (1982), Walker has championed the cause of the poor, the oppressed, the female, the dark-skinned, the tortured, the young, the imprisoned, the sexually dissident, and the dissident, full stop. From the Civil Rights Movement in the American South of the 1950s and 1960s, to women’s liberation in the 1970s, to her campaign against female genital mutilation in the 1990s and environmentalism since the 1980s, she has consistently combined writing with politics. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, her 2007 collection of essays, Walker shows how activism begins at home and is lived in “outrageous acts and everyday rebellions,” as her friend Gloria Steinem put it. And because Walker writes as a form of activism, her work is unashamedly didactic: it seeks to enlighten, to raise consciousness, to bring about change. In the early fiction – The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), the short-story collection In Love and Trouble (1973), Meridian (1976) – and in the essays of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), her themes and plots addressed black, gender, and cultural politics. From The Temple of My Familiar (1989), described by herself as “a romance of the last 500,000 years” (White: 445), she has begun to develop a vision of spiritual activism that she communicates through storytelling. Drawing on the creative and spiritual sources of peoples all over the world, from the Swa of the Amazon basin to the Maori of Australia and the Hopi of the United States, she writes about real and invented tribes: the Dogon of Mali in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), the Mundo of Mexico in By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), and the African Olinka in The Color Purple. Hers is not merely an ethnographic interest. Alice Walker wants to tell the stories of the world because she believes the world needs them to survive, and to survive better than it has done hitherto. Storytelling, then, is a resource, an invitation to enlightened thinking, acting, and feeling. In a novel such
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as Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), the literature that results from it reads like “orature,” oral tradition put into writing, like an elder addressing the tribe in a village council, or a wise grandmother telling stories to her little ones. The Color Purple famously created orature from an abused black girl writing letters to God in nonstandard English, the only language she has. American literature has been interested in representing the speech of the people at least since Mark Twain, but not the speech of black people, much less black women, unless as an object of ridicule or comedy. In Walker’s hands, that speech, long regarded as backward and degraded, becomes a vibrant literary language that gives voice to a woman, a people, and a subject hitherto not regarded as worthy of, or fit for, writing, let alone literary writing. Yet this voice did not come out of nowhere. Walker has always been generous in acknowledging her sources, among them the stories told in her Southern sharecropping family that inspired The Color Purple and her earlier fiction, and the work of African American literary forebears like Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and – most of all – Zora Neale Hurston. In Celie’s voice, we hear an echo of Janie Crawford, Hurston’s protagonist in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a novel Walker brought back to the reading public’s attention after decades of neglect. Lately, Walker has shared her sources of inspiration and creative thought in postscripts to her novels and essay collections, with reading lists of ethnographic, spiritual, and New Age works for the delight and instruction of her audience. And yet, that same audience has often reacted with outrage and hostility to her evident idealism and generosity. What can be so offensive about her work as to provoke, not just criticism, but outright hatred, protest demonstrations, and even censorship? Best known is the controversy around The Color Purple, which was partly about Celie’s black speech, but mostly about Walker’s race and gender politics. To understand how transgressive her behavior and ideas were, and to gauge the huge impact her writing has had on contemporary literature and feminist theory, her life and work need to be viewed in the context of America’s troubled race and gender relations in the second half of the twentieth century. Born into a family of poor, black sharecroppers in the racially segregated South where, as biographer Evelyn White explains, the law “allocated $1.43 for the schooling of a black child, compared to $10.23 for a white one” (White: 15), Walker’s background was not exactly conducive to a glittering career in American letters. Her own father had been involved in building a school in the local community to better the education of local children, and such activism and aspiration no doubt set an important example. Shot in the eye with a BB gun at the age of eight by one of her brothers, Alice Walker was shocked into awareness of the violence that socially disempowered men can routinely inflict on women and children. Connecting this gendered abuse with the multiple incidents of racial violence against members of her family for generations back, she developed a fearlessness, and a sense of justice and of solidarity with the women around her. Alice did well at school, securing a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, and later the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where her writing talent
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was spotted early by the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Through the Civil Rights Movement, in which she had been active since her time at Spelman, Walker became involved with Mel Leventhal, a white and Jewish civil rights lawyer, whom she married in 1966. This union of young idealists, at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in Mississippi, made them targets of hate for Southern white racists and also brought vilification from fellow black activists, who saw her marriage to a white man as a betrayal of the black cause. Yet this was the result of a-changing times. After the death of Martin Luther King in 1968, black militancy had won the day in political action, and the Black Arts Movement advocated the positive portrayal of African Americans in literature. At the same time, women’s liberation was the talk of the nation – albeit, chiefly as a target of ridicule. In this charged climate, Walker’s first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, exposed violence against women in a black Southern family, causing outrage among critics. Again Walker was accused of betraying her race, this time because of her depiction of black men. Although their violence is shown to be rooted in poverty and oppression by whites, and although the protagonist Grange, in his “third life,” redeems himself by becoming a caring grandfather, the novel’s focus is on the victimization of women. Black militants saw feminism as a “white” thing, and they – men and women alike – objected to Walker’s treatment of domestic abuse also because of Walker’s marriage to a white man. Meanwhile, anti-feminist sentiment was rife in the media, black feminism was still in its infancy, and white feminists were largely blind to, or ignorant of, black women’s oppression. To teach her interracial audience about the plight of black women, past and present, then became Alice Walker’s mission. In the short stories of In Love and Trouble, in the articles she wrote as a contributing editor for Ms. magazine, and in her second novel, Meridian, she dramatized and explained the multiple ways in which black women had been kept down, mistreated, and misrecognized, but also how they had fought and triumphed against the odds. Told in very brief chapters, the plot of Meridian develops through multiple flashbacks and ostensibly unrelated, almost freestanding, short stories. This fragmented form, like that of a crazy quilt, is highly effective in rendering Meridian’s conflicted sense of identity, and set the mold for much of Walker’s later fiction. Not unlike Walker herself at this point in her career, Meridian Hill is a young, idealistic black woman of the South whose actions and thoughts are out of step with her time and she cannot seem to please anyone. A high-school drop-out, she gives birth to an unwanted baby, enters into an equally unwanted marriage, and begins to harbor murderous thoughts about herself and her child. But, committed to non-violence, she has the baby adopted, and becomes a Civil Rights worker. Years later, she finds herself pregnant again by Truman, a fellow activist, and has an abortion. Meridian’s rejection of motherhood puts her at odds with her traditional and self-sacrificing mother, and with the history of black women who, during slavery, were charged with the care of white children at the expense of their own – if they were allowed to keep them at all. Her continuing commitment to Civil Rights, which is also a form of atonement for
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Meridian, gains her the disdain and rejection of Truman and of her friend AnneMarion, both of whom have turned away from non-violence and grassroots work among the “folk” to revolutionary sloganeering and Black Nationalism. Truman’s rejection is exacerbated by his marriage to Lynne, a white student from the North, which baffles Meridian: “Who would dream, in her home town, of kissing a white girl? Who would want to? … It thrilled her to think she belonged to the people who produced Harriet Tubman, the only American woman who’d led troops in battle” (Walker 1982: 105–6). But Meridian’s pride in being a black woman is challenged when, much later again, the two become friends and Lynne confides that she has been raped – by a black man. Now, Meridian is torn between her race and her gender: “I can’t listen to this,” said Meridian … “Wait a minute,” cried Lynne. “I know you’re thinking about lynchings and the way white women have always lied about black men raping them. Maybe this wasn’t rape … It felt like it was.” Meridian sat back down again … “Can’t you understand I can’t listen to you? Can’t you understand there are some things I don’t want to know?” (Walker 1982: 153)
This dialogue is a good example of how Walker educates her readers in sexual and racial politics, by dramatizing it in interracial sisterhood, and historicizing it in African American experience. But the episode also shows what some readers might take exception to: in Meridian, Walker questions motherhood and Black Nationalism and white feminism, by asking difficult questions of each. And so she would continue. Using her experience of working in Civil Rights, her stock of family stories, and her extensive knowledge of African American history and literature, Walker began to teach her readers a respect and admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the talents of “ordinary” black women that they had rarely been given, and that she felt so strongly herself. Her first essay collection, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, tellingly opens with a definition of Walker’s version of feminism: Womanist 1. From womanish. (Opp. Of “girlish,” …) … A black feminist or feminist of color … referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behaviour … Responsible. In charge. Serious. 2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually … Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female … 3. Loves music. Loves dance … Loves the Spirit … Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. 4. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. (Walker 1984: xi–xii)
Part 4 is clearly the most important here: feminism is but a bleached, pastel version of womanism, lacking the blackness that makes the latter vibrant and strong. But 1–3 of the definition deserve attention too: spirituality, sensuality, outrageousness,
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responsibility, solidarity with the common people (“the folk”) – and sexuality, indeed. At the time, feminism was still largely associated with white, middle-class, and educated women, who admired Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. But they would never have heard of Sojourner Truth, the illiterate ex-slave who campaigned for women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Walker’s lesson in how to theorize women’s oppression – but also their achievement and pleasure – was necessary and timely. Zora Neale Hurston emerges here as a womanist par excellence, a creative and spiritual ancestor. In “Looking for Zora,” Walker describes her search for Hurston’s grave, to find only a weedy patch of ground without so much as a marker. In the end, she has a stone placed there with the inscription “Zora Neale Hurston: A genius of the South” (Walker 1984: 107). But the true memorial to Hurston was Walker’s own writing, not just In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, but particularly The Color Purple, which appeared in the same year. Celie’s vernacular voice was, as we have seen, in part inspired by Hurston’s way with folk speech in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Shug Avery, the blues singer who becomes Celie’s lover, has more than a hint of Zora’s real-life personality about her. Yet the novel’s radicalism is perhaps only measured accurately by the controversy that began around The Color Purple almost as soon as the novel was published, and exploded when Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation hit the screens. A dramatization of womanism as a practice of self-determination and “speaking back to power” in everyday life, The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a young black woman abused and routinely humiliated by her (step-)father and husband. Celie is barely seen at all by those around her: “Who you think you is, he say … Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (Walker 1983: 176). Yet Celie survives, and more than that – she triumphs. She takes her husband’s lover, Shug, for her own and makes common cause with feisty, audacious Sophia and other women of the extended family. Celie even manages to transform her husband Albert from a wife-beating brute who insists on being called Mr. – into a caring, nurturing male who shares in Celie’s happy reunion with her long-lost sister Nettie at the end. To be sure, this story, told in Celie’s letters to God and to Nettie, is the stuff of melodrama, and of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel which also dealt in rape, the dastardly deeds of men against innocent heroines, the withholding of important letters, and the appearance of surprise inheritances. But that, in a way, is the point: here Walker draws on the history of the European novel to present a quintessentially American tale of black women’s oppression that at the same time celebrates their strength, courage, and culture. What did those who demonstrated against The Color Purple and wanted to have it banned from libraries, schools, and colleges find so objectionable in it then? Celie’s language – regarded by some as uneducated and “shameful” – was one thing, but perhaps only the least. Again, Walker’s representation of Mr. – ’s abuse of Celie was judged offensive, the more so as it is preceded by (what we are led to believe is) Celie’s father, Fonso, raping her at the age of 14. The novel thus opens with incest, moves through domestic violence and a lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug,
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only to end with a happy 4th of July celebration where all the family are united happily ever after. Not that order is restored to the patriarchal family of old: it is completely rearranged. Incest turns out not to be incest, as Fonso is Celie’s stepfather; Nettie, evacuated to Africa for fear of her being abused by Fonso, returns safe and well; Shug’s new lover Grady is also in the party, and Celie and Mr. –, now toppled from his pedestal and named Albert, have found a peaceful modus vivendi together. As in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, this happy ending shows how black men can change, but its unlikelihood, plus rape, incest, and lesbianism, proved too much for some. School boards tried to ban the novel from reading lists, and when Walker “got into bed” with Steven Spielberg for the film version (even writing her own screenplay), cinemas were picketed in protest and Walker began to receive hate mail by the sackful. In “In the Closet of the Soul,” she reflects: An early disappointment to me in black men’s response to my work is their apparent inability to empathize with black women’s suffering under sexism … a book and movie that urged us to look at the oppression of women and children by men became the opportunity by which black men drew attention to themselves and … [claimed] that inasmuch as a “negative” picture of them was presented to the world, they were, in fact, the ones being oppressed. (Walker 1988: 79)
She would later document the controversy at great length in The Same River Twice (1996), devoted solely to The Color Purple’s writing and reception. Still, The Color Purple was the making of Alice Walker as a literary superstar, and it enabled her henceforth to concentrate on her art without compromise or financial worry. The Temple of My Familiar, her next novel, worked a huge canvas on which the characters move between Europe, Africa, and the Americas – routes reminiscent of the slave trade – in order to find family members, enlightenment, or simply themselves. The most New Age-y of Walker’s fiction up until that time, Temple features an old black woman, Miss Lissie, who has lived many lives and remembers many things, including being burned at the stake as a witch, and having been a lion once upon a time. As in The Color Purple, there is a male character in need of transformation, a troubled young woman looking for African roots, and a host of other characters who are journeying, reading, listening, and talking in search of enlightenment. The entire cast is envisaged, at the end, as a “new age clan” (Walker 1990: 446). And just as Shug Avery makes a brief appearance in Temple, so also does Tashi, a minor character in The Color Purple, return in Walker’s next major work, Possessing the Secret of Joy. Again exploring diasporic relations between Africa and the United States, Walker confronts in this novel the practice of female genital mutilation (F.G.M., also known as clitoridectomy or female circumcision) and condemns it in a taut and harrowing narrative of female suffering whose traumatic effects last a lifetime. But this is no simple tale of men’s violence against women. Tashi chooses to be “circumcised” as an act of allegiance to her tribe and in protest against colonial rule and missionary
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teaching. The circumcision is carried out by an old woman, M’Lissa, for whose murder Tashi is executed at the end by the postcolonial government of her native country. Her story of trying, and failing, to forget what has happened to her is told in the multiple voices of Tashi, the African child, Evelyn, who is Tashi after she has come to America, and Mrs. Johnson, her married name. Her journey is charted as one of traumatic memory recovery through Jungian psychoanalysis and an anthropological search for the origin of F.G.M. in cultural myth. Critic Eva Lennox Birch explains: The enormity of the “cleaning out” of the female genitals … is not left to reader imagination. And yet, although the subject matter is painful, the manner and style of the narrative is not. This novel is less discursive, more economic and concentrated than any of her previous novels in its focus upon one issue and the consequences it had for a woman and her close family. (Birch: 238)
A campaigning book, Possessing the Secret of Joy was supplemented in 1993 with a film, Warrior Marks, and collection of essays of the same title, co-authored by Walker and the British filmmaker Pratibha Parmar. It succeeded in drawing worldwide attention to F.G.M., and a U.N. resolution against the practice has since been passed. Yet again, Walker’s activism engendered controversy, however. She and Parmar were accused of cultural imperialism for imposing a western feminist framework on African women in condemning F.G.M. Others found problematic Walker’s personal identification with the “patriarchal wound” of F.G.M.; she called it a “sexual blinding” in the subtitle of Warrior Marks. As so often in the critical reception of Walker’s work, what one side of the debate saw as offensive or narcissistic or just plain wrong, the other viewed as brave, taboo-breaking, and merely honest. Walker herself regards suffering and activism as sides of the same coin: “It is true that I am marked forever, like the woman who is robbed of her clitoris, but it is not, as it once was, the mark of a victim … Your wound itself can be your guide” (Walker and Parmar: 18). Walker refers here to the incident with the BB gun, mentioned above, that blinded her in one eye and left her scarred for life. But a scar can be transformed into a vision, as when Walker writes about her daughter Rebecca one day gazing at her mother’s face, exclaiming: “Mommy, there is a world in your eye … where did you get that world in your eye?” (Walker 1983: 393). Since Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker has continued to tell the stories of the world. Healing stories, and stories of damage too, from an ever-widening sense of responsibility that seeks to embrace life, the universe, and everything in a philosophy of love, nurture, and mindfulness. If this sounds dreamy, unworldly, and naïve, consider the following: The freedom to speak and to write about life as one knows or imagines it is a right that most Americans take for granted. It is that basic, and that precious. Even after all these years, nearly thirty, of writing that has engendered controversy, I am still undaunted in the face of possible condemnation and censorship. My country’s gift to me. I continue
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to write the stories I believe to be spiritually authentic, creatively true. Stories that are medicine – sometimes bitter, but also sweet – for myself and for the tribe. (Walker 2007: 186, emphasis added)
To write in a way that is “spiritually authentic, creatively true,” and to pay the price in condemnation and controversy – that is freedom, America’s gift to Alice Walker, and hers to the world.
References and Further Reading Allan, Tuzyline Jita (1995). Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics: A Comparative Review. Athens, O.H.: Ohio University Press. Birch, Eva Lennox (1994). Black American Women’s Writing: A Quilt of Many Colours. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Bloom, Harold, ed. (1988). Alice Walker: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. Cade, Toni, ed. (1970). The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: New American Library. Dieke, Ikenna, ed. (1999). Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Appiah, K. A., eds. (1993). Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad. Howard, Lillie P., ed. (1993). Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Lauret, Maria (2000). Alice Walker. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ong, Walter J. (1989). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge. Steinem, Gloria (1984). Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. London: Jonathan Cape.
Walker, Alice (1982). Meridian [1976]. London: Women’s Press. Walker, Alice (1983). The Color Purple [1982]. London: Women’s Press. Walker, Alice (1984). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose [1983]. London: Women’s Press. Walker, Alice (1988). Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987. London: Women’s Press. Walker, Alice (1990). The Temple of My Familiar [1989]. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Walker, Alice (1997). Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism. London: Women’s Press. Walker, Alice (2007). We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Walker, Alice and Parmar, Pratibha (1993). Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. London: Jonathan Cape. White, Evelyn C. (2004). Alice Walker: A Life. New York: Norton. Winchell, Donna Haisty (1992). Alice Walker. New York: Twayne.
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Don DeLillo Mark Osteen
“All plots tend to move deathward,” declares Jack Gladney, the narrator of Don DeLillo’s best-known novel, White Noise (1985: 26). This aphorism captures both the style and one of the major themes of a writer for whom plotting and dying are integrally related. DeLillo’s characters are haunted, fascinated by death: some, like Gladney, live in constant fear of it; others, such as Gary Harkness of End Zone (1972) and Glen Selvy of Running Dog (1978), court it – the idea of an end giving their lives structure and meaning. Likewise, many of DeLillo’s own plots – from those of early novels such as Running Dog, to mid-career works like Mao II (1991), through his more recent Cosmopolis (2003) – end with a protagonist’s violent death. But for DeLillo, death is less an event than a “quality of the air” in which we live (DeLillo 1985: 38): it has become a television show, a consumer item, a performance. Death is, of course, not DeLillo’s only theme, but his characters’ dances with death are key aspects of his novels’ ambitious social and psychic anatomy. Bombarded by cinematic and consumer images and assailed by fears of imminent disaster, his characters respond by withdrawing into quasi-religious rituals, following pseudo-divine authorities, or seeking miraculous transformations in the hope of rediscovering transcendence, or at least integration. DeLillo repeatedly demonstrates how the pursuit of such perfect plots and ideal structures opens the door to authoritarianism and violence. Nevertheless, his characters’ quests provide glimpses of a potentially redemptive realm, as his work catalogues the varieties of American religious experience, implicitly asking a question explicitly posed at the beginning of Mao II: “When the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith?” (DeLillo 1991: 7). This spiritual concern may be partly a result of DeLillo’s upbringing: the son of Italian immigrants, born 1936 and raised in the Bronx, he is the product of a Catholic education at Cardinal Hayes High School and Fordham University. In interviews, however, DeLillo has professed a different faith: a staunchly modernist belief in the power of language to remake the world. His fiction manifests that power: his sculpted prose (almost literally so – he has testified to his love for the physicality of the words
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he types on his manual typewriter), talent for epigram, and astonishing ability to imitate different idioms, make him perhaps the most gifted and influential stylist in contemporary American letters. Yet he remains alert to how words may become tools of domination; hence, his protagonists repeatedly confront institutions whose inauthentic language – medical euphemisms, advertising slogans, military jargon – masks amorality and tyranny. Perhaps the most original and bracing feature of DeLillo’s work is his ability to dissect postmodern culture from within. Thus, his work brilliantly mimics the argots of various subcultures – advertising, cinema, sports, pop music, educational television, conspiracy theorists, religious orders – to mount a penetrating critique of their dehumanizing effects. Beginning with his first novel, Americana (1971), he has painted a detailed picture – or perhaps better, shown us a film – of late twentieth- and early twentieth-first-century American culture. His novels are the work of a writer who, though actively engaged with contemporary society, trains a relentlessly skeptical eye on its shifting political and cultural currents. DeLillo’s work is also erudite, displaying a familiarity with classical philosophy and early Christian mysticism, as well as with modern authors as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, psychologist Ernest Becker, and nuclear theorist Herman Kahn; filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Miklós Janscó, and Akira Kurosawa; and visual artists such as Sabato Rodia, Garry Winogrand, and Giorgio Morandi. Despite these manifold influences, DeLillo’s work repeatedly addresses a set of related contemporary themes: the tension between individualism and public life; the prevalence of spectacle – movies, advertising, television, terrorist violence – and the consequent decay of historical consciousness; capitalism’s complicity with murder, war, and pornography; Americans’ unfulfilled yearning for spiritual meaning. DeLillo’s early novels tend to be sardonic and slightly chilly; they are full of talk, yet little communication takes place among characters who often speak in witty miniature essays. His hollowed out, self-obsessed protagonists are difficult to like. However, their eccentricity and passivity make them marvelous sounding boards for DeLillo’s ideas and themes. They also enable him to experiment with a range of genres, from the bildungsroman to the thriller, spy novel, sports story, and Menippean satire. Film is a palpable influence on DeLillo’s early fiction, and he has admitted his admiration for the leading lights of mid-century European cinema. In Americana, in fact, he uses cinematic allusions and structures to reveal, through a fractured bildungsroman narrative, the crippling effects of media representations on identity. His protagonist, David Bell, leaves a glamorous television job to make an autobiographical film. But the film – patched together from a mélange of styles adapted from his adman father’s archive of television commercials and his own idiosyncratic cinema education – only teaches him that creating an identity outside the domain of images is impossible, and perhaps undesirable. This first novel incisively depicts the framed and fragmented nature of postmodern consciousness, while also posing a crucial question to other writers and filmmakers: how can art avoid becoming just another consumer item?
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His next two novels are essays in what David Bell calls “the nature of diminishing existence” (DeLillo 1989: 277). In each, the protagonist retreats from his community to indulge in self-purifying rites. In End Zone, college football player Gary Harkness’s obsession with nuclear holocaust epitomizes his quest for an “end zone” that nullifies complexity. Here DeLillo subverts the tropes and structures of the typical sports novel: far from the brutes and fun-loving simpletons that usually populate such books, his players are eccentric intellectuals with obsessions ranging from German philosophy to nuclear strategy. He also uses his plot to question the relation between plots and death: by placing the stereotypical “big game” not at the end but in the center of the novel and disguising its action in arcane jargon, DeLillo frustrates his readers’ desire for a cathartic climax. He thereby implies that a similar desire for apocalyptic confrontation and purification – for death at the end of the plot – underlies Cold War gamesmanship and theoretics. End Zone thus traces the fascination with linear plot to a quasi-religious desire for purification. The protagonist of Great Jones Street (1973), rock star Bucky Wunderlick, is even more passive and exhausted than Harkness. In this rather static satire of rock ’n’ roll celebrity, Wunderlick abandons his group in mid-tour to seek what seems to him the only exit: a stillness bordering on non-existence. As Bucky responds to an array of characters who maneuver to acquire from him two products – his legendary Mountain Tapes and a silence-inducing drug – he learns that even his withdrawal has been marketed to his ravenous public, and ends up losing control of both his symbolic death and his re-emergence. Both novels exhibit DeLillo’s mastery of idiom – those of football and pop music, respectively – but their unconventional plots, which downplay narrative movement, challenge and may defeat readers looking for such easily digested genre fictions. DeLillo’s next book, the vast and complex Ratner’s Star (1976), is his most forbidding text. Blending an imaginative history of mathematics with a rewriting of Carroll’s Alice books, this quasi-science fiction novel presents, in the form of a Menippean satire, a disturbing parable of scientific arrogance. By DeLillo’s own admission a text that is “all outline” (DiPietro: 11), this novel about mathematics is organized like a giant math problem or logical paradox. The episodic first section is filled with bizarre, cartoonish characters enlisted for an underground project to decrypt a message from outer space. The second section shifts to a Virginia Woolf-like arrangement of interlocking free-indirect sections: adventures thus give way to reflections. But, in fact, the whole novel is a reflection for, in seeking the age-old chimera of a perfect language, Ratner’s Star’s scientists find only the infinite regress of self-reference represented by the novel’s palindromic structure and its recurrent trope of the boomerang, which comes to signify both human history and the shape of the cosmos. Ultimately, Ratner’s Star implies, science has become a religion, its truths dependent largely upon our belief in them. DeLillo’s next three novels are the source of his reputation as a “paranoid” writer. In each, beleaguered or bored characters seek meaning by involving themselves in violent secret societies. The cool style of Players (1977) – an exercise in the “intimacy of distance” (DeLillo 1977: 6) – reflects the detachment of its protagonists, blasé
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young urbanites Lyle and Pammy Wynant, who separate to pursue distinct plots: Lyle gets involved with a cadre that hopes to destroy “the idea of money” through violent acts against the Stock Exchange; Pammy becomes the third party in a destructive gay male relationship. Each one’s involvement amounts to a kind of terrorism, and at the end both remain transients, mere players suspended between commitment and engagement. Running Dog considers the enduring appeal of fascism, the power of film, and the convergence of the two in pornography. In this dark revision of medieval romances (one character is even named Percival), the desired icon is an unholy grail – a legendary film of Hitler’s final days – that symbolizes its various pursuers’ shared amorality. Written in terse, fast-pace prose, Running Dog takes the form of a movie thriller to show how movies and capitalism collude in marketing violence. In both novels, which Joseph Dewey (2006: 49) calls narratives of “failed engagement,” characters contrive plots designed to protect themselves from the depersonalization of contemporary culture, but their explorations fail to provide the deeper commitments they seek. Both novels present searing critiques of consumerism as an ideology that turns humans into automatons or animals, and transforms all values into commercial ones. Though superficially resembling these novels, The Names (1982) is more resonant, displaying what many critics find to be a new seriousness and depth in DeLillo’s work. It is the first of his novels explicitly set outside the U.S. – at various Mediterranean locales – and these settings allow DeLillo to expand his thematic reach beyond those of his cerebral but at times sterile 1970s’ novels. The Names tracks “risk analyst” James Axton’s encounters with a murderous cult to dramatize the irresponsibility of Americans abroad. Like Players and Running Dog, The Names is a study of commitment: Axton begins the novel as a self-deluded dilettante who denies all domestic and political obligations and objectifies “Orientals,” but gradually becomes aware that his careful “neutrality” only allows others to use him for nefarious ends. The novel ends with an astonishing scene borrowed from Axton’s nine-year-old son Tap’s novel about their epigrapher friend’s experiences in a Pentacostal church. Written in marvelously misspelled Faulknerian prose, this section reveals DeLillo’s real subject: the mysteries of language. Axton comes to realize that although language can be used to mask atrocity, it is also a gift that can restore community and relieve the pressures of history. Like many of DeLillo’s children, Tap embodies the potential for an authentic language expressing the “fallen wonder of the world” (DeLillo 1982: 339). If The Names remains DeLillo’s least-appreciated great novel, its successor, White Noise (1985), made him famous, becoming his best-selling book and winning him the National Book Award. Part academic satire, part study of male midlife crisis, part domestic comedy, part disaster tale, White Noise is DeLillo’s funniest novel as well as his most unsettling. The narrator, professor of Hitler Studies Jack Gladney, is haunted by history (his work treats Hitler as a pop star much like Elvis), vexed by his children and stepchildren (his son Heinrich plays chess by mail with a mass murderer), and paralyzed by his own creeping mortality. After being exposed to a toxic cloud, Gladney takes a desperate measure – contriving a murder plot designed to free him from his fear of dying – that gains richness from our (and perhaps his) awareness of
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its absurd futility. A mordant satire of consumerism, television, and the post-nuclear family, White Noise surveys the places where Americans seek “peace of mind in a profit-oriented context” (1985: 8): the mall, the supermarket, the motel, the television set. The novel “channels” these places’ synthetic voices – the white noise of postmodern society – not only to criticize consumerism and the media, but also to reveal what DeLillo calls the “radiance in dailiness” (DiPietro: 70–1). That is, White Noise suggests that even though the waves and radiation of mass culture may have left us with only tabloid myths and marketing mantras, these “spells” may offer fleeting consolation to the drifting souls in our centerless world. Extending and enriching the themes of his 1970s’ novels, DeLillo’s next novel, Libra (1988), examines a watershed moment in American history: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Libra’s historical richness, ingenious plotting and, most of all, its imaginative empathy for the universally despised assassin Lee Oswald, demonstrate DeLillo’s growth as a novelist. Here his talent for dialogue and facility with ideas are employed upon a truly worthy subject, as the novel’s sweeping narrative offers both a plausible conspiracy theory about the assassination and a critique of such conspiracy theories. Libra’s divided plotlines – a compelling portrayal of Oswald that converges with an account of rogue C.I.A. agents fashioning an assassination scheme – embody the deep ruptures that DeLillo diagnoses in the American soul. Depicting the C.I.A. as a kind of secular church, DeLillo suggests that Oswald, at once its patsy and its prophet, is the uninvited but inevitable guest at Kennedy’s Camelot round table. In Oswald, we have seen the enemy – on television! – and he is us. In the wake of White Noise’s unnerving comedy and Libra’s historical scope, Mao II appeared to be a more polished version of Great Jones Street. Reclusive novelist Bill Gray, like Bucky Wunderlick, comes to understand that his withdrawal has only made him more ripe for exploitation by characters such as his creepy factotum Scott Martineau. But Mao II is important for addressing DeLillo’s view of the writer’s social role, and in our post 9/11 world its analysis of the symbiosis between terrorism and the media is eerily prescient. Gray declares that what moves masses today are not novels but the dramas staged by terrorists harnessing the power of images. Mao II dramatizes how his Romantic/modernist version of authorship has been supplanted by what I call “spectacular authorship” (Osteen: 192), which counters the western mythos of individualism as effectively as Andy Warhol’s silkscreens (which provide the novel’s title) exploded the narratives of western art. DeLillo again experiments with form by incorporating photos of assembled masses at significant events of the late 1980s, including the Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral, Tiananmen Square, and the Sheffield soccer disaster. While this strategy may seem to bear out the narrator’s assertion that “the future belongs to crowds” (1991: 16), it also implies that the novelist cannot afford to be separate from the currents of contemporary life. Thus, though Gray dies an ignominious death during his hapless attempt to re-emerge, a more viable contemporary artist lives on in photographer Brita Nilsson, who shapes, rather than being shaped by, the spectacular images that surround her; it is she, rather than Gray, who likely represents DeLillo’s own stance.
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Six years later, DeLillo published his magnum opus, Underworld (1997), a vast chronicle of American life since the 1950s, in which he explores in unprecedented detail the myriad relationships between the Cold War’s most hazardous consequences, weapons and waste. Beginning with a brilliant set piece portraying the famous 1951 Dodgers–Giants baseball playoff game (which took place the same day as the Soviet Union’s second atomic test), then looping backward from the 1990s, Underworld enlists an enormous cast of real (J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce) and fictional characters to trace the dissolution of the postwar American community into isolated monads of fear and estrangement. DeLillo uses a montage-like arrangement of fragments to document Americans’ psychic and cultural fission – the material and spiritual waste of militarism and capitalism. As Underworld shuttles from famous events to private lives, it embodies how, as one character declares, “everything is connected” (DeLillo 1997b: 825). Numerous carefully threaded motifs expose the interaction of weapons and waste, and brothers Matt and Nick Shay exemplify the terror wrought by these twin forces, as well as the longing for wholeness, harmony, and radiance that those forces steal and distort. Yet the novel finds seeds of regeneration in the work of actual artists such as Rodia, who single-handedly built the magnificent Watts Towers out of discarded objects, and in fictional ones such as Klara Sax, who transforms bombers into pieces of art. Imitating their salvage operations, Underworld constructs what DeLillo calls a “counterhistory” (1997a: 63) aimed at resisting and undermining the dominant ideologies and technologies of the postwar period. In its enormous reach, technical brilliance, trenchant political analysis, complex characters, and diverse settings (it is the first of his novels to draw upon his Bronx background), Underworld is probably DeLillo’s greatest achievement, and it won him the William Dean Howells Medal in 2000 as the “most distinguished work of American fiction published during the previous five years.” In its wake, DeLillo has undertaken more modest projects, including several plays and three shorter novels. The least successful of these, Cosmopolis, tracks youthful billionaire currency trader Eric Packer’s limousine ride across Manhattan, as he deliberately dispossesses himself en route to a rendezvous with his assassin. With its brittle, hyperverbal characters, ostentatious display of learning (particularly monetary theory), and unappealing protagonist, Cosmopolis revisits the themes and styles of DeLillo’s early novels. Despite its flaws, it works as an astute snapshot of a particular moment in recent history – the go-go 1990s – when capitalism seemed ready to engulf and energize the world. When it was published in early 2003, however, it already seemed a bit dated. More compelling is The Body Artist (2001), a poetic, novella-length meditation on mourning and artistic inspiration that requires and rewards close reading. Once again a protagonist – in this case a performance artist named Lauren Hartke – retreats into seclusion only to re-emerge through a work that announces a new self. Here DeLillo reformulates the relation between death and plots: The Body Artist begins, rather than ends, with a death (Lauren’s husband’s suicide), then uses it to limn the arc of grief and trace the complex relationship between loss and creativity. Lauren’s emergence is
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propelled by a personage who may be a figment of her imagination, a child-like man she dubs Mr. Tuttle. At once muse, ghost, and echolalic savant, Tuttle – another figure who symbolizes the potential for transcendence through purified language – becomes her instrument both for remembering her husband and for putting him away. Indeed, The Body Artist haunts and is haunted, implying that inspiration is a form of ghostly possession, a means of undertaking the dead that also brings new selves into existence. Its plot moves not toward death but toward a qualified resurrection. Falling Man (2007) also begins with death – the thousands caused by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Falling Man seems to be a novel DeLillo was destined to write: indeed, given his career-long fascination with terrorist violence, secret societies, religious fanaticism, and the media, the events of 9/11 seem almost to have come from one of his books. Like The Body Artist, it concerns loss and the competing needs to remember and to forget. Opening as a dazed Keith Neudecker walks from the ruined North Tower, the novel follows his life over the next three years. Or perhaps one should call it his afterlife, for though Keith breathes and speaks, he has left much of himself behind in the Tower. Caught between reenactment and release, he conducts an affair with another survivor whose briefcase he salvaged from the wreckage, then becomes obsessed with poker, which he treats as a clarifying discipline. Keith’s estranged wife Lianne also struggles with trauma: she copes with the painful memory of her father’s suicide (he killed himself to avoid succumbing to dementia) by leading a writers’ group for Alzheimer’s patients; she deals with the 9/11 disasters by flirting with Catholicism, in which she wants both to believe and to disbelieve. The couple are represented by the Morandi paintings that decorate their home: they too are natura morta, still lifes, frozen in time. As in White Noise, in Falling Man death has become a quality of the air, a ubiquitous presence permeating everything, like the ash that covered New York in the aftermath of 9/11. DeLillo employs other symbols to illustrate this post-traumatic condition. One is that of “organic shrapnel,” which refers literally to the way that victims’ shattered bodies become projectiles after explosions (DeLillo 2007: 16), and metaphorically to the lingering effects of trauma on memory and emotions. The most important symbol, however, lies in the title itself. Ostensibly, it is the nom de guerre of one David Janiak, a performance artist who stages “falls” all over New York City in tribute to the victims of the disaster, particularly one man whose deathward plunge was forever captured in a famous photo. But it really names everyone in the book: after 9/11, DeLillo suggests, we are all fallen, all falling again and again. That includes the hijackers, whom he shadows in three brief inter-chapters. In the last of these, at the novel’s conclusion, the point of view shifts in mid-sentence from a hijacker to Keith as the plane hits the North Tower. At that moment, we cannot help but recall Jack Gladney’s words: all plots tend to move deathward. But they do not stop there: in Falling Man, death is both an end and a beginning. At the end, we understand that DeLillo’s work mirrors that of Janiak and the Alzheimer’s group, and that such art, fashioned out of painful experience, may become organic shrapnel, or may instead permit us to salvage, if not resurrection, at least some redemptive meaning out of the deathward fall of plots.
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Boxall, Peter (2006). Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge. Cowart, David (2002). Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens, G.A.: University of Georgia Press. DeLillo, Don (1972). End Zone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. DeLillo, Don (1973). Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. DeLillo, Don (1976). Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, Don (1977). Players. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, Don (1978). Running Dog. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, Don (1980). Amazons. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (collaborative novel, written with Sue Buck, under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell). DeLillo, Don (1982). The Names. New York: Knopf. DeLillo, Don (1983). “American Blood,” Rolling Stone, December 8: 21–8, 74 (on the J.F.K. assassination). DeLillo, Don (1985). White Noise. New York: Viking. DeLillo, Don (1988). Libra. New York: Viking. DeLillo, Don (1989). Americana [1971], rev. edn. New York: Penguin. DeLillo, Don (1991). Mao II. New York: Viking. DeLillo, Don (1997a). “The Power of History,” New York Times Magazine, September 7: 60–3 (essay on the relationship between narrative and history). DeLillo, Don (1997b). Underworld. New York: Scribner.
DeLillo, Don (1998). White Noise: Text, Criticism and Notes, ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Viking. DeLillo, Don (2001a). The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, Don (2001b). “In the Ruins of the Future,” Harper’s, December: 33–40 (essay on the 9/11 attacks). DeLillo, Don (2003). Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner. DeLillo, Don (2007). Falling Man. New York: Scribner. Dewey, Joseph (2006). Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Dewey, Joseph, Kellman, Steven G., and Malin, Irving, eds. (2003). UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s “Underworld”. Newark, D.E.: University of Delaware Press. DiPietro, Thomas, ed. (2005). Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Duvall, John, ed. (2008). Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeClair, Tom (1987). In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana, I.L.: University of Illinois Press. Lentricchia, Frank, ed. (1991). Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Osteen, Mark (2000). American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ruppersburg, Hugh and Engles, Tim, eds. (2000). Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. New York: G. K. Hall.
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Gerald Vizenor: Postindian Gamester A. Robert Lee
The indian is the invention, and indian cultures are simulations, that is the ethnographic construction of a model that replaces the real in most academic references. Natives are the real, the ironies of the real, and an unnameable sense of presence, but simulations are the absence, and so the indian is an absence, not a presence. (Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, p. 85)
Postindians, indians Postindian. indian (lower case and italicized). Storier. Survivance. Shadow distance. These and other Gerald Vizenor coinings might seem a long way from the received vocabulary to do with Native America. Yet few writers have been more resolute, or ebulliently ironic and comic-imaginative, in seeking to dismantle stereotype – Vanishing American to Hollywood Indian, Longfellow’s Hiawatha to radio and television’s Tonto – while at the same time affirming the unstereotypic pluralisms of Native identity. Born of mixed White Earth Anishinaabe (Chippewa or Ojibwe) and white legacy, city-fostered in Minneapolis, army enlistee based in Japan, one-time staff writer on the Minneapolis Tribune, the holder of professorships at Bemidji, Minnesota, Berkeley, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, and with an anglicized French Canadian name likely assumed by a forebear for trading purposes, he as much as anyone himself embodies that plurality. The verve, not to say abundance, of his writings has justly put him at the very forefront of contemporary Native authorship. Postindian–postmodern. The one abets and fuses with the other, writing provocatively, and often startlingly, attuned to moving-on from, or at the very least through and around, indians. Postindian, for Vizenor, and as amplified in the discursive writing of Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports (1990), Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (1994), and Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of
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Absence and Presence (1998), has been nothing if not a mot clef. It carries his insistence on Natives wrested free of Euro-American gaze, and the language of appropriation and naming that has gone with it, to which end he has taken on not only the spectrum of “Indian” stereotype but Natives (for him often in university Ethnic Studies departments) where they themselves have colluded with pre-set styles, cultural mold, or stereotype. Under this dispensation he has gone on pointing out the process whereby Native peoples throughout the Americas were “othered” well before the Columbian landfall. A plethora of indian confections has come under his unremitting, and always wholly particular, ironic scrutiny, be it Rousseau’s noble savage and the “black men of the forest” excoriated by an Anglo-Puritan like Cotton Mather, James Fenimore Cooper’s Chingachgook and Chateaubriand’s Attala, the “Indians” of Cowboys and Indians and “Indian” beauty queen pageants, along with Mother Earth cultists and the sports indians of the Atlantic Braves and Washington Redskins. Was not the very appearance of “discovered” Native peoples made over into caricature, noble or demonic savagism, to be further perpetuated by missionary religion and anthropology, not to say whole swathes of visual and literary imagery? How best to reaffirm Native America’s own terms of life, no supposed one pan-Indian story but a massive and evolving cultural diversity of history, tribe, custom, shamanism, language, humor, art, locale, ethnic mix and identity, and, dare it be said, individuality? To this end, Vizenor has invented a whole company of trickster mixed-bloods, wily, sometimes wild, lustful, often enough shape-shifters, and pledged always to upsetting the cultural fixed seams and binaries by which Natives have been defined. Each of his successive novels and story collections positively abounds in these rare incarnations. They include the savvy trans-America pilgrim Proude Cedarfair in Bearheart – first published as Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), then Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990) – the genially disruptive China-voyager, Griever de Hocus, in Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1986), and the entire multi-named Browne reservation dynasty (the pseudonymous Almost Browne above all) and their allied tricksters of The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (1988), Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel (1997), and Chancers (2000). Stone Columbus features as Minnesota casino-barge heir to the High Admiral in The Heirs of Columbus (1991). Laundry, the lecturer in tribal philosophies, speaks in due trickster voice of his encounter with the bear wise-woman Bagese at Oakland’s Lake Merritt in Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World (1992). The Anishinaabe Japanese orphan hafu Ronin Browne in Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) roams the atomic city with a contrary force of will. Not least are to be counted Vizenor’s alterego Clement Beaulieu (the name taken from his own family) in the cycles Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade (1978) and Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (1981), and the irreverent storyteller of the short story “Four Skin Documents” in Landfill Meditation (1991) with his satires of the “Indian” media politicos he calls the San Francisco Sun Dancers – along with the character Cedarbird who makes a reappearance in Chancers.
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For all of them, their mentoring inspiration begins in Naanabozho, the great trickster spirit of the Anishinaabe, whose manifestations blend the antic with the serious, the sly with the heroic. As Vizenor observes in Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories, Naanabozho “disguises himself in many living things to explain and justify through imagination the conflicts of experience in tribal life” (Vizenor 1993: 155). Vizenor’s tricksters, recognizably contemporary, can give an American update to Chaucer’s pilgrims, out-monkey China’s own monkey kings, or run a blank book business just off the White Earth reservation and turn a Berkeleylike campus and its institutional habits upside down. The Columbian legacy they can transpose into a laser show and claim Columbus as both Sephardic Italian and Mayan mixed-blood returning to Atlantic-Caribbean-American homelands. They can chronicle the murderous replacement of museum tribal bones and skulls with those of academics and anthropologists. They can even not just query but shout in outrage toward the Japan of the Hirohito–Tojo regime as toward the U.S. of the Enola Gay and Little Boy, and especially, in the name of massacred children’s spirits, at the passive banality of Hiroshima’s Peace Museum. All of their respective disruptions – the more soaringly fantastical or Baroque the more the point – are done in the name of working magic against antagonists who reduce Native life, all life, to a single definition (an Ishmael Reed term like uniculturalist much applies). The texts, thereby, in which Vizenor situates them could not be less fabulation or playfield for its own sake. As theatrical, winning, as may be the popular-culture “Indian” of Western dime novel, cinema, comic strip, coins, stamps, or barbershop and tobacco advertising, the effect has been one of holograph or mannequin, a silhouette. For Vizenor, these “Indians” or, again, for him, indians, amount to “double-others,” beguiling but also at times lethal fakery. “My pen was raised to terminal creeds” (Vizenor 1990b: 235) he writes in “Avengers at Wounded Knee,” a chapter of his autobiography, Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (1990). It speaks exactly to his resolve of subverting all bound and finished definition of Natives and each other human kind. What image of Natives, for instance, can be said to have prevailed during the socalled “Indian Wars” – the Pequots in pre-revolutionary New England, the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838, the “frontier” Plains tribes of the Sioux, Comanche, and Cheyenne, or the Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890? What image holds for city-raised Natives, male and female, Natives with Ph.D.s, or filmmaker and author Natives? In interview, he has even been heard to say “I believe we are all invented as Indians” (Vizenor 1981: 46). His fiction, assuredly to his own postindian writ, yet assuredly also in the name of clearer understanding, seeks quite to de-invent (and often enough re-invent) the invention. The novels and stories, along with the huge roster of journalism, discursive writing, autobiography, poetry, and drama, time and again pitch for better recognition, with new language as need be, not only of Native survival but, in another of his terms, of “survivance.” That is, whether on reservation, or in the cities, in the Americas, or in the wider globe, Native survivance signifies more than just survival but live, enactive,
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and always creative presence. If, too, that has meant the guying of fantasy indians from, say, colonial or screen versions of Pocahontas and Geronimo to out-of-time beads-and-blankets poseur radicals and T.V. hotline spiritualists, it has in no way meant sidestepping the historic setbacks. Vizenor’s writings perfectly well acknowledge, and confront, the broken promises to the tribes, the violent colonial land thefts and forced removals, the impact of different episodes of disease – deliberately imposed colonial smallpox, influenza – fetal alcohol syndrome, and on- and off-reservation drug use and other self-destructive behavior. At the same time, he would be the last to give concession to victim-mongering, Natives as forever history’s losers, and somehow, indeed, less than the multidimensional subjects of their own lives.
Gamester Vizenor’s riposte, in these respects, has been scriptural tricksterism, his often magicreal or Baroque roster of novels and story-cycles whose mixed-bloods subvert every would-be essentialist template of the indian. This is fiction as serio-comic gaming to embrace plotlines that circle and reverse-swerve, Baroquely named characters, and, for sure, his different neologisms. Each text is likely to cite, or rather incorporate, a wide eclecticism of sources: be it Baudrillard on simulation or Beckett on silence, or Sioux luminaries like Luther Standing Bear on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the formal citizenship for Native Americans which became law in 1924 or the writer-activist Vine Deloria of Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) on tribal sovereignty. It has often involved Vizenor in taking controversial shies in several directions at once. The arc embraces cinema cliché from D. W. Griffith’s silent two-reelers like The Redman and the Child (1908) to epic Westerns like John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and, latterly, to Kevin Costner’s prairie melodrama Dances with Wolves (1990). The sepia-tinted memorial photographic stills (1907–30) of Edward Curtis he designates after-images, posed icons of inertia. American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) leadership like that of Russell Means and Dennis Banks he has teased as Red Power kitsch and worse, and, for his pains, has been threatened with violent reprisal. In the thrust of these accounts, and the styles of his own storying, as he terms it, timidity would be the last attribute to be assigned to him. The literary upshot has been a major role in the so-called Native Renaissance, usually dated from Scott Momaday’s fine-spun Jemez Pueblo healer-novel, House Made of Dawn (1968). Vizenor’s fiction joins other landmarks like James Welch’s Montana Blackfeet dark comedy, Winter in the Blood (1974), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), with its war-and-peace zones of Pacific jungle and Laguna Pueblo, and Almanac of the Dead (1991), with its all-Americas hemispheric politics of indigeneity and ecology. Louise Erdrich’s Chippewa-webbed stories, from Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986) onward, belong in the gallery, as do Tom King’s Medicine River (1990), with its wry First Nations community life and personnel “on the reserve” as
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the Canadianism has it, and Sherman Alexie’s carnivalesque Spokane/Coeur d’Alene novels like Reservation Blues (1995). Vizenor’s contribution, even so, has been always his own, the gamester both fierce and gentle, the dialogic inventor of voices and narrative. If he has positively relished reflexivity – Native storytelling as itself story, tricksterism about tricksters, or each reductive travesty of the indian held up to his authorial see-through mirror – this has far from caused him to lose hold of the reality of Native America’s sustaining human creativity across hemispheric time and space. Quite the contrary: it has provided the very rationale for his writing. A selection of key novels highlights the point.
Bearheart and Griever As the novel with which Vizenor made his literary bow, Bearheart (1978, revised 1990) serves notice of nearly all his characteristic storytelling traits. A visionary pilgrim narrative set in a dystopian America as bereft of spiritual balance as petroleum, and situated on deserted highways, Bearheart is told through the discovered manuscript of Saint Louis Bearheart, leader and tribal heir to cedar-woodland Anishinaabe of the Upper Mississippi. As he and his fellow “circus pilgrims,” together with the mongrels Pure Gumption and Private Jones, set out for the Anasazi-Puebloan Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and from there for the Fourth World, their serial journey becomes the stock-taking of a western order turned ecologically toxic, glutted on fast food and all manner of pharmaceutical nostrum. Vizenor’s pilgrims suggest Chaucer or Bunyan become hyper-real, players caught up in a kind of ongoing New World kaleidoscope or even Kabuki performance. Their number looks to Bearheart himself and his wife Rosina Parent (“She did not see herself in the abstract as a series of changing ideologies”: Vizenor 1990a: 35). Good and bad faith companions range from Bishop Omax Parasimo, wearer of three meta-masks, Lilith Mae Farrier, literal sexual lover of her boxer dogs, Benito Saint Plumero, the priapic owner of a prodigious and endlessly in-service penis called President Jackson, and Inawa Biwide, orphan pure-spirit tortured at New Mexico’s Palace of Governors, to Bella Darwin-Winter Catcher, sacrificial blatherer about Mother Earth, the male lovers Pardone Cozener, lawyer illiterate, and Dr. Wilde Coxwain, fake tribal historian, and Sir Cecil Staples, “monarch of unleaded gasoline,” the Evil Gambler of Anishinaabe myth and the skin-poisoned custodian of What Cheer Trailer Ruins. Bosch or Grosz stalks the novel, an itinerary of murder, sexual highs and lows, torture, and cancer (the graphic “Hlastic Haces” sequence) within an American civilization as much in need of repair of word (the group alights at one point at the Bioavaricious Regional Word Hospital) as of spiritual compass. Vizenor’s text is pitched to act as exorcism, Native-centered fantasia as necessary clearing ground. Griever, more lightly playful in tone than Bearheart, continues the trajectory. Appointed to teach at Tianjin’s Zhou Enlai University and accompanied by his savvy rooster companion, Matteo Ricci (named for the Italian Jesuit who brought
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Christianity to China), Griever de Hocus pledges himself as much to challenge China’s party-led and puritanical conformism as America’s no-holds-barred economic profligacy. The master of antic gesture, he liberates nightingales and street-market chicken, becomes a whole serial of Chinese opera figures in paint and costume (the “holosexual clown”), outwits bureaucratic control and censorship of the university curriculum in his role as professor, frees a line of prisoners destined for execution, and gets thrown out of the opening night at Maxim’s of Beijing. His pursuit of Hester Hua Duan, the beauteous translator, sino-sexual vaudeville, does yet more to undermine the established order. True to mythic-trickster form, Griever de Hocus escapes from his trail of reversals and transgressions by ultra-light plane, headed ostensibly for Macau. Flying high, having dived low, and, like the story that encloses him, he moves on and out resistant as always to all closure or final destination. Given a tribal protagonist the virtual twin or cousin of the monkey king himself, Vizenor’s China narrative can justifiably be said to subject Ch’-Eng-en’s classic The Journey to the West to its own inspired, and suitably about-face, retelling.
The Heirs of Columbus (1991) Vizenor may not have been the only Native novelist to have taken on the Columbus quincentenary of 1992 – The Crown of Columbus (1991), under the husband–wife authorship of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris and with its New England academic format, was another – but it assuredly was the most ingenious. It offers a trickster version of Columbus as foundational discovery figure. The text itself thus becomes a virtual-reality quest, the very portrait of the Genoese admiral as full of contradiction. Who actually was he? What was his true identity and ethnicity? How has he been interpreted in history, especially his relationship to Native America? The novel thus brings into plays a series of sleuths, motley, Baroque as ever, the likes of Felipa Flowers, Chaine Riel Doumet, and Lappet Tulip Browne, whose task is to track down the mysteries arising out of Columbianism. How, actually, to account for the enslavement of Natives, Spain’s expulsion of the Jews, Pocahontas’s burial in Gravesend, Kent, or Columbus as template for country and city place-name, Catholic Masonic charity, lighthouse, and university? As the plot weaves from one mystery and signification to another, with insets of a New York trial created to investigate crimes against Native America and whose evidence includes cyber-moccasins, holographic bear sex and sock magic, it becomes clear that Vizenor is once again writing trickster script. Appropriately, when Stone Columbus, owner and talk-show of the bingo-barge Santa María Casino and yet another member of the world’s “mixed-blood nation,” projects his laser show onto the night sky, the figures include Naanabozho, Louis Riel, Crazy Horse, Black Elk, and Columbus himself. On offer is the novel’s own meta-fictive tableau, history, and Native history above all, as a form of signwriting still far from being anything like finally deciphered.
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Hiroshima Bugi (2003) It might be thought typical that Vizenor would have one of his mixed-bloods write a chronicle of the world’s first atomic-ruin city. Ronin Ainoko Browne, the emblematically named hafu offspring of the boogie dance Okichi and her White Earth Anishinaabe lover Orion Browne and one-time Japanese-language translator for General MacArthur known also as Nightbreaker, acts as yet one more trickster emissary to history’s tragedy. Ronin’s own account, in turn, is monitored, and glossed, by Nightbreaker’s friend, the Arizona-based author of each sequential “manidoo envoy” (manidoo, the Anishinaabe for spirit). Hiroshima Bugi thereby operates as double-track narrative, two voices given both to measuring the world by atomic calendar (hence the half-title Atomu 57) and to an inspired play of cross-reference between Anishinaabe tradition and a Japan not only of wartime, postwar reconstruction, and economic bubble but the affirming cultural abundance that embraces the Ainu, Shinto and samurai, Kabuki and Bunraku, Basho¯ and Lafcadio Hearn, Roshomon and other Toshiro Mifune films by Akira Kurosawa, and texts like Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary (1955) and Kenzaburo Oe’s Hiroshima Notes (1965). The fulcrum of Hiroshima Bugi lies in Ronin’s dismay at the Hiroshima Bomb Dome Peace Monument and museum and his cosmic shout against both the collusive antagonism of the Hideki Tojo military-fascist wartime government and the White House–U.S. military process that led to the bombing. He shouts at greatest pitch, transgressively, but also affirmatively, at Tokyo’s Yasukuni war shrine (Yasukuni Jinja) for those responsible to seek forgiveness from “the kami spirits” of martyred children. He equally indicts the fake post-atomic nuclear peace since Hiroshima, and the death of life it implies, against which his every trickster’s sexual-creative energy serves as antidote. Around such, Vizenor piles story into story, whether Ronin’s relationship with his waitress-lover Miko, as they find sexual bliss ironically (and contrarily) near the Imperial Palace as the very bastion of court formality, or the story of the historical Scots Chinook sailor, Ranald Macdonald, as the first-ever westerner to teach English to the Japanese. The novel folds in, and out, of itself as though to emulate a busily peopled and decorated Japanese folding-screen or dwelling (nihon-ra). The upshot is a multi-tier narrative of Japan under Native eyes, Japan under its own art’s eyes. Postindian? Postmodern? It would be hard to think otherwise.
Vizenor Fictions All of these novels belong in the company of Vizenor’s other fiction, equally postindian/postmodern and wholly of imaginative kind in their reflexive flights of story and textual gamesmanship. Wordarrows (1978), a collection of essays-as-story, fact-asfiction, explores Franklin Avenue, Minnesota, as “urban reservation,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs as the new fur trade, and the imprisoned Dakota rapist-murderer
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Thomas White Hawk as cultural schizophrenic. Earthdivers (1981), his twenty-one story collection, with a span running from the Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne in 1864 to the campus politics of Ethnic Studies departments, offers a virtual postindian manifesto in the light of the charades and masks. Vizenor makes necessary reference to Anishinaabe creation myth: “our vision is to imagine like earthdivers a new world” (Vizenor 1981: 107). Landfill Meditation, with its early appearance of Almost Browne, again plays fast and loose with story–essay boundaries, and not least in the guying of Mother Earth sentimentality or A.I.M. pan-nationalist warrior politics and similar “terminal creeds.” Each of the other fictions in Vizenor’s trickster-postindian consortium likewise shares the drive to free Native peoples of imposed monochrome category. The Trickster of Liberty (1988), fourteen interlinking tales given over to the Browne dynasty of Shadow Box Browne and Wink Martin, again takes aim at leadership fakery (Coke de Fountain) and all-connecting spurious “Indian” pose (“The Last Lecture at the Edge”). In Dead Voices (1992), Vizenor takes up the footfall of Samuel Beckett in a California shaman story dealing in mirror and bear transformation and the ambiguity whereby the printed word has imprisoned as much as liberated Native continuity. Hotline Healers (1997), further trickster pieces from the White Earth barony, includes Nixon’s offer of the vice-presidency to Almost Browne for the removal of Castro (the celebrated eighteen-minute lost tape), the marvelous idea of Almost’s Blank Book business, with its implicit commentary on the writing-up of Native culture and signed Warhol-like and spuriously as if by well-known authors, and yet more New Age and Beauty Pageant “Indians.” In Chancers (2000), the scene returns to the campus, Berkeley to be precise, Native skulls and artifacts made contested ground by two groups, the malign, murderous Solar Dancers and the benign Round Dancers: the fantasy, Native history seen transhistorically, involves execution, orgy, and a surreal graduation ceremony involving Pocahontas, Ishi, and the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. With Father Meme (2008), Vizenor takes on priestly sexual abuse of Native children, an exquisite, and yet as always highly affirming, revenge story told as though at the Mayagi Ashandiwin Restaurant by an ex-altar boy and now journalist to a visiting French woman lawyer. It brings up to date a literary career – that of postindian and gamester – not only as sumptuous in its imaginings as any in Native American authorship but well beyond.
References and Further Reading Ballinger, Franchot (2004). Living Sideways: Tricksters in American Oral Traditions. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Berkhover, Robert, Jr. (1978). The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage.
Blaeser, Kimberly M. (1996). Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Deloria, Vine (1969). Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan.
Gerald Vizenor Erdrich, Louise and Dorris, Michael (1991). The Crown of Columbus. New York: HarperCollins. Fiedler, Leslie A. (1969). The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day. Krupat, Arnold, ed. (1993). New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Krupat, Arnold (1996). The Turn to the Native. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Krupat, Arnold (2007). Red Matters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lee, A. Robert, ed. (2000). Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Bowling Green, O.H.: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Lee, A. Robert (2003). Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Owens, Louis (1992). Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Owens, Louis, ed. (1997). “Special Issue on Gerald Vizenor,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 9 (1). Owens, Louis (1998). Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Radin, Paul (1972). The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Schocken. Ruoff, A. Lavonne Brown (1990). American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographical Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Simard, Rodney, ed. (1993). “Special Issue on Gerald Vizenor,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 5 (3).
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Stedmand, Raymond William (1982). Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American Culture. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Velie, Alan (1982). Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, Gerald (1981). “An Interview with Gerald Vizenor by Neil Bowers and Charles Silet,” MELUS, 8 (1): 41–9. Vizenor, Gerald (1990a). Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles [1978 title Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart]. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, Gerald (1990b). Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, Gerald (1993). Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories. Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, Gerald (1994a). Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. Vizenor, Gerald (1994b). Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader, ed. A. Robert Lee: Hanover: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. Vizenor, Gerald and Lee, A. Robert (1999). Postindian Conversations. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Warren, William W. (1984). History of the Ojibway People [1885]. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Wilson, Terry, ed. (1985). “Special Issue on Gerald Vizenor,” American Indian Quarterly, 9 (1).
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Precocious, imaginative, and disturbing, Bret Easton Ellis’s novels about violence, the mediascape, consumer desire, and the vacuity of contemporary life are always perfectly attuned to the spirit of the age and pitched in terms that make them definitively modern. Like Damien Hirst or Quentin Tarantino, Ellis commands his own distinctively brash aesthetic and produces novels that polarize and provoke. Not a purist, not a man of letters, Ellis mines popular culture in search of the resources he needs to animate and energize his fiction. Others, like A. M. Holmes, Dennis Cooper, Chuck Palahniuk, Irving Welsh, and Michel Houellebecq, have followed in his wake, but rarely have they managed to equal his achievements or, indeed, match his notoriety. With a celebrity that rivals his literary achievements, Ellis, like a Hemingway or a Mailer, seems more than happy to be part of the story, even as he writes it, an aspect of his work that only serves to fuel the interest in a career that began with the first of many media storms that would come to characterize his life, with the publication of Less Than Zero (1985) when he was just twenty-one. Ellis was born in Los Angeles in 1964. The son of a wealthy property analyst, he was brought up in privileged though unhappy circumstances and remembers his father as a man who was “violent, emotionally abusive and very difficult to live with” (Gerrard: 14). At eighteen, Ellis entered Bennington College, where, in 1984, he joined a creative writing course and wrote the first version of the novel that was to become Less Than Zero. Under the guidance of his tutor, the new journalist Joe McGinnis, Ellis revised his baggy manuscript and submitted it to Simon and Schuster. By the time he was twenty-one, Ellis was a nationally renowned writer, the author of what the press were calling a Catcher in the Rye for the eighties and being marketed alongside other young novelists (Tama Janowitz, David Leavitt, Jay McInerney amongst them) as a member of a literary brat-pack. Less Than Zero describes Christmas in Los Angeles through the eyes of Clay, an aimless college student who has returned to California to spend the vacation with his indifferent family and his so-called friends. The loose narrative sees Clay drifting from
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parties to bars to nightclubs and back again and mixing with former lovers, vacant rich kids, C-listers, wannabes, rent boys, and drug dealers. Witnessing violence, emotional cruelty, and sexual experimentation along the way, the ill-formed Clay wanders through this world, seemingly unable to offer anything more than the most cursory of insights into his environment. Predictably, this journey leads nowhere and the novel ends with him packing his bags and preparing to return to college. No part of contemporary American life is more thoroughly explored in Less Than Zero than consumer culture. Preoccupied with his glimpses of a billboard that bears the unsettling call to “Disappear Here,” and obsessed with music, fashion, and film, Ellis’s central character is lost in a world of products and images. Unable to distance himself from the mediascape, Clay’s subjectivity is adrift on a sea of signs. With the action set amid the tangled freeways, television screens, and shopping malls of late-twentieth-century Los Angeles, Ellis constructs a perfect fictional counterpart to the classic accounts of postmodern culture fashioned by Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Jean-François Lyotard. Less Than Zero thus records the experiences of those who live in contemporary society’s deterritorialized spaces, emerging, as Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney argue, from his observations of postmodern culture. This documentary design is complicated by the understanding that Ellis is not simply reporting on this world, he is satirizing it too. Clay’s emptiness and his bland affirmation of consumerism and mass culture are signs of a wider social malaise. The fruits of a society dazzled by images and stricken by affluenza, Clay’s story is no celebration of youthful decadence, but a cautionary tale with a moral that implicates not just his own kind, but all who share Clay’s casually materialistic dreams. Significant in itself, and at odds with the public perception of Ellis as a degenerate purveyor of semi-literate smut, Less Than Zero’s moral design does not, however, define the novel. What makes Less Than Zero interesting is that Ellis’s vision remains subtle throughout and refuses to settle for straightforward condemnation. As it records the realities of a postmodern culture and raises concerns about its social consequences, Less Than Zero also articulates a sense of the contradictions that lie at the heart of its own project and, by implication, contemporary American society as a whole. On an obvious level, any novel that takes its title from a song by Elvis Costello and its epigraph from Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven must inevitably find itself affirming mass culture even as it looks to interrogate it. This insight must be added to the understanding that the style of Less Than Zero, with its reliance on brand names, straplines, and cinematic allusions, is bonded to the currents of consumer society in profound ways. Clay lives, breathes, and talks consumerese and sees the world with eyes clouded by images he has culled from M.T.V. Even so, he still manages to shape a life from materials that, though weighed down by commercial constraints, remains living, fluid, and creative. The novel thus balances an understanding of the limitations of the world it describes with a sense of the possibilities that remain available. In this sense, it is not straightforwardly satirical, but subtle in ways that locate it alongside classic accounts of wealth, celebrity, and
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consumption like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), and Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970). The nuanced dissection of modern life practiced in Less Than Zero is not sustained in Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), a novel that prefers to work with blunt instruments. Coming after the publication of The Rules of Attraction (1987), a relatively unsuccessful follow-up to Less Than Zero, the controversy generated by American Psycho has come to define Ellis’s career. The bloody furor prompted by the novel began before it had even been published when Simon and Schuster, repulsed by the subject matter, terminated Ellis’s contract. At a stroke, they freed him to negotiate a new deal with Random House, keep the $300,000 he had already received, and ensured huge advance publicity for the novel. Though remarkable in themselves, these events were soon overshadowed by the outrage that greeted publication itself. Vilified as a “how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women” by the National Organization of Women, the novel attracted condemnation from almost all sides. Even The New York Times called for its readers to “snuff this book” (Rosenblatt: 3). When critics did try to defend the novel, they tended to privilege issues linked to censorship and free speech over criticisms of the text, an approach that strengthened the impression that American Psycho was more of a literary event, than a work of literature. Needless to say, the publicity generated ensured the success of American Psycho, a success that sees the novel continue to sell even now, more than fifteen years after it was published. Mary Harron’s film version, made in 2000 with Christian Bale as Bateman, has only served to keep the novel in the public gaze, and provides further evidence of American Psycho’s enduring popularity. The central irony, missed by so many amid the controversy, is that the novel itself is intimately concerned with the spectacularization of violence in the modern media. Stripped of its reality, and replicated in endless scenes of brutal mayhem, violent imagery is one of contemporary culture’s defining motifs. It is Ellis’s awareness of this truth that lies behind the writing of a novel that is designed to draw readers into a meditation on the meaning and impact of violence in popular culture. Far from being a how-to manual, the novel is more a primer that asks why and to what effect? In American Psycho, Ellis’s narrator, Patrick Bateman, a twenty-six-year-old Wall Street broker, moves through a series of partially connected sequences in which the extremes that characterize his existence come into focus. The freedoms afforded Bateman by the deregulated world of Reaganomics blur his ability to distinguish between his work in mergers and acquisitions and the “murders and executions” he commits in his time off (Ellis 1991: 206). His behavior is dictated by the overwhelming pressure he feels to purchase and accumulate to the point that he loses his ability to differentiate between paying for drinks in a nightclub and taking violent possession of another individual. This confusion is captured in Ellis’s descriptions of Bateman as he prowls New York: The meat-packing district just West of Nell’s, near the Bistro Florent to look for prostitutes … I find her on the corner of Washington and Thirteenth. She’s blond, slim and
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young, trashy but not an escort bimbo … and behind her, in four-foot-tall red block letters painted on the side of an abandoned warehouse, is the word MEAT. (Ellis 1991: 168)
This passage not only objectifies the woman in terms of her flesh, but also establishes straightforward links between Bateman’s obsession with consumption and his violence. Located in relation to some of his favorite restaurants, the obvious implication is that the experience promised by the prostitute extends the pleasures he finds elsewhere. Thus, when, in a later chapter, Bateman describes how he “tries to cook and eat girl,” he is both expressing his violent lusts and articulating his boundless capacity for consumption (Ellis 1991: 343). Crucially, Ellis does not look to explain these acts by offering psychological insight, or exploring the depths of his narrator’s mind. Instead, he connects Bateman’s behavior with consumer society. The American psycho is a literal embodiment of the cut-throat dealer, a man who pursues the principles of laissez-faire capitalism to conclusions that are legitimated within the terms defined by its own twisted logic. The fact that Bateman remains screened off from reality throughout the novel only adds emphasis to this position. He gets his economic data from the computer screen, his worldview from the television, and his sense of New York through the tinted glass of his limo. This screening, in Baudrillardian fashion, makes him unable to differentiate illusions from realities, to the extent that the violent acts he perpetrates become indistinguishable from the blizzard of violent images that surround him. The fact that he often chooses to record the suffering of his victims on video adds to this impression, and suggests that his violent acts are simply an extension of what he sees as his right to generate, project, and consume images. Blind to the brutality of his own actions, he lives in a world that has become as unreal to him as T.V. Ellis’s argument is simple: contemporary society’s obsession with wealth, images, and consumption has created a context in which Bateman’s violence can flourish. In these terms, American Psycho seems to echo the concerns articulated by Less Than Zero. The difference is, however, that where his first novel is complexly aware of the ironies of its own enterprise, American Psycho is relentless in its pursuit of its targets, seeking ever more extreme ways of making its case. While its brutality and hyperbole make for a powerful and affecting read, the novel works within a vision that is problematically blinkered. The central anxiety is that if, as Ellis suggests, Bateman’s behavior is the product of the objectifications of consumer society, then American Psycho mimics those processes in its endlessly detailed portraits of objects and violent murders. In choosing this approach, Ellis thus finds himself trapped by his own logic, replicating the processes of reification that are so heavily implicated in his depictions of Bateman’s violence. This narrowness is mirrored in critical responses to American Psycho. Though it is Ellis’s most widely discussed novel, the majority of commentaries, my own included, tend to work in similar ways. There is reflection on the effects of de-realization, discussion of the Darwinian conditions created by fiscal policy in the 1980s, and analysis
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of the metaphorical parallels that link the novel’s images of conspicuous consumption to Bateman’s epicurean violence. While the responsibility for such a uniformity of response must lie in part with the poverty of the critical imagination, it is also the fault of a novel that can only really be read in one rather straightforward way. American Psycho is, in conclusion, a very literal book. Based on a rudimentary metaphorical scheme and a simple idea that it works to death, there are a very limited number of interesting things to say about it. Even Ellis seems jaded by the whole thing. Writing in Lunar Park (2005), he offers a précis of the novel’s concerns that is marked by a weary tone: For those who weren’t in the room at the time, here’s the CliffsNotes version: I wrote a novel about a young, wealthy, alienated Wall Street yuppie named Patrick Bateman who also happened to be a serial killer filled with vast apathy during the height of the Reagan eighties. The novel was pornographic and extremely violent. (Ellis 2005: 17)
Beyond the clarity of the insight offered and the ways in which it seems to shortcircuit the debate around American Psycho, it is the self-reflexive quality of this passage and the layers of meaning created around the tension between Ellis the author and Ellis the character that makes this passage interesting, an introspection that sees Ellis moving beyond the satirical dimensions of his earlier fiction. Though apparent in many of his novels, self-reflexivity is central to Lunar Park and to Glamorama (1998), the novel he wrote after American Psycho. Told by Victor Ward, a twenty-seven-year-old “model-slash-actor,” Glamorama returns to Ellis’s signature concerns – wealth, consumption, popular culture, fashion, and celebrity – in a novel framed by a series of complex narratorial devices. The result is a playfully conceived comedy of manners focused on a dim-witted narrator. Obsessed with fame, labels, and the minutiae of interior design, Victor believes that “the better you look … the more you see” (Ellis 1998: 27). At the start of the novel, Victor stands on the verge of stardom. Soon, however, various personal reverses take their toll. As his celebrity stock falls, his world disintegrates and instead of securing the part in Flatliners II that he so desires, he gets himself involved with an international terrorist cell that draws its recruits from the worlds of fashion and celebrity. A series of atrocities follow before the cell implodes in violence, leaving Victor to try to reassemble what remains of his life. As this outline of the plot suggests, Glamorama’s account of violence, consumption, and excess seems almost like the last possible permutation of the themes explored in Ellis’s earlier fiction. This impression is strengthened by the novel’s reliance on plot devices that layer fantasy and reality together to create a text that is intensely self-conscious and possessed with an exaggerated sense of its own artificiality. More Zoolander (2001) than Tender is the Night (1934), the result is engagingly kitsch and frequently amusing, but rarely as challenging as his earlier novels. It is, however, in the nexus of ideas that link identity, celebrity, and self-reflection together that Glamorama is at its most striking, a suggestion that can be brought
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into sharper focus by looking more closely at the novel that extends these themes, Lunar Park. Though for The New York Times it may be “the worst novel ever,” a book that offers, according to the Boston Globe, a “lurching ride to nowhere,” Lunar Park does have legitimate claim to be Ellis’s most interesting work since Less Than Zero. On a more prosaic level, the novel also makes the task of writing an introduction to Ellis much more challenging for the simple reason that Lunar Park gives Ellis the opportunity to do this for himself. In his long opening chapter, “the beginnings,” Ellis describes his career in a voice that reveals the extent to which he is aware of his own place in the wider debate about contemporary American fiction. Freed from the pretensions of literary criticism, Ellis’s instantly engaging summary of his own life and work is as illuminating as it is readable. The critical autobiography sketched out in this opening is not, however, as straightforward as it appears. Even as he writes about himself, Ellis actually manages to do something else entirely. In the course of describing Less Than Zero as a novel that offers an “indictment … of the Reagan eighties and, more indirectly, of Western civilization in the present moment,” dismissing the Brat Pack as “a media-made package: all fake flesh and punk and menace,” and acknowledging that the controversy around American Psycho is so well documented that he feels “no need to go into great detail about it here,” he provides both an elegant summary of many of the arguments that have informed critical responses to his fiction, at the same time as he moves that debate forward with one authoritative stride (Ellis 2005: 6, 11, 17). At the heart of this design is Ellis’s mockubiographical form. Beginning as a story about Bret Easton Ellis that mixes established fact with implausible fiction, the novel shifts registers and develops into a suburban horror story that owes much to films like Halloween (1978) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and the fiction of Stephen King. Now married to a movie actress and trying to re-orientate himself after years of drug excess and literary celebrity, Bret Easton Ellis, at the beginning of Lunar Park, leaves Manhattan behind for a dysfunctional family life in the suburbs. The plan is to rehabilitate his life, his relationships, and his career, a project that is soon in trouble as the wayward Ellis finds himself quickly overwhelmed by S.U.V.s, parents’ evenings, malignant toys, and unexplained murders. With his mind plagued by echoes of the violence conjured in his earlier novels, and his steps haunted by the ghost of his dead father, the narrator’s world rapidly unravels. Before long, he is lost inside his own mind, trapped in a lonely lunar park of artificiality, sorry memories, and nightmares. The play on writerly design and the status of the author is, at first sight, the most alienating feature of Lunar Park. Legitimate questions can be asked about a book that rehashes familiar reflections on fictionality and dwells on the troubles of a millionaire novelist. There is, however, more to this enterprise than the gameful (and, indeed, gamy) ploys of Paul Auster and Dave Eggers or, indeed, the immensely popular films scripted by Charlie Kaufman for directors Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. Where these looping, self-reflexive texts are concerned with foregrounding the self-evidently
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fictional status of their narratives and problematizing the power relations locked within the D.N.A. of authorship, Ellis uses his imagined version of himself to articulate a sense of the writer as a commodity. He is a brand author, another bright star in the contemporary’s constellation of signs. This understanding of Lunar Park as a text that explores the style–commodity– celebrity matrix at the same time as it is a constituent product of that matrix and an agent of its operation is fundamental to Ellis’s design. Reluctant to separate itself off from the context of its production, Lunar Park is acutely sensitive to the synergies that drive modern culture. Conceived in relation to a sweeping panorama of brands and identities, it is part of a mediascape in which film, advertising, music, press, visual culture and digital media and contemporary fiction are all converging. Effective in these terms, the novel also succeeds in recharging Ellis’s old concerns with a whole range of new meanings and implications. First, Lunar Park has a much more poignant and personal quality to it than any of Ellis’s previous fiction. When his narrator writes, “My life – my name – had been rendered a repetitive, unfunny punch line and I was sick of eating it,” it is impossible not to connect this with the author’s own sense of dislocation (Ellis 2005: 37). Moreover, the portrait of the malignant father, so closely tallying with known details of Ellis’s life story, carries with it an intimacy that is undimmed by the narrative structure. Indeed, the aesthetic design serves to prevent this book being yet another miserable memoir in the style of Jerry Stahl, Elizabeth Wurtzel, or, in terms that are not only laughable, but strikingly appropriate, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), a faux-memoir of a completely different kind. Unlike them, Ellis is happy to play with this genre, mocking the therapeutic search for the true self and the banality of lifestyle therapies in a novel that is not about the depth of human consciousness, but about its superficiality, its fragility. More focused than Glamorama and more complex and ambiguous than American Psycho, Lunar Park is not trapped in safe questions about the relationships between the smoke and the mirror, the monkey and the organ grinder, that are the traditional domain of self-reflexive novels, but enabled by them. His chamber of horrors, his poetic dovetailing of personal fact and media fiction, his reliance on an iconography drawn from the sign systems of celebrity and popular culture, all combine in a novel that defies the attempt to privilege depth over surface and resists the desire to resolve the tension between Ellis as the writer of satires and his role as a man who helps create the conditions he is looking to satirize. In choosing horror as his mode, Ellis finds a strategy for looking into the heart of contemporary life and uses it to construct a vision of the colonialism of consumption and the media in terms that are subtle and challengingly ambiguous. This is not invective, but analysis. Ellis is no more against celebrity, commodification, or media society than he is against electricity or the wheel. Instead, he examines the world created by this confluence of forces and asks his readers to think about how they are going to live in it. Lunar Park’s provocative conclusion is that answers can only be found by skating on the surface, not by diving into the depths.
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References and Further Reading Annesley, James (1998). Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto. Annesley, James (2006). Fictions of Globalization. London: Continuum. Arvidsson, Adam (2006). Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge. Brooker, Peter (1996). New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, the New Modern. Harlow: Longman. Caputi, Jane (1993). “American Psychos: The Serial Killer in Contemporary Fiction,” The Journal of American Culture, 16 (4): 101–12. Durand, Alain-Phillipe and Mandel, Naomi, eds. (2007). Novels of the Contemporary Extreme. London: Continuum. Ellis, Bret Easton (1985). Less Than Zero. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ellis, Bret Easton (1987). The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ellis, Bret Easton (1991). American Psycho. New York: Vintage. Ellis, Bret Easton (1994). The Informers. New York: Knopf. Ellis, Bret Easton (1998). Glamorama. New York: Knopf.
Ellis, Bret Easton (2005). Lunar Park. New York: Knopf. Freccero, Carla (1997). “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho,” Diacritics, 27 (2): 44–58. Gerrard, Nicci (1994). “Bret and the Beast in the Corner,” Observer Life, October 16: 14–18. Mailer, Norman (1991). “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho,” Vanity Fair, December 31, 54 (3): 124–9, 182–3. Murphet, Julian (2002). Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum. Rosenblatt, Roger (1990). “Snuff this Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review, December, 16: 3, 16. Stephenson, William (2007). “A Terrorism of the Rich: Symbolic Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama and J. G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 48 (3): 278–94. Tyrnauer, Matthew (1994). “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair, 57 (8): 70–3, 100–1. Young, Elizabeth and Caveney, Graham (1992). Shopping in Space: Essays on American Blank Generation Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail.
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Amy Tan: “American Circumstances and Chinese Character” Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson
And then I realized what the first word would have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother’s breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin. (Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, p. 228)
Amy Tan is best known for her fiction on mothers and daughters, and her focus on cross-cultural and cross-generational (mis)communication. It is not insignificant that the quotation above, from The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), explores the ways in which the mother and daughter interact in a symbiotic relationship, developing language to meet each other’s needs. Three of Tan’s five novels – The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter – focus explicitly on the relationship between mothers and daughters, women who speak each other’s languages, but only partially and faultily. In addition to these novels, The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) focuses upon a mothersubstitute in the form of an older half-sister, Kwan, who is brought to the U.S. as an unwelcome “favor” for the Chinese American child, Olivia. Unusually for Tan, the novel includes a non-Chinese mother. This potentially interesting cross-cultural relationship is never fully developed, however; the mother, who describes herself as “American mixed grill, a bit of everything white, fatty, and fried” (Tan 1995: 3), has an adolescent desire to be “different” and seeks this difference through inappropriate romantic entanglements with “foreign” men, yet she is fairly swiftly dismissed from the text. Almost all of the characters in this third novel are unsympathetic. Olivia Bishop is an unhappy woman who has spent her long, married life thinking her husband Simon is in love with his previous girlfriend, Elza. She also resents Kwan’s presence in her life and treats her badly. Kwan, incomprehensibly, never registers
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Olivia’s disregard, instead insisting that they once knew each other in a former life as Miss Banner, a missionary woman who did not believe in God, and Numumu, a servant girl who worked for the mission. Later, on an improbable visit to China, Simon, Olivia, and Kwan retrace old steps, and Olivia is seduced into believing Kwan’s stories of their previous life. Kwan disappears whilst on their trip, and afterwards, Olivia miraculously gives birth to a daughter despite twenty years of infertility. Even the short plot summary suggests the novel’s weaknesses. Kwan is written in “translated” English for the most part, with the effect that she is made to appear stupid, her broken English marking her out as non-native. Although Tan uses a variety of Englishes in all of her texts – she claims this comes from conjuring up her mother Daisy as her imagined reader (Tan 2003: 278) – this technique is the least effective in this novel. In other novels, Tan is able to meld Englishes more seamlessly, incorporating a variety of voices and vocal competences smoothly. Interestingly, even Olivia’s speech is grating in this novel, sprinkled as it is with unexpected (and perhaps unwarranted) swearing, words that seem to jar against the page. Thus, Tan moves from a narrative focusing on mother–daughter conflict to one of sister rivalry, where incomprehensibility is moved from generational and cultural conflict to one of just cultural conflict. Kwan’s representation, though perhaps meant to be sympathetic, is a weakness of the novel, since Tan makes her appear idiotic and simple, wrapped up in stories of “yin people” – ghosts – and their other lives. Only in her latest novel does Tan move significantly away from the Chinese American family, and only then partially successfully. Saving Fish from Drowning (2005) is a sprawling book which follows twelve tourists on an ill-fated journey to Myanmar (formerly Burma). The novel is narrated by the dead Bibi Chen, a socialite who dies in mysterious circumstances prior to the trip she organized. Bibi is the overarching voice of the narrative, spirited (in more than one sense) and more than a little spiteful. Yet despite this fantastical narration, Tan begins her text with a framing device not only of apparent reality/truthfulness (a newspaper article outlining Bibi’s death) but also a “A Note to the Reader,” in which the author claims to have come across Bibi Chen’s story in the archives of the American Society for Psychical Research as well as having met her personally. This is, of course, fictional framing, and the fact that Tan does not sign the note offers the reader this clue (though apparently some early readers were convinced of the Note’s literal veracity, including Gail Caldwell, writing a review in the Boston Globe). There has, to date, been little critical exploration of the novel. Reviews were mixed, with many critics bemoaning the move from mother– daughter strife to a comic novel of cultural misunderstanding, in which American tourists live up to their poor reputations regarding cultural sensitivity, and the native Burmese, the Karen tribe, fulfill the role of naïve natives. In addition to her five novels, Tan has published one collection of non-fiction pieces loosely tied around her memoirs, The Opposite of Fate, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994). Her work receives both supportive and critical commentary, with some critics applauding Tan’s exploration of the undervalued mother–daughter nexus, whilst others suggest that she is guilty of
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Orientalism and of producing false versions of Chinese history and myth. This is a charge that Tan denies: I know from reactions to my fiction that there are people who believe that the raison d’être of any story with an ethnic angle is to provide an educational lesson on culture. I find that attitude restrictive, as though an Asian-American artist has license to create only something that specifically addresses a cultural hot point, and not a work about human nature that happens to depict that through Asian-Americans. (Tan 2003: 191)
Such a view may be easy for Tan to maintain, given her crossover success; indeed, it is this very success in the mainstream American literary canon that makes her suspect in the eyes of some critics, who either see her as playing into white feminists’ viewpoints by focusing on mothers and daughters at the expense of dealing with ethnicity, or who see her as a representative of an Orientalist logic who plays to a white mainstream readership. It has been argued, for example, in relation to The Hundred Secret Senses, that Tan’s “ethnicizing” of the primitive contributes significantly to her success among white, middle-class, “mainstream” readers. Such a statement is unfair to both Tan and her readers, who are unlikely to be homogeneous. Other critics have been restive over Tan’s popularity with readers and have expressed the wish to see primarily positive representations of Asian American characters. However, to a one, Tan’s Chinese mothers are both difficult and culturally illiterate in some respects, refusing to moderate their voices and mannerisms to take account of mainstream culture, something which causes their American daughters to experience shame. Tan’s willingness to engage in the complexity of character is surely to be commended, and any suggestion of an appropriate template for characters is one that is rightly resisted. Tan has been taken to task for supposedly essentializing ethnic identity as “authenticity,” for failing to present the Chinese as survivors (except if they head for America), and for being “obsessed” with China, although, of course, there is no obligation on Tan to represent China, America, or Chinese Americans in any particular fashion. Bella Adams, who has written extensively on Tan, firmly refutes suggestions that the author is somehow at fault for her depictions either of ethnicity or of her “narrow” focus on the family. Instead, Adams argues that Tan is “situated in an Asian American feminist tradition that is critical of both Asian American literary studies and mainstream American feminism for their respective tendencies to marginalize gender and ethnicity issues” (Adams 2005: 27). In attempting to explore the impact of ethnicity on mothers and daughters, Tan therefore privileges neither identity marker but looks at how they interconnect. In what follows, I will focus my attention on Tan’s three most successful novels – those which do address the mother–daughter nexus – in order to explore how she intertwines ethnicity and gendered relationships. The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s first novel, was originally envisioned as a series of short stories; it was only upon publication that it “became” a novel (Tan 2003: 345). It is also the only one of Tan’s books to be filmed, and this may account somewhat for its continued popularity almost twenty years after it was first published. Even Tan’s most
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staunch supporter in the U.K., Bella Adams, admits that The Joy Luck Club is a “fairly formulaic text” (Adams 2005: 35), which makes its prominence somewhat perplexing. Yet at the same time, the novel focuses on issues of importance to many women, particularly their relationships with their mothers. The Joy Luck Club offers a narrative of linkages: mothers and daughters present stories of their lives, and these lives both intertwine and remain somehow apart. Across all stories is a sense of a divide, with language and culture both interfering in the transmission of understanding. As Jingmei Woo says, “My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more” (Tan 1989: 27). Indeed, as readers, what we get is secret access to the thoughts of mothers and daughters that they do not share, so that they are bound to persist in misunderstandings of each other. The mothers of the text are haunted by their own mothers’ absences through death, suicide, disappearance, and loss of face; what they discover in the U.S. is that this loss is replicated in their relationships with their daughters. Even though they are physically available, the daughters fail to connect in the way that the mothers would like. Thus, the mothers are forever stranded between a Chinese past, which they can only access in their memories (and which often holds terrible wounds), and their American present, in which they do not fully belong. At the beginning of the novel, Suyuan Woo is dead, her place at the mah jong table and therefore within the Joy Luck Club of the title, taken by her daughter Jingmei. Jing-mei is later given the task of completing her mother’s longed-for, but never completed, reunion with her abandoned Chinese daughters. Each living mother and daughter narrates her own stories, with the mothers’ stories coming in the first and last of the four sections, representing the mah jong table. Each narrator is allocated two stories apart from June, who has a story in every section (figuratively taking her mother’s place). June narrates the very first story, but in the subsequent three sections, her story comes at the end, so her voice therefore manages to both begin and end the novel. This positioning of the stories is read multiply by critics. Helena Grice, for example, suggests that “it is significant within the symbolic construction of the text that Tan has the daughters follow the mothers, which could be seen as a hint of resolution” (Grice: 67). Other critics suggest that the framing of the daughters’ stories by the mothers’ stories gives the mothers the most power. However, Adams suggests that this perspective “ignores the fact that Jing-mei opens, closes and generally dominates the text, thereby giving the daughters the upper hand” (Adams 2005: 58). What is obvious is that the section breaks show how little communication between generations there is, and it must be remembered that Jing-mei is only able to insert her stories in each section because of her mother’s death. In Tan’s later books, particularly in The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses, stories are explicitly narrated across generations; in The Kitchen God’s Wife, the stories are even interrupted by seemingly natural breaks. The first two chapters of The Kitchen God’s Wife are narrated by Pearl, a Chinese American woman partially estranged from her mother, but very soon the novel becomes the story of Jiang Weili (later
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named Winnie Louie), and is all the better for it. Although Tan’s reputation is based mostly on The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, which has received significantly less critical attention, is in many ways a stronger book. It is also significantly more autobiographical, a text that tells the story of Daisy Tan’s first abusive marriage. The novel begins with secrets and the request – or even demand – that they are finally uncovered. Pearl has M.S., but has not told her mother; her mother has a tragic past, but has not told her daughter. Urged on by the meddling (and misunderstood) Hulan/ Auntie Helen, Winnie and Pearl relate their untold stories. Near the very end of the novel, Pearl is afforded another chapter, but the rest of the text – and the very final chapter – belong to her mother. The Kitchen God’s Wife is, ultimately, constructed as an oral tale, interrupted on occasion by the mother’s voice recognizing her audience’s reactions – laughter, denial, hunger – and her desire to feed that or remove it. For example, Chapter Five begins: “First I told my daughter I no longer had a pain in my heart, the reason why I said she had to come right away” (Tan 1991: 101). This section uses quotation marks to indicate speech, and finishes just over the page with the words, “And then I told her” (p. 102), before a section break where the discourse continues with no quotation marks. This, then, is the story of Winnie’s life, very clearly offered to her daughter. For example, at the beginning, Winnie interrupts herself to say: “I never told you about my mother? That she left me? Oh. That’s because I never wanted to believe it myself. So maybe that’s why I did not tell you about her” (p. 102). Through this direct storytelling, the women forge the connection that has been previously missing in their relationship. Winnie as an adult recounts her own childhood memories of her mother: “But some things I can remember very clearly: the heaviness of her hair, the firmness of her hand when she held mine, the way she could peel an apple all in one long curly piece so that it lay in my hand like a flat yellow snake. You remember? That’s how I learned to do that for you” (pp. 102–3). Through speech, generations are connected. Yet this storytelling – occasionally interrupted with a recognition of the need for food, or tea – becomes an improbably long tale, not possibly told in one setting, though we as readers are given no other explanation for how it could have been told. There is a narrative corollary to this: Winnie relates the last day she spent in her mother’s company, before her mother disappeared (or killed herself, or ran away – her absence is never resolved). Her mother takes Winnie on a sojourn out into the delights of the city, but the number of things they do, and the delights they experience, are unlikely to have been remembered accurately. It is more likely, as Winnie herself later admits, “maybe it is all my memories and imagination of her, now gathered into one day” (p. 105). Tan’s use of oral storytelling in this second novel in some ways goes over old ground – the complexity of communication (and mis-communication) between generations, the primacy and disappointment of the mother–daughter relationship – but here Tan offers at least some connection as the basis for a way forward. If in The Joy Luck Club, the gap between generations seems unbridgeable, in The Kitchen God’s Wife, there is real movement toward reconciliation. This is also true of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, which acts as one long wish for connection across generations. Set both in the
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contemporary U.S. and in China of the early part of the century, the novel traces almost literally the mother’s story through the daughter, with LuLing constantly attempting to contact her own lost mother through non-traditional means (including using her daughter Ruth as a psychical translator). In this novel, the familiar plot lines of fractured families, secrets, and fear of the supernatural combine to offer a richer and deeper reading experience for the reader. LuLing, the daughter of the title, is the mother of Ruth, who only comes to hear and understand her mother’s story once LuLing has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (as was Tan’s own mother). Ruth is, significantly, unable to read her mother’s written story; she has to have it translated. Part two of the novel is the translated life of LuLing, who did not know that her Precious Auntie – a scarred woman who acts as her nursemaid – is her biological mother until they fight over her impending marriage. Precious Auntie, who cannot speak but who is understood by LuLing (though not by others) through sign language, writes a confession of her relationship. LuLing refuses to read it, and as a result of misunderstanding this, Precious Auntie kills herself. This saves LuLing from a potentially disastrous marriage but unfortunately makes LuLing forever regret her actions, forever seek forgiveness that cannot be forthcoming. Throughout her novels of mother–daughter love, Tan outlines the ways in which the communication across generations is never straightforward or easy. Partially this is down to language itself, a factor that again divides critics. Some see it as a means of preserving the identity of the Chinese or immigrant self in the new reality of America. Others attack Tan’s use of different levels of linguistic competence in English as representing a form of exoticism or even a covert form of Orientalism. Such a polarity of reactions characterizes responses to Tan’s work. Grice explores the barriers provided by the mother tongue, or the language that the daughter only partially connects with or understands: “Often the mother is speaking, but the daughter is not present as a recipient or addressee of the mother’s speech either because she is not listening or cannot yet understand” (Grice: 47, italics in original). It is this idea of process of knowing and learning that seems fundamental to Tan’s work. After all, as Grice further argues, Tan’s view of mothering is complex and contradictory: “She seems to veer between a celebratory impulse, which does nothing to demystify mothering as an activity, and a far more negative version in which the all-powerful and all-knowing mothers become suffocating and damaging influences upon their daughters” (Grice: 68). Certainly, it appears that Tan works through issues regarding her own mother’s biography in her texts, from her mother’s abusive first marriage, to her depressive tendencies, to her later Alzheimer’s disease. Her canon offers a fictive rendering of Chinese American familial relationships informed by her own upbringing as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. It is important to stress, however, that Tan’s work is more than simple auto/biography, more than a transcription of reality. She uses the process of storytelling to transform stories of loss into stories that can be read as empowering, even if not all critics agree as to her success in this endeavor. As Tan acknowledges, she writes specifically for her mother, and specifically in the mode of celebration:
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I began to write stories using all of the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts. (Tan 2003: 278–9)
In a comic and telling autobiographical moment in The Opposite of Fate, Tan relates the story of traveling with her mother to China. On the flight, their white companion looked at his airline food and said, “I guess this is a Western version of Oriental food” to which Tan’s mother replied, “This Chinese idea of American food” (Tan 2003: 155). This comic reversal of the Oriental gaze could well be simply playful on Tan’s part, a fictive response to critics who feel her own gaze is too American, too assimilationist. Yet careful reading of Tan’s work offers a multitude of such moments. If Rose in The Joy Luck Club seems to claim that American opinions are better than Chinese opinions, she finds herself unable to stick to this conclusion. And if Miss Banner offers a long rendition of American strengths to Numumu in The Hundred Secret Senses, Numumu’s reply shows up Miss Banner as the ignorant one: “On and on she went, until I felt myself growing small and dirty, ugly, dumb, and poor” (Tan 1995: 178–9). Adams argues firmly that Tan is not an essentialist writer, nor is she unaware of the political importance attached to larger world events. For Adams, Tan is aware that the personal is political, and therefore the focus on domesticating larger political relations is not only an acceptable, but indeed a necessary response to the world: hence the repeated references to Japanese invasion in the lives of mothers, who sometimes react by setting up diversionary events which could be read as frivolous; or discussions of patriarchal power and abuse, which are explicitly ignored, with apparently no language there to contest such behavior; or (in the U.S.) racism, which is sometimes expressed in a gentle voice. Tan’s mothers and daughters communicate – and mis-communicate – across generational divides, their domestic interiors offering the space to explore how “American circumstances and Chinese character” (Tan 1989: 289) are actively joined together, both aligned and misaligned.
References and Further Reading Adams, Bella (2005). Amy Tan. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Adams, Bella (2008). Asian American Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bloom, Harold, ed. (2001). The Joy Luck Club: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House.
Bloom, Harold, ed. (2008). Amy Tan: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House. Grewal, Inderpal (2005). Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Amy Tan Grice, Helena (2002). Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women’s Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Huntley, E. D. (1998). Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, C.T.: Greenwood. Rosinski, Natalie M. (2006). Amy Tan: Author and Storyteller. Mankato, M.N.: Compass Point. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen (2004). Amy Tan: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. Tan, Amy (1989). The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ivy.
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Tan, Amy (1991). The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Ivy. Tan, Amy (1995). The Hundred Secret Senses. New York: Putnam. Tan, Amy (2001). The Bonesetter’s Daughter. London: Flamingo. Tan, Amy (2003). The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. London: Harper. Tan, Amy (2005). Saving Fish from Drowning. New York: Putnam.
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Paul Auster: Poet of Solitude Mark Brown
Since the critical success of The New York Trilogy (1987), Paul Auster has published a further ten novels, a memoir, and written or directed four films. Prior to that he had carved out a precarious living as a poet, essayist, and translator. The essays from this period (roughly the 1970s) provide many clues to the inspiration for much of the literature that follows, as do the interviews collected with them (see The Art of Hunger, 1997). It is possible to distinguish – a little arbitrarily at times – four phases to Auster’s career so far. What follows demonstrates how the works have moved from poetry and non-fiction, through the early fictions, to the films of the mid-1990s, and subsequently to the later novels. As we shall see, each phase is distinct in the form he adopts and the themes the work interrogates. Whilst pursuing this chronology, I will show how the key themes of language, identity, solitude, and the power of writing and storytelling are held in common, explored, and developed. One of the most distinct features of Auster’s work is the way the lives of his writercharacters frequently collapse into the lives of the characters they create, consistently calling into question the boundaries of where the “real” world ends and the fictional world begins and, in a postmodern way, questioning the capacity of literature to represent reality at all. Patricia Waugh has described how writing of this type is metafictional, and “self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 1984: 2). The most consistent metafictional feature of Auster’s work is the central role of writer-characters. Again and again, his work demonstrates the struggle of the writer with language and the struggle to represent the world. In what follows, I will give a substantial reading of one significant text from each phase of Auster’s career, while also offering a brief account of the other texts.
Poetry: “An Art of Loneliness” Between 1974 and 1980, Auster authored a number of collections of poetry, which have been anthologized in Ground Work (1990) and Collected Poems (2004). Despite
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Auster suspecting it may be his best work, very little critical attention has been paid to his poetry. In the poems themselves, which are small, taut, and intense, “Auster struggles towards the real, and his poetry enacts that process” (Auster 2004b: 11). Auster’s struggle toward reality is problematized by anxieties about the capacity of language to represent, language as a way of being in the world, and the failure of language symbolized as the biblical fall of man. Because it is through language that we attempt to decipher experience, Auster’s poetry becomes “less a mode of expressing the world than it is a way of being in the world” (Auster 1997a: 37). Consequently, these poems illustrate the poetic paradox of having to posit “the reality of this world, and then to cross into it” (Auster 1997a: 42). In the poem “Scribe,” Auster considers how “The name / never left his lips: he talked himself / into another body: he found his room again / in Babel” (Auster 1990: 33). The appeal here to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which describes how God condemns the peoples of the world to speak in different tongues, signals the themes of the Tower, the Fall of Man, and the failure of language which are to recur frequently. For Auster, the poet is isolated in his room by the very task of writing the world. As a result, he sees the “poet as solitary wanderer,” and poetry as “an art of loneliness” (Auster 1997a: 42). In the later prose poem, “White Spaces,” the poet once again finds himself in the lonely room, a frequent concern in Auster’s aesthetic project, and another of his metafictional devices (books, poems, and films about writers sitting in rooms writing). Although the poet remains in his room in this poem, he can in a sense go anywhere he wants, and so he is able to establish a fragile connection with the world beyond his room. “White Spaces” was finished just before the death of Auster’s father. In writing about this loss in The Invention of Solitude (1982), Auster again probes the problematic relationship between the writer and writing, the writer and language, and the solitary nature of the writer’s craft. These difficulties are explored through the chasm between language and experience, manifesting itself here as “a wordless panic,” which Auster compares to A. (his Kafkaesque, third-person self) “being forced to watch his own disappearance” (Auster 1982: 77). What follows from this is the association between a character’s relationship with language and the extent and stability of their textual presence. The concept of a character’s textual transparency or disappearance becomes an Austerian motif explored often in the subsequent fiction.
Early Fiction: Language and Identity The New York Trilogy marks Auster’s emergence as a significant figure in American fiction. The Trilogy belongs to a category of literature known as metaphysical or antidetective fiction (see Holquist: 147–56). Here, many of the conventional features of detective fiction are present – a crime, a detective, an investigation – but they are subverted to deflect the detective’s investigation away from the traditional concerns
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of crime toward an enquiry into the nature of identity, language, and literature itself. These inversions are most clearly illustrated when “the detective, the high priest of logic, in his attempt to locate missing persons becomes himself the missing person” (Swope: 211–12). Each of the three stories is structured loosely around Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, “Wakefield,” in which a man disguises himself and takes lodgings near his home. He remains unrecognized until, twenty years later, Wakefield returns to his house on a whim, and here the story ends. The fate of the central characters in the Trilogy is to become, like Wakefield, an “Outcast of the Universe” (Hawthorne 1987: 133). Through the motif of the missing person and the traditions of the detective form, each story explores the unstable nature of identity for its central detective character. Quinn, a writer of detective fiction in “City of Glass,” takes on the Stillman case in the name of his author when he receives a phone call meant for a detective called Paul Auster. His identity is already obscured in a triad of selves which is unconventionally dominated by his pseudonym, William Wilson, and his detective character, Max Work. The issue of identity is further complicated by the addition of a “Paul Auster” character in the story who is biographically identical to the author. In “Ghosts,” Blue enters an ontological struggle with language while confined to his room watching Black across the street. When he sits down to write his report, Blue finds “that words … obscure the things that they are trying to say” (Auster 1987: 147–8). For the unnamed narrator in “The Locked Room,” his identity becomes subsumed by that of his missing author friend when he marries Fanshawe’s wife and becomes a father to his son. When Fanshawe finally provides a notebook to explain his actions, the narrator finds that “[e]ach sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible,” creating mystery rather than providing resolution (Auster 1987: 314). The general disorientation that the reader experiences through Auster’s shifting narration and the dis-unity of authorship are explored more specifically through the relative rigidities of the conventions of detective fiction. Auster himself has pointed out that he is using the traditions of detective fiction “to get to another place … altogether” (Auster 1997a: 279). By subverting the conventions of the crime, the detective, and the investigation, the other place that Auster gets to is the struggle with language and the struggle to identify not the criminal, but the nature of identity itself. Auster’s second novel, In the Country of Last Things (1987), shares the concerns of language and identity with The New York Trilogy. The narrative of Anna Blume displays a typically Austerian structure in that it takes the form of an extended letter in which the first-person address is interrupted by a narrator. This device reminds the reader of the many lapses and losses of memory and language. While writing the book, Auster sub-titled it “Anna Blume Walks Through the 20th Century” and she encounters the terrible manifestations of the century’s events in a dystopic city (Auster 1997a: 284–5). Tim Woods describes how the novel “explores the manner in which human history is subject to various structures and
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forms of power that traverse the body and the world, break it down, shape it, and rearrange it” (Woods: 109). Among the identifiable events from which Auster has constructed his anonymous city are the siege of Leningrad, the New York fiscal crisis of the 1970s, and the Cairo garbage system. Moon Palace (1992) is the story of Marco Stanley Fogg’s quest to establish a secure sense of identity despite the symbolic indistinctness of his name. Fogg follows a Quinn-like trajectory of linguistic confusion and descent, but recovers from physical and textual erasure. From the opening lines of this novel, Auster’s demonstrates his use of chance as a narrative device. His philosophy of the contingent (see Auster 1997a: 287–9) is translated in this novel as a series of chance events – Fogg meeting Kitty; her discovering him, delirious, in Central Park; unknowingly taking a job as his grandfather’s biographer and subsequently discovering his paternity and origins – which construct Fogg as a person. Chance becomes a consistent theme in Auster’s work, frequently shaping his characters’ lives. In The Music of Chance (1992), Auster examines two of his favorite themes: chance and inheritance. Following the death of a father he has never known, Nashe is guided by chance on an archetypal American quest of travel and discovery, which occupies the first part of the novel. Along with Jack Pozzi (clearly a reference to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, 1954, a significant influence on the second half of this novel), he then gambles and loses his freedom on the “single blind turn of a card” in what becomes an existential exploration of the nature of freedom and control (Auster 1992: 202). Nashe and Pozzi are set to work on the estate building a wall in a meadow. The futile labor of building the wall – a structure that memorializes only itself – is paralleled by a utopian but carceral society encoded in the model of “The City of the World.” This model is fundamental to how we read the second part of The Music of Chance as it expresses a (modernist) order that stands in contrast to the (postmodern) contingency of Nashe’s life up to this point. Leviathan (1993) is the story of a writer, Benjamin Sachs, his descent into an abyss of linguistic and social disconnection, and the struggle of his friend, Paul Aaron, to tell that story. At the beginning of the novel, Sachs has an almost prelapsarian relationship with language, while for Aaron words “are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions” (Auster 1993: 49). The figurative notion of language fragmenting and disintegrating resonates with Sachs’s ultimate fate when he is literally blown apart by his own bomb while on a violent campaign to encourage America to return to its founding principles, symbolized here by the compass (literal and moral) of Henry David Thoreau, the author of the early account of American self-reliance, Walden (1854). Auster’s sixth novel, Mr. Vertigo (1995), explores the themes of self-hood and illusion through the many selves that eventually form the life of Walter Clairborne Rawley. Walt’s impoverished origins on the streets of Saint Louis do not inspire him into a journey to the west, as is traditional in the American novel, but upward into a dreamlike realm, disconnected from the realities and certainties of firm ground.
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When the mysterious Master Yehudi teaches Walt to levitate, we are returned to the theme of identity as Auster interrogates the relationship between the interior self and the physical, bodily self.
Films: Community and Baseball Auster’s films, made in the mid-1990s, represent a shift in both medium and tone. There is a warmth and optimism about the films which is felt only occasionally in the preceding novels. This optimism expresses itself in the form of community and, in particular, in the representations of Auster’s own home borough, Brooklyn. It also emerges in the key creative relationship in the filmmaking process – between Auster and the director, Wayne Wang. At the centre of Smoke (1995) is the friendship between Paul Benjamin (the pseudonym Auster used for Squeeze Play, a novel written in 1978 before the literary success of the Trilogy; see Auster 1998: 120–5, 231–435), a novelist; Auggie Wren, the manager of the Brooklyn Cigar Company store; and Rashid Cole, a black kid from the projects. Paul buys his cigars from Auggie’s store, and is able to escape his loneliness and isolation when the friendship between the three men develops into a strong bond of obligation. The way in which obligations emerge and strengthen in the film is illustrated by three key scenes. In an early scene, Paul is accepted into the society of the shop when he contributes the story of a bet between Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I. The sharing of stories in this way marks the store out as a space of “dialogic exchange” (Brooker 2000: 107). Raleigh bet that he could weigh smoke – which Paul compares to weighing someone’s soul – by weighing the ash and subtracting it from the weight of the un-smoked cigar (Auster 1995: 24–6). Smoke subsequently becomes an important image in the film, capturing the idea of an insubstantial quality at the center of the community analogous to storytelling. Consistently in Auster’s work the bonds between writers and artists (other writers, painters, dancers) contribute to the central writer-character’s narrative, often providing a route back from linguistic disintegration and personal despair. So, when Auggie shows Paul his photo project, the solidarities between the two men are strengthened by a sense of artistic recognition. The project itself consists of photographs of the cigar store taken from the same place at the same time everyday for thirteen years. Together, the photographs represent “a modernist sensibility keen to order the randomness of the everyday” (Brooker 2000: 112). In the penultimate scene of the film, Auggie gifts Paul the story of how he came to acquire the camera used in his project. The story Auggie tells becomes “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” and breaks Paul’s writer’s block. For Paul Benjamin and for Paul Auster, the metropolitan nightmare of Quinn’s existence has been replaced by the myriad opportunities to discover, tell, and share stories. Thus, storytelling itself becomes a way of placing oneself in the world.
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Blue in the Face (1995), meanwhile, broadens Auster’s focus by encompassing the concerns of the wider Brooklyn community in an unstructured and partly improvised companion-piece to Smoke. Here Auster and Wang employ baseball as the social practice around which the community coheres. Baseball has performed a significant role in much of Auster’s work – as a pastime, a social strategy, a form of community, and a trope for New York City itself (see Brown: 168–75). Together, Smoke and Blue in the Face demonstrate that, at this stage in his career, Auster’s work still wrestles with the persisting insecurities of being singular in a plural world. But in these films the characters seek out dialogic spaces in which to overcome their loneliness and reconnect themselves to the social world. The central sequence of Lulu on the Bridge (1998) is a dream framed by the “real time” shooting of jazz saxophonist, Izzy Maurer, and his trip to hospital in an ambulance. Dream represents an escape from corporeal reality and the re-establishment of a stable place in the world. It has a tangible effect here; the “magic isn’t just simply a dream,” Auster has said of the film, “[i]t’s real, and it carries all the emotions of reality” (Auster 1998: 145).
Late Fiction: Storytelling as Sanctuary After the films, Auster’s fiction takes on a distinct change in subject matter, tone, and address. Two themes dominate this body of work. The idea of a place of imagination to escape to and remake the self comes to dominate Timbuktu (1999), The Book of Illusions (2002), and The Brooklyn Follies (2005), while an exploration of the genesis of a story and the essence of literary art are at the center of Oracle Night (2004) and Travels in the Scriptorium (2006). Timbuktu functions as a mythical and dream-like place in the 1999 novel of the same name. In Timbuktu, the quest is to establish a stable identity, pursued primarily through the point of view of a tramp’s scruffy mongrel, who functions as both a social outsider and a curious observer of humanity. Ultimately, Mr. Bones’ many lives demonstrate the provisional nature of selfhood. With Willie, his master, he discovers that disappointment and failure can lead to disconnection, loneliness, and premature death. He also finds the family to be undermined by the illusory nature of the suburban dream. In this story, the “place” that harbors the greatest potential for true companionship for Mr. Bones is the illusory and imagined world of Timbuktu. The Book of Illusions is the most accomplished and complex text in this phase of Auster’s work. The novel traces the lives of two men, Professor David Zimmer and silent-film actor Hector Mann, in their continuous and mobile pursuit of inner peace. Because this novel comes after Lulu on the Bridge, which was something of a critical disaster, it is also possible to read this novel as a contemplation of the relative values inherent in literature and film – where film is a potentially ephemeral form and Illusions itself stands as a testament to both the power of storytelling and the primacy of the novel.
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Zimmer writes a treatise on Hector’s films as a way of dealing with his sorrow after his wife and children are killed (loss of this kind figures in many of Auster’s works). He is then tempted to Tierra del Sueño – the land of dreams in Spanish – to meet Hector, by a woman, Alma – whose name means soul. Sixty years earlier, Hector had abandoned his origins to embark on a film career as Hector Mann. After witnessing the murder of his lover, he travels around America as an itinerant worker under the pseudonym Herman Loesser. While he remains Herr Mann, he is also “Lesser” or “Loser” (Auster 2002: 144, italics in original). This name satisfies both Auster’s sense of wordplay and Hector’s need to retain some small part of his previous self, while at the same time acknowledging his remorse for his part in the killing. The transition from one life to another, from one sense of self to the next, gradually evacuates Hector’s humanity until he witnesses “the picture of his own death … the portrait of a soul in ruins” (Auster 2002: 192). However, this nihilistic and despairing experience, along with chance, provides Hector with his salvation. His marriage to Frieda marks his last new self, and his last change of name. This time, and in a play on the arbitrary nature of naming, Auster christens his central character Hector Spelling. Hector had vowed never to make films again as a self-inflicted punishment for his role in the murder. After the death of his son, he seeks a way to justify breaking his own promise by making “movies that would never be shown to audiences [in] an act of breathtaking nihilism” (Auster 2002: 207). One of these films, The Inner Life of Martin Frost, provides a framework for the reading of The Book of Illusions. The film is a text-within-a-text in which the eponymous author creates and falls in love with a beautiful female character. Martin realizes that once the story he is writing is finished, she will fully become a fiction – a character and nothing more – and to keep her alive he must destroy the manuscript. Following this reading, Hector becomes a figment of Zimmer’s imagination, his lives dreamed up and recorded by Alma, while she in turn is created by Zimmer to protect himself from the destructive effects of loss. All of the characters, though, are the metafictional creations of their author, Paul Auster. Oracle Night is the story of a young writer, Sidney Orr, and his mentor John Trause (an anagram of Auster). The stories of the two men are intertwined with the fictional narratives they write in a symptomatic expression of the recursive structures identified by Brian McHale as “mise-en-abyme” (McHale: 124). As McHale notes, “strategies involving recursive structures – nesting or embedding, as in a set of Chinese boxes … – have the effect of interrupting and complicating the ontological “horizon” of the fiction, multiplying its worlds, and laying bare the process of worldconstruction” because the narrative worlds fall into and, crucially, resemble each other (McHale: 112). The Brooklyn Follies explores two places, one real and one imaginary. First, there is the neighborhood in Brooklyn where the book’s narrator, Nathan Glass, has settled to await his own death. Here, he gathers a group of unconventional Brooklynite friends around him. Second, there is the imaginary and abstract Hotel Existence,
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a “place where a man goes to when life in the real world is no longer possible” (Auster 2005: 100). Earlier in the novel, this exact phrase has been used to describe the works of Poe and Thoreau (Auster 2005: 14). The implication is, of course, that literature and the imagination can create spaces where the self can be recreated and renewed. Travels in the Scriptorium explores storytelling and writing through the metafictional device of a writer meeting the characters he has created. Mr. Blank, a name that is both potentially an empty signifier and one onto which proliferating meanings can be projected, is an aging Auster-like character confined to a mysterious room. While trapped in this room – reminiscent of the rooms of many earlier writer-characters – Mr. Blank is required to finish a manuscript as an exercise in “imaginative reasoning” (Auster 2006: 80). By providing a satisfactory conclusion to the story, Mr. Blank is freed from his demons. Then, at the end of the novel, Mr. Blank picks up another manuscript from the desk which has the name and opening passage of the novel we are reading, and it becomes clear that Mr. Blank has himself become a character; no more than “the words I am writing on the page” the narrator informs us (Auster 2006: 130). This, then, is a text operating at McHale’s ontological thresholds of story worlds, and, like much of Auster’s earlier work, constantly moving the ground beneath the reader’s feet and questioning the categories of reader, writer, and character to their limits.
References and Further Reading Auster, Paul (1982). The Invention of Solitude. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (1987). The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (1990). Ground Work. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (1992). The Music of Chance. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (1993). Leviathan. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (1995). Smoke and Blue in the Face: Two Films by Paul Auster. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (1997a). The Art of Hunger. London: Penguin. Auster, Paul (1997b). Hand to Mouth. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (1998). Lulu on the Bridge. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (2002). The Book of Illusions. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (2003). Collected Prose. London: Faber and Faber.
Auster, Paul (2004a). Oracle Night. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (2004b). Collected Poems. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook. Auster, Paul (2005). The Brooklyn Follies. London: Faber and Faber. Auster, Paul (2006). Travels in the Scriptorium. London: Faber and Faber. Brooker, Peter (1996). New York Fictions. Harlow: Longman. Brooker, Peter (2000). “The Brooklyn Cigar Co. as Dialogic Public Sphere: Community and Postmodernism in Paul Auster and Wayne Wang’s Smoke and Blue in the Face,” in Urban Space and Representation, eds. Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy, pp. 98–115. London: Pluto. Brown, Mark (2007). Paul Auster. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1987). “Wakefield,” in Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales, ed. Brian Harding, pp. 124–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Holquist, Michael (1971). “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction,” New Literary History, 31: 135–56. McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge. Peacock, James (2009). Understanding Paul Auster. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. Russell, Alison (1990). “Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster’s Anti-Detective Fiction,” Critique, 3 (2): 71–84. Swope, Richard (1998). “Approaching the Threshold(s) in Postmodern Detective Fiction:
Hawthorne’s ‘Wakefield’ and Other Missing Persons,” Critique, 39 (3): 207–27. Varvogli, Aliki (2001). The World that is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Waugh, Patricia (1984). Metafiction. London: Methuen. Woods, Tim (1995). “The Music of Chance: Aleatorical (Dis)harmonies within the ‘City of the World,’ ” in Beyond the Red Notebook, ed. Dennis Barone, pp. 143–61. Philadelphia, P.A.: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Bharati Mukherjee Judie Newman
Bharati Mukherjee’s career is that of a transnational, perpetually caught between cultures. Born in 1940 in Calcutta, the daughter of Bengali Brahmins, both of whom had their origins in what was once India, then East Pakistan, and is now Bangladesh, she was brought up in a typically Indian joint family of some forty co-residents. Four years in Europe were followed by a return to Calcutta, where Mukherjee shuttled between her home in a guarded compound and an equally walled-off, Anglicized, private school run by Irish nuns, who promoted “English” culture. After undergraduate study in India, Mukherjee moved to the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and married the Canadian writer Clark Blaise, by whom she has two sons. From 1964 onward, she has been an academic, becoming an American citizen in 1988. With six novels, two collections of short stories, and two works of non-fiction to her credit, Mukherjee has emerged as a distinctive literary voice. Whereas her earlier work centered on expatriation and dislocation, the later fiction extends its scope, exploring a variety of Asian American encounters, and chronicling not merely the incomer’s adaptation to America, but also America’s transformation by its immigrants. In The Tiger’s Daughter (1971), Tara, an Indian revisiting Calcutta after years abroad, registers the decline of the city, together with a growing awareness of her own foreignness. The novel is very much Mukherjee’s Cherry Orchard, as upper-class Bengalis face the end of their way of life, squeezed between political unrest, on the one hand, and the emergent Marwari business class, on the other. Mukherjee herself described the novel as chronicling the violent passing of an era, its characters essentially fleshed out abstractions, from the representation of older values (Joyonto Roy Chowdhury) to the Marxist (Deepak Ghose) and the Marwari politico, P. K. Tuntunwala, whose sexual victim Tara becomes. Tara herself is a designedly passive figure, since Mukherjee wanted a heroine porous to her culture, reactive rather than proactive, recording rather than doing. Characteristically, the novel ends with Tara trapped in a car by rioters, wondering if she will get out alive. Attacked by some readers for its lack of sympathy to the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, the novel was later
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characterized by Mukherjee as “rather British,” with its echoes of Forster and ironic tone. Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977), a non-fiction work, published with Clark Blaise, also records a period spent in Calcutta and confirms Mukherjee’s realization that she was no longer merely in exile from India but effectively an immigrant into North America. Mukherjee’s other work in collaboration with Blaise, The Sorrow and the Terror (1987), marked a further level of disenchantment, this time with Canada. In their investigation of the Air India plane crash of 1985, Mukherjee and Blaise indicted the Canadians for their ability to write off their own citizens as foreigners. At some personal risk (the couple received death threats while investigating the existence of Sikh terrorist cells in Canada), they undertook a comprehensive investigation, arguing that the tragedy was the result of the Canadian unwillingness to act on behalf of their “visible minorities,” whose deaths were treated as an Indian problem. Mukherjee’s experience of racism in Canada made her prefer the American “melting-pot” approach to immigration as opposed to the “mosaic” of Canadian multiculturalism, which freezes immigrants as timeless, marginalized exotics. In Mukherjee’s later work, exile is transformed into immigration, cross-fertilization, and transformation. In her second novel, Wife (1975), she demonstrates her refusal to envisage the problems of her immigrant characters as existing only within an Indian context. The appropriately named Dimple Dasgupta (“dimple – a small surface depression”) is trapped like a rabbit in the headlights of Mukherjee’s irony; the adoption of a third-person view grants the reader only limited sympathy with the heroine. Caught between Indian traditions and an America which she knows only through television and magazines, Dimple is entrapped in fantasy, allowing media images to script her into adultery and eventually murder. As the violence escalates, Dimple’s tragedy is not ultimately that of an Indian woman so much as that of any woman, alienated and torn apart by contradictory social messages and cultural signs. In urban America, there is no meaningful community to which Dimple can attach herself; she finds it only in the ersatz world of soap operas and talk shows. In this respect, the novel expands from an account of immigrant “culture shock” toward the major theme of Mukherjee’s mature fiction – the human encounter with technology, and its impact on fragile individuals. Dimple provoked a hostile reaction, especially from feminist critics, reacting to the double stereotype of the passive neurotic and the violent madwoman. Arguably, however, Dimple kills her husband both out of selfassertion against Indian traditions and in conformity to the models of violent America where “women on television get away with murder.” The short stories show a similar evolution from immigrant to transnational themes. In Darkness (1985), Mukherjee explicitly recognized the influence of Bernard Malamud, whose fiction also focuses upon immigrants adapting to American culture. All but one of the stories in Darkness concern immigrants and the exception (“Courtly Vision”), a description of a Mughal miniature, represents something of an aesthetic manifesto. In interview, Mukherjee described her impatience with the current vogue for minimalism in American writing and espoused maximalism, arguing that minimalism disguises a nativist social agenda, designed to keep out anyone with too much story
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to tell. Just as the Mughal miniature is crammed with details and stories, so Mukherjee’s short fiction registers the weltering variety of immigrant experience. If many of her stories center upon “chiffon saris” – women attempting to live between two worlds, cooking matar panir with pork, or silently suffering David Mamet’s Patel jokes in a New York theater – others feature such protagonists as the Turkish Jewish middleman of the title story of The Middleman (1988), selling death in Latin America, the Marcos supporter in exile from the Philippines, an Afghan spending Thanksgiving with an Italian American family, a middle-class war veteran whose Vietnamese daughter returns to haunt him, Ugandan Asians in Flushing, a Tamil refugee in Hamburg, and (in a story of quite exceptional emotional power) the relatives of those murdered in the Air India disaster. Mukherjee has stated her belief that instead of seeing Indianness as a fragile identity to be preserved against obliteration (or, worse, a visible disfigurement to be hidden) it is, rather, a set of fluid identities to be celebrated. It is this sense of life as a continual emigration from one self to another, which pervades Jasmine (1989), in which the heroine Jyoti, born in a mud hut in Hasnapur, becomes successively Jasmine (renamed by a progressive husband), a split-tongued Kali (murdering her American rapist), Jazzy (an “undocumented” in Florida), Jyoti again (taking refuge in an enclave of Punjabi-speaking Jats in Flushing), Jase (as the “day mummy” to the child of liberal Manhattan yuppies), and Jane (as the mistress of Bud Ripplemeyer, an Iowan banker). Bud is also transformed. Having previously thought of Asia only as a soy-bean market, he now finds himself living with an Indian woman and an adopted Vietnamese son, Du, while the Lutheran (Hmong) Church raises funds for Ethiopia, by selling quilts at a Mennonite fair, in a drought-ridden Iowa stalked by the Aryan Nations. The separation and re-embedding of these very different identities in the American context creates the impression of a soup of signs, colliding to create new meanings. Readers of the earlier novels, who recalled the moment when Dimple Dasgupta decapitates her husband over his breakfast cereal, were unsurprised by a succession of violent incidents, from her mother’s attempt to strangle the infant Jyoti (a dowry-less bride), to the braining of a rabid dog, a father gored to death by a bull, a beloved teacher shot and a husband blown up by Sikh terrorists, rape, murder, one lover crippled by a gun-toting bankrupt farmer, another (would-be) lover half eaten by his own pigs. Small wonder that Jasmine comments that dullness is a kind of luxury for her fellow immigrants, longing for lives of total ordinariness. Paradoxically, however, the overall impression of the novel is of jubilant and affirmative energy, in which the inventiveness of survivors is matched by pullulating linguistic variety and control. Statistically, South Asian immigrants are the most successful of any group moving to the U.S.A. If Mukherjee celebrates Jasmine’s evolution, however, she also recognizes the human cost of such transformation in the realization that there are no harmless compassionate ways to remake oneself: “We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams” (Mukherjee 1989: 29). Bud Ripplemeyer’s ex-wife sees Jasmine as a tornado leaving destruction behind her. Critics have also felt that
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Jasmine’s rampant individualism damages all it touches, and reinforces the image of woman as femme fatale. What critics have missed is that, rather than representing underdevelopment, Jasmine has a remarkable affinity for technology. Even her voice resembles computer-generated telephone voices. As Mukherjee’s epigraph from James Gleick’s Chaos (1987) suggests, Jasmine features a set of metaphors and concepts taken from chaos theory: a startling incongruity between causes and effects, non-linearity in its various senses, recursive symmetries, extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, fractal (“broken up” or “irregular”) forms. In this paradigm, nature gives the lead to technology, and the migrant and the marginal are the sites of new discovery. Written in a succession of twenty-six “short takes,” fast-moving, varied, and noisy on data, the novel overwhelms the reader with the sheer amount of its plot. It also registers the awareness that small fluctuations on the micro-scale can quickly lead to very large-scale instabilities – the famous “Butterfly Effect” – as the local becomes the global. The connection between marginality and chaos, in its scientific sense, is also exemplified in Du, a genius in recombinant electronics, with a gift for scavenging, adaptation, and appropriate technology, unsurprising in a veteran of refugee camps who has survived on a diet of worms and lizards. At the close of the novel, Du moves to Los Angeles to support the sister who kept him alive in the camp. As a shadowy double to Jasmine, a fellow killer with more than one life behind him, Du nevertheless typifies positive interpretations of marginality and chaos. Above all, what Jasmine suggests is that even the smallest story can have enormous effects. Like the beat of a butterfly’s wing, the “local” story may become a tornado demolishing western literary paradigms. Rather than assimilating to western norms, Jasmine demonstrates how the Third World story may exert its power on First World criticism and writing. The Holder of the World (1993) sketches a similar transnational trajectory to its author’s – but in reverse. In its frame tale, the American narrator, Beigh Masters, a twentieth-century asset hunter, is engaged in a quest for a lost Mughal diamond, assisted by a computer programmer, Venn Iyer, who organizes a virtual time trip for her, in the process excavating links between seventeenth-century Massachusetts and pre-colonial India. Venn and his team are portrayed as the heirs to the East India Company, the new imperialists of cyberspace. In the inset tale, Indians (Native Americans) are replaced by Indians (from the subcontinent) as the heroine, Hannah Easton, moves from Puritan New England to the Coromandel Coast, and the court of the Emperor Aurengzebe. Mukherjee was inspired to write by a pre-auction viewing in Sotheby’s in New York of a seventeenth-century Indian miniature of a woman in elaborate Mughal court dress, who was Caucasian and blonde. Transactions between cultures are therefore at the heart of the novel, which reveals at its close that Hannah was the original for Hester Prynne, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). But why rewrite The Scarlet Letter? The clue lies in Hannah’s location in Salem, the town whose material prosperity was founded on trade with the East. In the eighteenth century, Salem’s city seal bore a palm tree, a Parsee, and a ship, with the Latin motto “To the farthest port of the rich East.” Between the 1780s and 1830s, Salem was a
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major international port for the East Indies and China trade – silk, tea, chinaware, textiles, and pepper. It was probably the richest American city per capita in 1790. Hawthorne had personal connections with India, as the son of an East India captain who had sailed to the East half a dozen times, including a trip to Bengal in 1796, and to Madras, on the Coromandel Coast in 1800. Most biographers of Hawthorne have been more interested in his Puritan forebears than in the tradesmen and sea captains who dominate his family history. Mukherjee’s project, of restoring connections between Hawthorne and India, takes its place in an honorable tradition of filling in the gaps in history, specifically the American looting of the East. Mukherjee also extends the connection from the single classic text and writer to the institutions that create canonicity. It is no accident that the frame narrator is a Yale graduate, that the action is located in the outskirts of present-day Madras, in the early years of the East India Company, and involves a famous diamond. Elihu Yale (to whom Mukherjee refers in the novel) made a vast fortune in Madras and was responsible for the financing of Yale College in its early years. In India, Yale created a personal fortune by dubious means, including the acquisition of a private fort, trade independent of the Company, extortion, ruthless repression, and a career as a diamond merchant. Hannah’s husband follows Yale’s example, with his own private fort, and sends his plunder to New York. Just as the exploitation of India establishes the fortunes of Salem and of Yale College, so it is implicated in the creation of America’s great classic, The Scarlet Letter. Mukherjee’s subsequent novels focus squarely on globalization. In Leave It to Me (1997), the heroine (Faustine, then Debbie, then Devi), adopted from an Indian orphanage, traces her ancestry to an Asian criminal and an American hippy mother, and explores the Vietnam era and its consequences in multicultural America. The idealist pre-globalists of the 1960s’ counterculture, hippies on the overland trail in India, with their utopian visions of a global village, are contrasted with the unpleasant ability of the predatory criminal to exploit the same networks and routes. The heroine’s quest for her roots culminates in a violent conclusion which may or may not involve the discovery of her father as a notorious serial killer. Mythological paradigms (the novel draws on the stories of Kali, Durga, and Devi) offer scant consolation. Social commentators have highlighted the emergence of global crime, the networking of powerful criminal organizations across the planet, as a relatively new phenomenon, an essential feature of the Information Age. Desirable Daughters (2002) concerns identity theft and the penetration of the Indian mafia into America, emphasizing the problems of an age of connectedness. The action ranges widely across time and space, with a murder plot which links India, the Indian community in Jackson Heights, and the present existence of the narrator, Tara (formerly Mrs. Bish Chatterjee, from Calcutta), in San Francisco. As Tara comments, “I saw my life on a broad spectrum, with Calcutta not at the centre, but just another station on the dial.” Tara’s exhusband, Bish, is a writer of software programs who now enjoys semi-mythological status among Indians as the Stanford college student who made a fortune overnight in computer bandwidth routing technology.
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In the novel, the central question concerns the usefulness or redundancy of narrative in a globalized world. Is there a use for the novel when primary myths have been superseded by Internet connections and software writers? Does literature have an adaptive function, part of the human urge to create scenarios, reading ahead into distant places or times, so that stories enable human beings to survive and reproduce better in their environment? What kinds of story are adaptive, therefore, in a broadband world? Mukherjee’s exploration of this question is novel as she explores the oppositions of tradition and modernity through the microcosm of a sibship, three sisters adapting to different environments. The desirable daughters, Didi, Parvati, and Tara, are part of a doomed social group, a middle-class, conservative, Calcutta-bred clan, already extinct in their native habitat. The plot turns upon a case of attempted identity theft when Tara meets a stranger, “Chris Dey,” claiming to be her nephew. Unknown to her sisters, Didi had given illegitimate birth to a son, but before the adult Chris can claim his heritage, his place is usurped by an interloper who kills him, steals his name, and attempts to take his place in the family. By the time Tara establishes the existence of the illegitimate child, the real son is already at the bottom of San Francisco Bay. The point of the novel is not to re-establish contact with a denied male line of descent, but to focus on a sibship. Mukherjee’s plot sets up two models of connectedness: the global (embodied in both the master of connectivity, Bish the software genius, and the criminally networked “Chris Dey”), and the three sisters whose connections are traditional, intimate, and lateral. In the action of the novel, there is a continual tension between the two stories, alternately prioritized. In the book’s opening epigraph, Mukherjee evokes tradition – both as impossible to follow, and as a felt necessity. No one behind, no one ahead The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone’s path, Easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.
Mukherjee described this Sanskrit verse, adapted by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger, and passed to her by a Bolivian student in Berkeley, as embodying the globalization that is worth having, the idea that we can take from each other’s heritages what we need and sew it together into our own culture. The opposition between the narrow traditional path (closed) and the broad, easy, pathless present (without a connection back to the past) is embodied in the contrast between the opening of the novel and its broadband present. In the opening, Tara Lata, the nineteenth-century bride, is not about to be transferred to a human bridegroom to continue an ancestral line. She is headed into the forest to marry a tree. Her groom-to-be has died of a snakebite and Tara Lata has become unmarriageable. For a solution, her father turns to Hindu custom. In marrying her to a proxy-husband, a tree, he permits her to occupy the respected position of married woman, within the family home. What appears to
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be a bizarre practice is, in fact, a highly efficient adaptive strategy. Paradoxically, in pursuing Indian tradition and confining his daughter to a life without the distractions of husband, children, and mother-in-law, the father transforms her into an emblem of rebellion, offering refuge for dissidents fighting the British Raj. As an opening sequence, therefore, the story that Tara tells of the tree bride raises a host of questions concerning the relation of tradition to modernity, conformity to rebellion. But why has Tara chosen to tell this story? Hers is emphatically a broadband world. Her husband is part of the process of globalization, the process by which people become increasingly interconnected across natural borders and continents. His mobile phone routing devices connect the whole world. The system, called CHATTY, uses the whole field, connecting in the flat, with a billion short passes linked. It also exemplifies the method of the novel. In interview, Mukherjee said that her aesthetic strategy was using the width of the field, of history, geography, diaspora, gender, ethnicity, language. In the novel, the reader is passed from story to story across a broad geographical and historical sweep; the narrative passes from one controller to another, at times appearing to be misdirected or displaced, with the story moving forward through changes of direction, side-passes, and feints. The straight trajectory of a story based on patriarchal descent is replaced by a model that involves many side connections, sibships, and lateral moves. Bish’s discovery underlines the sense in the novel of a complex network of connections in which people are both receivers and senders across a very broad field, where routers are as important as roots. Mukherjee deliberately casts her discussion of the relation of tradition to modernity in the context not of vertical lines of descent but in terms of sibships and lateral familial connections, drawing on Adlerian birth-order theory and Frank J. Sulloway’s bestseller, Born to Rebel (1996), which advanced the argument that laterborns are more likely than firstborns to adapt revolutionary alternatives. Birth-order theory is a Darwinian story. Birth order introduces the need for differing strategies in dealing with sibling rivals in the competition for parental investment; divergence minimizes competition for scarce resources. Tara Lata, the rebel, is the third child of a third child. The three Bhattacharjee sisters occupy different places on the family stage. Didi, the eldest, earns her living as a traditional Indian performance artist. Parvati shares her family space with a constantly changing cast of extended family members and consequently lives in a world of compromise between conformity and independence. Inspired by the story of the tree bride, Tara has diversified, rebelled, and adapted, in order to find a space for herself. Siblings are like broadband, occupying different positions in the field. Bish may appear omnipotent – his connections creating an empire which overrides national boundaries and hostilities – but he is seriously injured when Tara’s house is demolished by a bomb, triggered by a reconfigured cell phone. The reader ends the novel convinced that the target was Bish, and that the bomber was part of an international globalized criminal network. The false Chris is the product of a world in which it is easy to make global connections, communications are swift, and no border is impenetrable, a post-9/11 world. But things are not quite so simple. This is volume
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one of a planned trilogy, in which volume two, The Tree Bride (2004), is in some senses its heir, inheriting its characters and history. In this respect, the novel sequence is peculiarly contemporary. In the putative trilogy, the second story takes over the stage from the first, dethroning its authority as priority narrative, but is itself vulnerable to the appearance of a third story. The parallel is explicitly familial – specifically with the three daughters of the title. In this case, many of the conclusions of the first volume are reversed or negated in the second, which challenges all the assumptions of the first. And the third volume – potentially altering the story again – has yet to appear.
References and Further Reading Alam, Fakrul (1996). Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne. Banerjee, Mita (2002). The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Dlaska, Andrea (1999). Ways of Belonging: The Making of New Americans in the Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee. Vienna: Braumuller. Mukherjee, Bharati (1971). The Tiger’s Daughter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Mukherjee, Bharati (1975). Wife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Mukherjee, Bharati (1985). Darkness. Markham, Ontario: Penguin. Mukherjee, Bharati (1988). The Middleman and Other Stories. New York: Viking Penguin. Mukherjee, Bharati (1989). Jasmine. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Mukherjee, Bharati (1993). The Holder of the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Mukherjee, Bharati (1997). Leave It to Me. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mukherjee, Bharati (2002). Desirable Daughters. New York: Hyperion. Mukherjee, Bharati (2004). The Tree Bride. New York: Hyperion. Mukherjee, Bharati and Blaise, Clark (1977). Days and Nights in Calcutta. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Mukherjee, Bharati and Blaise, Clark (1987). The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy. Markham, Ontario: Penguin. Nelson, Emmanuel, ed. (1993). Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland. Newman, Judie (1995). The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions. London: Edward Arnold. Newman, Judie (2008). Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire. London: Routledge. Sulloway, Frank J. (1996). Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives. New York: Pantheon.
Index
Abadie, Ann J. 308, 309, 310 Abish, Walter Alphabetical Africa 51–2 How German Is It 49 absurdism 33, 34, 172 Acker, Kathy 5, 48 Adams, Bella 524, 525, 528 Adams, Henry 197, 406 Adams, John Quincy 180 Adler, Alfred 545 Adorno, Theodor W. 197 advertising 180 aesthetics, political 446, 486, 487 African American writing black humor 166–8 city novels 30–1 crime-writing 120, 143 detective fiction 128–31 Gates 6 gay culture 120 modernism 15–16, 109–21 politics 352 postmodernism 48 protest novels 28 science fiction 120 short stories 79–80, 121 women writers 112–13, 119 World War II 119 see also specific authors
African Americans Communist Party 343–4 Faulkner 305–6 folklore 357, 359 Great Depression 114–15 Great Migration 21–2, 109, 483 homeplace 484–5 humor 159–70 Marxism 343–4 North/South compared 345 rural life 22 self-hatred 202 South 92 Agee, James 262 Ager, Horace 256 Agrarians 87 AIDS epidemic 34 Air India plane crash 540 Albany, New York 33 alcoholism 189, 271 Aldridge, John W. 6, 242 Alexie, Sherman 184, 187 “Captivity” 53 India Killer 34 Reservation Blues 509 Algren, Nelson 27, 163, 396 The Man with the Golden Arm 28 Never Come Morning 28 Ali, Mohammad 179, 436, 441
548
Index
alienation 20, 188 Allee, W. C. 324 allegory 230–2, 287 Allen, William Rodney 161 Alther, Lisa: Kinflicks 168–9 Altman, Dennis 403, 406, 408, 409–10 Alurista 151 Amazing Stories 201 American, as term 1–2 American Book Award 436 American Civil War 84, 85, 86, 465, 481, 482 American dream 309–10, 466 American Indian Movement 508 see also Native Americans American Psycho (Harron) 516 American Short Story Masterpieces (Carver and Jenks) 81 Amis, Martin 96 Anaya, Rudolfo: Bless Me Ultima 152 Anderson, Edward: Thieves Like Us 139 Anderson, Paul 354 Anderson, Sherwood 3, 11, 13, 14, 16, 304 Winesburg, Ohio 18, 73 Anishinabe people 82 Antichrist 180 anti-communism 128, 132 anti-hero 161 anti-racist movements 343 anti-Semitism 104, 106, 257 antiwar protestors 175 Antler, Joyce 100, 101 Anvil 76 Anzaldúa, Gloria: Borderlands/La Frontera 155 Apess, William: A Son of the Forest 189 apocalypse 66, 164 Appiah, K. A. 346, 347 Apple, Max: The Oranging of America 1 Apuleius: The Golden Ass 406 Aquila, Richard 36 archetypes, Chicano 153–5 Arendt, Hannah 413 Armenian Americans 77
Armstrong, Jeannette C. 186 Armstrong, Louis 117, 354, 355 Arnold, Matthew 196 art 14, 251, 295–7 Arthurian legend 323 Asch, Sholem: East River 26 Asian American writing feminist writers 472 identity 471 women 479, 522–9, 539–46 see also specific authors Asimov, Isaac The Caves of Steel 123 The Naked Sun 123 assimilation fiction 26, 82, 98, 147 Aswell, Edward 265 Atlantic Monthly 328, 329, 370 Attaway, William: Blood on the Forge 28 Auchincloss, Louis 78 Austen, Howard 409 Auster, Paul 107, 519, 530–8 The Art of Hunger 530 and Barthelme 80 The Book of Illusions 535–6 The Brooklyn Follies 535, 536–7 characters 530, 531 City of Glass 52 Collected Poems 530–1 essays 530 experimental fiction 48, 97, 530 films 534–5 Ground Work 530–1 In the Country of Last Things 32, 532–3 The Invention of Solitude 531 language/identity 531–4 Leviathan 533 metafiction 530, 537 Moon Palace 533 Mr. Vertigo 533–4 The Music of Chance 376, 533 The New York Trilogy 31–2, 530, 531–2 Oracle Night 535, 536 place of imagination 535–7 poetry 530–1
Index “Scribe” 531 Squeeze Play 534 Timbuktu 535 Travels in the Scriptorium “White Spaces” 531 Aztlán concept 151
535, 537
Baird, Helen 304 Baker, Elliott: A Fine Madness 161–2 Baker, Kevin Dreamland 34–5 Paradise Alley 34–5 Striver’s Row 34–5 Baker, Mark: Nam 173 Bakhtin, Mikhail 264 Balaban, John 178–9 Remembering Heaven’s Face 178, 179 Balch, Anthony 390 Baldwin, James 361–8 Another Country 30, 118, 364, 365 biographical details 361–2 critical acclaim 361, 367 and Cullen 113 essays 361 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” 362 The Fire Next Time 117, 364–5 “A Fly in Buttermilk” 364 Giovanni’s Room 118, 120, 363 Go Tell It on the Mountain 30, 117, 118, 361–3 Going to Meet the Man 79, 118 “Going to Meet the Man” 91, 364 on homosexuality 363 If Beale Street Could Talk 30, 366 as influence 438, 439 Just Above My Head 118, 366–7 “Many Thousands Gone” 362 Nobody Knows My Name 117 non-fiction 366 Notes of a Native Son 117, 361 “Previous Condition” 362 race/nation 93 reviewing books 362 segregation 364 “Sonny’s Blues” 363–4 “Stranger in the Village” 362
549
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone 118, 364, 365–6 in Time 364 travels 362 Baldwin, S. D. 204 Bale, Christian 516 Balzac, Honoré de 383 Bambara, Toni Cade 79, 436 Banks, Dennis 508 Banks, Russell 245 Baraka, Amiri 119, 352, 439 Barks, Cathy W. 272 Barnes, Djuna 13, 14 Nightwood 13, 17 Barth, John 7, 48, 200 LETTERS 52 “Lost in the Funhouse” 80 The Sot-Weed Factor 53, 57 Barthelme, Donald 57, 80, 424 Amateurs 80 “The Balloon” 80 City Life 80 Come Back, Dr. Caligari 80 Great Days 80 Sadness 80 Sixty Stories 80 Snow White 51, 52, 57, 195, 200 Unspeakable Practices 80 Barthes, Roland 200 Bates, Karen Grigsby: Plain Brown Wrapper 130 “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” 465 Baudrillard, Jean 48, 515, 517 Bearden, Romare 357 Beat Generation 387 Beattie, Ann: Love, Always 200 Beaumont, Charles: “Place of Meeting” 65 Beauvoir, Simone de 349, 350, 493 Becker, Ernest 498 Beckett, Samuel 418, 425, 533 Bedient, Calvin 448 Beegel, Susan 245 Before Columbus Foundation 436–7 Beidler, Philip 172 Bell, David 499 Bell, Pearl K. 414
550
Index
Bellow, Saul 395–402 The Actual 400–1 The Adventures of Augie March 29, 395, 396–7 The Bellarosa Connection 400 biographical details 395–6 compared with Twain 29 critical acclaim 395 Dangling Man 396, 399 The Dean’s December 399 and Hemingway 397 Henderson the Rain King 395, 397–8 Herzog 395, 398 Humboldt’s Gift 395, 398–9 To Jerusalem and Back 400 Jewishness 396, 400 literary influences 396 marriages 395, 397–8, 400–1 More Die of Heartbreak 400 Mosby’s Memoirs 398 Mr. Sammler’s Planet 29, 395, 398 National Book Award 96 Nobel Prize 96, 399 optimism in characters 401 in Partisan Review 396 picaresque novel 396–7 Pulitzer Prize 96, 398–9 Ravelstein 395, 401 and Roth, P. 97, 456 Seize the Day 395, 397 A Theft 400 The Victim 100, 396 Ben-Hur 405 Benjamin, Walter 198 Bennett, Arnold 302 Berenson, Bernard 216 Berger, Thomas: Little Big Man 52 Bergson, Henri 88, 232 Berman, Ronald 273, 278, 279 Bernal, Vicente: Las Primicias 148 Bernstein, Carl: All the President’s Men 123 Berriault, Gina: The Descent 164 The Best Man (film) 405 Betts, Doris 88 Bevis, William 188 Bierce, Ambrose 169
The Big Sleep (film) 332, 333 Birch, Eva Lennox 495 Bird, Gloria 184–5 Bird, Robert Montgomery: Nick of the Woods 190 birth-order theory 545 Black Aesthetic 439 Black Arts Movement 86, 352, 439, 491 black humor fiction African American 166–8 anthologies 163, 164 anti-hero 161 gender 168 grotesque 159 Jewish American 161 joke of powerlessness 161 madness 163–4 Roth, P. 6, 165 social criticism 164 transgression 159–60 Vonnegut 160–1 war/disease/death 159 Black Mask 122, 135–6, 137–40, 332, 334 black nationalist discourse 86, 439, 441 see also African Americans Black Power 86–7, 109, 484 blackness 92–3, 219 see also African Americans Blaine, James G. 406 Blair, Sara 357 Blaise, Clark 539, 540 Blank, Carla 436 Blast 76 Blatty, William Peter: The Exorcist 67, 68 Blazek, William 278 Bleak House (Dickens) 274 Bloch, Robert 66 Block, Lawrence 143 Blood Meridian 36 blood quantum issues 188 Bloom, Alan 399–400, 401 The Closing of the American Mind 399 Love and Friendship 400 Bloom, Amy 107 Bloom, Harold 381, 460
Index Blotner, Joseph 310 Bludis, Jack 135 Blue in the Face (Auster) 535 blues, Memphis 366 Boas, Franz 12, 283 Bob Roberts (Robbins) 408 body/sexuality 155 Bold, Christine 37, 38 Bolden, Margaret 343 Bone, Martyn 94 Bontemps, Arna 287 Black Thunder 112 Boodin, John Elof 324 Bookstaver, May 237–8 boosterism 27, 262 Borderline (film) 315 Borges, Jorge Luis 80 Boston Globe 519, 523 Botting, Fred 69 Bourdeau, Steve 264 Bourjailly, Vance 6 Bourne, Randolph 20 Bower, Bertha Muzzy: Lonesome Land 41–2 Box, Edgar (pseudonym): see Vidal, Gore Boyer, Jay 442 bracero program 150 Bradbury, Malcolm 247 Bradbury, Ray 66 Bradfeld, Scott: What’s Wrong with America 1 Bragg, Melvyn 381 brainwashing 197–8, 204 Brauner, David 97 Brautigan, Richard 5 Dreaming of Babylon 123 The Hawkline Monster 52 Breu, Christopher 136 Brewer, Gil 141 Briffault, Mark 324 Brinkmeyer, Robert 84 Bristol, Horace 325 Brite, Poppy Z. 69 Lost Souls 68 Britten, Benjamin 353 Brodeur, Paul: Outrageous Misconduct 128 Brodkey, Harold 97, 107
551
Brodsky, Louis Daniel 304 “Brokeback Mountain” 36 Brooker, Peter 534 Brooks, Gwendolyn: Maud Martha 119 Brooks, Van Wyck 20, 309 Brown, Cecil 436, 437 Brown, Harold Chapman 323 Brown, John Gregory: Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery 93 Brown, Larry: Joe 90, 93 Brown, Sterling 287 Brown I and II cases 91 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas 284 Bruccoli, Matthew J. 272, 273 Bruce, Lenny 163, 165 Bruce-Novoa, Juan 148, 149, 153 Bryer, Jackson B. 272 Buchanan, James 467 Buckley, William F., Jr. 379, 408 Buffalo Bill 37 Bukiet, Melvin Jules 107 bullfighting 240, 242, 247 Bunker, Edward 143 Bunting, Josiah: The Lionheads 172 Bunyan, John 230–1, 323 Bureau of Indian Affairs 191, 511–12 Burke, James Lee 143 Burnett, W. R.: Little Caesar 139 Burr, Aaron 406 Burroughs, William S. 48, 229, 386–94 The Adding Machine 388 Ah Pook is Here 392 Ali’s Smile 388 APO-33 388 audio experiments 390 Beat Generation 387 biographical details 387–8 The Burroughs File 388 Cities of the Red Night 388, 392 Cobblestone Gardens 388 as cult figure 386–7 Cut-Up/Nova Trilogy 388, 389, 391 drug use 386 Electronic Revolution 393 Exterminator! 388
552 Burroughs (cont’d) Ghost of Chance 392 interviews/letters 388–9 Interzone 388 The Job 393 Junkie/Junky 387–8, 389, 390 Last Words 388 marriages/sexuality 387 media appearances 386 Minutes to Go 388 My Education: A Book of Dreams 392 Naked Lunch 51, 159, 386, 388, 389–91, 392 Nova Express 6–7, 388, 391 paintings 390, 392 The Place of Dead Roads 388, 392 Port of Saints 392 Queer 389, 390 shooting of Joan Vollmer 386, 387–8 The Soft Machine 388, 391 The Third Mind 393 The Ticket that Exploded 388, 389, 391 Time 388 Tornado Alley 388 The Western Lands 388, 392 The Wild Boys 388, 392 The Yage Letters 386, 388, 390 Busch, Fredrick 240 Bush, George W. 404 Bushnell, Candace: Sex and the City 216 Butler, Jack 94 Butler, Octavia: Patternmaster saga 120 Butts, Mary 318 Byron, George Gordon 148 Byron, Glennis 69 Cahan, Abraham The Rise of David Levinsky 16, 26, 98 Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto 16 Cain, James M. 139, 141 Double Indemnity 140 Mildred Pierce 33, 140 The Postman Always Rings Twice 140 Cain, Paul 139
Index Calderón, Héctor 148 Caldwell, Erskine 85, 87, 88, 89 Tobacco Road 87, 93 Trouble in July 91 Caldwell, Gail 523 California 33, 34, 77, 130 Calisher, Hortense 78 In the Absence of Angels 100 “Old Stock” 98, 100–1, 104, 106 Call Me Burroughs 390 Callahan, John F. 359 caló (Chicano slang) 152 Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Kramer and Wirth-Nesher) 104 Campbell, Joseph 324 Campbell, Neil 2 Camus, Albert 349, 350, 396 Canada 540 Capa, Robert 327 Capote, Truman 48, 75, 408 In Cold Blood 3 Other Voices, Other Rooms 63 Cappetti, Carla 27 Caputo, Philip: A Rumor of War 173–4 de Cardona, Elizabeth 180 Caribbean 84–5 Carillo, Eduardo 149 Carnegie, Andrew 256 Caron, Tim 347 Carr, Caleb: The Alienist 31, 34 Carroll, Lewis 498, 499 Carver, Raymond 49, 73, 75, 81 Cathedral 81 Elephant 81 What We Talk about When We Talk about Love 81 Will You Please Be Quiet, Please 81 Cash, W. J.: The Mind of the South 89, 93 Cather, Willa 219–28 Americanization 221 Arizona trip 225 on cinema 223 cultural loss 220–1, 224 Death Comes for the Archbishop 21, 222, 225, 226
Index “The Enchanted Bluff” 221, 226 entropology 219–28, 225–7 ethnography of 224–5 French culture 226–7 imperialist allegations 219 A Lost Lady (film version) 223 Lucy Gayheart 220, 223, 226 memory 220, 223 music 222–3 My Ántonia 2, 21, 219, 220, 223, 225, 226 in The Nation 219 “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle” 219, 221–2, 223 Not under Forty 224 O Pioneers! 221, 225 One of Ours 215 permanence/transmission 222–7 The Professor’s House 21, 220, 222, 223 “Sapphira and the Slave Girl” 219 Shadows on the Rock 224, 226 short stories 74 signature style 15 The Song of the Lark 219, 223 “Tom Outland’s Story” 225 Catholic Church 27, 151, 279–80 Caveney, Graham 515 Cawelti, John Adventure, Mystery, and Romance 133 The Six-Gun Mystique 36 celebrity culture 102, 386–7 Cendrar, Blaise 252 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote 435 Cézanne, Paul 232 Chabon, Michael 107 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 33 Chametzky, Jules 104 Chandler, Raymond 332–41 on American English 5 The Big Sleep 33, 123, 124, 138, 332, 336–7, 338 biographical details 334–5 in Black Mask 122, 138–9, 334–5 character/atmosphere 333 cinema 4 detective fiction 335–6
553
Farewell, My Lovely 138, 139, 144, 332, 337, 339 genre-blurring 14, 332–41 and Hammett 135–6, 334, 335–6 hard-boiled fiction 334, 335–6 The High Window 125 as influence 143 The Lady in the Lake 337 The Little Sister 124 The Long Goodbye 332, 337, 338 man of honor characters 336, 340 Marlowe 138–9, 332–3, 336–7, 338–9, 340 moral intuitions 338–9 narrative 333–4 Paterson on 127 peripheral writing 339–40 poetry 335, 339 pulp fiction 333–5, 339–40 quest romances 336–7 “The Simple Art of Murder” 122–3, 136 social decline 338 women characters 337–8 Chardin, Teilhard de 120 Charyn, Jerome American Scrapbook 1 Eisenhower, My Eisenhower 164 Going to Jerusalem 164 The Single Voice 164 Chateaubriand, René 506 Chávez, César 150 Chávez, Fray Angélico 148–9 Eleven Lady-Lyrics and Other Poems 149 Cheever, John 78 The Enormous Radio and Other Stories 78–9 Cherokee Phoenix 189 Chesnutt, Charles 92–3 The House Behind the Cedars 93, 110 Chicago Bellow 396–7 Forrest 120 Great Depression 27 historic transition 28 Irish Americans 77
554 Chicago (cont’d) novels about 27–9 Polish Americans 28 Wright, R. 115, 343 Writers Project 395–6 Chicago Democratic Convention (1968) 386 The Chicago Review 390 Chicago University 27 Chicana writers 153, 154, 155 Chicano civil rights movement 130, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156 Chicano culture archetypes 153–5 domestic violence 155–6 masculinity 151, 155–6 mythologized women 153–5 oral tradition 149 patriarchy 153 as term 147–8 Chicano literature 48, 147–58 hard-boiled fiction 156–7 homosexuality 155 identity 157 male perspective 153 novels 152 poetry 148–9 post-World War II 149–50 short stories 79–80, 152 see also specific authors child possession tales 67 Chin, Frank: Donald Duk 34 Chinese American fiction 34, 48, 81–2 Chinese American identity 472–3, 475 Chinese Cultural Revolution 475 Chinese-Japanese War 477 Chopin, Kate 90, 92–3 “Desiree’s Baby” 92–3 Christianity 57, 77–8, 189 see also Catholic Church Christie, Agatha 122, 334 Chronicle of Rheims 404 C.I.A. 382–3, 384, 501 cinema Cather 223 European/Hollywood compared 315
Index Faulkner 303, 304 H.D. 4, 315–16, 317 and literature 4 spectatorship 319 Cisnero, Sandra: “Woman Hollering Creek” 154 city life 24, 30–1, 35 see also urban fiction civil rights 86–7, 109, 363–4, 484, 491–2 see also Chicano civil rights movement Claridge, Henry 272 class 76, 77, 86, 87 Clemons, Walter 408, 448 Clendinen, Dudley 84 Cline, Sally 272 Clinton–Lewinsky scandal 451 Close Up 315 Coatlicue 155 Codman, Ogden, Jr. 211 Cody, Buffalo Bill 37 Cohn, Deborah: Look Away! 94 Coke, A. A. Hedge 186 Cold War C.I.A. 382–3 cultural binaries 197 Faulkner 64 Heller 411 King 66 paranoia 140–1 Updike 467 Collier, John 191 Collier’s 72, 421, 423 Cologne-Brookes, Gavin 445, 446, 450, 452 colonialism 184–5, 188–9 color caste 110, 308 Colorado 77 Columbian Exposition 37 Columbus, Christopher 510 Comer, Krista 40 coming out 33 Committee of Responsibility to Save War Injured Children 178 commodification 4, 32, 125 Communist Party 77, 343–5, 346–7, 358 community 81, 82, 319
Index Condon, Richard: The Manchurian Candidate 197, 198 confessional poetry 49 confidence culture 376 Conklin, Gary 404 Conroy, Pat 262 conscience, crisis of 177 conscientious objectors 175, 178–9 consciousness 355, 448 see also double consciousness consumer culture 515–16, 517 Coontz, Stephanie 294, 300 Cooper, Dennis 514 Cooper, James Fenimore 37, 38, 506 Coover, Robert 48, 58, 165, 424 “The Babysitter” 52, 80 A Night at the Movies 200, 204 The Public Burning 53, 56, 57, 165, 203–5 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. 53 Copway, George 190 The Cornell Writer 428 Cornwell, Patricia Post Mortem 125 Scarpetta novels 143 Corpi, Lucha Black Widow’s Wardrobe 157 Crimson Moon 130 Eulogy for a Brown Angel 130 Gloria Damasco series 130, 157 corrido (song) 149 Cortés, Hernán 153, 154 Costello, Elvis 515 Costner, Kevin 508 costume dramas 131–2 Coupland, Douglas: Generation X 50 Courier-Journal, Louisville 328 Covici, Pascal 324, 325, 328, 330 cowboy culture 38, 506 Cowley, Malcolm 89, 278 The Portable Faulkner 88, 305 Crane, Stephen Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 15 The Red Badge of Courage 15 Crews, Harry 93 Karate is a Thing of the Spirit 88
555
Crichton, Michael 5 crime fiction: see detective fiction Cross, Amanda: Poetic Justice 130 cross-cultural relationships 6, 522–3 cross-generation communication 522, 525, 527, 528 Crow Indians 219 Crumley, James 143 Cuaderno de ortografía 148 Cuban culture 249 Cuban missile crisis 165 Cubism 4, 232, 357 cuentos (Mexican short stories) 152 Cullen, Countee 109 Color 113 Copper Sun 113 One Way to Heaven 113 cultural binaries 197, 199–200 cultural exports 180–1 cultural identity 155, 357 cultural politics 355 culture assimilation 26, 82 diversity 21, 210 European hegemony 437 loss of 220–1, 224 permanence 223–7 postmodernism 49–50 transmission of 222–3 White/Native American 43 see also mass culture; popular culture culture industry 197, 201 Curnutt, Kirk 278 Curtis, Edward 508 Curtis, Tony 414 cyberpunk science fiction 48 Daly, Carroll John 122, 136 Dances with Wolves (Costner) 508 D’Angerville, Mouffle 378 Danielewski, Mark Z.: House of Leaves 57 Dante Alighieri 431 Danticat, Edwidge 436 Dean, James 328 Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (Bryer and Barks) 272
556 Death Wish 136 DeBellis, Jack 469 Debs, Eugene 19 decorum 159, 160 degeneracy 63, 70, 303, 305 Delany, Samuel R. The Fall of the Towers 120 The Return to the Neveryon sequence 120 DeLillo, Don 497–504 Americana 498 and Barthelme 80 biographical details 497–8 The Body Artist 502–3 Cosmopolis 497, 502 counterhistory 502 death in 497, 503 End Zone 497, 499 Falling Man 503 family depictions 201–2 Great Jones Street 32, 499, 501 influences on 498 Libra 501 Mao II 202, 203, 497, 501 The Names 500 National Book Award 500 as paranoid writer 499–500 Players 499–500 postmodernism 31, 498 Ratner’s Star 499 religious themes 497–8 Running Dog 497, 500 terrorism/media 501, 503 Underworld 32, 165, 203, 502 White Noise 50, 165, 196, 201, 202, 497, 500–1 William Dean Howells Medal 502 Dell, Floyd 13 Deloria, Vine, Jr. 508 God is Red 186 Demby, William Beetlecreek 120 The Catacombs 120 DeMille, Cecil B. 205 Denning, Michael 19 Depression: see Great Depression Derrida, Jacques 56–7
Index detective fiction African American 120, 128–31, 143, 335–6 archetypes 156–7 California 33 Cawelti on 133 costume dramas 131–2 domestic violence 127 feminist 124–7, 145 gender 124–7 Great Depression 139–40 hard-boiled 122–3, 137–40 humor 129 liberalism 124 male gaze 125–6 parodied 123 race/ethnicity 128–31 second renaissance 123–4 sexual politics 124–5 social commentary 127–8, 131–3 U.S./British compared 122, 136 women victims 125 women villains 124–5 women writers 143, 156–7 see also specific authors Detroit 33 DeVoto, Bernard 264 Dewey, Joseph 500 Dexter, Pete 32 Díaz, José 150–1 Díaz, Junot 4 Dick, Bruce 437–8, 441 Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 201 Dickens, Charles 34, 274 Dickey, James 262 Dickstein, Morris 159–60 Didion, Joan Play It as It Lays 516 The White Album 200 Diego, Juan 154 Dimbleby, David 404 dime novels 37, 122 DiPietro, Thomas 499, 501 “Dirty Realism” 3 Disch, Thomas M. 5
Index Dixon, Melvin: Trouble with the Water 120 Dmytryk, Edward 140 “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me” (Russell) 109 Doane, Janice L. 234 Doctorow, E. L. 7, 96 Billy Bathgate 31 The Book of Daniel 201 Ragtime 56 The Waterworks 31 Welcome to Hard Times 52 docufiction 7 domestic violence 127, 154, 155–6 Donald, J. 316, 319 Donleavy, J. P.: The Ginger Man 161 Doolittle, Hilda: see H.D. Dorris, Michael: The Crown of Columbus 510 Dos Passos, John 6, 251–60 Adventures of a Young Man 259 “Afterglow” 251 Armory Show 251 “Biographies” 256–7 “Camera Eye” 257 Century’s Ebb 259 Chosen Country 259 District of Columbia trilogy 259 experimental techniques 256 homage to Whitman 256 Manhattan Transfer 20, 24, 25, 252–9 Midcentury 259 modernism 11, 13, 252 on New York 252–4, 255–6 New York City 24 “Newsreels” 257–8 non-linearity 254–5 One Man’s Initiation 251–2 in Paris 251, 252 repeated motifs 254–5 Three Soldiers 252 U.S.A. trilogy 5, 19, 251, 253, 256, 259 “The Writer as Technician” 257 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 396 double consciousness 2, 92, 129, 276, 354 Double Indemnity (Wilder) 140
557
doubleness 41, 43 Douglass, Aaron 109 Douglass, Frederick 357 Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick) 160, 164 Dred Scott case 482 Dreiser, Theodore 292–301 An American Tragedy 32, 298 biographical details 3, 6, 293 characters’ sense of inadequacy 292–4 Dawn 293 emotions/art 295–7 family, idealized 292–3, 298 The Financier 295, 299 The Genius 297–8 irony 299–300 Jennie Gerhardt 295 Newspaper Days (A Book About Myself) 293 and Roth, P. 456 Sister Carrie 24, 292–7, 299 Twelve Men 294 Dresser, Paul 294 Dreyer, Carl: The Passion and Death of a Saint 316, 319 Du Bois, W. E. B. 109, 354, 356 The Quest of the Silver Fleece 110 The Souls of Black Folk 2, 92, 354 du Maurier, Daphne: The Scapegoat 405 Dubnick, Randa 232 Dumas, Henry 79 Dunbar, Paul Laurence: The Sport of the Gods 110 Durkheim, Émile 203 Dutton, Robert R. 29 Earhart, Amelia 403 Earley, Tony 88 Eastlake, William: The Bamboo Bed 172 Eastman, Charles Alexander: Indian Boyhood 190 Eastwood, Clint 136 Ebersole, Lucinda 404, 409 Edison, Thomas 19 Eggers, Dave 519 Eisenberg, Deborah 107 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 60, 204, 328, 417
558 Eliot, T. S. 54, 196, 251 Prufrock 302–3 The Waste Land 51, 201, 255 Elkin, Stanley 105, 107, 161 Ellerman, Winifred 315, 318 Ellington, Duke 109 Ellis, Bret Easton 514–21 American Psycho 32, 69, 130, 376, 516–18 biographical details 514, 519 consumer culture 515–16 critical responses to 517–18 Glamorama 518 as influence 514 Less Than Zero 514–16, 517, 519 Lunar Park 518, 519–20 popular culture 514 The Rules of Attraction 516 satire 515–16, 520 self-reflexivity 518, 519–20 Ellis, Edward: Seth Jones 37 Ellis, Trey Home Repairs 120 Platitudes 120 Ellison, Ralph 352–60 African American folklore 357, 359 on American history 356 biographical details 353 Black Arts Movement 352 Communist Party 358 critical responses 352 cultural politics 355–7 epiphanies 356 Going to the Territory 352 on Hurston 114 invisibility metaphor 353–4 Invisible Man 30–1, 49, 117, 166, 352, 353–7 Juneteenth 117, 359 literary influences 357 Marxism 358 National Book Award 352 “A Party on the Square” 91 plunging imagery 355–6 pluralism 356 politics/literature 352
Index on racism 87, 353 and Reed 439 “Remembering Richard Wright” 358 Shadow and Act 352 on social realism 358 time 86 underworld of sound 355 “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” 355 whitewash metaphor 356 “The World and the Jug” 356, 358 and Wright, R. 116, 357–9 Ellroy, James 143 The Big Nowhere 132 The Black Dahlia 125, 132 White Jazz 3 Elvins, Kells 390 Emerson, Ralph 317, 373 emotion/art 295–7 The Empire Star 438 encyclopedic narrative tradition 431–2 The Enduring South (Reed) 84 Eng, Phoebe 479 English language Americanized 5 Chicano writers 152 Native American fiction 82, 186 see also vernacular English literary culture 20 Enlightenment 57 entropology 225–7 epiphanies 54, 73, 356 Erdrich, Louise 192–3 The Best Queen 508 The Crown of Columbus 510 Love Medicine 81, 82, 193, 508 The Master Butcher’s Singing Club 190 Esquire 272, 379, 423 The Essential Gore Vidal (Kaplan) 407 Estleman, Loren 143 ethnic literatures 48, 107, 471 ethnography 27, 224–5 Eugenides, Jeffrey 4 European culture 3, 12, 20, 82, 437 Everard, Katherine (pseudonym): see Vidal, Gore
Index evil 70, 413 evolution theory 21 exceptionalism, myths of 36, 84, 246 excorporation 202–3 existentialism 349–50, 363 Exodus, Book of 287 experimentation art 251 genres 5 Jewish American 97 modernists 11, 53 narrative 17, 22 postmodernism 48 Expressionism 315, 426 F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 273 Fabre, Michel 349 fabulation 371 Fair, A. A. (Erle Stanley Gardner) 125 Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr. 326 family birth order 545 fantasy 298 idealized 292–3, 294–5 nuclear 294–5, 300 sentimentalized 300 Fante, John 76–7 Farrell, James T. 76–7 Studs Lonigan 27 fascism 197, 380 fatalism 86 Faulkner, William 19, 302–12 Absalom, Absalom! 21, 85, 86, 90, 302, 303, 305, 309–10 African Americans 305–6 American Dream 309–10 As I Lay Dying 17, 308–9, 359 “Barn Burning” 75, 303 cinema 4, 303, 304 color caste 308 “The Compson Appendix” 305 critical acclaim 302 Delta materials 307–8 “Dry September” 91 A Fable 302, 310
559 Flags in the Dust 306 A Ghost Story 310 Go Down, Moses 76, 305, 308, 310 Gothic 63 Great Depression 309 Greek sensibility 307–8 The Hamlet 309 history 305 Intruder in the Dust 303 Knight’s Gambit 76 Kreyling on 88–9 Latin America 303–4 Light in August 69, 93, 305–6 The Mansion 302, 309 marriage 310 modernism 11, 53 Mosquitoes 302, 303 narrative 22 Native Americans 305–6 Nobel Prize 22, 64, 88 nuclear war, fear of 64 O’Connor on 88 as prophet without honor 303–4 Prufrock character 302–3 race/class 86 regionalism 3, 5, 304 religious influences 306 Requiem for a Nun 303, 306 “A Rose for Emily” 63, 75–6, 306 Sanctuary 14, 303, 307 Sartoris 303, 306–7 Scots heritage 305 short stories 73, 74, 75, 76, 306 Soldier’s Pau 302, 310 The Sound and the Fury 17, 51, 64, 89, 303, 304–5, 308–9 Southern fiction 85, 88, 89 South/North 86, 92 stream of consciousness 305 style/subject 87 These Thirteen 306 time 63, 64 The Unvanquished 76 whiteness/blackness 92–3 on Wolfe 261 see also Yoknapatawpha County
560 Fauset, Jessie Plum Bun 112 There is Confusion 26 fear 61, 164 Fearing, Kenneth 14, 139 Federman, Raymond 159 Double or Nothing 52 Fedorko, Kathy 214 Feiffer, Jules 164 Feinberg, Leslie 97 Fellini, Federico 408 female body 155 female genital mutilation 489, 494–5 female sexuality 124, 320 feminism 13, 317–18, 444, 491, 492–3 radical 437, 440 feminist criticism 347–8, 471–2 feminist detective fiction 124–7, 145 Ferrigno, Robert 143 fictionality 55–6, 58, 481 Fiedler, Leslie 96, 455 Field, Andrew 369 Le Figaro 328 Filipino grape workers 150 film noir 137, 140, 375 see also cinema Fire!! 113, 283 First Nations 508–9 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield 221 Fisher, Mike 219 Fisher, Rudolph 74, 109, 128 The Conjure Man Dies 112, 123, 129 Walls of Jericho 26, 112 Fiske, John 202–3 Fitch, Clyde 214 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 271–81 “Babes in the Woods” 273 The Beautiful and Damned 274–5, 516 “Benediction” 273, 279 biographies/critiques 6, 272 Catholic education 279–80 celebrity status 271, 272 choices 279 cinema 4, 276–7 The Crack Up 272 “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” 273
Index “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” 279 double consciousness 276 The Great Gatsby 20, 24, 253, 271, 273, 275–7 and Hemingway 240 “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” 271 “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year” 271 idealized past/improved future 276 The Last Tycoon 272, 279 letters 272–3 literary naturalism 274 in magazines 271, 272 marriage 271, 272 materialism 279 “May Day” 273 rejuvenation theme 277 short stories 73, 74 signature style 15 social changes 274 “The Swimmers” 280 symbolism 272, 277 Tender is the Night 271, 272, 277–9 This Side of Paradise 217, 271, 273–4, 275 time 276–7 Fitzgerald, Zelda 271 Five Civilized Tribes 189 Flaubert, Gustave 15, 236–7 Madame Bovary 447 Foer, Jonathan Safran 107 Foley, Barbara 343 folklore 357, 359 Fonda, Henry 405 Foote, Shelby 310 Ford, Ford Madox 240 Ford, Gerald 467 Ford, Henry 12, 19, 104, 257 Ford, John: Fort Apache 508 Ford, Richard 50, 80, 93 Forrest, Leon Divine Days 120 There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden 111 Fort Apache (Ford) 508 Fort Pierce Chronicle 284
Index Foucault, Michel 58 Fowler, Doreen 308, 309 fragmentation of narrative 17–19, 165–6 France 140, 226–7 Frank, Anne 457–8 Frank, Marcie 407, 408, 409, 410 Frankfurt School 201 Franklin, Benjamin 280 Freeman, Judith 335 Frege, Gottlob 12 Freud, Sigmund 12 conscious/unconscious 57 narcissism 61 repression 160 Three Studies on Sexuality 235 Frey, James: A Million Little Pieces 520 Fried, Lewis 97 Friedman, Bruce Jay 105, 162, 163 The Dick 162 A Mother’s Kisses 103, 162 on Southern 160 Stern 103, 162 Friedman, Susan Stanford 317 From Modernism to Postmodernism (Hoffmann) 49 frontier culture 36, 37 Fryer, Judith 215 Fugitive poets 87 Fugitive Slave Law 481, 482 Fullerton, Morton 212, 217 Gaddis, William 2, 434 Gadsden Purchase 190 Gaines, Ernest 79, 93 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman 119 Galloway, David D. 30 gangster perspective 139 Gardner, Erle Stanley (A. A. Fair) The Bigger They Come 125 Give ’Em the Ax 125 Garland, Hamlin 173 Garvey, Marcus 439–40 Gass, William Omensetter’s Luck 54–5 The Tunnel 55
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. African American writing 6 Figures in Black 6, 443 on metaphor in Hurston 286 on Oates 446 on Reed 443–4 The Signifying Monkey 6, 443–4 signifying theory 357 on Wright, R. 346, 347, 357 Gattaca (Niccol) 408 gay culture 33, 34, 97, 120 see also homosexuality Gefin, Laszlo 242, 243 Gellhorn, Martha 3 gender 49, 124–7, 168, 286, 472 genre-crossing 5, 14, 165 George, Nelson 436 George, Peter 164 Gerrard, Nicci 514 Geyh, Paula 48 Gibson, William 48 Neuromancer 201 Gilchrist, Ellen 93 Giles, James 2 Gilman, Sander 97 Gilpin, William 37 Gilroy, Paul 480, 481 Ginsberg, Allen 100, 386, 387, 389 Glasgow, Ellen 86, 87, 89 The Romance of a Plain Man 85 Gleich, James: Chaos 542 Glissant, Edouard 304 Godard, Jean-Luc 498 Goddu, Teresa 68 Gold, Michael 3, 259 Jews without Money 25–6 Goldstein, Rebecca 107 Gondry, Michel 519 Gonzales, Rudolfo “Corky” El Plan espritual de Aztlán 151 Yo soy Joaquín 151 Good, Dorothy B. 273 Goodis, David 141–2 Dark Passage 141 Nightfall 141 Goodman, Allegra 107
561
562 Goodman, Paul 242 Gordon, Caroline 87 Gordon, Joan 68, 69 Gothic genre counter-narrative 61 degeneration 70 evil 70 fear of modernity 61–2 grotesque 63 heroes 61 horror 66 imagination of disaster 64–5 interiority 60 Lovecraft 201 narcissism 60–1 postwar 68 rationality/superstition 67 representation 68 science fiction 66 serial killers 69 stagnation 61, 62 symbolism 60 U.S. presidents 60 vampire 65–6, 67, 69 women writers 68, 69 Gover, Robert J.C. Saves 168 One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding 167–8 Grafton, Sue, alphabet series 126–7, 144 grand narratives (Lyotard) 57 The Grapes of Wrath (film) 325 Grau, Shirley Ann Keepers of the House 93 Pulitzer Prize 93 Grauerholz, James 392, 393 Gray, Richard 85 Gray, Spalding 405 Great Depression African Americans 114–15 Chicago 27 detective fiction 139–40 Faulkner 309 Harlem 116 Mexicans 149 Native Americans 191
Index radical politics 12 short stories 76 Great Migration 21–2, 109, 483 Greenberg, Clement: “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” 196–7 Greene, Graham 172 Greenwich Village 12, 20 Gregson, Ian: Postmodern Literature 49 Grey, Zane: Riders of the Purple Sage 39, 41, 43, 44 Grice, Helena 525, 527 Griffith, D. W. 466, 508 Grimm, Percy: Light in August 91 El Grito 151 grotesque Anderson 73 black humor 159 Christianity 77–8 Gothic genre 63, 91, 92 horror 162 O’Connor 77 Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty 148 Guillain-Barré syndrome 415, 416 Gunn Allen, Paula 187 Guthrie, A. B.: The Big Sky 43–4 Guy, Rose: A Measure of Time 116 Gysin, Brion 393 Hachiya, Michihiko: Hiroshima Diary 511 Haggerty, E. George 69 Haiti 286 Halberstam, Judith 67 Haley, Alex: Roots 120 Hall, James 143 Hall, Stuart 202 Halloween 519 Hamblin, Robert W. 304, 310 Hambly, Barbara Benjamin January novels 131 Fever Season 132 Hammerstein, Oscar 328 Hammett, Dashiell in Black Mask 122, 135–6 and Chandler 122–3, 333, 335–6 The Dain Curse 123 The Glass Key 138
Index hard-boiled fiction 5, 334 The Maltese Falcon 33, 123, 124 Paterson on 127 pulp/high modernism 14 Red Harvest 123, 138, 334 Hansen, Joseph 143 Hapgood, Hutchins 13 Haraway, Donna 201 hard-boiled fiction Black Mask 137–40 Chandler 334, 335–6 Chicano crime writers 156–7 contemporary 142–5 defined 135–7 and film noir 375 Hammett 5, 334 masculinity 143 paperbacks 140–2 see also noir fiction Haring, Keith 386 Harjo, Joy 184, 193 Harlem 26, 30–1, 109, 111–12, 116 Harlem Renaissance allegory 287 Great Migration 21–2 Hurston 6 Morrison 483 novels of 26 Reed 439 short stories 74 Toomer 18 Van Vechten 283 see also African American writing; New Negro novels Harper, Frances W. 92–3 Harper and Brothers 265 Harper’s Ferry raid 132, 481 Harrington, Alan: The Confession of Dr. Modesto 160 Harrington, Evans 310 Harris, Joel Chandler 85 Harris, Oliver 389, 390 Harris, Stephen 409 Harris, Thomas Hannibal Lecter series 143 Silence of the Lambs 69, 70
563
Harris, Trudier 348 Harron, Mary 516 Harvey, David 48 Hasford, Gustav: The Short-Timers 179 Hassan, Ihab 48 Hawks, Howard 310, 333 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 61, 72, 375 The Scarlet Letter 217, 309, 467, 542–3 “Wakefield” 532 Hay, John 406 Hayles, N. Katherine 201 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 313–21 Asphodel 314, 316–17 biblical references 320–1 Bid Me to Live 320 biographical details 313, 319 cinema 4, 315–16, 317 “Conrad Veidt” 313–16 critical acclaim 317 in Europe 314 female desire 320 The Gift 314, 319, 320 Heliodora 320 Her 313, 317 Hymen 320 jellyfish experience 317–18 Joan of Arc 316 lesbian desire 313, 315, 318 “Majic Ring” 314, 318–19, 320 Nights 315 Notes on Thought and Vision 314, 317, 320 Paint It Today 313, 314 Pilate’s Wife 320 and Pound 314 repetition 316 reviews 316, 319 Sea Garden 320 séances 313, 318–19 “The Sword Went out to Sea” 314, 320 transcendentalism 317–18 Tribute to Freud 318 as visionary 313–14, 318, 319–20 Hearst, William Randolph 406 Hecht, Ben 4 Hegel, G. W. F. 57
564
Index
Hegeman, Susan 3 Heller, Joseph 48, 411–19 biographical details 107, 411–12, 415, 418 Catch-22 51, 100, 104, 161, 163–4, 172, 411, 412–14, 415, 418 Closing Time 412, 417–18 Cold War 411 death motif 411–12 fear/paranoia 164 God Knows 415, 416 Good as Gold 98, 104–7, 415–16, 417 Guillain-Barré syndrome 415, 416 McHale’s Navy 414 marriages 415 No Laughing Matter 415 Now and Then 411, 418 parody 104–7 Picture This 415, 416–17 Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man 412, 418 Sex and the Single Girl 414 Something Happened 414–15 on Southern 160 Vietnam War 411 We Bombed in New Haven 414 Hemenway, Robert 284 Hemingway, Ernest 6, 11, 240–50 Across the River and into the Trees 241 on America 245–9 androgyny 242 Bellow on 397 “Big Two-Hearted River” 74–5, 242, 244, 246 biographical experiences in fiction 240–1 bullfighting 240, 242, 247 Busch on 240 Cuban culture 249 cultural comparisons 247–9 Death in the Afternoon 243, 245, 247 diction 22 A Farewell to Arms 243 The First Forty-Nine Stories 75 The Garden of Eden 242 Green Hills of Africa 248 “Hills Like White Elephants” 241
“In Another Country” 241–2 In Our Time 13, 18, 74–5, 252 as influence 245 as journalist 3 “The Last Good Country” 246 masculinity 240–1, 242 Nobel Prize 22, 240 nostalgia 246 “Now I Lay Me” 244 The Old Man and the Sea 242, 249 paratactic style 243 and Pound 242–3 “Remembering Shooting-Flying” 245 repetition 243–4 sequential reading of 244–5 short-story cycle 73, 74–5 “Soldier’s Home” 247 and Stein 243–4 stylistic influences 75, 242–3 The Sun Also Rises 135, 242 To Have and Have Not 241 Under Kilimanjaro 241, 248–9 “Wine of Wyoming” 247 Henkle, Roger 166 Henry, Frederic 243 Henry, O. 73 Hepworth, Candida 148, 149–50 Herald Tribune 326 Herbert, Zbigniew 498 Herndon, Angelo 358 heroes 60–1 Herr, Michael: Dispatches 172 Hershman, Marcie 107 Hiaasen, Carl 143 Higashida, Cheryl 348 Higgins, George V. 143 high/low culture 5, 14, 195, 315 Highsmith, Patricia 142–3 Hijuelos, Oscar: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love 202 Hilden, Patricia Penn 188 Hilfer, Tony 97 Hillerman, Tony: Talking God 130 Himes, Chester Blind Man with a Pistol 129, 144 Cotton Comes to Harlem 120
Index Harlem cycle 143–4 humor 128, 129 If He Hollers Let Him Go 116 Plan B 129 Hiney, Tom 333 Hinojosa-Smith, Rolando: Estampas del valle 156 Hiroshima Bomb Dome Peace Monument 511 history 53, 86, 90, 305 Hitchcock, Alfred: Lifeboat 326 Hobson, Fred: Serpent in Eden 87 Hodges, Robert E. Lee, Jr. 175 Hoffenberg, Mason 160 Hoffmann, Gerhard: From Modernism to Postmodernism 49 Hogan, Linda 193 Hogle, Jerrold E. 61 Holden, Craig 143 Hollinger, Veronica 68, 69 Hollywood 4, 33, 303, 304 Holmes, A. M. 514 Holmes, Sherlock 136, 334 Holocaust 29, 30, 97, 133 Holquist, Michael 531 homoeroticism 69 homosexuality 155, 363 see also gay culture HooDoo 284, 285–7, 289, 440 Hook, Andrew 254, 255 Hooker, Richard: M*A*S*H 164 Hopkins, Pauline 128 Contending Forces 110 Horkheimer, Max 197 Houellebecq, Michel 514 Howe, Irving 96, 356, 455, 456–7 “Black Boys and Native Sons” 358 World of Our Fathers 105 Howe, Julia Ward 465 Howells, William Dean 217 Huckleberry Finn comparisons 29, 31 Hughes, Langston 74, 109, 439, 490 Ask Your Mama 113 The Big Sea 113 I Wonder as I Wander 113
565
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” 110 Not Without Laughter 113–14 Simple Speaks his Mind 114 Tambourines to Glory 113 The Weary Blues 113 “Who’s Passing for Who” 114 Hume, Kathryn 438 humor 128, 129, 159–70, 185 see also black humor fiction Humphreys, Josephine: Dreams of Sleep 90 Hurricane Katrina 94 Hurst, Fannie 283 Hurston, Zora Neale 282–91 biographical details 282–3 “Black Death” 289 “Cock Robin Beale Street” 289 “The Conscience of the Court” 289 critiques of 114 “Drenched in Light” 283, 289 Dust Tracks on a Road 114, 283, 287–8, 289 The Eatonville Anthology 283, 289 “Escape from Pharaoh” 289 “The Fire and the Cloud” 287, 289 folk tales 285–6, 288 “The Gilded Six Bits” 284, 290 “High John De Conquer” 289 Hoodoo 285–6, 289, 440 “Hoodoo and Black Magic” 284 “Hurricane” 289 as influence 6, 490 “John Redding Goes to Sea” 289 Jonah’s Gourd Vine 22, 114, 283, 284–5 literary/academic awards 284 in Locke 109 “Magnolia Flower” 289 on marriage 290 metaphors 286 Moses, Man of the Mountain 283, 287, 289 Mrs. Doctor 283–4 Mules and Men 22, 114, 283, 285–6 “Muttsy” 289 novel on Herod the Great 284 oral vernacular 286
566 Hurston (cont’d) “Possum or Pig?” 289 Seraph on the Suwanee 283, 284, 288 short stories 74 “Spunk” 114, 284, 289 “Story in Harlem Slang” 289 “Sweat” 284, 290 “The Tablets of the Law” 289 Tell My Horse 22, 283, 286 Their Eyes Were Watching God 22, 111, 114, 283, 286, 289, 490, 493 Voodoo Gods (Tell My Horse) 286 and Walker 119, 493 Hutcheon, Linda 48, 56, 200 Huyssen, Andreas 196 identity Asian American 471 Chicano literature 157 Chinese American 472–3, 475 cultural 155, 357 ethnic 524 Jewish 62, 97, 455, 458–9 language 531–4 Mailer 383 Oates 445 opposition 354 plurality of 2 race 2 self-reflection 518 Western fiction 41 identity markers 231–2 identity politics 107, 188 Idol, John Lane, Jr. 261, 265 Igby Goes Down (Steers) 408 Imagism 242, 251 immigrant fiction 2 immigrants European 24 Jewish 25 second generation 231–2 South Asian 541 transformation 541–2 undocumented 154 improvisation 16, 354 indian 505, 506, 507–8
Index Indian Arts and Crafts Act 188 Indian Child Welfare Act 188 Indian New Deal 191 Indian Wars 507 Indians: see Native Americans industrial relations 324, 325, 327–8 Industrial Workers of the World 13, 258 infection metaphor 65 Ingram, Russell 90 interiority 15, 60, 482 Inventing Southern Literature (Kreyling) 84 invisibility metaphor 353–4, 355 Irish Americans 27, 33, 77 irony 299–300, 468 Irving, John 169 Isaiah, Book of 288 Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go 201 Ishmael Reed Quintet 436 Islas, Arturo: The Rain God 155 Israel 97 Italian Americans 77 Jackson, Andrew 189 Jackson, Blyden 308 Jackson, Mississippi 91 Jacobs, Elizabeth 149, 151, 154 Jaffe, Harold 7 Jamaica 286 James, Henry 15, 197, 212–13, 406, 447 James, William 232–3, 236, 279, 446 Jameson, Fredric 48, 200, 515 JanMohamed, Abdul R. 349 Janowitz, Tama 514 Janscó, Miklós 498 Japanese Americans 1, 511 Jazz Age 271, 272, 279 jazz music 4, 354 Jefferson, Thomas 406 Jehlen, Myra 189 Jenks, Tom 81 Jewett, Sarah Orne 211 Jewish American fiction assimilation fiction 26, 98 Bellow 396, 400 black humor 161 experimentation 97
Index first/second/third generations 96–7 inter-Jewish tensions 102–3 Jewish father/American son 105–6 National Book Award 96 New York City 74, 79 nostalgia 107 postmodernism 50 post-World War II writers 29–30 Roth, P. 454 San Francisco 34 self-hatred 97–8, 100–1, 103, 104, 106–7 women writers 96, 97 see also specific authors Jewish American Literature (Chametzky et al.) 104 Jewish identity 97, 162, 455, 458–9 Jews assimilated 455 Judaism 29–30 passing trope 102, 106 stereotypes 105 working-class life 79 Joan of Arc 316 John Reed Club, Chicago 343 The John Updike Encyclopedia (DeBellis) 469 John Updike website 469 John Wayne myth 175 Johns-Manville Company 128 Johnson, Charles R.: Oxherding Tale 120 Johnson, Charles S. 283 Johnson, Diane 334 Johnson, Dorothy M. The Hanging Tree 42 “Lost Sister” 42, 43, 44 “A Man Called Horse” 42 “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” 42 Johnson, Georgia Douglas 283 Johnson, Greg 450, 451 Johnson, Howard 1 Johnson, James Weldon 109 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man 15–16, 26, 111 The Book of American Negro Poetry 440
567
Johnson, Lyndon 165, 330 Johnson County War 43 Jonah, Book of 284–5 Jones, Gayl: Corregidora 86, 119 Jones, James 262 Jones, LeRoi/Amiri Baraka 352, 439 Divine Comedy 119 The System of Dante’s Hell 119 Jones, Manina 144, 145 Jones, Suzanne W. 84 Jong, Erica Candida Confesses 168 Fear of Flying 105, 168 How to Save Your Own Life 168 Parachutes and Kisses 168 Jonze, Spike 519 journalist-novelists 3 Journey to the West 476–7 Joyce, James 54, 73, 196, 425 Finnegan’s Wake 386 A Portrait of the Artist 251 Ulysses 53, 54, 229, 263, 431 Joyce, Joyce Ann 348 Judaism 29–30 Jung, Carl 12 Kafka, Franz 80, 196, 396 Kahn, Herman 498 Kanellos, Nicolás 149 Kansas City 32 Kantor, Rosemary Klein 200 Kaplan, Fred 407, 408 Kassanoff, Jennie A. 217 Kaufman, Charlie 519 Kaufman, George S. 325 Kawin, Bruce 304 Kay, Cameron (pseudonym): see Vidal, Gore Kazan, Elia 327, 328 Kazin, Alfred 11, 12, 329, 455 New York Jew 105 Starting Out in the Thirties 105 A Walker in the City 105 Kelley, Robin 343, 344, 345 Kelley, William Melvin: dem 120 Kelly, Lauren (pseudonym): see Oates, Joyce Carol
568
Index
Kenan, Randall 89 A Visitation of Spirits 120 Kennedy, Edward 451 Kennedy, John F. 330, 380, 407, 442, 501 Kennedy, Richard S. 261 Kennedy, William Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game 33 Ironweed 33 Legs 33 Quinn’s Book 33 Keogh, William 168 Kermode, Frank 54 Kerouac, Jack 4, 262, 387 Kesey, Ken: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 161, 172 Keynes, John Maynard 12 Khomeini, Ayatollah 501 Killens, John O. 436, 437 And Then We Heard the Thunder 119 Kilpatrick, James Jackson 84 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 116, 491 King, Rodney 130, 437 King, Stephen 519 Christine 66 Desperation 66 Salem’s Lot 67 Shining 66 King, Tom: Medicine River 508 Kingston, Maxine Hong 471–9 China Men 474, 475–6 Cultural Revolution 475 female life cycle 474 The Fifth Book of Peace 471, 477–8 gender identity 472 identity-writing 471 legacy of 478–9 on 1960s 476–7 pacifism 477–8 San Francisco 476–7 talk-story 474–5 Tripmaster Monkey 471, 472, 476–7 Vietnam War 477, 478 The Woman Warrior 471–5, 478–9 woman warrior/no-name woman 472–3 Kinnamon, Keneth 347, 348 Kirby, Jack Temple 86
Kitunda, Jeremiah M. 248–9 Kleist, Heinrich von 56 Klinkowitz, Jerome 172 Knights, Pamela 213 Kollin, Susan 40 Konch 436, 443, 444 de Kooning, Willem 426 Kopechne, Mary Jo 451 Korean War 477 Kosinski, Jerzy 96, 97 Kovic, Ron 173 Kramer, Michael P. 104 Kreyling, Michael 84, 88 Krupat, Arnold 187, 188 Kubrick, Stanley 160, 164, 370 Kurosawa, Akira 498, 511 labyrinth motif 57 Ladies’ Home Journal 216 Laity, Cassandra 317 L’Amour, Louis 36, 38 landscape 3, 43, 44, 90, 304 language experience 446 identity 531–4 over time 17 racial/racist 118 reality 57 regionalism 3, 5 spoken 286 style 5–7 Tower of Babel 531 Yiddish 16 see also English language; oral tradition Language Poetry 229 Lardner, Ring 17, 73–4 The Big Town 74 You Know Me Al 17, 74 Larsen, Nella Passing 26, 112 Quicksand 22, 112–13 Lasch, Christopher 292–3 Lash, Scott 48 Last Summer 405 The Lasting South (Kilpatrick and Rubin) 84
Index Latin America 84–5, 303–4 Laughlin, James 370 Lawrence, D. H. 222, 259, 375 Lawrence, Seymour 423–4, 425 Layman, Richard 251 Leal, Luis 148 Lear, Jonathan 220 Radical Hope 219 Leavitt, David 97, 514 LeClair, Thomas 55, 57, 161 Led Zeppelin 515 Ledbetter, Mark 90 Lee, A. Robert 505 Lee, Harper 63 Lee, Hermione 216 Lee, William (pseudonym): see Burroughs, William S. The Left 76 Leger, Fernand 252 Leibowitz, Herbert 346 Lennon, J. Michael 378, 380, 381 Leonard, Elmore 143 lesbianism 155, 313, 315, 317, 318 LeSueur, Meridel “Annunciation” 76 The Girl 76 Lethem, Jonathan: Gun with Occasional Music 123 Leventhal, Mel 491 Leverenz, David 432 Levin, Ira: Rosemary’s Baby 67–8, 70 Levine, George 432 Levine, Lawrence W. 197 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 225 Lewin, Michael Z. 123 Ask the Right Question 126 The Way We Die Now 126, 127 Lewis, C. S. 393 Lewis, Jerry 405 Lewis, Lloyd B.: The Tainted War 171 Lewis, Nancy 216 Lewis, R. W. B. 216, 217 Lewis, Sinclair on Don Passos 259 Elmer Gantry 21 It Can’t Happen Here 20
569
Main Street 20, 216 Nobel Prize 3, 261 Lewis, Wyndham 318 liberalism 61, 124 Life 325, 423 Limerick, Patricia: The Legacy of Conquest 40 Lincoln, Abraham 406, 441 Lincoln, Kenneth: Indi’n Humor 185 Lindbergh, Charles 56, 460 La Llorona 154–5 Locke, Alain 109–10, 283, 287 The New Negro 109, 111–13 Lomelí, Francisco A. 149 Lomperis, Timothy 175 Lonesome Dove 36, 43 Look Away! The U.S. South (Smith and Cohn) 94 Loos, Anita 17 Los Angeles 33, 35, 131, 149, 334, 338 Louis, Joe 357 Lovecraft, H. P. “The Colour Out of Space” 63, 201 “Dagon” 62 Gothic tales 201 “The Horror at Red Hook” 62 “The Lurking Fear” 62 ‘The Outsider” 62, 70 “The Shadow over Innsmouth” 201 The Loved One 160 Lowe, John 347 Lowell, Robert 381 Lowry, E. D. 255 Loy, Mina 317 loyalty oath 163 Lucid, Robert F. 378 Ludington, Townsend 259 Lulu on the Bridge (Auster) 535 lynch mob 91 Lynn, Kenneth S. 242 Lyotard, Jean-François 48, 54, 57, 515 lyrical love poetry 148 Lytle, Andrew 84 McCaffery, Larry 55, 57, 161 McCall, Dan 347
570 McCarry, Charles: The Miernik Dossier 3 McCarthy, Cormac 45–6, 50, 89, 93 All the Pretty Horses 45 Blood Meridian 45 Cities of the Plain 45 The Crossing 45 Outer Dark 93 McCarthy, Harold 346, 349 McCarthyism 140, 144, 163 McCoy, Horace 14, 139, 141 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? 140 McCullers, Carson 63, 75, 85 “The Ballad of the Sad Café” 63 Clock without Hands 91 Macdonald, Dwight 197 “A Theory of Mass Culture” 195 MacDonald, John D. 128, 139, 142 The Deep Blue Goodbye 125 The Lonely Silver Rain 125 Macdonald, Ranald 511 Macdonald, Ross 142 Black Money 125 The Instant Enemy 125 Lew Archer novels 124, 128 Underground Man 124 The Way Some People Die 124 McElrath, Joseph R. 329 McEvoy, Emma 69 McGill, Ralph 87 McGinnis, Joe 514 McGrath, Patrick 66 McHale, Brian 48, 536, 537 McInerney, Jay 514 McKay, Claude 109 Home to Harlem 26–7, 111–12 Macksey, Richard 346, 348, 349 McLuhan, Marshall 14, 120, 254 McMillan, Terry 436 Waiting to Exhale 120 McMullen, Bonnie Shannon 278 McMurtry, Larry: Lonesome Dove 36, 43, 44–5 McNickle, D’Arcy The Surrounded 191 Wind from An Enemy Sky 191
Index McPherson, James Alan 79 Elbow Room 121 Hue and Cry 121 “A Solo Song: For Doc” 121 “Why I Like Country Music” 121 Macpherson, Kenneth 315 MacShane, Frank 332, 335, 340 McVeigh, Timothy 407 Madsen, Deborah 147, 153, 154 Mailer, Norman 377–85 Advertisements for Myself 379 An American Dream 1, 200, 379–80, 383 Ancient Evenings 380–2 Barbary Shore 377, 378, 380 biographical works 381, 384 Cannibals and Christians 380 The Castle in the Forest 378, 383, 384 on C.I.A. 382–3, 384 critiques of 6, 378–9 cultural revolution 379–80 death of 107 death as motif 377 The Deer Park 378 Egyptian culture 381–2 in Esquire 379 The Executioner’s Song 381 film production 4 The Gosepl According to the Son 384 “A Harlot High and Low” 383 Harlot’s Ghost 378, 381, 382–4 identity 383 Jewishness 97, 103 as journalist 3, 48 and Millett 381 The Naked and the Dead 377 The New York Times 379 obscenity/fascism 380 Of a Fire on the Moon 381 Oswald’s Tale 384 in Playboy 379 Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man 384 The Presidential Papers 379, 382 The Prisoner of Sex 381 Pulitzer Prize 96, 389 and Reed 439 social critique 377–8
Index The Spooky Art 384 spying 378, 383 “technologyland” 382 Tough Guys Don’t Dance 382 and Vidal 409 Why Are We in Vietnam? 379, 380 Maine, Barry 259 Malamud, Bernard The Assistant 29–30, 100 death of 107 and Heller 415 The Magic Barrel 79 National Book Award 96 Pulitzer Prize 96 and Roth, P. 97, 456 Malcolm X 116, 439 male gaze 125–6, 153 Malin, Irving: New American Gothic 60–1 La Malinche 153–4, 157 Malinowski, Bronislaw 12, 224, 225 Malory, Thomas 323 de Man, Paul 264 The Man to Send Rain Clouds (Rosen) 79 Manganaro, Marc 247 Mann, Thomas 53 marginalized groups 50, 81 Margolies, Edward 347 Marias River massacre 192 Markfield, Wallace 162 Marlowe, Philip: see Chandler, Raymond marriage 13, 210, 290, 345 Marshall, Paule 79 Brown Girl, Brownstones 31 Praisesong for the Widow 119 Martin, Reginald 441 Martin, Tera 477, 478 Martinez, Julio A. 149 Marxism African Americans 343–4 base-and-superstructure model 57 Ellison 358 Wright, R. 77, 347 Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman 408 masculinity Chicano 151 hard-boiled image 143
571
Hemingway 240–1, 242 private eye term 136 vérité school on conviction 173 Western fiction 38, 39, 41–2 Mason, Bobbie Ann In Country 202 “Shiloh” 49, 90 Mason, Charlotte Osgood 283 Mason, Robert: Chickenhawk 173 Mason–Dixon line 433 mass culture 13, 20, 195, 196 see also popular culture mass media 165, 198 Mather, Cotton 506 Matheson, Richard 66 I Am Legend 65–6 Mathews, John Joseph: Sundown 191 matrilineage fiction 472 Matthew’s Gospel 173–4 Maupin, Armistead: Tales of the City 34 Mayfield, Julian: The Hit 119 Means, Russell 508 A Medal for Benny 327 media 4–5, 180–1, 501 see also mass media Meerloo, Joost A. M.: The Rape of the Mind 198 Melling, Philip H. 249 Melville, Herman 61, 72, 159, 169 Moby Dick 375, 431 memory 220, 223, 481, 483–4 Memphis blues 366 Mencken, H. L. 86–7, 221, 273, 274, 438 Mendelson, Edward 431 Menschlichkeit 97, 98, 107 Meredith, Burgess 329 Meriwether, James B. 311 Mertz, Barbara (Elizabeth Peters) 131–2 Messent, Peter 124, 244 mestiza subjectivity 147–8, 155 metafiction 7, 55–8, 530, 537 Mexican Americans 147, 149–50, 156 see also Chicano culture; Chicano literature Mexican Revolution 152, 154 Meyer, Annie Nathan 283 Michaels, Walter Benn: Our America 224
572 Micheaux, Oscar 133 Michigan 245 Milazzo, Lee 448 Miles, Barry 386, 392 Millar, Margaret 143 Miller, Arthur The Crucible 205 Focus 100 Miller, Henry 5 Miller, James E. 272 Miller, Jean Baker 472 Miller, Merle 6 Miller, Susan Brown 438 Miller, Warren: Siege of Harlem 166 Millett, Kate: Sexual Politics 381 Millgate, Michael 311 Milton, John 282, 323 Mirrielees, Edith 323 misogyny 437 Mississippi 93–4 Mitchell, Margaret 86, 87 Gone with the Wind 4, 88 Mitford, Nancy: Zelda 272 mixed blood 187–8 mixed media 199–205 mixed-race marriage 345 Mizener, Arthur 272 modernism African American writing 15–16, 109–21 Cather 222 circulation of literature 14 contexts 11–14 cross-genre/cross-media 11 Dos Passos 252 European 3, 12, 196 form 14–19 high/low brow 14 impact of 51 media 4–5 Picasso 197 poetry 251 popular culture 201 and postmodernism 22, 53–4 Roth, H. 97 themes 19–22 war novels 15
Index modernity 29–30, 61–2, 544–5 Momaday, N. Scott: House Made of Dawn 192, 508 Monfredo, Miriam Grace Seneca Falls mysteries 131, 132 Through a Golden Eagle 132 monoculturalism 437, 439, 441, 507 Monroe, Marilyn 451 monstrosity 67, 69, 70 Monteith, Sharon 84, 91, 92 Montoya, José: “El Louie” 151 Moorer, Frank E. 346, 348, 349 Mootry, Maria 348 Mora, Pat: Santa Agua/Holy Water 154–5 Morandi, Giorgio 498 Morgan, Robert 262 Morrison, Toni 51, 480–8 belonging/community 484–5 Beloved 68, 118, 480, 481–2 The Bluest Eye 118, 202, 484–5, 486 colloquialism 486 in Gregson 49 Harlem Renaissance 483 historical perspective 480–1 interiority 482 Jazz 118, 480, 481, 483, 486, 487 Love 485–6 memory 481, 483–4 Mercy 118 musical themes 486–7 nostalgia 485–6 “Ohio 1873” 118 Oklahoma 483–4 “124 Bluestone Road” 118 orality 487 Paradise 481, 483–4, 485, 487 Playing in the Dark 118, 219 political aesthetic 486, 487 Pulitzer Prize 4 and Reed 436 on slavery 480–1 Song of Solomon 118, 481, 485, 486 storytelling 486–7 Sula 484, 485 Tar Baby 486 whiteness 1
Index Morrow, Bradford 66 Mosley, Walter 129, 144 Bad Boy Brawly Brown 144 Cinnamon Kiss 130 Devil in a Blue Dress 120, 144 Red Death 144 mother–daughter fiction 472, 522, 524–5, 527 Mother Earth cults 506 Motley, Willard: Knock on Any Door 28, 116 Ms. 491 Mukherjee, Bharati 6, 539–46 adaptive strategies 544–5 biographical details 539 birth-order theory 545 Cherry Orchard 539 critical responses to 539–40 Darkness 540–1 Days and Nights in Calcutta 540 Desirable Daughters 543–5 exile themes 539–40 globalization theme 543–4 The Holder of the World 542–3 immigration themes 540 Indianness 541 Jasmine 541–2 Leave it to Me 543 The Middleman 541 rewriting classic texts 542–5 Sanskrit verse 544 The Sorrow and the Terror 540 The Tiger’s Daughter 539 transnational themes 540–1 The Tree Bride 546 Wife 540 Muller, Marcia 123 Ask the Cards a Question 144 The Dangerous Hour 126 Edwin of the Iron Shoes 126 Muller, Robert 173 multiculturalism 437, 540 Murder, My Sweet (Dmytryk) 140 Murray, Albert: Train Whistle Guitar 119 Murrieta, Joaquín 151 Myrdal, Gunnar 92 mystery fiction 122, 123, 333
573
myth/history 86 myth-making 45, 85–9, 153–5 N.A.A.C.P. 109 Nabokov, Vladimir 369–76 Ada 370, 371, 372, 374 autobiography 370 Bend Sinister 370, 371, 372, 373, 374 butterfly/soul motif 374 Camera Obscura/Laughter in the Dark 369 coming to America 369 on creativity 373 The Defense 371 Despair 371, 372 erudition 371 The Eye 371, 372, 373 on Freud 57 The Gift 371, 372 identity theme 371 Invitation to a Beheading 371, 372, 373, 374 King, Queen, Knave 371 Laughter in the Dark 371, 372 lepidopterology 370, 374 literary influences 373 literary success 369 Lolita 161, 162, 370, 371, 372, 374–5 Look at the Harlequins! 370, 371 in magazines 370 Mary 371 The New Yorker 370 The Original of Laura 370 other world theme 372–3, 375 Pale Fire 51, 52, 370, 371, 372, 374 Pnin 370, 372, 373 postmodernism 371 Pushkin translations 370 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 370, 371, 373 riddles 371–2 short stories 370 in Switzerland 370 transcendence 373 Transparent Things 370, 371, 372, 374 trickster narrators 376 “The Vane Sisters” 372, 373
574 Nadel, Alan 357 narcissism 60–1, 234 narrative community 81, 82 experimentation 17, 22 fragmentation 17–19 media 4–5 place-making 85 point of view 15–16 self-reflexivity 7 The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Romine) 84 Nathan, George Jean 273 The Nation 110, 113, 219 National Farm Workers Association 150 National Liberation Front 175 National Organization of Women 516 national types 231 Native American fiction colonialism, legacy of 188–9 cultural revival 185–6 cultural strength 183–4 English language 186 humor 185 land symbolism 3 militant 34 oral tradition 186, 191, 192 Other 2 postmodernism 48 short stories 79, 81–2 survivor guilt 184 transformative 183 tribal language 186 trickster tales 186–7 see also specific authors Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act 193 Native American pressure groups 131 Native Americans alcoholism 189 alienation 188 blood quantum issues 188 European America 82 Faulkner 305–6 Great Depression 191 Hemingway 246
Index place, importance of 186 population statistics 184 San Francisco 34 sent to trans-Mississippi West 189 stereotypes 505 survival/survivance 507–8 Native Renaissance 508 naturalism 2–3, 32, 274 Nava, Michael: The Hidden Law 156 Navajo culture 130, 193 Navajo Tribal Police 130–1 Naylor, Gloria 436 Mama Day 120 Nazareth, Peter 438, 439 Neal, Larry: “Ellison’s Zoot Suit” 352 Neely, Barbara Blanche among the Talented Tenth 129 Blanche Cleans Up 129 The Negro Quarterly 358 Neihardt, John: Black Elk Speaks 190 Neilson, Heather 404, 409 Nelson, Jill 436 Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters 163 neo-abolitionism 86 neo-conservatism 437, 441 Neo-HooDoo aesthetic 440, 441 neo-Puritanism 79 neo-slave narrative 481 New American Gothic (Malin) 60–1 New Americanist critics 1 New Black Aesthetic fiction 120 New Criticism 87, 88, 272 New Deal 21, 396 New Gothic 5 New Journalism 48, 425 The New Masses 76 The New Negro anthology (Locke) 109 New Negro novels 111–13 New Orleans 33, 69, 132, 304 New Republic 370 New Western History 40, 41 New York City 31, 34–5 DeLillo 32 Dos Passos 24 Fitzgerald 24
Index Harlem 26, 30–1, 109, 111–12, 116 Jewish American fiction 79 Jewish immigrants 25, 74 Salinger 31 as symbol 20 transport 254 The New York Times 329, 379, 414, 516, 519 The New York Times Book Review 324, 369, 423 The New Yorker 78, 370 Newman, Judie 7 Newsday 330 Newsweek review 329 Niccol, Andrew 408 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 446 Nightmare on Elm Street 519 Nixon, Richard M. 53, 58, 123, 204, 425, 441 noir fiction 3, 50, 135–46, 382 noir film 315 Nordan, Lewis 89, 93 Wolf Whistle 90 Norris, Frank: The Pit 27 North, Michael 220, 237 North/South 110, 115, 345 North Vietnamese Army 175 nostalgia 85, 107, 246, 485–6 Noth, Chris 405 Nouveau Roman 80 novel as genre 152, 195–6 nuclear warfare, fear of 64, 164 Nuttall, Jeff: My Own Mag 389 Oates, Joyce Carol 445–53 aestheticism, radical 446 ambition, personal/national 450 Angel of Light 449 The Assassins 447–8 The Assignation 446, 450 autobiographical writing 449–50 Beasts 451 Because It Is Bitter 451 Bellefleur 449 biographical details 446 Black Girl/White Girl 452
575 Black Water 446, 451 Blonde 451 A Bloodsmoor Romance 449 On Boxing 450 Broke Heart Blues 451 By the Northgate 448 Childwold 448 consciousness 448 critical acclaim 452 The Crosswicks Horror 449 deification/demonization 451 “Delirium and Detachment” 445 Do With Me What You Will 448 “The Dream of the ‘Sacred Text’” 447 essay collections 448 Expensive People 447 The Faith of a Writer 452 Faithless 452 The Falls 451 The Female of the Species 452 fiction/non-fiction 446 Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang 451 A Garden of Earthly Delights 447 The Gravedigger’s Daughter 451 Haunted 452 Heat 452 I Am No One You Know 452 “I Stand Before You Naked” 446 identity 445 I’ll Take You There 451 “In the Old World” 446 Invisible Woman 447, 448 on James, H. 447 language/experience 446 Last Days 450 Marriages and Infidelities 448 Marya: A Life 449, 452 Middle Age: A Romance 451 Missing Mom 451 The Museum of Dr. Moses 452 My Heart Laid Bare 449 My Sister, My Love 451 Mysteries of Winterhurn 449 National Book Award 447 New Heaven, New Earth 448 poetry 448
576 Oates (cont’d) prostitution of body/mind 447 pseudonyms 446 Rape: A Love Story 451 Raven’s Wing 450 “A Report to an Academy” 446–7 The Rise of Life on Earth 450 “Slow” 446 “Slow Motion” 446 Solstice 449 Son of the Morning 448, 449 surrealism 452 The Sweet Enemy 446 The Tattooed Girl 451 them 33, 447 Three Plays 450 The Time Traveler 450 Twelve Plays 446, 450 twins/doubles 446 Uncensored: Views and (Re)views 452 Unspeakable 452 victims/survivors 450 We Were the Mulvaneys 451 What I Lived For 451 The Wheel of Love 448 “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” 448 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? 448 Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going 452 Wild Nights 452 Will You Always Love Me? 452 With Shuddering Fall 447 (Woman) Writer 448, 450 Wonderland 448 writer/teacher 446 You Must Remember This 450, 452 Zombie 69, 450 Obama, Barack 109 Ober, Harold 272 O’Brien, Sharon 224 O’Brien, Tim 174, 177 “Ambush” 178 “Ghost Soldiers” 177–8 If I Die in a Combat Zone 177
Index “The Lives of the Dead” 175 The Things They Carried 175 obscenity 380 Occum, Samson: Sermon Preached By Samson Occum 189 O’Connor, Flannery 63, 73, 75, 77, 85, 88 Everything that Rises Must Converge 78 A Good Man is Hard to Find 63, 77–8 The Violent Bear It Away 91–2, 93 O’Connor, Frank 72, 82 The Lonely Voice 72 O’Connor, William Van 273 “October Cities” (Rotella) 32 Oe, Kenzaburo: Hiroshima Notes 511 oedipal conflict 25 Of Mice and Men (film) 325 O’Hara, John 78 Ohio 55 Oklahoma 483–4 Oklahoma City bombing 407 Oldham, Estelle 304 olfactory images 104 Olsen, Tillie 97 “Tell me a Riddle” 76 Open Door Policy 406 Opium Wars 477 Opportunity Magazine 283 oral tradition Chicano 149 Native American fiction 186, 191, 192 storytelling 2, 73 Walker 490 Orientalism 524, 527 Orlando Sentinel 284 Ornitz, Samuel: Haunch Paunch and Jowl 98 Ortego y Gasca, Felipe D. 150, 152 Ortiz, Simon J. 79, 184–5, 186, 188 Osteen, Mark 501 Oswald, Lee Harvey 384, 501 Other 2, 65, 91, 269 Otis, Elizabeth 328 Owens, Louis 183, 185, 187–8 Bone Game 188
Index Ozick, Cynthia “Envy” 98, 103–4, 107 The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories
100
pachuco (chorus in play) 151 Page, Thomas Nelson 85 Palahniuk, Chuck 514 Paley, Grace 79, 107 “The Contest” 98, 101–2 The Little Disturbances of Man 100 Palmer, R. B. 140 paperback revolution 140–2 paranoia 140–1, 164 paratactic style 243 Paredes, Américo: With his Pistol in his Hand 149 Paretsky, Sara 123, 126, 128 Bitter Medicine 127, 128, 145 Burn Marks 128 Hard Time 127 Indemnity Only 127, 144 Total Recall 132, 133 Tunnel Vision 127 Warshawski character 127, 145 Parini, Jay 407 Parker, Dorothy 74, 97 Parker, Robert B. 143 Parmar, Pratibha 495 parody 104–7, 200–1 Partisan Review 76, 396 passing trope 26, 102, 106, 110 pastiche 200–1 pastoralism 85 Paterson, John: “A Cosmic View of the Private Eye” 127 patriarchy 153 Paul, Moses 189 Paul, Steve 245 Paz, Octavio 544 Peabody, Richard 404, 409 The Pearl (film) 327 Peek, Charles A. 3, 310 Pelecanos, George 143 Pelfrey, William: The Big V 172 penis metaphor 168 see also phallocracy
577
People to People Program 328 Percy, Walker The Last Gentleman 93 The Moviegoer 33, 90 Percy, William: Lanterns on the Levee 309 Pérez de Villagrá, Gaspar 148 performance 222–3 Perkins, Maxwell 264–5 Perloff, Marjorie 232 Peters, Elizabeth Amelia Peasbody series 131–2 Crocodile on the Sandbank 132 The Curse of the Pharaohs 132 Petry, Ann: The Street 28, 116 phallocracy 40 Pharr, Robert Deane: S.R.O. 116 Philadelphia 32 Philips, Gene D. 304 Phillips, Robert 450 picaresque novel 396–7 Picasso, Pablo 197, 232, 236 Pick, Daniel 175 Pickford, Mary 466 Pictorial Review 216 Piercy, Marge 5 Pifer, Ellen 375 Pinkerton, Allan: The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives 122 Pinkney, Darryl: High Cotton 120 Pitts, James Howell 283 Pittsburgh 32–3 Pizer, Donald 2, 251, 256, 257, 258, 259 place 85, 89–92, 186 see also landscape; regionalism Plain, Gill 124 Plains Indians 219 Plant, Deborah 284 plantation myth 86 Plath, Sylvia 49 Plato 399–400 Playboy 379 Pocock, J. G. A. 61 Podhoretz, Norman 302, 378 Poe, Edgar Allan 61–2, 72, 90, 201, 375, 468 “Annabel Lee” 375
578
Index
Poe (cont’d) “The Masque of the Red Death” 32 “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” 122 “The Mystery of Marie Roget” 131–3 “The Purloined Letter” 122 poetry 109, 148, 251 Poirier, Richard 2, 378–9 Polish Americans 28 Polish Jewish Americans 29, 79 Polite, Carlene Hatcher: Sister X 120 politics aesthetics of 446, 486, 487 African American writers 352 cultural 355 culture industry 197 race 77, 93, 132, 492 radical 12 sexual 492 Vidal 404 and writing 489 Polk, Noel 310 Pollock, Jackson 426 POOL Productions 315 popular culture borrowings 200 Ellis 514 high art 315 Indian 507 indian 507–8 and mass culture 196 modernism 201 violence 516 see also mass culture Porter, Katharine Anne 74, 87 Ship of Fools 93–4 Posnock, Ross 352, 358 postcolonialism 354–5 Postindian 505–6, 507 Postmodern American Fiction (Geyh et al.) 48, 49, 50 Postmodern Literature (Gregson) 49 postmodernism African Americans 48 culture 49–50 DeLillo 498 fictional characters 58
gender 49 grand narratives 7, 57–8 labyrinth motif 57 and modernism 22, 53–4 Nabokov 371 playfulness 53 race 48–9 range of 7, 48–51 Reed 119, 441 referentiality 55 representation 58–9 satirized 406 urban fiction 31–2 Vonnegut 420 post-nuclear disaster worlds 65 see also apocalypse post-Reconstruction era 483 post-world wars 12, 149–50, 173 Pound, Ezra Asphodel cycle 314 and H.D. 314, 318 Her 314–15 as influence 111, 242–3 modernism 51, 111, 251 spectatorship 315 Prager, Emily 97 Pratt, Alan R. 160 Pratt, John Clark 171 press, small/mainstream 14 see also media The Prevailing South (Clendinen) 84 Price, Albert 283 Price, Richard: The Wanderers 31 Priestman, Martin 143 printing technologies 13, 148, 195–6 Pritchard, William H. 467 private-eye term 122, 136 Prohibition 137–8, 247 proletarian fiction 76, 139–40 Prose, Francine 97 Prosser, Gabriel 112 protest novels 28 Proulx, E. Annie 50 Proust, Marcel 53, 88, 196, 229 psychoanalytic approach 234–5 Pulitzer Prize 4, 96
Index pulp fiction 199, 333–5, 339–40 Punter, David 62, 69 Punter, Percival P. 283 Puritanism 3, 180 Pynchon, Thomas 2, 428–35 Against the Day 56, 434 biographical details 428 challenging reader 434–5 on control 433 The Crying of Lot 49 34, 52, 58, 164, 165, 203, 428, 431 cult following 429 experimental 5, 48 Friday the 13th 200 Gidget 200 Gravity’s Rainbow 53, 57, 166, 428, 430, 431–2, 433 idealization 434 Mason & Dixon 433–4 names of characters 431 revelation 430 Slow Learner: Early Stories 429, 432 “The Small Rain” 428 V. 51, 54, 164, 165–6, 428, 429–31, 434 Vineland 200, 203, 432–3 Queen, Ellery Quilt 436
122
race blood quantum 188 class 86 detective fiction 128–31 identity 2 instability 16 invisible blackness 92–3 lynchings 91 mixing 2, 92, 187–8 nation 91–4, 93 North/South 110 Other 91 and politics 77, 93, 132, 492 pollution fears 62–3 postmodernism 48–9 stereotypes 16, 87
579
race riots 130 racism 13, 345, 353, 364, 437, 540 Raeburn, John 240 de Ramirez, Susan Berry Brill 183 Ramos, Manuel The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz 156 Luis Montez series 156 Rampersad, Arnold 358 Randall, Alice 4 The Wind Done Gone 4, 88 Random House Dictionary 423 Ransom, John Crowe 21, 87, 307 Rapaport, Herman 171 rape 86 Raphael, Lev 97 Rattray, Laura 278 Rauschenberg, Robert 386 Reagan era 69, 433, 442, 516, 519 realism in fiction 15–16, 50, 81, 358 reality 7, 55–9, 517, 531 Reaves, Sam 143 Rechy, John City of Night 34 The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez 155–6 Reconstruction Era 85, 86, 109 The Red Pony (film) 327 Red Power 508 The Redman and the Child (Griffith) 508 Reece, Byron Herbert: The Hawk and the Sun 91 Reed, Ishmael 436–44 “Airing Dirty Laundry” 443 awards/fellowships 438 Bigger than Boxing 436 black nationalism 439, 441 Chattanooga 438 Conjure: Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed 436 critical acclaim 443–4 experimental 48, 51 and feminists 444 Flight to Canada 119, 440–1 For All We Know 436 The Free-Lance Pallbearers 439 Garvey 439–40
580 Reed (cont’d) Gates on 443–4 Harlem Renaissance 439 as iconoclast 437–44 Japanese by Spring 441, 443 Konch 443, 444 The Last Days of Louisiana Red 440 literary influences 438 Mixing It Up 436 monoculturalism 439, 441 multiculturalism 437 Mumbo Jumbo 58, 119, 438, 439, 440 neo-conservatism 437, 441 Neo-HooDoo aesthetic 440, 441 and other African American authors 168, 436–7 postmodernism 119, 441 Pow Wow 436 on racism 437 Reckless Eyeballing 441, 442 The Reed Reader 436 satire 438 Terrible Threes 441–2 Terrible Twos 441, 442 Writin’ is Fightin’ 442 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down 119 Reed, John 12, 13 Reed, John Skelton 84 referentiality 55 regionalism 5, 21, 74, 84, 93–4 Reich, Charles: The Greening of America 1 Reich, Tova 97 Remapping Southern Literature (Brinkmeyer) 84 Remington, Fredric 38 repetition 229, 235–6, 316 Repin, Ilya 197 representation 58–9, 68 repression 160, 210, 211, 481 reproductive rights 128 Revard, Carter 193 rewriting history 131–3 Reynolds, Guy 221–2 Rice, Anne: Vampire Chronicles 68, 69 Rich, Adrienne 49, 472 Ricketts, Edward F. 323–4, 325–6, 327
Index Ridge, John Rollin: The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta 190–1 Rilke, Rainer Maria 396 Ríos, Isabella: Victuum 153 Rivera, Tomás: Y no se lo tragó la tierra 79–80, 152 Robbins, Tim 408 Roberts, Thomas 334 Robeson, Paul 315, 357 Robinson, Forrest G. 36, 40, 41, 46 Rockwell, Norman 226 Rodgers, Lawrence R. 26 Rodgers, Richard 328 Rodia, Sabato 498, 502 Rolo, Mark Anthony 82 Roma (Fellini) 408 Romine, Scott 84 Roosevelt, Eleanor 345 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 27, 326, 407 Roosevelt, Theodore 19, 37, 38, 406 Roppolo, Kimberley 193 Rorty, Richard 48, 446 Rosen, Kenneth: The Man to Send Rain Clouds 79 Rosen, Norma: Touching Evil 103 Rosenbaum, Thane 107 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius 53, 58, 165, 203–5 Rosenfeld, Isaac 396 Ross, Alan 33 Ross, Harold 78 Rotella, Carlo 28, 32 Roth, Henry 17, 97, 107 Call It Sleep 25, 97, 98 A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park 25 Roth, Philip 79, 454–61 American Pastoral 457, 459 American trilogy 457, 459 The Anatomy Lesson 457 black humor 6, 165 The Breast 165 The Counterlife 458 critical acclaim 460 “Defender of the Faith” 100 doppelgänger figure 455 “Eli the Fanatic” 100, 454–5
Index Everyman 460 Exit Ghost 460–1 The Facts 456 The Ghost Writer 104–7, 456, 457 Goodbye, Columbus 100, 102–3, 454 Great American Novel 4 The Human Stain 457, 460 I Married a Communist 457 as Jewish writer 50, 97, 454–61 on Johnson 165 Letting Go 455 My Life as a Man 457 National Book Award 96, 454, 460 Operation Shylock 458–9 Our Gang 460 The Plot Against America 56, 460 Portnoy’s Complaint 102, 105, 162–3, 456–7 The Prague Orgy 457–8 Pulitzer Prize 96 When She Was Good 455–6 Zuckerman Bound series 107, 457 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 506 Rowe, John Carlos 173 Rowlandson, Mary 53 Ruas, Charles 404, 410 Rubin, Louis D., Jr. 84 Ruby, Jack 163 Ruhm, Herbert 136 Rukeyser, Muriel 491 rural life 21–2 Rushdie, Salman 386 Russ, Joanna 5 The Female Man 49 Russell, Bertrand 12 Russell, Bob 109 Russell, Jamie 387 Russell, Ray: The Case Against Satan 67 Russian Revolution 12 Russo, Richard 50 Sahlins, Marshall 226 Said, Edward 354 Saldívar, José David 148 Salinger, J. D. 97 The Catcher in the Rye 31, 100, 163
581
Sallis, James 143 San Francisco 33, 34, 35, 476–7 San Francisco News 324 Santoli, Al 173 Saroyan, William 76–7 Sartre, Jean-Paul 63, 64, 251, 349, 350 satire Ellis 515–16, 520 Menippean 438, 498, 499 Reed 438 Twain 438 Saturday Evening Post 72, 73, 271, 421, 423 Saturday Review 284, 328 Savoy, Eric 61 Sayers, Dorothy L. 122, 334 Saypol, Irving 204 Scarlett 4 Schaefer, Jack: Shane 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46 Schmid, David 141 Scholes, Robert 371 Schomburg, Arthur A. 109 Schulz, Max 159 Schuyler, George 128, 437 Black No More 113 “The Negro-Art Hokum” 113 Schwartz, Delmore 259 science fiction 5, 66, 120, 123 Scott, Walter 323 Scribner’s Magazine 213 Seattle 34 Seed, David 5 Segal, Lore 97 segregation 343, 364 Selby, Hubert, Jr.: Last Exit to Brooklyn 31 self-empowerment 50 self-hatred African American girls 202 Jewish American fiction 97–8, 100–1, 103, 104, 106–7 self-reflexivity 7, 159, 238, 518, 519–20 Sellers, Peter 160 Seltzer, David: The Omen 67 Seltzer, Mark 142 serial killers 69
582 Série Noire 140 Server, Lee 140 Settle, Mary Lee: The Killing Ground 89 settlers 189 sexual politics 124–5, 492 sexual violence 364 sexuality 13, 124, 125, 155, 320 Shadow Conspiracy 408 Shain, Charles E. 273 Shakespeare, William 323 Hamlet 467 The Merchant of Venice 459 The Tempest 120 Shaw, Joseph T. 135 Sheen, Herbert 283 Shelley, Mary 66 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 148 short stories 72–83 African American fiction 79–80, 121 Chicano 79–80, 152 comic 73–4 commercialization rejected 73 Dirty Realism 3 Great Depression 76 innovation 80 manners and mores 80 Native American fiction 79 realism 81 regionalism 74 Southern Renascence 75–8 working-class life 76, 77 short-story cycle 73, 74–5, 76, 81 Shostak, Debra 454 Siemerling, Winfried 2 Silko, Leslie Marmon 79, 191 Almanac of the Dead 192, 508 Ceremony 186, 192, 508 Gardens in the Dunes 192 Simmons, Diane 477–8 Simmons, Herbert: Corner Boy 116 Simpson, O. J. 437 Simpson, Philip L. 142 simulacra 203 Sinclair, Jo 97 Sinclair, Upton 3 The Jungle 27
Index Singer, Isaac Bashevis 79, 96, 100 Singh, Amritjit 438, 441 The Single Voice anthology 164 Skenazy, Paul 477, 478 Skipp, Francis E. 262 Sladek, John 159 slave revolt 112 slavery 86, 127, 133, 308, 356, 480–1 Sleepy Lagoon murder 132, 150–1 Smart Set 273 Smelcer, John E. 188 Smith, Jon: Look Away! 94 Smith, Rosamond (pseudonym): see Oates, Joyce Carol Smith, William Gardner 32 Smoke (Auster) 534 The Smoker’s Companion 323 social commentary 127–8, 164 social justice 131–3, 268–9, 338, 349 Soitos, Stephen 129 Sontag, Susan 64 The Volcano Lover 200 Sorkin, Adam J. 163, 164 Sorrentino, Gilbert: Mulligan Stew 52 sorrow song 92 South African American culture 92 civil rights movement 363–4 class 87 Hurricane Katrina 94 Jim Crow era 349 myth-making 85–9 and North 110, 115, 345 post-regional 84 South to A New Place (Jones and Monteith) 84 Southern, Terry 160 Blue Movie 160 Candy 160, 168 Dr. Strangelove 164 The Magic Christian 160 Southern fiction 84–95 exceptionalism 84 fatalism 86 Gothic 63, 89–92, 91 Gray 85
Index history 90 nostalgia 85 pastoralism 85 race/nation 91–4 regionalism 93–4 short stories 76–9 see also specific authors Southern Renascence 75–8, 87, 261, 263 space, sacred 245–6 space as text 211 Spanish language 152 Spanish-American War 257 spectacle 198 spectatorship 319 Spencer, Elizabeth: The Voice at the Back Door 93 Spencer, Scott 383 Spengler, Oswald 278 Spillane, Mickey 136, 140–1, 195 The Girl Hunters 125, 128 I, the Jury 124, 125, 140 Kiss Me, Deadly 125 One Lonely Night 141 Survival Zero 128 Vengeance is Mine 125 Spooner, Catherine 69 sports indians 506 sports novels 499 Stahl, Jerry 520 Standing Bear, Luther: Land of the Spotted Eagle 186 The Stanford Spectator 323 Stanwyck, Barbara 223 Steers, Burr 408 Stein, Gertrude 229–39 allegory 230–2 American character 20 Americanization 233 Blood on the Dining-Room Floor 238 cult status 229 expatriation 246–7 experimental 4, 97 Flaubert as model 236–7 and Hemingway 240, 243–4 as influence 18 Lectures in America 229
583
as lesbian feminist 229 Lucy Church Amiably 238 The Making of Americans 19, 229–30, 476 Mrs. Reynolds 238 A Novel of Thank You 238 prose portraits 11 psychoanalytic approach 234–5 Q.E.D. 237–8 racial stereotypes 16 repetition 229, 235–6 self-reflexivity 238 serial composition 229, 231–2, 235–8 standardization/singularity 230 stream of thought model 235 Three Lives 16–17, 229, 236–8 typology of character 232–5, 237 in Vanity Fair 14 Steinbeck, Elaine 324 Steinbeck, John 322–31 “Adventures in Arcademy” 323 “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” 325 America and Americans 330 “Argument of Phalanx” 324 Arthurian legend 323, 329 in Atlantic 328 awards 325, 327, 330 “Bear Flag” 328 biographical details 322–4, 327 Bombs Away, The Story of a Bomber Team 326 Burning Bright 327 Cannery Row 326–7, 328 cinema 4, 324–5 Cup of Gold 323 “Dissonant Symphony” 324 East of Eden 328 “Fingers of Cloud” 323 The Forgotten Village 326 “The Gifts of Iban” 323 The Grapes of Wrath 4, 324, 325, 327 “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank” 328 ill health 327, 328, 329, 330–1 In Dubious Battle 324, 327 industrial relations 324, 325, 327–8 and Johnson 330
584 Steinbeck (cont’d) Kazin on 329 and Kennedy 330 “Letters to Alicia” 330 literary influences 323 The Long Valley 325 marriages 323, 325, 326, 327, 328 A Medal for Benny 327 The Moon is Down 326, 328 “Murder at Full Moon” 324 on Newsday 330 Nobel Prize 330 Of Mice and Men 325 Once There Was a War 329 paradox 322 The Pastures of Heaven 324 The Pearl 327 “A Piece of It Fell on My Tail” 330 Presidential Medal of Freedom 330 Pulitzer Prize 325 The Red Pony 324, 325, 327 A Russian Journal 327 in Saturday Review 328 The Short Reign of Pippin IV 328–9 short-story cycle 73, 77, 324 stage adaptations 325 Sweet Thursday 328 Their Blood Is Strong 324 To a God Unknown 323, 324 Tortilla Flat 324, 325 Travels with Charley in Search of America 329 The Wayward Bus 327, 328 The Winter of Our Discontent 328, 329 Steinem, Gloria 438, 489 Steiner, George 378–9 Stephenson, Neal 48 stereotypes 16, 87, 105, 237, 505 Stern, Howard 169 Stern, Milton R. 278 Stern, Richard G.: Golk 165 Sterne, Laurence 435 Stevenson, Adlai 328 stock market crash 271, 323 Stone, Phil 304
Index Stone, Robert Dog Soldiers 180, 181 A Flag for Sunrise 180–1 Stout, Rex 123 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 362, 440 stream of consciousness 235, 305 Street, Webster Toby 323 Stribling, T. S. 89, 90 The Store 90 The Unfinished Cathedral 90 Stromboulopoulos, George 410 Strychacz, Thomas 242 The Stylus 283 Styron, William 93, 262 subversiveness 140–1, 354 Suckow, Ruth 74 Suddenly 405 Sukenick, Ronald 7, 424 Out 52 Up 52 Sulloway, Frank J.: Born to Rebel 545 superstition 67 surrealism 159, 380, 452 survivor guilt 184, 307 Swann, Brian 187, 188 Swope, Richard 532 symbolism 272, 277 Tafolla, Carmen: “La Malinche” 154 Tan, Amy 522–9 The Bonesetter’s Daughter 522, 526–7 children’s books 523–4 The Chinese Siamese Cat 523 critical acclaim 523 cross-cultural relationships 6, 522–3 cross-generation communication 528 direct storytelling 526 English language use 523, 527–8 ethnic identity 524 framing device 523 The Hundred Secret Senses 522, 524, 528 The Joy Luck Club 81, 472, 522, 524–5, 528 The Kitchen God’s Wife 522, 525–6 The Moon Lady 523
Index mother–daughter fiction 81–2, 522, 523, 524, 525, 527 The Opposite of Fate 523, 528 Saving Fish from Drowning 523 Tanner, Tony 2, 375, 428, 431 Tapahonso, Luci 192 Blue Horses Rush In 193 Ghost Singer 193 Tartt, Donna 93 Tate, Allen 21, 87 Tate, Claudia 346 Tatum, Stephen 36, 40, 43 Taylor, C. V. 323 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 12, 257 Taylor, Gordon 172 Taylor, Helen: Scarlett’s Women 88 Taylor, Jeremy 304 Taylor, Peter 75, 78 Teatro Campesino 150 technological developments 13, 14 television 165, 180, 202 temporary contract labor 150 terrorism 501, 503 Theroux, Paul 5 Thirteenth Amendment 109 This Week 72 Thomas, Clarence 437 Thomas-Graham, Pamela Blue Blood 130 A Darker Shade of Crimson 130 Thompson, Hunter S. 425 Thompson, Jim 141 The Killer Inside Me 142 Pop 142 Thoreau, Henry David: Walden 533 Thurman, Wallace The Blacker the Berry 113 Infants of the Spring 26, 113 Till, Emmett 90 time Ellison 86 Faulkner 63, 64 Fitzgerald 276–7 King 67 Lovecraft 62 Updike 463–5
585
Time 163, 197, 199, 364 Tocqueville, Alexis de 196 Todorov, Tzvetan 264 Tojo, Hideki 511 Tolkien, J. R. R. 393 Tompkins, Jane 40, 45 Toole, John Kennedy: A Confederacy of Dunces 33 Toomer, Jean 490 Cane 18, 22, 86, 111 in New Negro 109 short stories 74 short-story cycle 73 Southern fiction 85 Tortilla Flat (film) 326 totalitarianism 377, 378 Totten, Gary 215 Tourneur, Jacques 141 toxic waste 128 tradition 544–5 Trail, Armitage: Scarface 139 transcendence 373, 463 transcendentalism 317–18 transformation 41–2, 541–2 transgression 159–60 trash fiction 195–206, 201 Travis, Rebecca Hatcher 193 Treuer, David 193 tribal languages 186 trickster tradition 186–7, 376, 440, 506, 508–9 Tristan and Isolde legend 467 Trout, Steven 220 Truman, Harry S. 163 Truth, Sojourner 493 Ts’ai Yen 473 Turner, Darwin T. 287, 352 Turner, Frederick Jackson 37, 38, 40 Twain, Mark black humor 159, 169 detective fiction 122 “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” 122 Mississippi 304 on New England weather 119 oral storytelling 73
586 Twain (cont’d) Pudd’nhead Wilson 127 satire 438 on slavery 308 Southern Gothic 90 “The Stolen White Elephant” 122 vernacular 490 whiteness/blackness 92–3 typewriting 14 typology of character 232–5, 237 Updike, John 462–70 American dream 466 autobiographical writing 463 Brazil 467 The Centaur 462–3, 465, 466, 468 Christianity/idealism 465–6 Cold War 467 The Complete Henry Bech 468 The Coup 467 Couples 467 Gertrude and Claudius 467 “Here Come the Maples” 468 human condition 462 In the Beauty of the Lilies 201, 462, 465–6, 466–7 “In One Big Interview” 462 irony 468 Licks of Love 465 Marry Me: A Romance 467 Memories of the Ford Administration 467 A Month of Sundays 467 mundane/transcendence 463 National Book Award 462 in The New Yorker 78 on Oates 447, 452 Of the Farm 467 Picked-Up Pieces 462 Pigeon Feathers 462 “Pigeon Feathers” 468 The Poorhouse Fair 467 Rabbit series 462, 463–5, 469 realism transcended 462–3 Roger’s Version 467 S. 467 Self-Consciousness 462
Index Terrorist 466–7 “Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author” 468 time passing 463–5 Too Far to Go 462, 468 Toward the End of Time 468 “Transaction” 468–9 Villages 468 The Widows of Eastwick 467 The Witches of Eastwick 467 urban fiction 31–2, 34 Urgo, Joseph R. 310 U.S.–Mexico war 151 U.S. National Endowment for the Art 216 Valdez, Luis The Plan of Delano 150 Zoot Suit 150–1 vampire 65–6, 67, 69 Van Dine, S. S. 122 Van Vechten, Carl 16, 283 Vanderbilt Agrarians 87 Vanity Fair 14, 407 Vásquez, Richard: Chicano 152 vernacular 5, 199, 490, 493 see also oral tradition Versailles, Treaty of 256 Vidal, Gore 403–10 aphorisms 408 autobiographical material 408 The Best Man 405 biographical details 403–4 and Buckley 408 Burr 406 cameo roles in films 408 cinematic influence 405 The City and the Pillar 404, 409 Confucius 404 Creation 404, 405, 410 critical acclaim 6, 403, 410 Dark Green, Bright Red 404 Dreaming War 404 Duluth 200, 406 1876 406 Empire 406, 407
Index The Essential Gore Vidal 407 fictive laws 200 film work 405, 408 friendships 408 The Golden Age 406, 407 Hollywood 406 Imperial America 407 In a Yellow Wood 404 inventions/reflections upon history 405 The Judgment of Paris 404 Julian 405 Kalki 403, 405 on Kennedy 406–7 The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2001 407 Lincoln 406, 407 “Lincoln, Lincoln and the Priests of Academe” 407 Live from Golgotha 405 and Mailer 409 “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh” 407 Messiah 404–5, 408 “Monotheism and its Discontents” 405 Myra Breckinridge 405–6 Myron 406 “Narratives of Empire” 406 “On Flying” 403 Palimpsest 408, 409 Point to Point Navigation 409 politics 404 “President and Mrs. U. S. Grant” 407 pseudonyms 405 religion 405 Sanford family stories 406 Screening History 405 A Search for the King 404 A Season of Comfort 404, 408 The Selected Essays 407 sexuality 409 The Smithsonian Institute 406, 409 on television 408 “Theodore Roosevelt: American Sissy” 407 Two Sisters 408 United States: Essays 1952–1992 407 on U.S. foreign policy 406
587
in Vanity Fair 407 Visit to a Small Planet 405 Washington, D.C. 406–7, 408 Williwaw 404 Vietnam veteran fiction 173–5, 179 Vietnam War absurdism 172 antiwar protest 164–5, 175 de-objectification 171 ethnocentrism 173 facticity 175–6 Heller 411 Kingston 477, 478 Lewin 126 Mailer 380 mission 180–1 as postmodern conflict 171 stories 175 victims 174–5 Villanueva, Alma Luz: “La Llorona” 154 Villarreal, José Antonio: Pocho 152 Vines magazine 437 violence 364, 490, 491, 516, 517 see also domestic violence Viramontes, Helena María: “The Cariboo Café” 154 Virgin of Guadalupe 154, 155 The Virginian 37 Visit to a Small Planet (film) 405 visual imagery 15 Viva Zapata! (film) 327, 328 Vizenor, Gerald 51, 505–13 active listening 183 “Avengers at Wounded Knee” 507 Bearheart 186–7, 506, 509 biographical details 505 Chancers 506, 512 colonialism, legacy of 184 Crossbloods 505 Dead Voices 506, 512 Earthdivers 506, 512 Enola Gay 507 Father Meme 512 Fugitive Poses 505–6 Griever 506, 509–10 The Heirs of Columbus 506, 510
588
Index
Vizenor (cont’d) Hiroshima Bugi 506, 511 Hotline Healers 506, 512 Interior Landscapes 507 Landfill Meditation 506, 512 Little Boy 507 Manifest Manners 505 postindian 1–2, 507 Postindian Conversations 505 Summer in the Spring 507 The Trickster of Liberty 506, 512 tricksterism 506, 508–9, 509–10 Wordarrows 506, 511–12 Vogel, Speed 415 Voltaire 160 Vonnegut, Kurt 420–7 Bagombo Snuff Box 421 biographical details 420–1 on black humor 160–1 Bluebeard 426 Breakfast of Champions 425, 426 Canary in a Cathouse 421 Cat’s Cradle 164, 422, 423 Deadeye Dick 425 Fates Worse than Death 425 Galápagos 426 God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian 425 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater 422, 423 Happy Birthday, Wanda June 425 on Heller 414 Hocus Pocus 426 as influence 427 Jailbird 425 in magazines 421, 422–3 A Man without a Country 425, 426–7 military service 421, 427 Mother Night 422, 423 New Journalism 425 Palm Sunday 420, 425 Player Piano 421 postmodernism 420 reviewing books 423 The Sirens of Titan 422–3, 424 Slapstick 425 Slaughterhouse-Five 5, 52, 164, 165, 420, 423, 424, 425
on Southern 160 Timequake 426 Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 425 Welcome to the Monkey House 421, 423 Voodoo religion: see HooDoo Wagner, Jack 327 Wagner, Linda 252–3 Wagner-Martin, Linda 272 Waits, Tom 393 Walcott, Derek: “The Muse of History” 354–5 Wald, Alan 346–7, 358 Walker, Alice 79, 93, 489–96 biographical details 490–1 By the Light of My Father’s Smile 489 civil rights movement 491–2 The Color Purple 118–19, 489, 490, 493–4 essays 489 female genital mutilation 489, 494–5 hate mail 494 healing stories 495–6 on Hurston 284, 493 I Love Myself When I am Laughing . . . 284 In Love and Trouble 118, 489, 491 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 489, 492, 493 “In the Closet of the Soul” 494 Meridian 118, 489, 491 in Ms. 491 National Book Award 489 Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart 490 oral tradition 490 Possessing the Secret of Joy 489, 494–5 Pulitzer Prize 489 racial politics 492 and Reed 438, 442–3 The Same River Twice 494 sexual politics 492 storytelling 489–90 The Temple of My Familiar 489, 494 The Third Life of Grange Copeland 118, 489, 491, 494 vernacular 490, 493 Warrior Marks 495
Index We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For 489 womanism 114, 492–3 writing and politics 489 Walker, Margaret: Jubilee 119 Wall Street Crash 271, 323 Wallace, David Foster 2, 5 Infinite Jest 57 Wallace, Michele 438 Wallant, Edward Lewis: The Pawnbroker 30 Wallsten, Robert 324 Walters, Anna Lee 192 Walton, Priscilla L. 144, 145 Wang, Wayne 534 war fiction 15, 215 Warhol, Andy 229, 501 Warner, Michael 189 Warren, Nagueyalti 348 Warren, Robert Penn 21, 75, 86, 87, 262, 263 Warshow, Robert 203 Washington, Booker T. 437 W.A.S.P. majority 102, 106 Watson, Jay 306 Waugh, Patricia 530 The Way West 43 Webb, James: Fields of Fire 174–6, 179 Weeks, Edward 329 Weinberger, Eliot 544 Weininger, Otto 235 Sex and Character 234 Weird Tales 201 Weiss, Timothy 264 Welch, James 191 The Death of Jim Loney 192 Fool’s Crow 192 Winter in the Blood 192, 508 Wells, Alan 180–1 Wells, H. G. 117 Wells, Ida B, 109 Welsh, Irving 514 Welty, Eudora 73, 75 The Golden Apples 89 “Place in Fiction” 90–1 “Where is the Voice Coming From?” 91
589
Wertham, Fredric: The Seduction of the Innocent 197–8 Wesley, Valerie Wilson 129 When Death Comes Stealing 130 West, Nathanael 4, 159, 169, 438 A Cool Million 20 The Day of the Locust 20, 33, 516 West, Rebecca: “Opera in Greenville” 91 Western fiction 44–5 demythologized 52 doubleness 41, 45 as epic creation story 37 identity 41 legacies 46 masculinity 38, 39, 41–2 mobility/settlement 39 myth-making 45 short stories 74 transformation 41–2 Wharton, Edith 209–18 “Afterward” 215 The Age of Innocence 4, 209–10, 214, 215, 216, 217 A Backward Glace 211, 213 “Beatrice Palmato” 217 biographical details 209, 211–12 The Book of the Homeless 214 The Buccaneers 210 “Bunner Sisters” 213 The Children 215 critical acclaim 213–14, 217 The Custom of the Country 216 The Decoration of Houses 211, 215 Ethan Frome 210, 211–12 European harmony/U.S. dissonance 215–16 Fighting France 214 films of stories 216 French Ways and their Meaning 214 The Fruit of the Tree 211 and Fullerton 212 “The Fullness of Life” 211 Ghosts 214 The Gods Arrive 217 The House of Mirth 210, 211, 213–14, 215
590 Wharton (cont’d) house and unconscious 215 Hudson River Bracketed 217 In Morocco 214 Italian Backgrounds 214 Italian Villas and their Gardens 214 and James, H. 212–13 “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” 210 “Life & I” 211 “Love-Diary” 212 The Marne 215 The Mother’s Recompense 210 A Motor-Flight through France 214 “Mrs. Manstey’s View” 213 “The Old Maid” 216, 217 Old New York 217 Pulitzer Prize 209, 216 range of work 217 The Reef 210, 212 repression 210, 211 Sanctuary 210 short stories 74 on society 215–16 A Son at the Front 215 “Souls elated” 210 space as text 211 Summer 211, 212, 217 “Terminus” 217 Twilight Sleep 215 The Valley of Decision 212–13 war fiction 215 Whetstone, Diane McKinney 32 White, Edmund 407 White, Evelyn C. 489, 490 White, Walter 109 white community 1, 86, 219, 305 white supremacists 85 Whitfield, Raoul 139 Whitman, Walt 256, 259 Leaves of Grass 375 Why the South Will Survive (Lytle) 84 Whyte, William H.: The Organization Man 128 Wideman, John Edgar 32, 120 A Glance Away 120 Philadelphia Fire 32
Index Wild West Shows 37 Wilder, Billy 140 Wilkins, Mary 211 Willeford, Charles 143 Williams, Charles 141 Williams, John A. 143, 436, 437 The Man who Cried I Am 116 Williams, Raymond 180 Williams, Sherley Anne 347–8 Williams, Tennessee 75 Last Summer 405 Williams, William Carlos Great American Novel 3–4 In the American Grain 17, 20 White Mule 17 Wilson, Edmund 240, 272, 370 Wilson, Robert 229 The Black Rider 393 Wilson, T. Woodrow 256, 406 Winnemucca, Sarah: Life among the Piutes 190 Winogrand, Garry 498 Wirth-Nesher, Hana 104 Wister, Owen “The Evolution of the Cowpuncher” 38 The Virginian 36, 37, 38–9, 41, 43 With Honors 408 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 12, 446 Wobblies: see Industrial Workers of the World Wolfe, Bernard: Limbo 159 Wolfe, Thomas Clayton 93, 261–70 The Bonfire of the Vanities 31 critical acclaim 261, 264 dialogue 262–3 in Germany 267, 268 “The Good Child’s River” 265–6 The Hills Beyond 265 “I Have a Thing to Tell You” 266, 267, 268–9 linked autobiographical fictions 19 Look Homeward, Angel 19, 261–2, 264 Mannerhouse 262 modernist perspective 262 New Journalism 425 O Lost 264
Index Of Time and the River 19, 24–5, 262, 263–4 “Penelope’s Web” 265–6 plays 262 social justice 268–9 The Story of a Novel 263–4, 264–5 The Web and the Rock 19, 24–5, 262, 263–4, 265, 266 Welcome to Our City 262 “The World that Jack Built” 266–7 You Can’t Go Home Again 19, 25, 262, 263–4, 265, 266, 267, 268 womanhood 472–3 womanism 114, 492–3 women writers African American 112–13, 119 crime-writing 143 Gothic genre 68, 69 Jewish American fiction 96, 97 see also specific authors women’s rights convention 132 Woodrell, Daniel 143 Woods, Paula L. Dirty Laundry 131 Inner City Blues 130 Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes 128 Stormy Weather 132–3 Woods, Tim 532–3 Woods, William Crawford: The Killing Zone 172 Woodward, Bob: All the President’s Men 123 Woody, Elizabeth 188 Woolf, Virginia 318, 493, 499 Worker Schools 344 Workers Cultural Federation 343 working-class life 76, 77, 79 Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Cambridge Edition) 273 Works Progress Administration 27, 395–6 World War I 277 World War II 119, 191, 378, 432, 477 Wouk, Herman 96 Wounded Knee Creek massacre 190 Wright, Charles: The Wig 166–7 Wright, John S. 357
591
Wright, Richard 114–16, 342–51 Baldwin on 362 and Bellow 396 “Big Boy Leaves Home” 77, 91, 116 biographical details 342–3 Black Boy 115, 342–3, 348, 349, 357, 358–9 “Bright and Morning Star” 345, 347 in Chicago 343 Communist Party 343–5, 346–7 “Down by the Riverside” 347 Eight Men 116, 347 and Ellison 357–9 existentialism 349–50 father–son relationship 349 female characters 348 feminist criticism 347–8 “Fire and Cloud” 77, 345, 347 Guggenheim Fellowship 345 “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” 345, 347 hunger symbolism 342 Lawd Today 115, 348 “Long Black Song” 77, 348–9 The Long Dream 115, 346, 349 male characters 349 “The Man who Lived Underground” 116 marriages 345 Marxism 347 Native Son 27–8, 115, 345, 347, 348, 349, 358 The Outsider 115, 345, 348, 349–50 patricide in fiction 349 psychoanalytic approach 346 on race 92 relationship with father 342–3 religion 343, 344, 347, 348 Savage Holiday 115, 346 segregation 343 short stories 347 social justice 349 Southern fiction 85 travels 345, 349 Uncle Tom’s Children 116, 344, 345, 347 Wright, Sarah E.: This Child’s Gonna Live 86
592
Index
Wright, School of 30, 116 Wurtzel, Elizabeth 520 Wyllie, Barbara 375 xenophobia
13, 27
Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 68, 69 The Yardbird Reader 436 Yates, Richard 78 Y’Bird 436 Yeats, William Butler 200 Yerkes, James 469 Yezierska, Anzia 97 Bread Givers 25, 98–100 Hungry Hearts 74, 217 Yiddish 16, 162 Yoknapatawpha County (Faulkner) characters in 303 community 75–6, 89, 303 McCaslin family 307–8
relationships 302–3 romanticism 310–11 Sartoris family 307 Snopes clan 303 totality 19 Yoruba culture 440 Young, Al 436 Young, Elizabeth 515 Young, John K. 359 Young, Stark: So Red the Rose 85 Yukins, Elizabeth 349, 356, 357 Zagarell, Sandra A. 81 Zamora, Bernice: Restless Serpents 153 Zapata, Emiliano 327 Zaretsky, Eli 298, 300 Zemliansky, Pavel 437–8 Zinn, Howard 91, 92 Zoot Suit riots 132, 150–1
