Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction
Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction STACEY OLSTER State University of New York at Stony Brook
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE NEW YORK
NEW ROCHELLE
MELBOURNE
SYDNEY
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. c ambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521109802 © Cambridge University Press 1989 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1989 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Olster, Stacey Michele. Reminiscence and re-creation in contemporary American fiction / Stacey Olster. p. cm. Based on the author's thesis (doctoral - University of Michigan). Bibliography: p. ISBN 0-521-36383-7 1. American fiction - 20th century - History and criticism. 2. Historical fiction, American - History and criticism. 3. Political fiction, American — History and criticism. 4. Postmodernism - United States. 5. Memory in literature. I. Title. PS374.H5047 1989 813'.54-dcl9 88-29205 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-36383-9 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-10980-2 paperback Page 215 constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.
For Abraham Jacob Olster, who did not tell me how to spell the words I asked about, but taught me to look them up myself instead
History, the articulated past - all kinds, even our personal histories - is forever being rethought, refelt, rewritten, not merely as rigor or luck turns up new facts but as new patterns emerge, as new understandings develop, and as we experience new needs and new questions. There is no absolute, positive past available to us, no matter how rigorously we strive to determine it - as strive we must. Inevitably, the past, so far as we know it, is an inference, a creation, and this, without being paradoxical, can be said to be its chief value for us. In creating the image of the past, we create ourselves, and without that task of creating the past we might be said scarcely to exist. Without it, we sink to the level of a protoplasmic swarm. - Robert Penn Warren, 'The Use of the Past"
Contents
Preface Key to Abbreviations Introduction
page ix xiii i
1.
A Disruption of Sensibility A Last Millennial Variant A Long-Distance Affair An End to Ideology
13 17 24 31
2.
The Transition to Post-Modernism: Norman Mailer and a New Frontier in Fiction From Liberalism to New Historicism The Process on Display The Process on Record The End of an Era
36 39 45 55 64
Thomas Pynchon: An Interface of History and Science The Puritan Heritage An Entropic Theory of History Mediating Between the Strands
72 74 85 94
3.
4. John Barth: Clio as Kin to Calliope Eden Revisited The Literary Legacy A Nonrevolutionary Novel
106 109 115 125
Vlll
CONTENTS Conclusion: "Subjective Historicism"
137
Notes
153
Bibliography
172
Index
203
Preface
Imagine, if you will, a meeting between Gertrude Stein and Henry Ford at a cocktail party - an unlikely pairing, to be sure, but not an inconceivable one for two people born within eleven years of each other and dying a year apart. The conversation turns to America, specifically American history. Stein responds, as she did in The Making of Americans (1925), with authorial effusiveness: "It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realise our parents, remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete." Ford, concurring, reacts with assembly-line efficiency: "History is bunk." Ford was wrong, of course. Yet no less so was Stein. Assuming a generation to consist of twenty years, and subtracting the three generations of Americans that she cited from the year that her words appeared in print, one afrives at 1865 — shortchanging America of its past by almost ninety years of independence and by over two hundred years of European settlement. The more grievous error in Stein's remarks has little to do with chronology, however. Rather, it concerns the relationship they posit between having a history and having historical consciousness, making the historical sensibility of a nation's people dependent upon their nation's age in years. Viewed with respect to other countries in the world, which is the perspective from which Stein's comments are made, America is a young country, one whose history as a settled land dates back only to the early seventeenth century. But because those first European settlers were who they were, American history was understood by them in relation to a vast scheme of salvation history in which chronological age was largely irrelevant. Therefore, while America itself may not have had much history, either then or now, its inhabitants have had access to a sense of grand historical process from the very beginning. It was in the hopes of interjecting my own voice into those conversations, imagined and actual, that celebrate an antipathy to history that this study was first undertaken. Originating in part in response to my students, it reflects my own awareness that the undergraduates I now teach are a changed group from those I first encountered as a teaching assistant, that those whose historical IX
X
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sensibility (however limited) I could define with reference to the election or assassination of John F. Kennedy have been superseded by an undergraduate population whose average year of birth is closer to 1970. Reflecting as well the sensibility of one who, as an undergraduate herself, was regularly asked to date the last time she read a newspaper (and who, indeed, did not know of Nikita Khrushchev's death until four months after it had occurred), this study derives as much from the thought that the narrowed historical consciousness observed so frequently in students today may not necessarily be unique to current times, but - to this writer, at least - may be symptomatic of a kind of cultural insulation that the halls intended to enhance learning may inadvertently, and ironically, be inducing with respect to the world outside their confines. More than anything else, however, this study emerges from my own belief that literature - like everything else - is not written in a vacuum and, as such, results to a large degree from the impact that both inherited traditions and contemporary conditions have on individual writers. In pursuing an integration of American literature and American history specifically, I am traveling an intellectual road that others have traversed before me. In The Imagined Past (1980), for instance, Alan Holder examines portrayals of American history, mainly Southern history, and American historical figures that twentieth-century writers have recast based upon their own experience of the present. Similarly, in showing how twentieth-century literature continues to redefine perceptual trends set much earlier in time, I also am following a lead that others have previously set - notably Harvey Gross, whose Contrived Corridor (1971) treats modernist literature with respect to Hegel's dialectical historicism and Nietzsche's myth of eternal recurrence, and, more to my purposes, Harry Henderson, whose Versions of the Past (1974) considers American novels with respect to progressive and holistic frameworks, the first devoted to ideas and values that evolve over time, the second to manners and mores that are formed in discrete times. Yet in focusing here on the way that one such inherited constant, namely millennialism, intersects with contemporary variables, most of all the American experience of communism, the work that I have undertaken differs from the work of these earlier critics. Obviously, other long-standing traditions might be, and have been, claimed as guiding forces in the development of American history and American literature - the frontier springs immediately to mind as a prominent example. So, too, might it be claimed that a disillusionment with communism was but one variable that affected the historical imagination of contemporary writers today. I offer neither of these influences as singular or definitive. I offer them instead as providing a vivid illustration of the impact that can be produced when the variables of the present fit so snugly into the perceptual set bequeathed by the past. As should be evident by now, the views of American literature presented here do not distinguish novels written after 1945 from those written earlier with the on-off precision of a light switch. In this deliberate refusal, I am fully in agreement with what Gerald Graff has called "the myth of the postmodern-
PREFACE
XI
ist breakthrough." I also am aware, however, that in choosing to minimize the idea of distinct points of change I may be contributing to the slipperiness of that already slippery term called "post-modernism." Furthermore, because the only kind of disruption that I do consider here is the subjective one experienced by the writers of the novels that I examine, a feeling that I explore with reference to the facts of American sociohistorical conditions, I found it inappropriate to introduce into my discussion the more abstract arguments of recent literary theorists whose terminology would have obscured more than it would have clarified. To do so would have produced another work, not this one. Because the production of this work spanned a long time, and because completion of it was achieved under somewhat arduous circumstances, the debts that I owe professionally are necessarily intertwined with the debts that I owe personally. Some of the names that follow appear more than once because the people who bear them contributed to the final version of this book in more than one way and deserve to be cited for a variety of services rendered. James Gindin supervised the initial version of this study when it was first conceived as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan; directive without being dictatorial, he gave me enough freedom to make my own mistakes and enough guidance to correct them when necessary. Robert Weisbuch encouraged me, wisely and despite my own resistance, to turn that original study of contemporary literature into a piece of scholarship that was Americanist in its thrust. In adding that Americanist dimension to the work, Susan K. Harris, Ned Landsman, Ruth Miller, Nancy Tomes, and Barbara Weinstein kept me from going too far astray by checking my fledgling reading of earlier American texts against their own literary and historical expertise. Rose Zimbardo read every word of the completed manuscript - at her own request - and, in combining a critic's scrutiny with a colleague's solicitude, proved as ideal a reader as one might wish. Whatever merits this study now has reflect the advice that I received from these people; the flaws that remain are attributable to myself alone. The actual writing of the manuscript was facilitated by a number of people who were generous enough to let me stay in their vacated apartments over successive summers; in thus providing me with more space in which to work, Rose Zimbardo, Martin Stevens, Joseph Pequigney, Steven Mays, William J. Harris, and Susan K. Harris also contributed to a greater degree of sanity than would have been available to me in my own Long Island lodgings (as did Tom Maresca and Diane Darrow by feeding me - in great abundance - during those summer stays). Preparation of the typescript was aided by two State University of New York research grants. In teaching me how to use the personal computer that one of these grants afforded me, I am especially grateful to William Dawes, particularly for his patience in dealing with someone like myself who experiences fear and trepidation at thoughts of inserting plugs into electric sockets. Sheryl Fontaine, Richard Boyd, Patricia Roos, and Nancy
Xll
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Tomes all proofread the final version of the manuscript for the minuscule reward of one cooked meal. Marlon Ross, Lynn Thiesmeyer, and Michio Umegaki calmed numerous prepublication anxieties. My mother, Adeline Meister, and my sister, Deborah Olster, survived both me and the inevitable mess that followed in my wake with remarkable aplomb. Most of all, Elizabeth Maguire, Alex Geisinger, Eugene Goodheart, and the readers for Cambridge University Press supported the project from start to finish, despite expected and unexpected obstacles. To them I owe not just my thanks, but the fact of my continued employment. As I stated at the outset, my debts to these people are as much personal as they are professional, for each one extended himself or herself well beyond the duties exacted by formal obligations. The final debt that must be cited, however, is the one that I owe those people whose care and concern, in different and often overlapping ways, kept me going through the daily ordeal of committing words to paper. This book is dedicated to the person who taught me to do things for myself, but if a second dedication were possible, it would acknowledge Barbara Kos, Nancy Tomes, and Rose Zimbardo as those people who showed me how I could accept the help of others. Port Jefferson, New York
Key to Abbreviations
Norman Mailer ND BS DP AM PP AD CC WV AN MSG FM PS EE SG Pont.
The Naked and the Dead Barbary Shore The Deer Park Advertisements for Myself The Presidential Papers An American Dream Cannibals and Christians Why Are We in Vietnam? The Armies of the Night Miami and the Siege of Chicago Of a Fire on the Moon The Prisoner of Sex Existential Errands St. George and the Godfather Pontijications
Thomas Pynchon V. L GR
V. The Crying of Lot 49 Gravity's Rainbow
John Barth FO ER SWF GB
The Floating Opera The End of the Road The Sot-Weed Factor Giles Goat-Boy
XIV
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS LF C LET. FB
Lost in the Funhouse Chimera LETTERS The Friday Book
Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction
Introduction
After all, history is never literal. If it were, it would have no pattern at all, we'd all be lost. - Richard Nixon in The Public Burning (1977) At one point in The Public Burning, Robert Coover's "Historical Romance," a man exits from a theater into the Times Square area where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are to be executed.1 He takes in the scene before him. "People are carrying signs that his right eye tells him read SAVE THE ROSENBERGS! and HEIL EISENHOWER!, his left BOMB CHINA NOW! and ETHEL ROSENBERG BEWITCHED MY BABY! He is no longer surprised by these ocular reversals, in fact he is very clear-headed, which is the main cause of his panic. It strikes him that he is perhaps the only sane man left on the face of the earth" (356). If he is, he has more cause to panic than he knows - the reason he sees things as he does is because he has neglected to remove his 3-D glasses upon leaving the movie. If what he sees through those lenses passes for sanity, how much more insane must the unrefracted world be. Most authors today would find Coover's scene a paradigmatic expression of what contemporary life is like. Most also would find Coover's scene paradigmatic of what contemporary American life is like, the double vision of its unnamed man an apt representation of a country whose schizophrenia finally has come to the surface. It is when critics evaluate such scenes that problems arise. Some contend that an environment of disorder invalidates any order proposed in art. "If the world is absurd," claims Jerome Klinkowitz, "if what passes for reality is distressingly unreal, why spend time representing it? Physical, social, and political conditions may be a mess, and to view them from one perspective, imposing a rational order, is an aesthetic mess. . . . " Others point to these conditions to separate modernist from post-modernist thought. William Johnsen, for instance, finds that "Contemporaries reject Modernist use of metaphor, history, and myth to support a totalitarian obsession with order, by embracing the freedom of disorder." Ihab Hassan declares that "it is already possible to note that whereas Modernism created its own forms of
2
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Authority, precisely because the center no longer held, Postmodernism has tended toward Anarchy, in deeper complicity with things falling apart."2 Yet in their haste to legitimize post-modernism as a movement unto itself, critics are too quick to sever the ties it has with its artistic antecedents. Indeed, it seems as though it is not so much the post-modern artist who proclaims the irrelevance of the old, but the critic of post-modern art. I would argue the contrary position. For American novelists today, a chaotic environment provokes not unrestrained reveling but sheer terror, and, much like their modernist predecessors, they combat that terror by constructing systems of order within the confines of their works. More to the point, I would argue that these novelists construct particular kinds of ordered systems within the confines of their works - namely, systems of historical process in which the relationship between past, present, and future may be understood with respect to an overarching temporal scheme. Individually, each of the writers with whom I am most concerned - Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and, to a lesser extent, E. L. Doctorow and Robert Coover - depicts that scheme in terms of his own distinctive metaphor. Collectively, they emerge with constructions of similar traits - serial models of history, shaped like openended spirals, in which the past is reenacted but not repeated, and nonapocalyptic novels that assert that knowledge of the past can help to determine an as yet unwritten future. Far from being "totalitarian" in their impulses, however, these novelists remain acutely aware of the arbitrary and idiosyncratic nature of the historical schemes they propose. Much like the makers of 3-D movies whose cinematic perspective was available only when viewers wore polaroid lenses within darkened theaters, novelists today affirm the validity of their historical perspectives only when readers are actively engaged within the artifice of their texts. But much like those other movie magicians of the 1950s, the makers of Cinerama, once they have secured that engagement, post-modern writers present a view of historical process that is truly panoramic in scope. Ours is not the first time that American writers have offered panoramic visions of history. Earlier writers often directed their works to the propagation of millennial design and portrayed American history in accordance with whatever variant most suited their time - the Puritans with respect to a religious scheme that stretched from the Fall of Man to the establishment of New Heavens and Earth, the later Yankees with respect to a secularized Manifest Destiny that spread democracy from sea to shining sea. Nor is this the first time that American writers have acknowledged that the personality that informs a work of art also informs the view of history it contains. Emerson went so far as to replace the term "history" with "biography." Yet earlier writers did not expect that their own subjectivity could distort the historical schemes they presented or act as an obstacle to belief in them. Until the nineteenth century, faith in an ordered universe promoted faith in the millennial promise. Individual facts or events were subsumed within a priori systems of belief. Individual personalities were made subservient to the corroboration of objective evidence, notably that of Scripture and Newtonian science. Inheriting this Chris-
INTRODUCTION
3
tian millennial view of the universe, but celebrating the self that perceived its workings, the Transcendentalists displayed their historical consciousness with equal certainty because "the procession of facts" that made up their history derived from "an invisible, unsounded centre" in each that Emerson had elevated to godhead.3 Because all those separate centers united in one eternal Over-Soul, all perceptual differences among them conflated into one collective vision. By presuming a universe in disorder, however, novelists today acknowledge that any historical theory that recounts its workings is a subjective ordering of experience, "a provider of significance to mere chronicity," as Frank Kermode has observed (Sense of an Ending 56). Moreover, because individual consciousness alone invests events with significance, they realize that any projected design is subject to the limitations and frailties of its designer. Introducing their works as the imaginative offspring of their characters, as they often do, post-modern novelists demand that readers view the theories advanced within them as reflections of individualized - and often disturbed - consciousness. For example, The Book of Daniel is presented as the dissertation of Doctorow's graduate student, Book Two of The Armies of the Night is composed by Mailer's egotist of Book One, and the whole of Gravity's Rainbow may derive from the mind of Pirate Prentice, Pynchon's fantasist-surrogate. Furthermore, by presenting their works as though they are in the process of being composed, these writers expand their focus from the presentation of theories of history to include the process whereby such theories are formed. In structure, the novels most resemble those older ones of Southerners that show the searching as well as the synthesis. One recalls, for instance, Quentin Compson's piecing together the story of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! to conclude with a historical pattern that is seen as a set of rippling pools, or Jack Burden's researching the lives of Cass Mastern and Judge Irwin as he tells the tale of Willie Stark in All the King's Men and arrives at a "theory of historical costs" and a "theory of the moral neutrality of history" (393-4). In spirit, the novels spring from the well of Henry Adams, who investigated his own past in order to formulate a "larger synthesis" for the events he studied and proposed "A Dynamic Theory of History" as a way for man "to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed" (Education 472). "Standard formulas" for an idea of history fail for a number of reasons, but they do not always lead to the formation of alternative formulas to take their places. For one thing, the standard historical formula in America has shown an amazing resilience. Nineteenth-century novelists had grave misgivings about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century millennialism, but the most they could do was invert millennial premises in their work, as seen in Melville's juxtaposition of the Second Coming with the coming of The Confidence-Man and Hawthorne's reissuing of past evils at the end of "Earth's Holocaust." Even simple inversion could not be sustained for very long. Melville followed the revelation of The Confidence-Man with the redemption of Billy Budd. Haw-
4
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thorne switched from devolution and democratizing in The House of the Seven Gables to an ending that celebrates Edenic renewal and enrichment. For another thing, the reexamination of the past that facilitates historical theorizing always has been tempered by attitudes toward the past that millennialism fostered, to a perspective wherein the past gained value "only in order to the future," as Henry James, Sr., said, and the future was envisioned as a restoration of Eden. Therefore, although critics of American culture may be extreme in condemning an American antipathy to the past, their charges do have a certain validity given the relative positions of value that the past and the future have been ascribed.4 "You can't repeat the past," Nick Carraway warns. "Why of course you can!" replies Jay Gatsby. Yet why should Gatsby take all the rap for an Adamic dismissal of history when his urge to forget the past is emblematic rather than exemplary? And why should Nick presume to censure when his own return to the Midwest displays the same selective amnesia? Therein lies the paradox at the heart of American historicism, a paradox inherent in our very use of the word "history." Defined as a vision of temporal process, history denotes an inherited perceptual set, an idea of history that acts as a bulwark against the abyss of metaphysical chaos. Defined as what happened in the past, history denotes what that idea of history consigns to secondary status as one of its basic tenets. American writers carry a sense of both meanings simply by virtue of having an American consciousness. They also suffer from the tension that these paradoxical meanings generate. They may abjure the past and affirm the idea, they may denounce the idea and defend the past - they may even, as in the post-modern period, deliberately play upon contradictions inherent within both - but they still carry as part of their cultural luggage a particular idea of history within which the past has a place, however insignificant. Formulated by seventeenth-century Puritans, secularized by Enlightenment democrats, rarefied by nineteenth-century Transcendentalists, and glorified by twentieth-century communists into a plan for collective global salvation, the millennial idea of history has persisted over time in one guise or another. Even when it finally shattered after that last god failed, and alternative ideas of history emerged from the ruins of the explosion, so too did remnants of the ancient and durable American idea of history. Postmodernists, using different strategies of composition and refracted angles of perspective from those of their artistic forebears, nevertheless are grappling with the same tradition, unbroken though not unbent, with which their predecessors wrestled. Starting in the 1940s and snowballing in the 1950s, the process of reconstruction began as authors followed their rejections of millennialism with searches for new historical designs. Announcing in his "Prologue" that the world moves like a boomerang instead of an arrow, Ralph Ellison presented the narrative of Invisible Man as an attempt to give pattern "to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties" (502). At the same time, and within these same attempts at pattern, authors also began renouncing those tendencies that millennialism had encouraged. Efforts at Edenic renewal fail for most of their
INTRODUCTION
5
characters. Bellow's Augie March learns that a life of simplicity is only to be found in one who, like his brother George, is born simple. Assertions of innocence prove fraudulent. Joe Morgan writes his dissertation on the saving roles of innocence and energy in American history, and The End of the Road concludes with the disastrous consequences of assuming such a stance - the death of his wife during a botched abortion.5 Most of all, attempts to discard the past backfire with a vengeance, as Richard Wright's Outsider discovers when the family he deserts in Chicago reappears in New York to help condemn him for murder. Rather than looking at the past as disposable, novelists began to portray its continuity in the future and to commend the service it lent within "that airless no-man's-land of the perpetual present" that Norman Mailer described (PP 96). No longer did writers depict characters who sought to "light out for the Territory" or retreat for "moral attention" at the ends of their works. Recognizing that actions have consequences, writers concluded by showing their characters making efforts to assume responsibility, whether the kind of social responsibility that inspires the Invisible Man to come up from underground or the kind of personal responsibility that makes John Laskell pay for one child's funeral in The Middle of the Journey and John Yossarian commit himself to another's safety in Catch-22. In accounting for shifts in historical perspective, critics like to single out the impact of particular overwhelming events, working on the assumption that great events alone produce great changes in consciousness.6 But the 1950s, sandwiched between two especially explosive decades, was a relatively placid period that still produced the origins of that radical redirection of sensibility that we call post-modernism. In fact, when we take a long look back at the American literary tradition and try to trace the changes in historical consciousness that authors evinced in the past, we find that claiming influential events as catalysts of change proves untrustworthy even as a general rule of thumb. Different writers did not always respond in the same way to the same event; what caused one to doubt history allowed another to take heart from it. The conflict that forced Faulkner to question "why God let us lose the War" confirmed for Henry James, Sr., "how the Lord rules confused and disorderly things which are upon the surface, namely, by virtue of a pacific principle in the depths or at the centre."7 Conversely, different writers did not always return to historical thinking led by the impact of discrete historical events. Henry Adams cited the year 1900 as a turning point when he explained his own meditations on history, but he admitted that any number of other years could have served equally well to pinpoint the moment when he felt continuity snapped. It is here, in this sense of shattered sensibility, that the crux of the matter lies, for it has been a shared feeling of historical disruption that lay behind the attempts of earlier American writers to reimagine the movements of time, regardless of whether those feelings were attributable to any particular events. World War I, for instance, did not force Americans to rethink their ideas about history because it did not affect their sensibilities as cataclysmically as it did those of Europeans.8 That it took the Civil War to awaken Faulkner whereas
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the experience of living in a "Nunc Age" spurred Adams is beside the point. What is important is the uniformity of response that historical trauma evoked. The psychological mechanisms are almost identical for all writers at all times: reminiscence and re-creation, a return to the past for study and a reformulation of historical processes as a consequence. Artists, critics, and intellectuals of all sorts confirmed that a feeling of trauma already had overcome American writers by the 1950s. They often vied with each other to determine just when "the bad dream from which we cannot awaken, the bad d)ream of history" began.9 Whatever differences they may have had in dating its origins, though, writers agreed in assessing the aftermath of such a nightmare. "Our Country and Our Culture," a 1952 symposium published by Partisan Review (19.3-5 [1952]), revealed a mood of emotional impasse, characterized by an inability to find viable alternatives, adjustment without affirmation, and a reconciliation to lesser evils. Writers also agreed that the literature produced in such a climate was equally bleak. Almost every commentator focused on the word "conformity" in his indictment, and almost every one ascribed blame to a different cause: the rise of mass society, the unreality of daily events, the debilitating effect of valuelessness, and the paralyzing effect of new technology.10 Re-creating the 1950s nearly thirty years later, I trace the climate of historical and literary impasse that prevailed in that decade to political disillusionment, specifically disillusionment with communism, which many American writers had experienced earlier. To be sure, political disillusionment was not new; given the splintering of concerns that characterized - and often undermined - dissent in America for generations, a veritable tradition of political failure existed. Yet engagement with organized dissent was new for American writers who traditionally viewed such movements with skepticism. Emerson, for example, saw the "New England Reformers" as "partial," "not equal to the work they pretend" (454); radicalism in "Politics" he found "destructive and aimless" (428). Hawthorne left Brook Farm after less than a year. Communism, however, was more than a political ideology. As defined by Marx and Engels it was a philosophy of history, and as it was popularized in America it proved to be close to the philosophy that had shaped our own ideas. In its view of history evolving toward a Utopian classless society that would be preceded by an apocalyptic revolution, communism was millennialism all over again, dressed in a new set of terms, and commanding the same kind of belief and emotional commitment from its adherents. Most American writers, of course, did not join the Communist Party indeed, most had a limited knowledge of both theoretical Marxism and its practical application in Russia. Yet for those liberals whose defining trait was an "impassioned longing to believe," as Lionel Trilling recognized, this latest redemptive variant tapped a reservoir of unfulfilled longings (Introduction, Middle of the Journey xviii). Having founded their faith in Enlightenment values like equality, reason, and, perhaps most of all, the notion of progress over time, liberals before the twentieth century had looked to the promises of mil-
INTRODUCTION
7
lennialism and, somewhat later, of socialism for guarantees. But after a century of millennialist doubt, the horror of a world war, and the demise of the Socialist movement after 1919, twentieth-century liberals were left with a longing to believe but not much to believe in. A communism promoted as "twentiethcentury Americanism" was a particularly suitable repository of faith. As the Bolshevik Revolution seemed to confirm the Marxist promise, their beliefs were bolstered by facts. And with changes in United States foreign policy, like its 1933 recognition of Soviet Russia, and shifts in the Communist Party line, like its 1935 Popular Front, their loyalties could remain undivided. The point at which writers finally realized that events in Soviet Russia could no longer be accommodated within a humanistic tradition came to different people at different times - the 1936-38 Moscow trials for some, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact for others. It was not until the 1950s, though, that the impact of their sense of betrayal became fully realized, and after the facts about Yalta, China, and Southeast Asia had compounded its effect. Defined by the conviction of Alger Hiss at one end and Khrushchev's report to the Soviet Party Congress at the other, the decade's disillusionment was characterized by Daniel Bell as an "end of ideology," an accurate term, but one that is limiting with regard to American writers in that an end to ideology does not suggest the severity of loss that is felt when an "end to belief" occurs. Much closer to capturing the feeling that overcame writers is a 1952 short story by Norman Mailer entitled "The Man Who Studied Yoga." Recounting the exploits of its title character, who never enters into the piece directly, the story describes a man who has been involved with every major movement of the twentieth century: serving in France with Dos Passos and even arrested with e. e. in World War I, helping to found Dada in the postwar period, studying Marx in the 1930s and becoming, in turn, a communist and then a Trotskyist and then an anarchist and, finally, a pacifist during World War II. At the same time, in compiling this history of Cassius O'Shaugnessy, Mailer also compiled a listing of every failed impulse in the history of the twentieth century - millennial, political, and artistic alike - a listing capped off by the character's most recent escapade. Seeking to unscrew the navel he has rediscovered while meditating in India, he begins propitiously enough: "My navel had begun to unscrew. I knew I was about to accept the reward of three years of contemplation. So," said Cassius, "I turned again, and my navel unscrewed a little more. I turned and I turned, . . . and after a period I knew that with one more turn my navel would unscrew itself forever. At the edge of revelation, I took one sweet breath, and turned my navel free."
Only to uncover the state in which an accumulation of betrayals has left him: "Damn," said Cassius, "if my ass didn't fall off." (AM 161) Not every novelist who now conceives of a design for history would claim political betrayal as the direct source of his concern. For those whose birth
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dates cluster around the 1925-35 period, differences in age did produce differences in experience. Mailer, born in 1923, is old enough to have joined the Progressive Citizens of America, worked on Henry Wallace's presidential campaign, and renounced both later, saying that Russia's system of government was as debased as that of the United States. Pynchon, born in 1937 and describing himself as an "unpolitical '50s student," is too young to have received Mailer's kind of education at first hand (SL xv). Yet writers who began working or coming to maturity during the 1950s responded much like Mailer to a world that the most recent failure of a millennial variant had exposed as without plan, no matter what the extent of their past political involvement. What Mailer found to be characterized by "Dread," Pynchon found "saturated with anxiety." What Heller called "a state of progressive decay," Barth called the "tragic view of life."11 It is no wonder that the early works that emerged from this period presented a vast cast of characters who begin their literary lives as orphans or amnesiacs, as paralyzed or impotent, as affected by every combination of disability. With the irreversibility of time and the inevitability of death as their only certainties, from what could their authors draw strength? Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, novelists could not fall back upon religion when they needed to find a new ordering principle behind history. The God whom, at best, Mailer saw as embattled, Heller judged an "uncouth hayseed."12 Nor could they seek support from analogical disciplines. The laws of physics from whose constancy Whitman deduced the immutability of justice already had succumbed to Eddington's expanding universe. If writers wished for an ordering principle behind history, they had to construct it for themselves. And to do so they returned to the past to investigate, sometimes a past as recent as 1976 in Utah, sometimes a past as distant as the 1690s in Maryland, often a past as traumatic as the present through which they had lived, as in John Barth's locating Giles Goat-Boy during an allegorized Cold War, Thomas Pynchon's setting the greatest portion of Gravity's Rainbow "In the Zone" as World War II is ending, and both Robert Coover and E. L. Doctorow returning to the Rosenberg trial as a source. None of the works these authors write could be called a historical novel, if by that one means a piece of fiction that re-creates a discrete period of time in the interests of authenticity. Certainly, attention to detail runs high - Gravity's Rainbow, for instance, provides a compendium of prewar British candies, from wine jellies and Marmalade Surprises to gin marshmallows and Meggezone coughdrops. Documentary material abounds - transcripts from the Rosenberg trial in The Public Burning, newspaper clippings throughout The Executioner's Song, even footnoted references in Sabbatical. Nevertheless, in keeping with their authors' concern with historical process, fidelity to any one period is less important than the fluidity between many periods. Thus, the periods to which writers return lose their temporal particularity and expand outward in time and space. Set in 1956 New York, Pynchon's V. radiates historically to take in 1899 Florence, 1922 Africa, 1913 Paris, and 1919 Malta. In much the same way, the events on which writers focus imply much about those on which
INTRODUCTION
9
they stay silent. When it is recalled, in LETTERS, that in its own time the War of 1812 was known as the "Second American Revolution," that war of 1812 looks back to the war of 1776 and forward to the bicentennial of 1976. By imagining schemes that connect these periods to each other, and link event to event, writers offer works that are much closer to philosophies of history than they are to historical novels. Because each portrays his own philosophy in terms of his own recurrent metaphor, writers also present consistent and identifiable visions of historical movements. If Mailer's works are distinguished by the image of an advancing frontier, Doctorow's are distinguished by a succession of revolutionary engagements. If Pynchon portrays history in terms of principles of quantum physics, Barth presents history in terms of principles for literary composition. Deducing a distinctive sensibility from these perspectives is by nature a comparative endeavor. By discussing communism as a millennial view of history in Chapter 1, I establish the connection it bears to the ordered view of history that underlies the American consciousness of time. In so doing, I also examine why the failure of this last millennial variant in the twentieth century led writers, first, to renounce millennialism once and for all and, then, to redesign historical processes of their own. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on the processes conceived by representative authors who, as a group, define both "Americanism" and "post-modernism" today. For these purposes, I have selected Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth - Mailer because his own shift from liberalism to historicism mirrors the shift in sensibility that many authors underwent in the 1950s; Pynchon because his Puritan ancestry makes him heir to the most American, and the most ordered, of historical traditions at the same time that his knowledge of physics makes him privy to the most random disorder of contemporary conditions; and Barth because his interest in literary history in particular has caused him to search, as much as any American writer has, for a definition of what post-modern art should be. "Subjective historicism" is the name with which I denote the shared perspective of these authors. Extrapolating from the views of these three writers to the views of other novelists in my conclusion, I define the distinguishing characteristics of their sensibility. In the case of each writer, the concern for historical order originates in a predilection for structure itself. Sometimes, they acknowledge their inclinations publicly, Mailer admitting a "fondness for order," Barth confessing to being an "unreconstructed formalist," Coover recalling an early "commitment to design."13 At other times, they express their sympathies indirectly, by revealing the terror in which an absence of structure leaves their characters - like the Argentines in Gravity's Rainbow who are obsessed with building labyrinths because they cannot abide open spaces, or Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 who is obsessed with a Tristero conspiracy because she cannot cope with unrelated clues. Yet these authors also recognize that the structures with which people order time specifically are imaginative constructs that provide only the illusion of order. Never do they trust chronicles that presume to order, or even recapture, events on paper — be they the
10
REMINISCENCE AND RE-CREATION
Time magazine piece in The Armies of the Night or the Historie(s) ofJohn Smith in The Sot-Weed Factor. Nor do they completely authorize their own historical schemes. If Oedipa Maas reflects the artist in her question, "Shall I project a world?" (59), the cautionary response that is given her desire to systematize is one that artists maintain in relation to the theories of history that they fashion. They realize that, ultimately, no order advanced in art finds a correlative outside of it. Entropy is always on the increase in Thomas Pynchon's world. With these provisions in mind, writers portray history in terms of various spiraling processes, all of which adhere to certain uniform tenets. First, time is never static. Second, the past is not repeatable - no matter how much characters think about reversible or duplicable phenomena, whether Pynchon's World War II bombs or Doctorow's turn-of-the-century films. Third, history does not move in more than one direction - and this despite the displacements of chronology that the forms of the novels show. As Barth writes, "You can 'not go gently to that last goodnight,' or you can go gently: Either way you go, and it is goodnight" (FB 52). Nevertheless, history does continue to resonate so that the present grows out of the past and the past evolves into the present. Mailer can answer the question Why Are We in Vietnam? without mentioning Vietnam at all; from Anopopei to Alaska to Asia, history remains an ongoing conflict between the forces of civilization and the forces of savagery, with escalation the major difference. Coover can portray the Rosenberg trial as a spectacular Public Burning because its passion play of communists and capitalists recasts a drama played by Sons of Darkness and Children of Light for centuries, under the continued direction of Uncle Sam himself. To the extent that contemporary authors imagine temporal processes as spiraling, they renew a prominent image of American historical thought that has existed since the time of the Puritans. To the extent, however, that authors now depict that spiral as having no end and endow its movement with ambiguous connotations, they define a post-modern perspective that departs radically from the apocalyptic variants that prevailed for three hundred years. Concurrently, they renounce the comforts that "fictions of the End," as Kermode called them, once afforded: the certainty of ordained promises, the confidence of communal beliefs, and the assurance that present mayhem is transformable into future manna — perhaps most of all, the assurance that the end of the world will be followed by a restoration of Eden. For writers today to envision the end of an epoch would also be to assume that a beginning has preceded it and, more important, that the movement from one to the other can be explained in some causal, if not predetermined, way. Yet to assume this much is also to presume a logic that no longer operates in a world they know is governed by chance and accident. In Gravity's Rainbow, for instance, Slothrop's sexual exploits do not determine where bombs will fall on London; the map of his scores only happens to coincide with the map of German ones. Furthermore, because the sense of historical trauma that informs their sensibility often arose from faith in a communist "End" that
INTRODUCTION
II
never came - or, if it did, came in an unexpected collapse - American writers already know how disastrous subordinating, if not sacrificing, the present to the future can become. They thus renounce apocalyptic theories of history. For one thing, they doubt the arrival of the apocalypse. In Coover's The Origin of the Brunists, the end of the world is delayed from 8 March to 21 March to 8 April to 19 April to 8 June to a year into the future to seven or fourteen years into the future. And even if that moment of transformation should ever come, American writers question what will issue from it. The world explodes at the end of Mailer's "The Last Night," but the fate of the spaceship for which it is destroyed remains unknown. The impulse of post-modernists, then, is not to assuage our fears with reminders of ordered endings. They deliberately leave the conclusions of their works open. Because of these unresolved endings, the spirals that writers envision open into serial models of history. To be sure, all prospects are potentially frightening. When Oedipa Maas accepts her place in an "excluded middle," she admits that the state is "bad shit" and to be avoided - and with good reason when the subject she describes is American history specifically (L 136). With no set goal toward which its history moves, the country's future can eventuate in any number of unforeseen, and undesirable, circumstances: a totalitarian regime for Mailer, a society of Disneyland automatons for Doctorow. Yet by depicting its history moving toward a future of uncast shape, writers ascribe a human role in determining that shape. As Robert Penn Warren understood, "History is blind, but man is not."14 Nor is man helpless, for he has the experience of the past to guide him. Not that he has much choice, of course. Like the chambered nautilus that Barth often cites, which literally carries the past on its back as its shell expands outward with time, Americans in the twentieth century inherit three hundred years of history whether they choose to admit it or not. Millennialists would see that baggage as a burden. Post-modernists see it as an aid, a "Personal Flotation Device," as Barth describes the nautilus's spiraled shell, "not a dead weight carrying him under" (FB 170). Indeed, within the fictional worlds of their novels, the support of the past is the key to survival. Barth's navigators in Sabbatical chart their course upon its basis, "estimating our position by plotting our track; deciding] where to go by determining where we are by reviewing where we've been," and sail through meteorological and matrimonial storms with relative success (254). Pynchon's Tyrone Slothrop, in contrast, cuts himself off from his Puritan roots and is swamped by rough currents, drowning in "Regions of Indeterminacy" at the end of Gravity's Rainbow (830). In much the same way, post-modernists see the literary past as providing a fortifying service. Feeling none of the modernists' urgency to "make it new," they consciously fashion their works from the themes, forms, and characters of earlier literature whenever it is relevant to their vision to do so. Pynchon resurrects Oedpus Rex as a model for Oedipa Maas. Barth reclaims a 1708 poem as the source for a i960 novel, which itself recasts the form of English
12
REMINISCENCE AND RE-CREATION
picaresque fiction. Perhaps nowhere is their aesthetics more eloquently stated than in the dedication to Miguel Cervantes that introduces Coover's "Seven Exemplary Fictions": You teach us, Maestro, by example, that great narratives remain meaningful through time as a language-medium between generations, as a weapon against the fringe-areas of our consciousness, and as a mythic reinforcement of our tenuous grip on reality. The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader (lector amantisimo!) to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation. And it is above all to the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I, barber's basin on my head, address these stories. (Pricksongs 78-9) Reminiscence and re-creation address exactly the same impulse, implying that the spiral that describes the course of temporal movements in general describes the course of literary movements in particular. The only difference is in the responses that a survey of each course evokes. After looking at the evidence that centuries of time have left behind, it becomes difficult to assess their course as "progressive" or "regressive" - certainly with regard to American history, which writers so often see as regressing from the start. After looking over the evidence that centuries of writers have bequeathed, the situation proves more hopeful. With the past a well-stocked storehouse of literature to be reclaimed, as well as replenished, no longer must writers mourn the death of any art form or feel constrained by propagandistic dictums. And far from writing a literature of exhaustion, they are free to compose a literature of endless possibility.
Chapter i A Disruption of Sensibility
"For my part," I continued, beneficently seeking to overshadow her with my own sombre humor, "my past life has been a tiresome one enough; yet I would rather look backward ten times than forward once. For, little as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing, that the good we aim at will not be attained. People never do get just the good they seek. If it come at all, it is something else, which they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) Only in 1900, the continuity snapped. — Henry Adams, "The Grammar of Science" (1906) When Henry Adams cited the year 1900 as bringing an end to continuity, he recognized that the year he found pivotal to a nineteenth-century mind was but the latest of such points to leave behind a "historical neck broken" (Education 382). As if to prove his own awareness further, he preceded his mention of 1900 with the mention of other climactic points in time - the year 310 with the fall of the Roman Empire, "towards 1500" after the discovery of the West, "about 1600" with the revelations of Bacon and Galileo (383, 457). Yet in admitting these earlier years as approximations, Adams also recognized that denoting historical cataclysms by specific dates and thunderclap events was merely a matter of convenience. He followed his choice of 1900 with a set of landmarks that had served others equally well in portraying sentiments akin to his own - 1893 and Roentgen's x-rays, 1898 and the discovery of radium, 1904 and the announcement of Arthur Balfour that "the human race without exception had lived and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the century" (457). In so doing, Adams made historical cataclysm a function of consciousness rather than chronology, defined less by objective and more by subjective criteria, less by events themselves and more by the effects they had on the human imagination, effects he gauged in terms of changes in "the motion of thought" (457). Comparing the "motion of thought" to the movement of a cannonball, 13
14
REMINISCENCE AND RE-CREATION
Adams distinguished between two kinds of changes the "motion of thought" could undergo in response to a feeling of historical disruption. One he depicted as a swerve in direction and illustrated by the shift from pagan to Christian belief at the beginning of the fourth century and the later shift from Christian to scientific belief at the beginning of the seventeenth. The other he saw as a stoppage of all movement and illustrated by his own response to the "Nunc Age" in which he found himself entrapped at the turn of the twentieth century. Adams also distinguished between the aftermaths such different feelings of disruption yielded. Reflecting a present perceived as radically different from the past and therefore calling for a redirection of energies, the first eventuated in a flurry of activity and a sense of the past as irrelevant. Reflecting a present felt to be unbearable, having brought an end to history itself, the second produced a cessation of activity and a retreat to the past for sanctuary. Feeling that in 1900 the continuity snapped, Adams himself lapsed into "jutilitarian" silence (359). During the twentieth century, many American writers underwent both of the kinds of changes that Adams posited. Each resulted from the way their experience with communism affected their imagination, and each, in turn, affected the way they subsequently portrayed history in their work. The first drew its inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution, cited by John Reed in 1919 as "one of the great events of human history," and mythologized by Norman Mailer as late as 1951 as "the greatest event in man's history." Stimulated by what they perceived as present Bolshevik successes, and awaiting the imminent arrival of the future Utopia, American writers in mid-century viewed the past as at an end, but not history itself. On the contrary, as portrayed by John Dos Passos, they looked at each day as "the first morning of the first day of the first year."1 With a Depression-ridden America making it increasingly impossible to find that future realized at home, American writers looked for it more and more overseas. Writing in 1932, then, Dos Passos suggested the feelings about tomorrow that Americans entertained most strongly in the 1930s, the decade in which their communist romance grew most passionate, as evidenced in the fifty-two "intellectual workers" who attached their names to Culture and the Crisis, declared the union of their "class of brain workers" with the " 'lower classes,' the muscle workers" - "our true comrades" - and, in supporting Foster and Ford, aligned themselves "with the frankly revolutionary Communist Party" (3). Twenty years later, however, the cries of American writers held little evidence of what tomorrow might bring - mainly because they had little faith that tomorrow would come at all. Illustrating the second kind of disruption that Adams described, the cries of the 1950s were cries of historical impasse, shared by novelists, critics, and intellectuals of all sorts. "The 'modern' world of which Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos were the most penetrating interpreters, the world of the 20's and 30's . . . , froze to death in 1948," pronounced Norman Podhoretz in 1954 with stentorian reverberation. Eric Goldman fixed the date at 1949 to correspond with the communist conquest of
A DISRUPTION OF SENSIBILITY
15
China, the announcement of the Soviet atom bomb, and the trial of Alger Hiss. Even from abroad, C. P. Snow commented that "the Western societies are behaving as though they had reached an end-state of history."2 More important, these cries of despair reflected the literary output in the 1950s. If the early Bolshevik triumphs left writers with a heady sense of productivity, their awakening to Stalin's later outrages left them devastated and unable to produce much work at all.3 That communism in the twentieth century should have attracted a following among reform-minded Americans is not particularly surprising. A look backward in time shows America to have played host to movements of dissent for years. The 1840s, for example, saw the growth of social reformism, concerned with everything from alcohol to abolition. More to the point, America had experienced movements of economic dissent opposed to the amassing of capital as far back as Jefferson's battles with Hamilton or Andrew Jackson's fight against monopoly in national banking. But that American writers in the twentieth century were so strongly attracted to communism that their experience with it should produce an Adamsian disruption of sensibility is unusual and suggests a degree of involvement decidedly uncharacteristic of American authors. Although American writers have always been aware of the need for reform and have been partial to those reformist ideals they deemed part of their liberal heritage, their peculiar position with respect to American society made them shy away from outright commitment to organized protest in the past. In part, their resistance sprang from a reluctance to involve themselves in any extraliterary pursuits. As Hawthorne well knew, three years in the Custom House had made him a "tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs," but had put a halt to his creation of "tolerably poor tales and essays." Public speaking appeared to Emerson "like meddling or leaving your work," and caused the neglect of "my own spirits in prison - spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man visits if I do not." In part, their reluctance reflected a suspicion of any systematic program and any organized group, especially threatening to those Transcendentalists who valued individuality so highly. Although he admitted the value of reform attempted once, Emerson feared codification that might end in social alternatives as stringent as the systems they were designed to replace. And, in part, their reluctance stemmed from a continuing need, as writers, to stay connected, in some way, to the American social structure of which they were so critical. Thoreau might choose "to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually," even to "declare war with the State, after my.fashion," but the position maintained by most writers more clearly straddled the fine line between isolation and immersion that Emerson described in "Society and Solitude": "Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy."4 Given the limited extent to which writers in the past committed themselves to organized social protest of any kind, numerous questions arise about their
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espousal of communism in the twentieth century. First, why did American writers involve themselves with a movement whose ideology was political and European? Second, why did American writers involve themselves with a movement whose internal organization not only interfered with the artistic individuality they prized, but went so far as to restrict the expression of those who actually became members? Finally, why did a disillusionment with communism have so devastating an effect upon twentieth-century writers when the failure of earlier reform movements had not so seriously damaged their artistic adherents? In other words, because disillusionment with programmatic social reform had come to be almost part of the tradition of dissent in America, what was it about disillusionment with communism that drove writers to envision an end to history? Remembering that their involvement was more nearly emotional than political, a matter of idealism not ideology, provides part of the answer, the part favored by critics who have analyzed the infatuation of American writers with reference to the immediate needs for belief that a century of millennialist doubting and a recent world war had left unsatisfied. Recalling the ambivalent connotations that an "end to history" has always had for American writers enables those needs for belief to be understood within the context of age-old American traditions. Derived from a double-edged view of history, in which a sacred process fulfilled within secular time concluded with a grand finale in which "the mystery of God shall be finished" and "the kingdom shall become the Lord's all
the world over" the notion of an apocalyptic finale held a great attraction for American writers who believed in the paradisiacal restoration that was to follow. Michael Wigglesworth thus closed his Day of Doom with an injunction to "hasten our Redemption day." As Lionel Trilling acutely recognized, it was upon this very attraction that communism capitalized: "Karl Marx, for whom history was indeed a sixth sense, expressed what has come to be the secret hope of our time, that man's life in politics, which is to say, man's life in history, shall come to an end."5 Therefore, if communism provided Americans with that repository for belief that critics have noted, it provided a repository that was especially suitable because it necessitated so little redirection of the historical beliefs that had shaped American sensibility for three hundred years. As a result, writers attracted to communism in the twentieth century did not feel that they were casting their faith in a "foreign ideology," but rather that their own peculiarly American sense of history had been cast in modern, secular terms. Communism seemed to them a form of Americanism, to recall Earl Browder's slogan, with the promises of Marx replaying those of basic millennialism in a new key. So long as the Soviet present could be seen as corroborating the redemptive future promised, the notion of an "end to history" inspired hope among American writers, much as it did in earlier centuries. When Lincoln Steffens visited Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, he declared upon his return in 1919, "I have been over into the future, and it works" (Autobiography 799). Yet as present conditions in Russia became increasingly difficult to subsume
A DISRUPTION OF SENSIBILITY
17
within the context of a long-range historical process, and the gap between promise and fulfillment widened, an "end to history" came to inspire terror as it left writers with the prospects of a terrible present alone. Moreover, because the communism in which they believed had been viewed as a variant of their deepest native inheritance, American intellectuals suffered a double sense of loss when the facts about Stalin's Russia finally began to penetrate their consciousness in the late 1930s and early 1940s - not just for the loss of an alternative to America, but for the loss of America itself. No wonder, then, that they saw history at an end and a world in disarray. Having never subscribed to millennialism as a religious movement, American writers could not fall back upon religion, as their nineteenth-century predecessors had, when they were bereft of their enchantment with communism and needed to find an ordering principle behind history. If they wished for such a metaphysical ideal, they had to fashion it themselves - and so they did, not immediately but in a later period, by concentrating on the actual more than the ideal, on the past more than the future, and, ultimately, on responsibility more than reward. A Last Millennial Variant When the Modern Quarterly asked "Whither the American Writer?" in 1932, its seventeen respondents had few doubts about where the American writer of the time was with regard to communism. To the symposium's query "Do you believe that becoming a communist deepens an artist's work?" a total of eleven responded affirmatively, with three enthusiastic in their support and eight somewhat more qualified in theirs. In contrast, the question "Would not becoming a socialist have the same effect?" evoked eleven negative responses (without any qualification) that stressed the flabbiness of socialist thought ("a less passionate philosophy," according to Henry Hazlitt) and its weakness in providing a clear course of action. "As far as I can see," wrote Edwin Seaver, "a writer can be anything from a fake bohemian to a lawyer for the oil trust and still be a socialist." "Joining the Socialist Party is merely an easy sop to troubled social consciences," declared Granville Hicks, a step whose impact Dos Passos likened to "drinking a bottle of near-beer" (6.2 [1932]: 11, 14, 19, 11).
But if joining the Socialist Party was comparable to drinking near-beer, the majority of American writers, in particular those who considered themselves liberals, remained abstemious when it came to tapping the keg of Communist Party politics. In Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey, for instance, none of the fellow-traveling characters sees communism in terms of Marxist politics. John Laskell views the world as "a great sea of misery, actual or to come," but he does not see it as "forces in struggle" (34). Party loyalty to Arthur Crooms is mainly "an action in morals" and reactionary behavior merely "unsportsmanlike" or "caddish" conduct (151, 213). Recognizing this fact, Trilling also recognized the nonideological underpinning of the liberal mentality: "The word liberal is a word primarily of political import, but its political
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meaning defines itself by the quality of life it envisages, by the sentiments it desires to affirm." Therefore, if most liberal writers did not look to communism for ideological intellectual vigor, it was because they were not prone to think in ideological terms. If they did look to the movement in any such sense, it was only in the sense that Trilling defined ideology: as "the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding."6 It was the historical view of communism that provided that kind of comforting formula to American liberals, for its embracing world view, only vaguely understood, offered the reassurance that history abided by reasonable rules, followed logical patterns, and had a set purpose. And these easy bromides saved those "kind-hearted atheists," as Richard Wright called them, from facing that "black nothingness" toward which the "godless road" they traveled led (Outsider 358-9). Derived from the "actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes," communism made history the product of "quite material, empirically verifiable act[s]" rather than a chimerical "world spirit" or "any other metaphysical specter." Moreover, communism systematized all aspects of human history in accordance with such objective or scientific criteria. "Material relations" of men became "the basis of all their relations." Not some remote pattern of Providential destiny, but "the economic structure of society" came to be "the real foundation" that determined, in turn, the changing "legal and political superstructure^]" over time. Best of all, the vast panorama of history evolving over time ended in a material structure fully realized on earth in a magnificent social structure, an "association which will exclude classes and their antagonism," in which "there will be no more political power properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society."7 In point of fact, both Marx and Engels acknowledged that the process they outlined was neither foolproof nor wholly scientific - Marx admitted the role that chance, or "accident," played in historical development, not the least of which was "the 'accident' of the character of the people who first head the movement," while Engels denied credit to economics as the sole determining element of history. Nevertheless, they also continued to cite discoveries in other fields that they saw as corroborating the results that they found their study of economics to yield. Biologists like Darwin confirmed "the history of Nature's Technology." Agronomists like Karl Fraas revealed "another unconscious socialist tendency" in the cultivation of plants. And anthropologists like Lewis H. Morgan unearthed among the Iroquois gens a "prehistoric foundation of our written history" that, in 1877, verified "the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx forty years ago."8 For Americans, however, the conception of history that Marx "discovered" in the nineteenth century was the recovery of a conception of history over three
A DISRUPTION OF SENSIBILITY
19
hundred years old. The "association" toward which communism saw history evolving was hardly different in qualities from the New Heavens and Earth with which the first Americans saw history culminating. The proletariat to usher in "that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending" performed a "historic mission" similar to that of both Puritans and democrats. Emendations and interpretations of Marx and Engels enhanced even more the schematic similarities. With the destruction of bourgeois institutions that the dictatorship of the proletariat would perpetrate, a history of class struggles would end with the same apocalyptic fireworks as the history of Christian redemption. With the introduction of a conception that class struggle was preceded by a "primordial community" determined by blood groupings, defined by "childlike simplicity," and doomed to "a fall from the simple moral grandeur of the ancient gentile society," an Edenic beginning was added to the architecture of the design. Americans accepted the conception of history that their interpretation of Marx and Engels yielded because it affirmed a way of thinking about time and change for which they already had a "temperamental predisposition."9 That those Americans also spanned a number of decades and subscribed to dissent in various degrees only showed how strong that "predisposition" was. Most Americans, of course, did not cite historical processes explicitly when they described the appeal that communism presented. They tended to focus instead upon distinct periods of the American past whose ideals they saw communism extending. Defining "What Is Americanism?" for a 1936 Partisan Review & Anvil symposium on "Marxism and the American Tradition," writers established quite clearly the connection between the American and the communistic ideas of historical progression. Beginning with Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams, and extending through Henry Adams, Newton Arvin found "a perfectly real line in native American thought, the work of as true Yankees as ever existed, that moves on toward Marxist socialism as toward its culmination." Joseph Freeman cited a similar list of sources for "those ideas which, followed to their logical conclusion, were bound to lead to communism" and which influenced him long before he had ever heard of Lenin or the Bolshevik Revolution (3.3 [1936]: 4, 14). Moreover, having established that such a past tradition linked Americanism and communism, proselytizers gained a set of familiar references to invoke in their attempts to convince potential converts in the present. Defending himself before the Fish Committee, for example, William Z. Foster compared twentieth-century communists to earlier "revolutionists of capitalism," namely the "Colonial revolutionists" who freed America from "feudal European rule" and the Civil War Unionists who freed it from the rule of the slave-holding South. Similarly, defending the strikers in Harlan County, Melvin P. Levy portrayed Kentucky as an outpost of "pure old-American blood," its hills "probably the last place in the United States where the Revolution is still vital," and its workers - native sons down to their rustic speech - as inaugurat-
20
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ing a "second American Revolution, based on coal as surely as the first was on trade, and growing out of struggle between economic classes sharply defined."10 The Communist Party only helped to promote this kind of identification by steadily diluting those elements in its program that had caused the past equivocation of writers while broadening its base of support to include those people whom it formerly would have excluded. At the 1921 Third Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), the Western Communist parties were told to put aside their revolutionary desires and to concentrate instead on winning over a majority of the workers, cooperating, if need be, with recalcitrant organizations to form a "united front." By the time of the Seventh Congress's adoption of the Popular Front in 1935, even those formerly maligned socialists were embraced into the fold along with all those others for whom fascism had become the chief enemy by the middle decades of the century. And with the 1938 decision of the American Communist Party to support the Constitution of the United States, carry forth "the traditions of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and Lincoln," and uphold "the achievements of democracy" (New Republic 15 June 1938: 144), there appeared to be little difference between the adherents of revolution and the adherents of Roosevelt. As Joseph Freeman recalled when he described the Popular Front's alliances: For now you could be for every kind of social reform here, for the Soviet Union, for the Communist Party, for Proletarian Literature — for everything and anything that was at one time radical, rebellious, subversive, revolutionary and downright quixotic - and in doing so you were on the side of all the political angels of the day; you were on the side of the Roosevelt administration, on the side of Labor, the Negroes, the middle classes; on the side of Hitler's victims, on the side of all the oppressed colonial peoples in the world. In short, this is the only period in all the world's history when you could be at one and the same time an ardent revolutionary and an arch-conservative backed
by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union. A person could happily be both a communist and an American, and, in so doing, could leap on "the sweetest bandwagon in all history." 11 Yet even after many writers began to question how effectively the values of their own heritage were safeguarded within the Communist Party itself, they still thought them to be upheld by the ideals to which the Party professed devotion. Dos Passos expressed doubt about organized radicalism as early as 1934 when he protested the communists' disruption of a socialist meeting at Madison Square Garden. But in portraying Bartolomeo Vanzetti as a "hater of oppression who wanted a world unfenced," "another immigrant" in a long line of immigrants, "roundheads the sackers of castles the kingkillers haters of oppression," who landed at Plymouth Rock, he still endorsed the stance of radicalism as the oldest - indeed, the original - stance upon which America was founded (Big Money 435-7). Wright already had left his Chicago Party cell by the time he completed the first draft of Native Son in 1938. His feelings
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about the Party's commitment to blacks are clearly drawn in the hypocrisy of lawyer Max who retreats in terror from Bigger Thomas at the end of the book after his client actually believes the words with which Max has just defended him. Nevertheless, by having those words inspire Bigger for the first time with "the faith that at bottom all men lived as he lived and felt as he felt," Wright affirmed the argument itself, along with the principles upon which it rests - notably the inalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence and the right to strike for freedom that incited the "original Thirteen Colonies" (386, 365). When it came to portraying the familiar historical process that they saw the vision of communism extending, writers did not have to be as direct in their references as they did when they recalled the American values it purportedly affirmed. Because the course of America's destiny had always been argued in religious terms in the past - most obviously in the Reformed Christianity that compelled the Puritan mission - writers could suggest the Americanism of Marx's vision by expressing it in familiar religious terminology. Michael Gold's Jews Without Money reaches its dramatic height when the "lonely suicidal boy," Gold himself, is saved by the hope of the "workers' Revolution" - "the true Messiah" (224). James T. Farrell's Judgment Day builds to a climax in which paraders fill the streets, singing with exhilaration, " 'Tis the final conflict, /Let each stand in his place, / The International Soviet / Shall be the human raceyy (448). 12
To understand communism as a familiar millennial process, however, was not to offer communism as a complement to other millennial schemes upon which America rested or to argue that economic processes confirmed the idea of temporal ordering in the way that those of physics and astronomy had during earlier periods. 13 Rather, communism was understood as a replacement for those other conceptions of history whose promises time had proved false and whose tenets had been corrupted by their institutions, leaving in their wake what Trilling called a "detritus of pieties." For instance, when he offered "The Case of the Author" as exemplary of that of most American intellectuals, Edmund Wilson repeated and reaffirmed a litany of beliefs that had empowered Americans for centuries: I believe then in human evolution: I don't see how it is possible to reject the evidence that contemporary humanity, with all its faults, has developed from beings much lower, or to fail to draw the conclusion that we are to develop into something higher still. I believe in progress as the eighteenth-century people did, and I believe as they did that the development of machinery is part of it. Yet after stating that he did not believe in the way that capitalists used machinery and that there was a need to upset their "modern bourgeois-governed world" in order to reach that "higher" stage of development, Wilson ended by asserting that it was no longer possible to hold both revolutionary and religious views: "I know that some people manage to combine the two, but for myself, I am convinced that the traditional religions, however valid or inspir-
22
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ing in the past, were made possible only by ignorance, and that all the Western churches are obsolescent - in power over the minds that count if not in actual numbers." For Richard Wright, in contrast, there was no "if." He had experienced religion only as the attempt of some to rule others in the name of God and had found that "the naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn."14 Advancing communism as an alternative millennial idea, then, often became a two-step affair. First, writers had to discredit traditional religions as having failed or betrayed the millennial ideals that informed them; second, they had to assert the superiority of communism over the temporal schemes projected by the religions they dismissed. Thus, well before he discovers the "true Messiah" in the "workers' Revolution," the character Michael Gold hears from his mother just what the Messiah will do, specifically "save the world," "make everything good," and "conquer [people] with love," and learns at his own expense that Judaism is incapable of supplying such a redeemer. The descendant of Zaddicks whom all await "as for the Messiah" is as "blase as a fat African king" and worships riches more than righteousness. Likewise, well before Farrell's paraders acclaim the Judgment Day that the Soviets have inaugurated, the career of Studs Lonigan has begun moving toward that "grand and final day ofjudgment" awaited in the meaningless litany his priest intones in the trilogy's opening pages. The difference is that as Studs approaches that glorious day "when the God of Love would become the God of Justice," the vision of Catholic salvation grows dimmer and dimmer, until death leaves him "all-encompassing blackness, and then, nothing," at the same moment that communism infuses the paraders with an increasing sense ofjubilation.15 The promises of communism assured that men did not have to wait until after death to find the kind of justice for which they yearned. "I wanted to be happy in this world, not out of it," Bigger Thomas tells his lawyer (Native Son 329). So did many others. Communism led them to believe that they could find eternal happiness within their own lifetimes. Were not the Bolsheviks building on earth "a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer?" (Reed, Ten Days 230). Did not that kingdom indicate a dialectic of history moving infallibly toward its end? Did not that course logically lead to the redemptive classless condition for which all yearned? Yes, said the Party member. Yes, said the fellow traveler. Yes, said the furthest-removed sympathizer. What they did not say, however - at least not in the 1930s and sometimes not even in the 1940s - was that the logic of dialectical thought was not proof of a dialectic of history, that a scientific analysis of events was not a proof of the principles used to connect them, in short, that the historicism of Marx required as great and unquestioning faith as had the millennialism of traditional religions. Later, of course, and with the advantages of hindsight to guide them, writers who examined their conversion experiences were as vocal about that demand as before they had been silent. "The Dialectic then is a religious myth, disencumbered of divine personality and tied up with the history of mankind," Edmund Wilson wrote, the brainchild
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of one man who "projected himself into the character of the resolute seaman who carried the authority of the gods in his breast" and another who spent his boyhood years under the pulpit of Calvinist evangelism. "The progress of history toward a classless society is a theological notion," echoed Malcolm Cowley, "an article of faith that all good Marxists accepted." So, too, did writers come to realize that communism was by no means unique in predicating its classless society upon human belief. Irving Howe, for example, recalled that the Utopian futurism of socialism rested upon an equally unsubstantiated foundation: "There could hardly be a need to reply to those critics who wondered how some of the perennial human problems could be solved under socialism: one knew they would be."16 The difference - and it was crucial - involved the different degrees of devotion that the creeds of communism and socialism demanded. As Walter Rideout has shown, socialist novels written during the first two decades of the twentieth century almost never went beyond an attack on institutionalized Christianity to attack religion itself; while condemning the churches as weapons used by the rich to keep the poor in their places, authors upheld Christianity itself as a creed whose doctrine of brotherhood could inspire the masses to unite (Radical Novel 77-8). Christ, in other words, became the first great socialist. Those who cast their faith in communism, however, worshiped a dogma that tolerated no other gods. Its millennial promise was available only to those who had renounced competing faiths. It was their common willingness to make such a quasi-religious emotional commitment - whether to Marxism, Bolshevism, Trotskyism, or whatever variant sect they chose - that formed a common denominator for those who organized, those who proselytized, and those who merely sympathized. The common denominator also left adherents in a particularly vulnerable position. Renouncing all other religious beliefs for communism made communism a repository of too many beliefs - humanist, Americanist, progressivist, Enlightenment. More important, it made communism the sole repository of those aspirations, "the outrage and the hope of the world," as Whittaker Chambers phrased it (Witness 189, 196). What would happen, then, if outrage ever exceeded hope, if actuality ever overwhelmed eventuality? After Chambers came to face such questions, he returned to the hopes of his ancestors, becoming "an involuntary witness to God's grace and to the fortifying power of faith," and so rechanneled his zeal into the conduit through which it had originally run (6). Most liberal writers were not so fortunate. Unable to retreat to the faith of their fathers because they had never held it dear in the past, they had no sanctuary when faith turned fraudulent, when events occurred in Soviet Russia that mocked all humanistic hopes. Still less could they flee from themselves once they understood their own complicity in the betrayal. When the shock of discovery wore off, it became relatively easy for writers to point a finger at Soviet Russia, to cite the Moscow trials or the Nazi-Soviet Pact, to loathe Stalin as traitor to Marx's vision. It proved far more difficult to point to themselves and recognize that a sense of betrayal was inevitable, that
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REMINISCENCE AND RE-CREATION
the perceptual set with which they had looked upon communism made disappointment certain: For what in the present can ever live up to a vision of final glory? What made it worse was that it took them so long to realize their error, and that they realized it only after recognition was forced upon them.
A Long-Distance Affair More than any other factor, it was distance that made the disappointment of writers certain — distance in space from events in Russia, distance in time from events of the American past, and, from the start, distance in class from those with whom they sought to join hands. During the 1930s, as many as nine-tenths of the American intellectuals who adopted a revolutionary stance in literature were estimated as having bourgeois origins (Modern Quarterly 6.2 [1932]: 9). Many of the intellectuals in question made no secret of those beginnings. Edmund Wilson, for one, offered himself as "a specimen of the current American bourgeoisie," citing salary figures and family inheritances, and admitting, in 1931, that he had done "unusually well this winter myself" (Jitters 305, 119). Many acknowledged the distance that professional stature further enlarged. Sherwood Anderson, in fact, specifically invoked Theodore Dreiser's membership in "the artist class" as precluding his membership in the working-class Communist Party when he defended Dreiser against charges of criminal syndicalism ("Counted" 310). In this distance between writers and revolutionaries there was nothing unusual, for earlier writers who extolled the virtues of socialism often portrayed the class struggle from a removed position. Edward Bellamy provided only one view of the poor in Looking Backward, and that he placed at the end of his novel and portrayed, revealingly, as part of a nightmare that Julian West has. Jack London, whose roots were in the working class, narrated The Iron Heel from the perspective of Avis Everhard, a woman who numbers a "splitting headache" among the revolution's worst effects and misses the worst of the resultant rioting because of a convenient loss of consciousness (342). A survey of the characters created by later novelists shows a similar pattern emerging, as the ersatz freedom fighters who parade through Dos Passos's books illustrate over and over again. Reading Bellamy and Wells because they cannot find copies of Marx and Engels's works, they choose "to kinda get into things, into the revolution" without understanding the nature of the "things" into which they seek entry. Confusing socialism with anarchism, and anarchism with maximalism, and deciding "I'm a sort of a socialist" or declaring "she thought maybe she was an anarchist," they conflate all radical ideas into one amorphous "-ism." Indeed, reading and talking constitute the bulk of their participation. When they do engage themselves in acts of actual protest, their involvement has little to do with social concern. In Nineteen Nineteen, for example, Daughter meets her dates on picket lines. More often than not, their commitment is measured to their convenience. Met with policemen's clubs at
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the death watch for Sacco and Vanzetti, Mary French realizes "that she ought to have her hair bobbed if she was going to do much of this sort of thing."17 With fitting irony, individual writers at times recognized the gap that often existed between radical talk and radical action. Despite the fact that his success was lauded as "the most important event in the history of the American leftwing movement in literature" by left-wing critics, Dos Passos did not confer importance upon his characters for mouthing leftist views. Of those whose lives he interwove in U.S.A., only one, Ben Compton, is as consistent in his radical acts as he is in his talk, and even he is denied heroic stature by the author; the revolutionary speech he makes before his court sentencing sounds both silly and weak, as he himself realizes. More important, individual writers often recognized the gap between their own radical talk and actions. The autobiographical "Camera Eye" sections integrate an element of 5e//awareness into Dos Passos's trilogy as these images of spectator spartacists take on a selfparodic tone. Men and women talk red flags and machine-gun posts while they watch Emma Goldman eat frankfurters, and then go home to locked apartments and sound sleeps. Artists in black ties attend anarchist picnics to watch "le geste proletaire." Dos Passos was not alone in his awareness. Writing in response to a 1934 dinner that the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners held, Malcolm Cowley entertained similar suspicions that there was "something false and ridiculous" about the lives that he and other fellow travelers led: "We have proclaimed our loyalty to the working class while holding on to our comfortable places in the bourgeoisie. We give money, not too much of it, but we don't get slugged in the picket line. . . . We send too many telegrams, sign too many protests. It's hard to stay in such a position forever - either one has to go on from it, plunge actively into the Communist movement, or else slowly and imperceptibly draw back."18 Recognition and repudiation did not go hand in hand, however, as the careers of Don Passos and Cowley demonstrate. Dos Passos maintained his leftwing affiliations until as late as 1937. Cowley defended Soviet Russia through the Moscow trials. Furthermore, not all writers found elements of parody in their displays of revolutionary fervor. Reporting on the Bolshevik Revolution, John Reed could acclaim the Soviets' "passionate and simple" proletariat, admire those "dark masses" from whose "very soul" a new Russia would be born, and conclude from his observations, "The poor love each other so!" (Ten Days 60, 133, 230); at the same time, and without any sense of contradiction, he also could portray his own distaste at riding with such loving masses aboard a crowded train to Moscow (222). In much the same manner, he could show himself producing "internationalist" credentials to save his life at a roadblock after having invoked his American citizenship earlier to avoid a turn at guard duty in his apartment house. Again and again he misses the disparity and self-contradiction in his acts (214, 144). Disturbing as such lack of insight is, it becomes even more disturbing when the relationship between author and audience is taken into account. For Sherwood Anderson to distinguish communists from socialists by saying "I guess
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REMINISCENCE AND RE-CREATION
the Communists mean it" reveals simple ignorance when it is stated in private conversation; to repeat that conversation before others, and as part of an address entitled "I Want to Be Counted," reveals much more (310). It shows ignorance of those limits that an awareness of one's ignorance should impose. For Max Eastman to go to Russia "to find out whether what I have been saying is true" after already having said it in print implies much the same thing: Authority precedes accuracy, expetise precedes experience.19 To a certain extent, an unlicensed assumption of authority was understandable when writers were discussing Russia, for in describing the promised land of the millennium in progress they were limited by circumstances beyond their control: distance in space, hazards of travel, and difficulty of communication, especially right after the Revolution had taken place. Nevertheless, even in the accounts of those who were able to make the trip, romance replaced realism. Grizzled old soldiers sobbing like babes, workmen with shining faces, and burning-eyed Bolsheviks driven "on engines of exaltation" march through Reed's frozen landscape (Ten Days 125). A "land brimful of people and a people brimful of energy" inspire Eastman to rhapsodize about "star-tossing waves" and "rebel pulse-beats" (Love and Revolution 317, 327). No less did romance intrude when it came to discussing the American values by which they defined their politics, despite the fact that distance in time was the only obstacle to clear-sightedness. In contrast to their view of Russia, however, the conception of America that writers held was colored by an equally romantic negative theory of history: America had declined from its idyllic past in their eyes. To Dos Passos, for instance, the comparison between Plymouth in 1927 and Plymouth in 1620 paralleled that between modern Cordage shantytowns and virginal green river valleys (Big Money 435-6). Reasoning that the decline of America was the direct result of the use of a capitalist economy, writers assumed that the coming of communism would restore its past glory. But in recalling their native inheritance and repeating the familiar patriotic phrases as ideals to be resurrected, writers also assumed a view of the past that bore little resemblance to the past as it actually was. For Dos Passos to pose "immigrants haters of oppression" against "strangers" who buy power with wealth and then to conclude "we are two nations" was to erect a false dichotomy (Big Money 462-3). The formula takes for granted an initial golden world unity and ignores the divisive effects that wealth had produced in American society from the start. Never in the past had a sense of group mission led directly to demands for group property. In Plymouth, William Bradford's attempts at collective farming bred "much confusion and discontent and retarded] much employment" despite the Mayflower Compact (Plymouth 121). Nor was America a land in which the equalization of wealth and a classless society had ever been realized, or even intended, as ideals. If, in declaiming against "seekeing greate things for our selues and our posterity," John Winthrop subordinated upward mobility to saintly nobility, his "Modell of Christian Charity" did not do away with the social distinctions that wealth had already conferred upon his colonists (198). On the contrary, ascribing it to
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God's Providence that "some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subieccion," Winthrop, like most of the architects of the earliest American social structure, defended class differences as necessary to "the preservacion and good of the whole" (195). A similar misconstruction of America's past falsified the Revolutionary slogans that left-wing writers chose as their blazons, for in repeating the words of Enlightenment thinkers to justify their own twentieth-century programs, writers divorced the golden phrases from the historical circumstances and context from which they sprang. Nowhere was this more evident than in their repeated references to the Declaration of Independence, the document Garry Wills has termed "a blank check for idealists of all sorts to fill in as they like" (Inventing America xxiv). In Native Son, lawyer Max quotes from the Declaration in proposing the pursuit of happiness as the motive for Bigger's violent acts: "When we said that men are 'endowed with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' we did not pause to define 'happiness.' That is the unexpressed quality in our quest, and we have never tried to put it into words" (365). As the reader already knows, this has not been for lack of effort. Earlier in the novel Max has asked Bigger about the way he views "happiness" and the closest he has gotten to an answer has been a definition framed in negative terms: "[I]f I was happy I wouldn't always be wanting to do something I know I couldn't do" (329). Yet to the framers of the Declaration, "happiness" had a very specific meaning that, as Wills has shown (248-55), had little to do with the kind of personal fulfillment or satisfaction of the self that Max goes on to argue before the court. Derived from the moral-sense school of Francis Hutcheson and related more to the notion of "felicite publique," "happiness" was a numerically distributable quantity by which the social worth of any action could be measured, and the most worthy action was that "which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers."20 By these criteria, it is Bigger's execution, and not his release, that will produce the most "happiness" within the society in which he lives. So, too, the founders' notion of equality had little to do with individual rights. The "truth" that Jefferson held to be "self-evident" concerned one particular way in which "all men are created equal" - namely, in terms of the moral sense that all possessed uniformly and against which all the outer details that distinguished one person's lot from another's were relatively minor. The defense Max builds upon the basis of a deprived environment is, then, invalid in terms of the Declaration's own principles. Finding their idealized American past in a romanticized Russian present, writers were not inclined to scrutinize Russia too closely. This led critics in later years to charge them with having blinded themselves to facts. "They have eyes and they see not; they have ears and they hear not," alleged Lewis Mumford in charting "The Corruption of Liberalism." "The bitter truth about Russia during the thirties was always available," asserted Chester Eisinger, "but it took time for it to filter into the Western consciousness."21 Such charges, however, presume a kind of blindness that did not in fact exist. For one thing,
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writers did not ignore "the bitter truth about Russia" that came their way; if they were reluctant to seek it out themselves, they did not deny it when it was thrust upon them. The Nation and the New Republic, for instance, reported on the Moscow trials and the Nazi-Soviet Pact as soon as information about the events reached them. Moreover, not all aspects of communism were embraced with equal ardor. Wright shuddered at the self-effacement of Party members, having found in the trial of one such member both "a spectacle of glory" for the "degree of oneness" the defendant's voluntary confession affirmed and "a spectacle of horror" by virtue of the obliteration of personality that motivated that statement of falsehoods. Wilson and Hemingway censured the communists' appropriation of causes, Wilson deriding them for entering the Scottsboro case to enlist blacks, Hemingway for their use of the Spanish Civil War as an umbrella for purging "Divagationers."22 Perhaps most astutely of all, Dos Passos doubted the ability of any revolutionary movement to stay free of bureaucratic entanglement. "D'you know what it'll mean, your revolution?" the men in Three Soldiers are challenged. "Another system!" Suspecting this early that the true dialectic of history involved the rise and fall of systems, "organizations growing and stifling individuals, and individuals revolting hopelessly against them, and at last forming new societies to crush the old societies and becoming slaves again in their turn," he remained skeptical in his later works of the prospects held out by any and all revolutions - whether in Mexico, where he saw Zapata's revolution preempted by Obregon and the principles of Madero reinstated; or in Europe, where he feared revolution becoming "the war turned inside out"; or in America, where he saw the glorious cause aborted due to infighting among members caught up in "debatingsociety" maneuvers.23 Denial of the facts, then, was not the issue. Refusing to examine what the facts signified in relation to the slogans and the abstract ideals was. On three occasions, John Reed mentioned Lenin's suppression of the press by decree, and not once did he - a reporter himself - comment on what the adoption of such "temporary and extraordinary measures" might indicate. Maxwell Stewart noted the frequency of political trials in Russia and the fact that purges "of more or less severity" had become "almost annual affairs," yet he nevertheless entitled his piece "Twenty Years of Progress." If writers like these suffered blindness of any sort, it was willful, not perceptual. Dramatized years later by Ralph Ellison in an imagery of blindness (blindfolded black boxers, blind Chicago preacher, half-blind political organizer), which highlights the kind of blindness his narrator imposes over himself, the psychological mechanism employed was vividly illustrated in the picture of an Invisible Man who perceives information well but processes information badly. As the veteran in the Golden Day explains, "he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. . . . He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain."24 As the "simple" - not to mention scandalous - facts about Stalin's Russia emerged, writers engaged in so much short-circuiting that their evasions be-
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came formulaic. Recognition, equivocation, and extenuation shaped the usual reply in the late 1930s, as a glance at liberal journals shows. No matter what the outrage revealed, astonishment is the opening gambit of response. A Moscow trial proves "startling news" and "an extraordinary spectacle" to the New Republic in 1936, "even more unbelievable" and "even more amazing" in 1937, and "the usual bewildering picture of inherently incredible charges" by 1938. "Is Leon Trotsky Guilty?" the Modern Monthly asks. "What is your general impression of the Moscow trials?": "[V]ery confusing," says Theodore Dreiser; "Complete bewilderment," writes Clifton Fadiman; "They have me completely baffled," replies John Chamberlain.25 Suspension of judgment quickly follows: Either the events are too close in time to judge or too far away to determine. Having decided in 1936 that "Nobody at a distance can possibly know whether the charges are true," the New Republic stands its ground for the next two years and through the next two Moscow trials, repeating on cue how impossible it is for "anyone sitting in New York to pass judgment that is worth anything on these Russian trials" or for "persons at this distance from Russia to say with authority what is going on there." The Nation modifies its initial stance about the impossibility of passing judgment "at this time and from this distance" with a line that is more specific - and positive - with regard to time frame: "It is possible that it will be another hundred years before all the actual facts about the recent Soviet trials are known."26 Mitigating circumstances are the next step in the process of justification, so that reasons for withholding judgment are followed by reasons to be considered when making those judgments withheld. When the Russian temperament is considered, tradition makes understandable the tactics of the Moscow trials: In a country that never had civil liberties, at least ninety percent of tyranny was attributable to bad habits; in a country led by men conditioned by intrigue and terror, it was only "natural" that men suffer "the conspiratorial blues" a bit longer. When Russia's vulnerable position in the world is recalled, it is dawdling over collective security that accounts for the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Most of all, when Russia's pioneering role is remembered, and achievements are tallied against atrocities, it still comes out ahead. Reports of "Soviet Democracy" follow news of " 'Old Bolsheviks' on Trial" so that rights rescinded in court are reinstated - even extended - by a new constitution. Aid to Spanish Loyalists counters arrests of former Trotskyites. Recalling these earlier years, the New Republic urges its readers to maintain "Common Sense About Russia": "Old Bolsheviks might be liquidated, but industries were growing, labor had shorter hours and higher wages, the standard of living was slowly rising, social services spread, popular education was established." For the first time in its history, Russia is out of the red.27 Behind such convoluted reasoning lay one unassailable assumption: However morally shaky Stalinism was, Marxism remained sound; however oppressive and dictatorial Russia looked now, its Revolution was still inviolable. When the Modern Quarterly then asked, in 1938, "Was the Bolshevik Revolu-
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tion a Failure?" it made sure to distinguish in its symposium between the Revolution's achievements in Russia and the Revolution's achievements with regard to the world at large. Respondents took full advantage of the distinction. The question "Did the Bolshevik Revolution achieve its proletarian objectives?" received decisive replies from most, with eleven out of eighteen answers clearly negative and only one clearly affirmative. A final question — "Viewed in retrospect, did the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks retard the World Proletarian Revolution?" - elicited much more hedging. Nine respondents either qualified their answers severely or evaded the issue completely, among them six who had been quite confident in their earlier negations. So they equivocated: "The retrospect is not yet long enough"; "There are too many unknown quantities in this question to make a sensible answer possible"; "I don't know, not being a haruspex oracle, or Grand Ideological Fakir"; [W]e are as yet too properly close to the Bolshevik Revolution to estimate its total significance to the proletariat"; and, finally, "God might know the answer."28 As doubts about Stalin's policies increased, and suspicions hardened into certainties, leftists of all sorts began relying on such hair-splitting techniques in a frantic effort to retain the faith that was so necessary to their own emotional and spiritual balance. "Of course it is not socialism which has failed," said Norman Thomas after the third Moscow trial, "but the Stalinist perversion of it." "We do not know," said Louis Fischer after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, "whether the rigors of Soviet dictatorship are socialist inevitabilities or Stalinisms." "Nothing could be more dangerous," warned Max Lerner after Russia invaded Finland, "than to equate the communist parties or Soviet international politics with the whole of the Marxian outlook." In short, as the New Republic reminded its readers, "Stalin will not live forever."29 There came a point, however, when the strain of such mental gymnastics became too hard to bear and liberals had to confront what "crimes committed by the wrong people," as Dwight Macdonald put it, signified. The point of recognition came to different people at different times and was precipitated by different experiences and events: a trip to Spain for Dos Passos, a May Day parade for Wright, the Nazi-Soviet Pact for Fischer, the abandonment of Warsaw for Macdonald.30 More pressing concerns often interfered. Attention was diverted from the failure of Stalinism by the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Indeed, the dark umbra of fascism gave new luster to the halo of Russia: Not only did its third Five-Year Plan strike "a blow for sanity in a world rapidly going mad" with rearmament programs, its support of endangered nations crowned Russia as "the one great power which had been consistently antifascist in its foreign policy" in comparison with England's and France's collapse. Awareness was further clouded in the 1940s by the threat that Hitler had grown to pose. Cowley, for example, defended his support of a Russian alliance by judging Stalin's Beelzebub against Hitler's Satan and finding hypocrisy a lesser evil to endure than Evil Incarnate.31 Therefore, while the fire was kindled before World War II, the explosion of the communist ideal did not
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erupt until after it ended - and after Yalta, China, Southeast Asia, and Korea shattered even the last fragments of it. An End to Ideology The impact of that final explosion into awareness was tremendous precisely because the circumstances that precipitated full consciousness tapped a reservoir of misgivings that already existed. The net effect was cumulative. As a result, individual awakening led writers to conclusions that went beyond whatever particular event triggered awareness. Russia's attack on Finland, for instance, led to the immediate conclusion that it was acting no differently than any "intending aggressor," with its demands for control of Hagoe evidence of "a new form of communist imperialism," and its December 1939 attack "a brutal, unwarranted assault on a small nation" indistinguishable "from the fascist invasions of Ethiopia, Spain, China, Czechoslovakia, and Poland." The immediate equation of Stalinism and Nazism that this "Disaster in Finland" signaled had broader implications about the promise of communism itself: "A specter is haunting the world," went the obituary of Ralph Bates, "the specter of a revolution that is dead." Coming on the heels of the 1932-33 famines and the 1936-38 trials, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact plunged Oswald Garrison Villard into a similar abandonment of faith: "Now I am hopeless of any good coming out of the experiment."32 The sacred became the profane. As Stalinism came to be seen as an outgrowth of communism rather than an unfortunate digression in its progress to salvation, the sacred source itself came under attack from as many angles as it once had commanded belief. The titles of articles tell the story. Looking at Marxism as both a political and religious movement, Reinhold Niebuhr found "Ideology and Pretense" in its false claims to universality. Tracing Stalin's totalitarianism to flaws in a socialist economy, Lewis Corey opened "Marxism Reconsidered" by admitting that "all variants of Marxism are a failure." Finding the roots of failure in the Marxist conceptions of power and history, Granville Hicks decided, "We cannot leave it to history, as Marx and Engels did, to put the brake on the misuse of power," for to do so led down "The Blind Alley of Marxism."33 The recantations that followed are by now familiar. Hicks went public with his well-known apologia, "Politics is no game for a person whose attention is mostly directed elsewhere." Wilson, in private, cut whole passages from The American Jitters before it was reissued.34 Equally well known are the pejoratives used to castigate intellectuals - "Irresponsibles," "Truants," "Soft Utopians" - which intellectuals continued to use as they castigated themselves.35 Examining "Our Guilt in Fascism" in 1940, Waldo Frank ascribed the greatest "sin" to artists and critics, whose blindness to world conditions impaired their role as cultural leaders. Itemizing his "sins of silence, self-protectiveness, inadequacy, and something close to moral cowardice" over three decades later, Malcolm Cowley was still attempting to explain "The Sense of Guilt" he felt, while William Barrett's mea culpa indicted "our whole generation" of Truants.36
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The lesson learned overturned completely the text that had been preached. Good intentions were no longer thought to be sufficient excuse. As James T. Farrell remarked, no one had as yet invented a "sincereometer," and, as others quickly realized, good intentions had produced execrable results. "It is the actions of men and not their sentiments which make history," Norman Mailer concluded in "the best sentence Vve ever written" (so good that he wrote it in two different works). Ends no longer justified means, especially when the ends in question were not the promised End they had been thought to be. Fischer found that "Immoral means produce immoral ends." Dos Passos came to believe "that in politics the means tend to turn out to be more important than the ends."37 Perhaps most significantly, politics became designated as an area off limits to artists. When determining "Whither the American Writer?" for the Modern Quarterly in 1932, twelve out of seventeen respondents felt that a writer should participate in the social crisis before him. When assessing "The Situation in American Writing" for Partisan Review seven years later, and in particular the political tendency of American writing since 1930, twelve out of eighteen either dismissed politics entirely or saw it as an area writers entered at extreme risk: "An artist who gets into a political movement because he thinks it is the coming thing, is a weakling"; "[A]rtists are not political candidates; and art is not an arena for gladiatorial contests"; "Politics is a pursuit which is suitable to those who have nothing better to do"; "A writer should keep his eye on human beings or human behavior or on himself as a human being rather than on any one political tendency or movement."38 It was relatively easy to deal with the pain that an "end to ideology" left behind. Isolationism took care of "spiritual malaise" in the early years of World War II, as intellectuals urged themselves to keep out "of the whole revolting European mess," shift their focus to America, and "secure a good grandstand seat on top of Mount Olympus." But the aftermath, the end after the end, was far more shattering for, in its fullest effect, it involved not just a mere loss of an ideology, but the loss of faith in an ordered and progressive idea of history. And the trauma of that loss involved nothing less than "chronic spiritual terror, " as Wright so clearly recognized.39 It was in the literature they later wrote that novelists suggested the greater dimensions of that terror from which they had suffered. Because the Brotherhood had seemed to have "both science and history under control" and had thus afforded the Invisible Man "the only historically meaningful life that I could live" (331, 413), Ellison's protagonist considers a fall from Brotherhood grace as a "plunge outside of history," and is finally forced to reject "that spiral business, that progress goo!" (379, 440). Similarly, once they have exposed the lie behind communism's sense of progress, Mailer's Barbary Shore characters discover the "knot of history" at which they have arrived: "We assumed for far too long that socialism was inevitable and the error has reduced us to impotence. Socialism is inevitable only if there will be a civilization. What we have never considered is the condition that there would not be" (203).
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Indeed, impotence became the metaphor upon which novelists most relied to express their overwhelming feeling of loss. Novels of the 1940s and 1950s present an almost endless parade of characters who begin their literary lives as orphans, amnesiacs, paralytics, or impotents. The combinations and varieties of impairment proliferate: from Mailer's realistic characters like Michael Lovett and Sergius O'Shaugnessy to John Barth's more emblematic Todd Andrews and Jake Horner, to the outright allegory in which John Laskell recovers from scarlet fever (a "red" disease) in The Middle of the Journey, confronts his nurse called "Paine," and considers the "strange ambivalent kind of culture" people like himself are developing - "A kind of Kingdom-come by emasculation" (109). "HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION/' the Invisible Man is asked, as he dreams he sees his testicles hanging from a bridge. "Painful and empty," he replies (493).
Nihilism, cynicism, and relativism thus become the bases from which postmodern American consciousness originates in the 1940s and 1950s. In novels of that period, there are for the characters no feasible alternatives, let alone emotionally sustaining ones. Talks with the "Spirit of Alternatives" frustrate Saul Bellow's Dangling Man (89-94, 109-12). Richard Wright's Outsider finds nothing to guide him but his own random and meaningless desires (316). And so the literary version of isolationism became withdrawal. Having discovered along with the rest of his generation that "The worlds we sought were never those we saw; the worlds we bargained for were never the worlds we got," Bellow's Dangling Man retreats to a room (18). Mailer's Barbary Shore denizens seclude themselves in a boardinghouse. Ellison's Invisible Man jumps down a manhole. Refugees they certainly are, but permanent residents they are not - at least, not by their own assessments. "Please, a definition," Ellison's narrator interrupts. "A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action" (16). Yet lacking a sense of purpose to which action can tend, action eludes them. They spend their time instead desperately searching for some, any, system of belief, what Bellow's Joseph calls an "ideal construction," to take the place of ideology just as ideology once took the place of religion - only they search with a different set of preconceptions (93). Having been a history major at college, Joseph seeks a specific kind of "plan" or "program"; at the same time, having been disabused of one such plan during his revolutionary past, he already has learned to see through the masks of historical absolutism. He can name, he says, hundreds of "ideal constructions," each of which proclaims itself "the only possible way to meet chaos." He recognizes the gap between the "ideal construction" and the operations of the real world. But he also understands that the illusions provided by such systems are emotionally necessary. "Do you want one of those constructions, Joseph?" the "Spirit of Alternatives" asks. "Doesn't it seem that we need them?" he asks in turn (93). In the end, Bellow's hero fails. Unable to create a program of action for himself and weary of the attempt, Joseph submits himself to a prefabricated system of action and enlists in the Army with relief: "Long live regimenta-
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tion!" (126). Eight years later, Ellison offered a more successful effort. Admitting, like Joseph, that "the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived," the Invisible Man prepares to come up from underground (502). Unlike Joseph's, though, his plan is conceived in his own mind, and is brought to birth through the narrative he writes. It is the recollection and re-creation of the chaos he has lived on paper that enable him to change from one who talks about overt action to one who prepares for social reentry, from one who admits losing all sense of time to one who regains it, and, finally, from one who once considered himself "one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived" to one who realizes that "even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play" (16, 503). True, he never discloses the substance of his plan. Nor does he actually emerge in the course of the novel. We never learn, then, just what system of belief he has constructed to take the place of those that have failed him. All we can assume is that it is as individualized as the narrative that gives birth to it. In the 1950s, it would have been too much to expect authors to propose any more specific visions of the human plan because "plans of living" can only be made when their makers know what values they wish to preserve, promote, or discard. In the 1950s, American novelists were in the process of determining those values. If they withdrew from social consciousness in order to do so, they did not act as "Irresponsibles" or "Truants," however defensive their retreat may first have been. On the contrary. "This is 'resistance,' " Dwight Macdonald stated when describing another retreat, that of scientists who withdrew from atomic research, "this is 'negativism,' and in it lies our best hope" (Politics Past 179). For novelists in the 1950s, it was so indeed, for out of the "negativism" of withdrawal came the "positivism" that facilitated reemergence. By the 1960s, they were ready to present the "plans of living" they had created for themselves. Nowhere is that withdrawal and reemergence better encapsulated than in the career of Norman Mailer. Having spent the years between 1948 and 1955 bidding farewell to liberalism in his first three novels, he spent the next ten years without publishing a novel at all, only collections of essays. Later he credited one of those collections, Advertisements for Myself, with allowing him to discover his voice for the first time and acknowledged the influence of Henry Adams in helping him define a new historical perspective.40 "The White Negro" became the expression of that new voice and vision, the pivotal piece in Mailer's own shift from liberalism to existentialism, and one of the first examples of a nonmillennial perspective to emerge from writers in the postmodern period. Examining the work of Mailer in Chapter 2, then, provides a perceptual road map of the shift in historical sensibility that Americans experienced in the middle of the twentieth century, and serves, therefore, as a hinge between the millennial perspective shared by authors in the past and the open-ended perspective shared today by the authors in Chapters 3 and 4. Treating Mailer as a transitional literary figure also provides a hinge between the artistic sensibility
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of modern writers, like Dos Passos, whose work influenced Mailer, and the sensibility of post-modern writers, like Pynchon, whose work Mailer influenced in turn.41 Finally, spotlighting the work that Mailer wrote during the decade from i960 to 1970 in particular provides one example of how that new sensibility dealt with a period whose turmoil would, before, have called up an arsenal of millennialist rationalizations and whose ending would have demanded the most apocalyptic ofjudgments.
Chapter 2 The Transition to Post-Modernism: Norman Mailer and a New Frontier in Fiction "Soft-hearted philanthropists," thought I, "may sigh long for their peaceful millennium; for, from minnows to men, life is incessant war." - Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (1849) Already Alaska beckons on the north, and pointing to her wealth of natural resources asks the nation on what new terms the new age will deal with her. Across the Pacific looms Asia, no longer a remote vision and a symbol of the unchanging, but borne as by mirage close to our shores and raising grave questions of the common destiny of the people of the ocean. The dreams of Benton and of Seward of a regenerated Orient, when the long march of westward civilization should complete its circle, seem almost to be in process of realization. The age of the Pacific Ocean begins, mysterious and unfathomable in its meaning for our own future. - Frederick Jackson Turner, "The West and American Ideals" (1914) Norman Mailer is not the first American writer to conceive of history in terms of war. x Nor was he the only one to do so during the period of the 1940s and 1950s specifically. Whether set in World War I, like Faulkner's A Fable, or World War II, like Heller's Catch-22, whether depicting men overseas, like Mailer's own The Naked and the Dead, or men at home, like Bellow's Dangling Man, novels dealing with war often concerned themselves less with a particular war fought and more with War as a permanent process, a "fact or condition of nature, of physical laws," only punctuated by periods of armed combat (Fable 125). Mailer, however, has gone on to portray War without any one war ensuing. After a first novel set on a Pacific island during World War II, his subsequent works locate their battles in settings of few, if any, military trappings: a Brooklyn boardinghouse, a Hollywood retreat, an Alaskan hunting range. To be sure, the conflicts waged within these limited environments have extended ramifications - those in Brooklyn and Hollywood resonate to the Cold War, those in Alaska to the war in Vietnam. But in divesting his fictional settings of foreign antagonists, Mailer suggests that his interests lie less with the global politics that make war an ongoing concern and more with 36
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the home-grown American forces that contribute to its continuity. In other words, if Faulkner saw World War I as a "travelling minstrel troupe" to be transferred "intact to the fresh trans-Atlantic pastures, the virgin American stage" after
Europe was exhausted (Fable 190), Mailer portrays the traveling minstrel show of America moving ever-westward to greener pastures abroad. The vision is, of course, a re-vision of the script that directed the first settlers to Mather's "Desarts of America" with the same hopes that later propel Mailer's Deer Park actors to California's Desert D'Or. Likewise, the sexuality that Mailer ascribes to their performance finds precedent in those metaphorical piercings of the Continent that writers such as Turner lauded for years. Unlike these earlier historians - and much like most twentieth-century novelists Mailer portrays a land already ravaged. While his American dreamers can still be moved to action by glimpses of "a jeweled city on the horizon," the sign no longer signifies (AD 251). Stephen Rojack's City on the Hill is Las Vegas. Yet unlike earlier novelists, Mailer questions what the sign originally signified, in which case modern America may not so much be a deviation from that "fresh, green breast of the new world" whose passing Fitzgerald mourned as the fitting derivation of a mission of moral dubiousness, spawned by the mysteries of Christianity and the mercantilism of the Corporation, and presided over by a weakened God. No longer a process of simple degeneration over time, American history may follow a course already set in its schizoid inception. Surprisingly, Mailer refuses to conclude that its course is inflexibly set, that the outcome of one battle determines the outcome of a whole war. During the 1940s and 1950s, it was this willingness to hold the future in abeyance that distinguished Mailer's historical sensibility from that of older writers, most of whom simply negated millennialism's prophecies as their calls for maturity and responsibility negated the proclivities that it encouraged. Thus, Ellison's Golden Day is characterized by the rioting of insane asylum inmates; his beast slouching to Bethlehem is a robot whose iron legs "clanged doomjully as it moved" (Invisible Man 493). Faulkner's "Tomorrow" is a time of "straw and urine and vomit" (365); the only coming his Fable heralds is that of Technology in the next great conflict - a promise already fulfilled when advanced by a book set in World War I and published after World War II. By replacing a millennial with an existential perspective, however, Mailer transcends the kind of negation, or inversion, that had trapped the historical sensibility of novelists for over a century. The war that his works chronicle has an ending that is unknown for being undetermined or, as Mailer puts it, "not written" (Pont. 37). In Mailer's view, we can play a heroic role in deciding the nature of that ending. Proposing that each person is empowered with a particular mission "one of us to create, another to be brave, a third to love, a fourth to work, a fifth to be bold, a sixth to be all of these" - Mailer transforms the notion of personal responsibility into a historical directive. Yet, in specifically describing the end of history as "not written," Mailer reveals that the mission he deems central in its determination belongs to that sixth person who is charged with
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"all of these" tasks - the artist, whose role is "to be as disturbing, as adventurous, as penetrating, as his energy and courage make possible" and, by intensifying, if not exacerbating, "the moral consciousness of people" in this manner, "accelerate historical time itself."2 The injunction is hardly new. Its moral burden had been shouldered before by Whitman's "poets of the kosmos" and Emerson's "great men." But the historical conditions under which its formal obligation is discharged are new. When Emerson defined the role of genius, he described the duties of a moral barometer. Insisting that, in addition to farmers, sailors, and weavers, society needed "a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander," he charged these gifted men "to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers." He also endorsed Imagination as providing the most reliable means of measurement. 3 When Mailer enacts the role of writer over one hundred years later, he assumes the duties advanced by Emerson. To what other end are his essays on political candidates, sports figures, and movie stars devoted? At the same time, he also recognizes the obstacles that prevent an artist from carrying out his observatory task in quite the manner that Emerson specified, once faces, like those of the Kennedys, had been replaced by the flaccid look of the "wad": There was a time when a writer had to see just a little bit of a few different faces in the world and could know that the world vvas still essentially so simple and so phrased that he might use his imagination to fill in unknown colors in the landscape. . . . But the arts of the world suffered a curious inversion as man was turned by the twentieth century into mass man rather than democratic man. (CC 129) Unable to take his readings from the faces of those around him, suspicious of facts when the media prepackage "factoids," the artist is thrust back upon his own mercurial temperament in order to render his barometric role faithfully. Once the initiator of historical inquiry, the writer becomes both subject and object of his own investigation. Emerson would have been delighted at this injection of the subjective into historical assessment. Having assumed the world to be "mind precipitated," he distinguished the "sensual man" who "conforms thoughts to things" from the poet who "conforms things to his thoughts," and remained undisturbed at the "utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses." Although agreeing as early as 1951 that "One's psychological warp . . . may be precisely the peculiar lens necessary to see those relations [of the world] most clearly," Mailer remains more skeptical of the relations his own camera eye may capture. When he leaves Time magazine to find out "what happened" during the 1967 March on the Pentagon, he has no illusions about uncovering what "really" happened in The Armies of the Night. Of even more importance,
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if his work is to achieve the salutary ends he accords art, he must continue to maintain a reciprocal dynamic with the sensual world around him and, like Whitman's new breed of poets, find his inspiration in "real objects today, symptoms of the past and future."4 As Mailer's work progresses, the nature of those objects changes. So does his view of the kinds of effects art can hope to achieve among them. Never does he relinquish his view of what the proper subject of art is: "Art is not peace but war, and form is the record of that war" remains his battle cry throughout the 1970s (Pieces 157). What function that record can serve within the ongoing conflict it chronicles becomes another question, however, as he who charged into the fray intending to intensify consciousness and accelerate historical time in the 1950s begins learning the terrain and appreciating the value of small victories. Having realized by 1963 that "at best you affect the consciousness of your time, and so indirectly you affect the history of the time which succeeds you," Mailer settled himself in for a long campaign (CC 221). And so, as an afterthought, he added one more weapon to the writer's arsenal: "Of course, you need patience." From Liberalism to New Historicism For Mailer, perhaps more than for any other American writer, the election ofJohn F. Kennedy to the presidency augured the greatest number of possibilities. "There was obviously an ambiguity present in the hard Marxist front of one's ideas," he recalled, "some notion that the personality of the candidate was not separate from the history he would make. That soft idea arrived at its climax with
Kennedy" (CC 55). The Presidential Papers, allegedly written with Kennedy as audience, begins with this assumption with regard to Kennedy's candidacy. Although he quotes a New Yorker column that ascribes "the essence of his political attractiveness" to "his extraordinary political intelligence" (37), Mailer himself
focuses on the extraordinary sense of anxiety that "Kennedy's secrets" cause the traditional political boss: "[T]hey seem to have too little to do with politics and all too much to do with the private madnesses of the nation which had thousands - or was it hundreds of thousands - of people demonstrating in the long night before Chessman was killed, and a movie star, the greatest, Marlon the Brando out in the night with them" (31). Mailer, however, first has as much trouble as the boss categorizing Kennedy and the convention that nominates him. It is not until he witnesses the candidate's arrival at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles that Mailer gains a perspective on both. Walking into the convention headquarters, mobbed on all sides, with Kennedy bands playing and Kennedy teeth flashing, the candidate's entrance brings to mind every movie-related cliche from the grand premiere to Oscar night at the Pantages Theater: "[I]t was the scene where the hero, the matinee idol, . . . comes to the palace to claim the princess, or what is the same, and more to our soil, the football hero, the campus king, arrives at
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the dean's home surrounded by a court of open-singing students to plead with the dean for his daughter's kiss and permission to put on the big musical that night" (PP 38). The Democrats, in short, are nominating a box-office star for president. But, looks notwithstanding, the actor cast will not play the role as Tyrone Power. He once again will recall Brando, imbuing his performance with "the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others" (PP 48). With Kennedy, though, the screen presence meshes perfectly with the studio biography. He has commanded a PT boat during World War II. He has swum three miles with a crippled back while towing behind him a wounded crewmate. If his actions turn him into a traditional hero for most Americans, his intimacy with death transforms him into a different kind of hero for Mailer. It enables Kennedy to become that person whom critics never thought existed in real life - a White Negro, who understands that "if the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death . . ." (AM 312-13).5 Moreover, he embodies that stance in the most vindicating way possible for Mailer - he elevates it to "The Hipster as Presidential Candidate" (PP 44).
The primary significance of Kennedy to Mailer may well have resided in this embodiment, for "The White Negro," published in 1957, marks a critical turning point in Mailer's evolving historical perspective. Prior to that point, the protagonists of his early works play in one way or another with the remnants of a liberal heritage, reflecting an author intellectually aware of a bankrupt tradition but imaginatively incapable of formulating an alternative set of beliefs. Obviously, this tension suffuses those novels of the early 1950s in which politics plays an overt role in terms of plot: Barbary Shore, which populates its boardinghouse with breast-beating Trotskyites and Stalinists; The Deer Park, whose blacklisted Hollywood director must choose between revealing all or remaining silent. Yet no less does that authorial ambivalence pervade the war novel of 1948, for The Naked and the Dead's portrait of Lieutenant Hearn, a portrait that Mailer later would admit originated out of "a despised image of myself" (Manso, Mailer 101), poses the ability to think clearly against the inability to act conclusively. When Hearn recalls hearing a professor lecture a class on "the phenomenon of the kelp," the value of the dilettante's dialectics is made abundantly clear. Distinguished by no roots, no leaves, and no movement, and sybaritically absorbing its nourishment from its oceanic surroundings, the kelp are introduced by Mailer as forming the "bourgeois of the plant species" (ND 266). When Hearn's professor goes on to discuss the evolutionary status of the plants, which have had to remain behind in water when others moved onto land, and then passes around as a sample "a withered brown frond with a ropelike stalk," the function that they - and, by extension, that which they symbolize - now serve is confirmed beyond any doubt.
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A student holds up his hand. Sir, what is their main use? Oh, they have been used many ways. Essentially they are fertilizer. (ND 266) But recognizing, like his character, "He would have to react or die," and knowing "he would have to do something, and he had no idea what to do" (ND 258), Mailer still cannot fashion an action purposeful enough to turn his Hamlet into a hero. The most he can do is make Hearn decide to give up his commission after he returns from the book's reconnaissance mission: "Hearn and Quixote. Bourgeois liberals" (ND 456). And, as if aware himself of the falseness of even that solution, Mailer clumsily kills off the character with a sudden bullet before the mission gets very much under way. The victim of both General Cummings, who assigns him to lead the doomed mission, and Sergeant Croft, who falsifies a scouting report while on it, Hearn falls prey to the two characters whose drives for power embody the very kind of totalitarianism whose threat he has sought to mitigate. 6 Rather than contemplate what might be salvageable from the wreck of liberalism in 1957, Mailer begins "The White Negro" by asserting the irreparable damage that the tradition has suffered: "Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years" (AM 311). The liberal mode of response - if any remains to be taken - would attempt to alleviate that feeling of havoc by subsuming the present within a projected future. Mailer, however, considers the concentration camps and atom bomb to signal a more pervasive characteristic of modern times that calls into question all prospects of a future, reflecting a history in which the possibility of death has become a permanent backdrop against which events move at a faster pace. In his view, liberal methods of coping simply cannot keep up with this acceleration. Through most of modern history, "sublimation" was possible. . . . But sublimation depends on a reasonable tempo to history. If the collective life of a generation has moved too quickly, . . . the nervous system is overstressed beyond the possibility of such compromises as sublimation, especially since the stable middle-class values so prerequisite to sublimation have been virtually destroyed in our time, at least as nourishing values free of confusion or doubt. (AM 319) Mailer was not the first to evince such sentiments, of course. News of the concentration camps and the atom bomb provoked many to acclaim the uniqueness of the postwar era immediately after the conflict ended. So convinced was Norman Cousins that the "new age" born on 6 August 1945 "marked the violent death of one stage in man's history and the beginning of another" that he entitled his V-J Day editorial "Modern Man Is Obsolete" (5). Nor was Mailer the last to presume to speculate on what constituted the unique nature of those events that "The White Negro" takes as its basis. In the three decades
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since the essay appeared, theologians like Richard Rubenstein have defined the concentration camp as a new form of society for having infused the system of Western slavery with the operations of the modern corporate spirit, journalists like Jonathan Schell have distinguished nuclear warfare by the destruction of the ecosphere that it promises, and psychologists like Robert Jay Lifton have diagnosed the condition in which the survivors of both remain as permeated by feelings of "death in life."7 In focusing on the "psychic havoc" that the concentration camps and the atom bomb produced, however, Mailer bypasses the question of whether these contemporary calamities should be considered worse than the catastrophes of the past. Admittedly, even in concentrating his attention on the subjective feeling of unprecedented disaster, Mailer treads on ground that is less than original. Daniel Defoe, for one, was well aware that "nobody can account for the possession of fear when it takes hold of the mind" when chronicling his history of the plague year (Journal 250). Understanding as well how those fears of 1665 could be reactivated without the slightest bit of evidence, Defoe also recognized the state of perpetual anxiety that the plague left as its legacy, in which the citizens of London "were all kept with some kind of apprehensions constantly upon us" (249). Appearing in the second half of the 1950s, "The White Negro" emerged during a period of such reactivation. After the government had helped assuage the fears of nuclear weapons by publicizing the benefits of nuclear power, like the use of radioactive isotopes and more efficient sources of fuel, the testing of multimegaton bombs by both the United States and Russia, particularly America's test series of 1954 that spread radioactive ash over the Pacific, reawakened the terrors that had decreased quite markedly at the beginning of the decade.8 According to Mailer, the Negro has lived under such precarious conditions for two centuries and survived without sublimation, living as he does in "the enormous present" (AM 314).9 The model of conduct that Mailer proposes for the twentieth century, the hipster, copes with what are for him changed circumstances in the same way, metaphorically becoming a "White Negro" in the process. Yet to allow for the possibility of maturation over time, Mailer supplements the existentialist actions of the Negro with the reenactive impulses of the psychopath. Technically, he expresses the offerings of each in sexual metaphors.10 The Negro can survive because he follows the rhythms of his body. From him the hipster gains an orientation toward the present. From the psychopath, the hipster gains a way of contending with the past. The psychopath does not discard the past as meaningless, like the true existentialist. Nor does he repress the past while preparing for the future, like the true liberal. On the contrary, his courage lies in confronting the past, in seeking situations that offer "violent parallels" to those traumatic, and unresolved, situations of his childhood and that thus allow an "associational journey into the past [to be] lived out in the theatre of the present" (AM 320). For if he has the courage to meet the parallel situation at the moment when he is ready, then he has a chance to act as he has never acted before, and in
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satisfying the frustration - if he can succeed - he may then pass by symbolic substitute through the locks of incest. In thus giving expression to the buried infant in himself, he can lessen the tension of those infantile desires and so free himself to remake a bit of his nervous system. (AM 320) In terms of historical perspective, the hipster disgorges from the past those tensions it bequeaths to the present. At the same time, he develops from his engagements new and stronger responses to aid him in the future. Neither the simple retreat to primitivism that some claim nor the restoration of an "enormous present" against the ravages of "historical time" that others observe, the return to the past initiates a process of healthy dialectic, a historical spiral of growth in time. 11 To continue to grow, however, the hipster must also maintain an unenclosed pattern of growth. Once he becomes incapable of confrontation or not brave enough to return to the past, the backdrop of history comes into view and with it the onset of what Mailer calls "Dread." Kennedy embodies the hipster of Mailer's vision so well precisely because he has made the journey into the past: With his back injured, he has asked to return to PT duty and then maneuvered his boat so aggressively "that the crew didn't like to go out with him because he took so many chances" (PP 48). His later engagements turn an initial encounter with death into an intimate association, both literally and politically. Mailer provides a list of challenges not only undertaken but sought: a back operation that would either kill him or restore him to power, marriage to a woman too imaginative-looking for the public taste, a presidential nomination years before his proper time. The actions suggest ambiguity in the man himself. He chooses the most restrictive game of politics, yet plays by his own rules. More important, the nerve with which he performs implies that within Kennedy resides the psychopath's brand of recklessness. When D. H. Lawrence compared America's historical movement to a snake's sloughing off its skin, he saw that kind of nerve providing a necessary cure for the agonies of self-definition: It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don't care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out. It also needs a real belief in the new skin. Otherwise you are likely never to make the effort. Then you gradually sicken and go rotten and die in the old skin. (Studies 53) But if Lawrence saw a country divided between an older order and unlimited possibility, between European ancestry and Manifest Destiny, Mailer sees that conflict taking on more serious dimensions. The woods of Frederick Jackson Turner have disappeared by the twentieth century and the myth of unlimited possibility has burrowed into a nation's unconsciousness. The forces against which the myth battles no longer come from a mother country, but rather from the societal controls of that same country. Revolution now means schizophrenia, and by i960 Mailer sees the "fissure in the national psyche widened to the danger point" (PP 40).
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Kennedy's election looms so large for Mailer because the new president can bridge the country's fissure as he does his own. We needed to discover ourselves by an exploration through our ambiguity. And that precise ambiguity is embodied in the man we chose for our President. His magnetism is that he offers us a mirror of ourselves, he is an existential hero, his end is unknown, it is even unpredictable, even as our end is unpredictable, and so in this time of crisis he is able to perform the indispensable psychic act of a leader, he takes our national anxiety so long buried and releases it to the surface - where it belongs. (CC 170) A twentieth-century type, he would defuse the recoil predicted by Turner and force the nation "back to its existential beginnings, its frontier psychology" (PP 183). The New Frontier Kennedy administrates promises the psychic frontier Mailer seeks. In thus acting like no traditional sheriff, but as "an outlaw's sheriff" instead (PP v), Kennedy still is able to perform the Western hero's most basic function: the reconciliation of civilization and savagery. Like all frontiers, this point of reconciliation is understood to be a temporary one, and so it assuages rather than eradicates a conflict endemic to the nation. At the same time, it illuminates the progress of a larger war as well, for "the form of society" is, to Mailer, "no more than the line of the battlefield upon which the Devil distributes wealth against God's best intention" (PP 172). And the line of that battle is, to him, nothing less than the line of Destiny (PP 238).12 Assuming that man is not only the recipient of that embattled vision but an active participant in its determination, Mailer ascribes a metaphysical significance to actions in society that goes far beyond the impact they have in their immediate contexts. If he then asks, "Was it not possible that we were sent out of eternity to become more than we had been?" (PP 159), Kennedy's election affirms that question vehemently. Mailer suggests as much in a 1962 movie treatment called "The Last Night," written around a president he admits is "not altogether differentfromJohn F. Kennedy" (CC 380). Much like Hawthorne's "Earth's Holocaust" and "The New Adam and Eve," the story posits a world that has succeeded in poisoning itself. It ends, however, with the most open of alternatives as the president of the United States commands a rocketship that will voyage to a new planet. Even though he must detonate the ^arth to provide the ship with sufficient thrust, the president still views his actions as serving God. "May I be an honest man and not first deluded physician to the Devil," he says. Although the earth explodes, the spaceship is left with every possibility ahead of it, "streaming into the oceans of mystery, and the darkness beyond" (CC 396-7). But if Mailer also asks, "What then if we had become less?" (PP 159), he finds out with the assassination of Kennedy. The tragedy does not reside for him in Kennedy's proven abilities as president. If Mailer views him as having won "the biggest poker game we ever played" with the Cuban Missile Crisis (CC 42), he also views him as having made "one of the blunders of the cen-
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tury" with the Bay of Pigs affair (PP 64). Given the fact that Kennedy was defending "America's stake in Vietnam" as early as 1956, and sent sixteen thousand soldiers as advisers there while in office, one can only wonder what other "blunders" Mailer might later have found him perpetrating in order to protect that "keystone to the arch" of Southeast Asia and "finger in the dike" of the Free World.13 With Kennedy's death, though, Mailer is left ignorant of what the president would have done in the future one way or the other. The tragedy lies in the truncating of possibility. "He was a great man," said a girl at a party the other night. "No, he wasn't a great man," I said. "He was a man who could have become great or could have failed, and now we'll never know. That's what's so awful." That is what is so awful. Tragedy is amputation: the nerves of one's memory run back to the limb which is no longer there. (PP vii) Or, to use another of his metaphors, tragedy is waste - and waste for Mailer is shit. If the election of Kennedy promises God's work and a clean truce, his assassination reverberates throughout Mailer's subsequent two novels as a loosening of the Devil and a war in full regalia. The Process on Display An American Dream begins with a moment of triumph: "I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress." It then undercuts that opening premise on the next page as Stephen Rojack locates the difference between himself and the president in the degree to which the valor of each has been tested: "I looked down the abyss on the first night I killed . . . whereas Jack, for all I know, never saw the abyss" (9-10). Heaven is the Lower East Side and Hell is the top of the Waldorf Towers in this novel of inverted imagery. The frontier moves to what Mailer calls "the sexual badlands" of the novel (CC 130), the combat waged takes place upon the bodies of women, and the battle opens on a moment of spoilage. Every woman the book portrays has been possessed by Barney Oswald Kelly, a man who admits to being "solicitor for the Devil" (221).14 And every woman the book portrays possesses a physiological defect in her womb. Deborah, Rojack's wife, has "something malformed about her uterus" (31). Ruta, the German maid, is "slack, her box spoke of cold gasses from the womb and a storehouse of disappointments" (47). Even Cherry, the woman with whom Rojack seeks salvation, has felt she never can have children because a doctor "hinted something was wrong, and I never tried to find out" (167). Why Are We in Vietnam? is built upon a similar premise. Focusing on yet another frontier, Alaska, an area perfectly "marginated halfway between civilization and a nature culture-primitive constellation" (95), the novel describes a borderland that is already defiled. It is not particularly awe-inspiring, as its
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adolescent narrator realizes: "I mean DJ. could say you might just as well be in Yosemite" (129). Nor is it virgin territory any longer. "Brooks Range no wilderness now," declares the hunter Big Ollie Water Beaver. "Airplane go over the head, animal no wild no more, now crazy" (68). Instead, in concerning itself with a hired hunting expedition, the novel shows what happens when, as Mailer says elsewhere, "American Civilization had moved from the existential sanction of the frontier to the abstract ubiquitous sanction of the dollar bill" (AN 179). Paid for by American dollars since 1950, as a matter of fact, when the United States began subsidizing the French war effort, the war in Vietnam consumed an increasing amount of American money over the course of the next decade and a half: between $1,063 a n d $i-33 billion in 1954, from $105 million to $2 billion a month in the year 1966 to 1967 alone, and $20 billion annually by mid-1967.15 Paid for by Rutherford David Jethroe Jellicoe Jethroe, a corporation executive for Central Consolidated Chemical and Plastic, Mailer's Moe Henry and Obungekat Safari offers its fictional adventurers all the conveniences that money can buy: pink-tiled bathrooms, Venetian blinds, helicopter-assisted exploration, and whiskey-sour-assisted relaxation - in short, all the conveniences of technology. Because Mailer's purpose in each book is to show how American dreams can lead to nightmares like Vietnam, it is important to realize that the Alaskan landscape in Why Are We in Vietnam? is equivalent metaphorically to the sexual landscape in An American Dream. "Yes, America always lent itself to personification," he acknowledges when portraying his love for America as parallel to his love for his wife (AN 193-4). So are the urges he sees vented upon each fictional front parallel to each other as well. Only by understanding the way they interact can one comprehend Mailer's view of Vietnam as the product of age-old American tendencies encouraged by the most modern of technological advances. For Mailer, the impulse toward violence and the impulse toward sexuality derive from the same source. Having begun writing during a period in which the connection between the two permeated popular consciousness, Mailer is hardly alone in this contention. Less than a month after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Life magazine christened a photograph of a Hollywood starlet "The Anatomic Bomb." Less than a year later, a picture of Rita Hayworth was stenciled on the first bomb tested in the Bikini Atoll series.16 Not surprisingly, Mailer's first postwar fiction incorporates a similar imagery. When General Cummings contemplates the drawings of an asymmetrical parabola in The Naked and the Dead, he discovers that the curve that can denote the shape of a human breast can also denote the shape of a projectile's path. He also recognizes what this "curve of the death missile as well as an abstraction of the life-love impulse" proves: that "life and death are merely different points of observation on the same trajectory" (443). Nearly two decades later, Stephen Rojack reinforces the same point in An American Dream when he describes his killing of German soldiers in World War II: pulling the trigger "as if I were squeezing the softest breast of the softest pigeon which ever flew," to the
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extent that "still a woman's breast takes me now and then to the pigeon on that trigger," and leaving behind a face belonging to "an old man, toothless, sly, reminiscent of lechery" (11-12). In Mailer's metaphysics, then, the identical impulse can lead in two directions, toward creation or decreation, ultimately fulfilling the work of either God or the Devil. Rojack considers the early years with his wife as a time of great potential, when "her strength seemed then to pass to mine and I was live with wit, I had vitality, I could depend on stamina, I possessed my style" (AD 24). Creation can end in procreation, and Deborah gets pregnant. At its best, the impulse that results in procreation also produces the greatest amount of pleasure. When Rojack makes love to Cherry after removing her diaphragm, "for the first time in my life without passing through fire or straining the stones of my will, I came up from my body rather than down from my mind, I could not stop, some shield broke in me, bliss, and the honey she had given me I could only give back, all sweets to her womb, all come in her cunt" (AD 122-3). He feels certain that they have begun a child and furthered God's scheme.17 In contrast, when he ejaculates into Ruta's rectum, he satisfies only der Teufel: "I felt low sullen waters wash about a dead tree on a midnight pond. I had come to the Devil a fraction too late, and nothing had been there to receive me" (AD 49). There remains, however, a third alternative to sexual satisfaction of a healthy or unhealthy nature. As DJ. remarks, "An impulse once it is frustrated crystallizes the chemicals which had been interacting in order to fuel the move" (VN 161). At times, this frustration can produce heightened sensitivity and lead to beauty, "Cause beauty is a high form. It is a crystal. It is the frustrated impulse of a general desire to improve the creation" (VN 161-2). The sexual obscenity characterizing D.J.'s narrative helps transform his story into art. But that condition has an optimum level, as DJ. also understands: "Frustration makes you more telepathic because it makes you more electric. Up to a point, Poindexter, after that, dielectric, apathetic, insulated, you ass. Cause to be telepathic while frustrated is to be burned on charged wire" (VN 162). Physiologically, the result is cancer, "the growth of madness denied" (AD 249). Physically, the result is more apparent - an outburst of bodily force. As Mailer asserts, "Whenever one is aroused sexually and doesn't find consummation, the sex in one's veins turns literally to violence" (CC 196). The individual acts of violence that release that madness are never portrayed as pretty. Nor are they ever advocated as ideal, despite the charges of macho theatrics that critics keep casting upon Mailer.18 They are, at best, presented as facilitating "the catharsis which prepares growth" (AM 328). Even under these conditions, they are evaluated with respect to a strict moral hierarchy wherein the most acceptable acts are individualized between equals and expressed openly, thereby insuring a minimizing of destruction and a maximizing of personal responsibility.19 This is exactly why Rojack's killing of his wife is not condemned within the context of An American Dream. The fight between Rojack and his wife occurs between two equals. Deborah stands as tall as Ro-
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jack, she charges at him "like a bull," and she possesses so much strength that "For a moment I did not know if I could hold her down" (AD 35). In killing her, Rojack destroys the literal cancer residing in his wife; in so doing, he also releases the metaphorical cancer growing within himself, the madness that has driven him close to suicide. 20 The unimpeded growth of cancer bodes so ominously for Mailer because madness suppressed eventually becomes madness expressed - and in a new form. Differences in quantity become differences in quality, and individual acts of aggression erupt collectively to produce the kind of violence that Mailer hates most: "inhuman violence - violence which is on a large scale and abstract" (PP 136). Mailer's hatred of technology stems from the fact that it promotes this eventuality in every way possible. He considers contraception to have become "woman's most intimate introduction to the abilities of technology to solve delicate problems" (PS 49). As such, technology blocks the creative impulse from coming to fruition, the diaphragm meriting especial blame because its very mechanics serve to obstruct - and hence frustrate - that impulse. At the same time, technology allows that frustration to be channeled into the most destructive kinds of ventilation. By producing weaponry that distances people more and more from the consequences of their actions, technology removes from their heads the inhibitory constraints of responsibility and guilt. Twentieth-century testimony confirms the truth of Mailer's theory. For some, constraint is replaced by aesthetic appreciation. From an airplane, Mussolini's son-in-law can drop bombs and find pleasure in their patterns of explosion. From his drawing board, J. Robert Oppenheimer can discuss the "brilliant luminescence" an atom bomb blast would have. And from a control shelter ten thousand yards away, a brigadier general can portray the "clarity and beauty" of such a blast as "that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately." For others, constraint dissolves in business-as-usual tedium. Pilot Paul Tibbets can recall Enola Gay's mission to Hiroshima as "a perfectly unexciting and routine thing up until the point of taking a look at the damage that had been done" and still follow his description of "inconceivable" ruin with a description of himself and his crewmen as "sightseers." In much the same manner, Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb," can come to view his offspring as "just a big bang." 21 Significantly, all the hunting in Why Are We in Vietnam? depends upon aerial devices, the same aerial devices whose presence distinguished American combat in Southeast Asia. A helicopter drops off the men at a safe distance from their prey. The machine then circles around the animals, frightening them into a stupor. Mr. Cop Turd went swinging after them like a darning needle after ladybugs and headed the Dall ram off till they started to run back toward us, at which point he cut them off again . . . at which point Dall ram leader was like to be very confused and hit out this way and that way, and the Cop just went
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circling around until the sheep were fixed, shit they were hypnotized, it was pretty to watch, cause Hail Cop was like a bullfighter twisting a bull through the limits of his neck. . . . (VN 108) With one major difference. The hunters here never get close enough to the animals to be in any danger. When they do discharge their shots, they shoot when the animals are deceived under the crudest of pretexts - right after the helicopter moves away, leaving the rams "shivering from the release of anxiety," feeling "they were being born out again" (VN 109). And they shoot not to kill, but to decimate. As Rusty says, "Maybe a professional hunter takes pride in dropping an animal by picking him off in a vital spot - but I like the feeling that if I miss a vital area I still can count on the big impact knocking them down, killing them by the total impact, shock! it's like aerial bombardment in the last Big War" (VN 88). More than just a flippant remark, Rusty's comparison points to the continuities between American fighting in Vietnam and American fighting in earlier conflicts. Conceived of by a military whose policy of total war had erased the distinction between combatant and noncombatant as early as 1942, the creation of free-fire zones in Vietnam proved little different from the selection of targets - like Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, and, most extensively, Tokyo - for terror bombing in World War II. Characterized by an "unparalleled, lavish use of firepower as a substitute for manpower," as one officer wrote, these attacks perpetrated in Vietnam conformed to a motto of "Expend Shells Not Men" that had been embraced by that same military since World War I.22 Reflecting this massive imbalance between ammunition and aims, all the weaponry in Mailer's book is completely out of proportion to the hunters' needs. Like Deborah Rojack, who uses a .22 for moles and woodchucks, the men in Rusty's party use elephant guns for caribou. Big Luke can kill anything he meets with his old Swedish Husqvarna, but he carries a Winchester .375 Magnum instead. Medium Asshole Pete has grown up using a Savage .250 deer gun, but he immediately runs to borrow a more powerful weapon when he is invited on the expedition. When he then discovers that the borrowed gun will kill only with a "well placed" shot, he runs to a third-rate Mafioso and buys an "African rhinoceros-hippo-elephant-soften-the-bullet-for-the-lion double-barreled .600-. 577 custom, only-one-of-its-kind-ever-built Jeffrey Nitro Express" that he cannot even use properly (VN 83-4). In actuality, these traditional tactics proved wholly inappropriate in Vietnam. An agricultural more than an industrial land, Vietnam did not possess enough of the kinds of targets - bridges, dams, factories - that made bombing a sensible maneuver. By 1967, the United States had dropped 1,630,000 tons of bombs on North and South Vietnam - twice as much as it had dropped during the Korean War and three times as much as it had dropped on the Pacific theater of operations during World War II. On 25 August of that year, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified to the cost-effectiveness of such procedures: The 173,000 American missions that had destroyed $320 mil-
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lion in facilities had also cost $911 million in damaged American aircraft.23 Nor did Vietnam possess the kind of terrain in which progress could be measured in terms of classical fronts; rather, combat in Vietnam's dense jungles took the form of what Bernard Fall has called "la guerre sansfronts''or "la guerre desgrands vides" (15, 195).
Mailer, however, is interested less in the success rate of long-held American tactics and more with the long-standing American urges that they reveal. The point to be made in his novel is that the urge being vented in Alaska - and, by extension, in Vietnam itself - is ultimately the age-old American urge for power. In Why Are We in Vietnam? the violence is anal and the bombardment total. When Medium Asshole Pete kills a caribou, he sends a "Nitro Express up into his gut from the rear," which then blasts "through his intestines, stomach, pancreas, gallbladder, liver and lungs, and left a hole to put your arm in. . . . " The meat tastes bad, like "bile, shit, and the half-digested contents of a caribou's stomach." It also smells bad, like "stink wallow with your nose beneath the fever" (VN 102-3). In fact, it recalls the "whiff of the icy rot" exuded by Barney Oswald Kelly in An American Dream (203). The sexual conquest now suggests a more total form of control. In contrast to Rojack, whose movement toward sex and violence is for liberation, to exchange "an American Dream" for what has become "the American Dream," for Kelly and the hunters in Alaska, the movement toward both is for domination.24 The various motivations that impel the Alaskan hunters bear witness to the homegrown forces behind the expedition. For Big Luke Fellinka, the modern man's Natty Bumppo, it is boredom. "The helicopter was new to him, you read, . . . but he was an American, what the fuck, . . . wilderness was tasty but boredom was his corruption, he had wanted a jolt, so sees it D.J., Big Luke now got his kicks with the helicopter" (VN 103). In the "Grandma with Orange Hair" chapter of The Armies of the Night, Mailer will develop the type further. Comparing the marshals he sees around the Pentagon to those he has known during his army days, Mailer attributes their increase of hatred and decrease of dignity to changes in the American small town. Engulfed by supermarkets and shopping centers, the small town no longer can move westward to resettle. Nor can its inhabitants be stimulated by pioneer acts of courage - "no dreams now of barbarian lusts, slaughtered villages, battles of blood, no, nor any need for them . . . " (AN 174). Unlike the locusts of Nathanael West's Hollywood, however, those who form the "damp dull wad" of Mailer's contingent do not explode into violence when the ruse is unmasked and they discover they have been cheated (SG 53). Seeking redress because "life did not feel as good as the sum of their earnings encouraged them to believe it was going to be," these small-town refugees project their anger elsewhere: "wherever fever, force, and machines could come together, in Vegas, at the race track, in pro football, race riots for the Negro, suburban orgies — none of it was enough - one had to find it in Vietnam; that was where the small town had gone to get its kicks" (SG 144; AN 174). At the other end of America's social spectrum, Rusty Jethroe does not feel
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life to be very good either, although a quick glance might suggest otherwise. The "cream of corporation corporateness" (FN29), Rusty looks like a rugged cross between Dwight David Eisenhower and Henry Cabot Lodge - the general invincible in World War II and the ambassador impeccable in the war in Vietnam. Married to an elegant Southern lady and living in a splendid mansion, he possesses enough wealth to hire a hunting expedition for himself. But this portrait arises from D.J.'s point of view, and D J . hardly qualifies as an unbiased observer. No William Westmoreland, who learned his approach to organization at the Harvard Business School and gave the impression of a "clean-living, upright, corporate vice-president,"25 this "cream of corporation corporateness" has to spend twelve years on the road for his firm, is not sent down by that firm to Cape Canaveral, and thus has no say at all in its "big power space decisions" (VN 50). The "blond beauty" to whom he stays married remains a woman "he can never own for certain in the flesh of his brain" (KN113). To compensate for both public and private failures, he goes to Alaska. Although Rusty gives Luke a valid reason for wanting to catch a bear - "I want to behold Bruin right in his pig red eye so I'll never have to be so scared again" (VN 64) - what Rusty is most scared of is not the bear. He originally plans the expedition with "his opposite number" to impress their corporation heads (VN 46). Once his rival is picked to attend the Cape Canaveral meetings, however, Rusty has no choice but to continue on with the Alaskan safari. Rather than confirming Rusty's corporate prestige, the bear hunt only shows his corporate paranoia. He must bag big game in a big way - "Cause if he don't get a bear now, he can transfer to Japan" (VN 126). To testify on his behalf, he takes along two medium-asshole subordinates. Yet this only augments his problem. He now has both an audience to impress and new competitors to beat. Because the hunt also serves as a test of his sexual manhood, the same activity places Rusty on the line in both public and private life. The pressure to succeed increases. He rushes his shots. When Luke informs him that it is not the best season for bear, Rusty's no-win situation seems assured. Even D J . sympathizes with him at times, seeing his father caught up in a system not of his making. . . . in America the most stable and dependable human product we turn out, and our schools, businesses, armed forces, and legislative halls are proud to be so filled with the product, is a medium- to high-grade asshole like Rusty, who in turn obeys the orders only of G.P.A. - who, in case you forget, is Mr. Great Plastic Asshole. So don't be too hard on Rusty. He's a pig with a wild snouty mouth, but he's got good blood. (VN 38-9) Indeed he does, for his roots lie in magic, not technology - his grandmother was a witch. In fact, when father and son go off alone, Rusty recalls an earlier life that has had nothing in common with the one he leads at present. Passing on to D J . the rituals that he received as a child himself, Rusty tells his son,
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REMINISCENCE AND RE-CREATION " . . . I learned a lot from my daddy, he taught me one thing I'm going to teach you now - the only time a good man with a good rifle is in trouble is when he steps from sunlight into shadow, cause there's two or three seconds when you can't see." "I know that, daddy," says D.J. "Yeah, but you never made a principle of it. That's the difference." (VN 138-9)
Rusty's breath smells fine now, he lets a caribou go unharmed, and D.J. actually loves his father; but the moment a bear comes into view, these conditions change as Rusty's corporate paranoia returns. With an overeager blast he robs his son of the bear and then claims the dead animal as his own. The real impulse to kill, though, belongs not to Rusty, but to Tex Hyde. The literary descendant of Mailer's Sergeant Croft, another Texas hunter who has "good stock in him" (ND 126), Tex also inherits the attitudes bequeathed by his older companions in Why Are We in Vietnam? The motivations impelling Luke and Rusty all find a repository in this "most peculiar blendaroon of humanity and evil, technological know-how, pure savagery, sweet aching secret American youth" (VN 172). At the same time, Tex receives a far greater heritage as well, for the "State of Texas [is] personified by Gottfried Tex Hyde Jr." (VN 152). And the state of Texas personifies for Mailer the state of the Union. "Yeah, go back to the martyrs of the Alamo, and add a picture of Tex and his parents, Gutsy and Jane, in cameo, and you get a notion of the kink which resides in the heart of the Lone Star" (VN 177-8). The kink that resides in the nation's history is embodied within the unlikely marriage of Tex's parents, Gottfried Senior, an undertaker, and Jane McCabe, a "Texas ass saint, female division" (VN 175). Yet the kinks exist before that marriage ever takes place, for the personality of each spouse exhibits - but does not blend - conflicting traits. Gottfried's business deals in death, but Gutsy "comes all over the place out of a vast enthusiasm for life" (VN 174). Plain Jane McCabe has the opposite problem. Anticipating Mailer's 1968 description of Miami Republicans who "were not on earth to enjoy or even perhaps to love so very much" but "were here to serve" (MSC 35), she serves all those around her. She cooks, she cleans, she mends, she worries — all without complaint — and she manifests beneath her composure a most tremendous sexual libido. Instead of reconciling these opposites as their union portends to do, marriage only intensifies the incongruities already there. Jane cannot accept her own sexuality, and so her energies stay hidden within "her secret pussy" (VN 176). Gutsy still "comes more often than anyone in the whole fucking state from cowpuncher to President and back again" (VN 174), but he comes in all the wrong places - men, dogs, goats, even keyholes whenever possible. Throughout Why Are We in Vietnam? Mailer suggests this schism inherent in the American psyche in numerous ways. From the opening page allusion to "Doc Dick and Jek" (VN 5) - and one soon learns the identity of Mr. Hyde he populates the book with pairs of characters who reflect contradictory, yet
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complementary, traits. Gutsy comes all over Texas literally, but Rusty's very name implies the extent of his activity. D.J. comes all over the narrative verbally, but Tex, "who never sucked a dick and never let no one near him not even to touch" (KN218), indulges in buggery. It would appear, then, that the characters' actions exemplify Mailer's theories about sexuality and violence: He who satisfies himself sexually already has vented his energies; he who does not kills. Mailer, however, points out that the conditions giving rise to such divisions worsen with time. Each successive generation inherits the flaws of its heritage, but remains increasingly separated from past ways of coping with them. Rusty is removed from the struggles of his predecessors. "So, no wonder Rusty's a pig," remarks D.J. "His cells are filled with the biological inheritance and trait transmissions of his ancestors, all such rawhide, cactus hearts, eagle eggs, and coyote. Now, Rusty rolls that Chateau Lafite-Mouton-Rothschild around his liver loving lips, and he can tell 49 from 53 from 59, all the while thinking of 69" (VN 34). Yet D.J. and Tex remain just as ignorant of a more immediate past. Tex does not understand why Big Ollie covers a dead wolfs head and kneels before it. D.J. knows neither the names nor significance of the Arctic herbs and flowers. And not knowing the rituals of nature once practiced by Rusty, they must resort to black magic - to "private autopsies," "closet fucking," and "potential overturn of incest" - in order to gain their powers (VN 166). As reflecting the future for Mailer, these activities of Tex and D.J. fill him with dismay. In 1967, he will look at the Pentagon demonstrators and wonder if "that tissue of past history, whether traceable in the flesh, or merely palpable in the collective underworld of the dream, was nonetheless being bombed by the use of LSD as outrageously as the atoll of Eniwetok, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the scorched foliage of Vietnam" (AN 109-10). Five years later, he will look at the Young Voters for the President with undisguised apprehension: "They have the feverish look of children who are up playing beyond the hour of going to sleep; their eyes are determined, disoriented, happy and bewildered. So they shriek. With hysteria. The gleam in their eye speaks of no desire to go beyond the spirit they have already been given. Rather, they want more of what they've got. . . . Perhaps America has been worrying about the wrong kids" (SG 200). Or perhaps it is too late for America's worries to effect any change. "Oh, honey, here we are," says Cherry in An American Dream, to which Rojack replies, "Too late to save the co.untry" (187). If this is the case, An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? then consider what one still has the possibility of saving. Although both novels offer alternatives to the conditions they depict, the ending of each one either qualifies or undermines the possibility of realizing the solution it proposes. If Rojack wonders how one distinguished love from the art of the Devil (AD 166), Mailer allows him enough insight to make a correct distinction later in the book: "I believed God was not love but courage. Love came only as a reward" (AD 191). Unfortunately,
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Rojack does not possess sufficient courage to obtain that reward. He only has courage to attempt one walk around the parapet of Kelly's terrace; returning to his starting point is too much for him to contemplate. And as he realizes afterward, unwelcome consequences will follow from his unfinished mission: "Suddenly I knew something was wrong, something had gone finally wrong: it was too late for the parapet now" (AD 244). It also becomes too late for Cherry. By going to Kelly's suite instead of going to Harlem, Rojack indirectly allows her to be killed. At best he still can save himself, which he does. But the last page of the book acknowledges that such salvation cannot occur within the confines of the United States. Defining himself, much as Whitman did his poets, as a "new breed of man," Rojack must seek elsewhere for his cure, and so he begins "the long trip" to Guatemala and Yucatan, to Central America (AD 251-2). In Why Are We in Vietnam? Mailer negates his alternative solution even more soundly. Like Rojack, D J . understands what will facilitate his health; in fact, D.J. understands this far better than the confused Rojack at first. From the beginning of his narrative, D.J. exhibits the hipster's key mode of response. As he declares, "if D.J. makes it through a day without a single impulse held back, he should not need to piss a drop" (VN 163). He also knows enough not to examine those impulses too closely, understanding that "you deaden a mystery and your liver goes to shit" (VN 98). When he and Tex light out by themselves to the Endicott Range territory, they journey there under the most purgative of instincts. The boys strip off most of their sophisticated hunting gear. They follow scents as directionals. For the first time on the expedition, D.J. actually is moved by the landscape around him. For the first time he gains some understanding of what has spoiled the area they have left behind them. . . . D.J. could have wept for a secret was near, some mystery in the secret of things - why does the odor die last and by another route? - and he knew then the meaning of trees and forest all in dominion to one another and messages across the continent on the wave of their branches up to the sorrow of the North, the great sorrow up here brought by leaves and wind some speechless electric gathering of woe, no peace in the North, not on the top of the rim. . . . (FN211)
Coming close to epiphany with the Aurora Borealis, D.J. attempts to make total his alliance with the magnetic-fief and with Tex. But his actions backfire into a short circuit. "In the field of all such desire D.J. raised his hand to put it square on Tex's cock and squeeze and just before he did the Northern lights shifted on that moment and a coil of sound went off in the night like a blowout in some circuit fuse of the structure of the dark . . . " (VN 218). Although a union between D.J. and his alter ego does occur, it ends in undesired results as "something in the radiance of the North went into them, and owned their fear, some communion of telepathies and new powers, and they were twins, never to be near as lovers again, but killer brothers . . . " (VN 219). They depart from Alaska thinking their experiences will lead "the way into the new
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life" (VN 224). But the "new life" they expect to begin two years later will extend the "old life" they have encountered up North. Indeed, the "new life" in Vietnam promises to repeat an entire strain of American frontier history; if Alaska looks forward to Vietnam on the one hand, it also harks back to the Alamo on the other. D.J., however, misses the significance of his own story. Gleefully anticipating his induction into the armed services, he signs off confidently, with no apparent waves of interference. "This is D.J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot damn" (VN 224). He does not yet realize that Vietnam will satisfy as much as the pictures of Betty Grable that Major Dalleson plans to superimpose over maps in The Naked and the Dead to spruce up his classes. The one's "Hot dog!" leads to the other's "hot damn" with a bang. The Process on Record In his 1965 Berkeley speech on Vietnam Day, Mailer further extended the American paradigm of Major Dalleson's search for innovation. Speaking of Lyndon Johnson, Mailer asserted: The President believed very much in image. He believed the history which made the headlines each day was more real to the people than the events themselves. . . . But his ability to control the image, even put it down when necessary, was hampered by one fact. In the Great Society there was no movement, program, plan or ideal which was even remotely-as dramatic as the Civil-Rights movement. So the Civil-Rights movement was going to crowd everything else out of the newspapers. . . . So the President needed another issue. Then it came to the President. Hot damn. Vietnam. (CC 70-1) To the extent that Johnson remained acutely conscious of his public image, Mailer's assertion is well grounded. Running as an antiwar candidate against Barry Goldwater in 1964, Johnson repeated his promise not to send "American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys" at the same time that covert military operations against North Vietnam that had been launched in February continued unabated. Criticized, three years later, by the Senate Preparedness Committee for being too restrained in the bombing of North Vietnam, Johnson responded accordingly and authorized the bombing of fifty-two out of fifty-seven targets cited as overlooked. 26 Precisely because Johnson dealt so much in images, however, it becomes difficult to assess how much his actions in Vietnam arose from the motivations that Mailer claims. Because all Mailer can do is reproduce an image of an image, reality becomes refracted through multiple lenses, and empirical truth becomes an elusive, if not impossible, quality to locate. In a very literal way, the war in Vietnam was refracted through multiple lenses, more so than any other conflict, as Don Oberdorfer has documented. In contrast to the ten thousand television sets in use in America at the time of
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Pearl Harbor and the ten million sets in use at the start of the Korean War, nearly one hundred million sets were in use by January 1968, reaching a potential audience of ninety-six percent of the nation's population (Tet! 159). And, in a very literal sense, the war in Vietnam lent itself to the kind of distortion of reality that refraction produces. "I believe our present situation in Vietnam is so irrational that any attempt to deal with it logically is illogical in the way surrealism is illogical," declared Mailer at Berkeley (CC 71). Correspondents overseas certainly agreed. "Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it," wrote Michael Herr. "Straight history, auto-revised history, history without handles, for all the books and articles and white papers, all the talk and the miles of film, something wasn't answered, it wasn't even asked" (Dispatches 218, 49). Mailer is spared the task of portraying the war in Vietnam itself in The Armies of the Night, but the difficulty of portraying a protest of that war proves no less daunting, for the October 1967 March on the Pentagon that the book details presents a set piece of illogic from start to finish. David Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam and an Old Left strategist, calls in Jerry Rubin, "the most militant, unpredictable, creative - therefore dangerous - hippie-oriented leader available on the New Left," to form "a combined conventional mass protest and civil disobedience" to unify a divided peace movement (AN 251-2). They choose the Pentagon as symbolic of the Washington, D.C., war machine even though the building stands in Virginia and possesses no "symbolic loins" to immobilize (AN 255). And they mount a protest in defense of peace that meets with very real acts of brutality. After the March concludes, there seems no way to interpret the event, to measure its success or failure. "Yes," concedes Mailer in his account, "it was a battle conceived unlike any other, for in a symbolic war, victory had no tangible fruit. . . . There was an explanation to the attack on the Pentagon. It was somewhere in the shape of this event. If only he could brood on it" (AN 224).
He has trouble finding the shape of the event because Mailer has enough trouble finding the shape of Mailer as the book begins. The libertine manque tugs with the doting father of six. He admits to having "given his own head the texture of a fine Swiss cheese" with "modestly promiscuous amounts" of whiskey and drugs, but demands that his eighteen-year-old daughter not touch marijuana until she finishes college and never touch LSD at all (AN 15). The Marxist anarchist of times past battles with the left conservative of 1967. A proposed raise in income taxes to pay for the war in Vietnam enrages Mailer; yet he has to force himself to sign the protest he subsequently initiates. The middle-aged writer feels himself to have no particular age, but carries "different ages within him like different models of his experience" (AN 20). His personality turns protean, as he becomes at will "The Participant," "The Ruminant," "The Critic," "The Beast," "The General," "The Historian," and, finally, "The Novelist." Most important, the image he has tried to promote for himself and his work seems to be slipping. "One's own literary work
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was the only answer to the war in Vietnam," he declares early in the book, but then goes on to admit, "he had not done any real writing in months - he had been making movies" (AN 19), which, in turn, forces him to question: "His career, his legend, his idea of himself- were they stale?" (AN 73). He cannot know because so much of that legend is dictated by, and hence survives within, the media. A long-time veteran of their clout personally, Mailer recognizes the extended impact that their machinations have had on national affairs for over a decade: "By the time Eisenhower was first elected, the Media was beginning to make history as well as report it and Richard Nixon was its foundling" (SG 93). Replacing facts with "factoids," or "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper" (Marilyn 18), the media substitute embellishment for evidence. In so doing, the media also decide just who or what they will make available for public consumption. In i960, television prompters jam as Kennedy's name is placed in nomination - "an accident" (PP 54). In 1968, television microphones transmit antiwar songs as the Democratic majority plank is passed - a defeat of Daley's floor control (MSC 165). And in 1972, George McGovern makes a superb acceptance speech that nobody hears because he makes it at three in the morning - no time like prime time (SG 78). Even more insidious to Mailer is the media's striving for clear reception when none exists. As such, the media distort the message. For Mailer, no picture captures the finishing blow that Sonny Liston deals Floyd Patterson in 1962 because the knockout arises from mystery. Similarly, Time magazine cannot truly describe Mailer's 1967 performance at the Ambassador Theater because the event springs from ambiguity, not just a bottle of bourbon. The Washington Post cannot even convey the sense of spiritual awe that he experiences after his stay in the Occoquan jail because he expresses his feelings metaphorically. Retreating behind a mask of naivete, the wounded innocent bemoans: "It was obvious the good novelist Norman Mailer had much to learn about newspapers, reporters, and salience" (AN 240). The fact that two filmmakers follow the good novelist around the March to make a documentary of his life for the BBC exposes the fraudulence of his naive pose. Nevertheless, Mailer's concern with the communication networks in The Armies of the Night is quite genuine, symptomatic of his growing concern with recording the process of history and scrutinizing the artifacts in which that record will reside. Recognizing that "the mode by which we perceive reality can indeed become our reality" (EE 77), Mailer recognizes as well that the manner in which those perceptions are preserved varies in effectiveness from one age to another. In Washington, D.C., Mailer looks at the old HayAdams Hotel and sees in its structure a historical testament of "a time when men and events were solid, comprehensible, often obedient to a code of values, and resolutely nonelectronic" (AN 69). In contrast, he looks at modern architecture and sees no history at all, "no trace of the forms which lived in the centuries before us, none of their arrogance, their privilege, their aspiration, their canniness, their creations, their vulgarities," leaving us "less able to
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judge the sheer psychotic values of the present: overkill, fallout shelters, and adjurations by the President to drink a glass of milk each day" (PP 185). The key is in what form the preservation of history will take, because form, to Mailer, provides "the deepest clue we possess to the nature of time in any epoch" (CC 367). Having delineated the movement of history as a war since the start of his career, Mailer introduces form as the "record of a war" (CC 370). A deliberately elastic concept, form can encompass any battle of any scope - the form of society testifying to a war as expansive as that between God and the Devil, the form of driftwood testifying to a war as limited as that between the elements giving rise to it. Two qualities predominate. First, form ascribes a permanency to whatever it retains from the past, at best a physical permanency. When Sergius O'Shaugnessy commits his Desert D'Or experiences to paper in The Deer Park, he finds himself stronger for having been able to keep "in some permanent form those parts of myself which were better than me" (310). In contrast, when DJ. announces, "we have no material physical site or locus for this record, because I can be in the act of writing it" in Why Are We in Vietnam? he reveals his greater weakness because a Disc Jockey's tale of "expiring consciousness" can only exist for this professional record spinner as ephemeral sound waves alone (25-6). Second, in endowing vestiges from the past with a recognizable shape, form invests what it preserves with structure that was not possessed in the past's untranslated state. Therefore, while Mailer sees both memory and history as "record[s] of all the oppositions in one's life," he attributes to memory an organizing function that he does not attribute to history: "Memory is the mind's embodiment of form; therefore, memory, like the mind, is invariably more pure than the event" (CC 371). DJ. will sit stoned at a dinner in Dallas and make the same assertion with regard to his own story. Reminding the reader that the events he discusses have occurred two years prior to their narration, he concludes, "hence form is more narrative, memory being always more narrative than the tohu-bohu of the present, which is Old Testament Hebrew, cock-sucker, for chaos and void" (VN63). By reducing chaos in this manner, the attribution of form to temporal movements enhances the comprehension of history. For Mailer such improvement is critical, for in conceiving that the most dedicated artist's function is to "accelerate historical time itself," he makes that velocity dependent on an increase of human consciousness, "provided that consciousness can express itself in action and so alter society" (AM 302). Because any written account will provide history with a form of greater obduracy and order than any oral account, it can provide a valuable service in recording the war that is history in a most comprehensible manner. Mailer, however, also recognizes the problems that the contemporary writer has in finding appropriate forms for his work. Traditional methods of transposing the reality of the present prove inadequate when present reality is difficult to ascertain (due to the media's overlapping filters) and even difficult to isolate. In 1967, the one piece that exemplifies the whole does not exist for the writer. Even four days in October
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cannot summon up a historical continuum like one day in June 1904. At the same time, the Tolstoyan novel of an entire society cannot encompass a modern America split into innumerable factions. As Mailer asks, "Who can create a vast canvas when the imagination must submit itself to a plethora of detail in each joint of society?" (CC 129). In The Armies of the Night, Mailer provides his own answer: "For that, an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required, further he must be not only involved, but ambiguous in his own proportions, a comic hero . . ." (67). And so, having already served as Kennedy's "court wit" (not to mention Sonny Liston's pressroom clown), he nominates himself (PP 1). The multiple roles played by Mailer during his time in Washington are exaggerated deliberately, and exaggerated in such a way as to portray Mailer in the most humorous manner. He specifically includes, for example, an account of his difficulties in the Ambassador Theater's bathroom. He describes in full detail his subsequent antics as Lyndon Johnson upon that theater's stage. The rest of the book only provides more and more instances of a jester in modernday motley: Mailer as a pin-striped halfback charging past the Pentagon M.P.'s, Mailer as a hip Walter Mitty staring down an American Nazi in an Army truck, Mailer as a frayed E. G. Marshall defending himself in court. Classically bad performances all, they all are necessary poses for Mailer's analysis of the March, because "Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History" (AN 6$). With this tool, Mailer writes two versions describing the March on the Pentagon. Book One, "History as a Novel: The Steps of the Pentagon," exemplifies the only kind of history possible when no objective reality can be found and cause does not always dictate effect - a subjective history, an account of one's own experiences. As Mailer finally reveals, "the first book can be, in the formal sense, nothing but a personal history which while written as a novel was to the best of the author's memory scrupulous to facts, and therefore a document..." (AN 284). He thus refuses to embellish those facts in any way, but maintains a strict adherence to what actually happened. In fact, when discussing his night at the Hay-Adams, he admits relief at being unimpelled to recount what did not occur: "Of course if this were a novel, Mailer would spend the rest of the night with a lady. But it is history, and so the Novelist is for once blissfully removed from any description of the hump-your-backs of sex" (AN 66). Similarly, in keeping with the existential nature of the event itself - a "political action whose end was unknown" (AN 104-5) - Mailer does not allow his memory to impose the selectivity of hindsight over what he experiences. Therefore, after he is arrested, he includes within his narrative a short conversation he has with a man holding a clipboard even though he never sees the man again, because "Mailer, like a visitor from Mars, or an adolescent entering polite society, had no idea of what might be important next and what might not" (AN 160). This existential innocence of Mailer proves both a help and a hindrance. It hinders him in action because his naivete constantly undermines him. He truly
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believes, for instance, that he can get arrested early, quickly lend his name to the cause, and still return to New York that same night in time for a party. When in court, he honestly feels that his celebrity will not single him out in the judge's eyes (AN 231-2). His personal vision proves even a greater liability in his narrative history of the March. However comprehensive it may be as regards events concerning Mailer, it is limiting in its depiction of events that do not involve him personally. As a result, it neglects what happens to the combined SDS-Revolutionary Contingent troops on the Pentagon's Mall. Because Mailer listens to oratory, exorcisms, and the Fugs, he relates what occurs in the North Parking Lot; he does not discuss the heads being beaten across the highway and along the Pentagon steps. The closest he comes is a factual statement of what he imagines as he sees the troops in question retreating: Mailer had then that superimposition of vision which makes descriptions of combat so contradictory when one compares eyewitness reports - he did not literally see any uniformed soldiers or marshals chasing this civilian army down the embankment, there was nothing but demonstrators flying down toward them now, panic on their faces, but Mailer's imagination so clearly conceived MPs chasing them with bayonets that for an instant he did literally see fixed bayonets and knew in some other part of himself he didn't, like two transparent images almost superimposed. (AN 147) Because his history must remain both personal and factual, it becomes restrictive at moments like this. Yet the superimposition of vision arising at such historical moments affords Mailer access into the psychological moments of the novel. In this manner Mailer can ascertain what he desires, for "in writing his personal history of these four days, he was delivered a discovery of what the March on the Pentagon had finally meant," and that discovery, in turn, enables him in a "Novel of History, to elucidate the mysterious character of that quintessentially American event" (AN 241). Although the tone of Book Two, "The Novel as History," affects the dry objectivity of historical prose, it does not constitute the journalistic account that critics often envision. 27 Instead, the writing unabashedly proclaims itself as conjectural. Phrases like "speculations are possible," "this is sheer speculation," "one can only guess," and "the answers cannot be definitive" punctuate the second account Mailer presents, attesting to the novel's basis in fiction (AN 259, 269, 281). In fact, precisely because it makes no claims to factual authenticity, Book Two has more freedom than Book One does. Mailer can create within Book Two an imaginary dialogue between David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin. He can situate an imaginary frontier in the area between the Pentagon M.P.'s and the demonstrators. With this liberty, Mailer reduces the climactic episode of his own history to a few brief lines in his novel: "Shortly afterward, Mailer, picking a point still further to the left of the charge of the SDS and the Revolutionary Contingent, stepped over the line and was, as described, arrested, brought over the ramp to the River Entrance, and deposited in a Volks-
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wagon where he was soon to meet Teague and the Nazi" (AN 277). At the same time, he expands a brief view of retreating demonstrators to form the major focus of Book Two. In this way, the novel of speculation and selectivity probes deeper than the history of fact and authenticity, corroborating Mailer's claim that "the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historic inquiry" (AN 284). In his imaginary dialogue between David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin, then, Mailer sorts out the confused inception of the March with a method unavailable to him previously. In the conversation, Dellinger takes a practical approach, admitting that short of an overwhelming victory or an abysmal defeat, the exact nature of what happens at the Pentagon will not matter. Because any action will be distorted by the media anyway, the March simply should attempt to garner as much publicity as possible for the antiwar movement. Rubin, in contrast, takes a mystical stand and claims that a demonstration for mere publicity will cheapen the movement, that in fact a real victory can be achieved in terms of inner vision. A symbolic protest at the Pentagon emerges as compromise. Similarly, with the frontier he re-creates on the Mall between demonstrators and M.P.'s, the indecisive Mailer determines how the participants should be judged. Despite his early misgivings about the protesters, their drugged-up sensibilities, their banal use of language, and their vacuous knowledge of history, Mailer comes to view them as exemplars of both the best and the oldest of American traditions: no, this passage through the night was a rite of passage, . . . and now . . . in the false dawn, the echo of far greater rites of passage in American history, the light reflected from the radiance of greater more heroic hours may have come nonetheless to shine along the inner space and the caverns of the freaks, some hint of a glorious future may have hung in the air, some refrain from all the great American rites of passage when men and women manacled themselves to a lost and painful principle and survived a day, a night, a week, a month, a year, a celebration of Thanksgiving - the country had been founded on a rite of passage. (AN 311) The Pentagon spokesmen he comes to view in the opposite manner, as those engaged in a negative rite of passage, giving up the best principles to which they were born. With this understanding in hand, and with these same traditions in mind, Mailer finally arrives at an interpretation of the March's outcome. Like Dellinger, he takes a realistic stand in his first appraisal and decides that nobody but Lyndon Johnson benefits from the demonstration. But in the appraisal that concludes the book, Mailer shows his closer ties to Rubin's mysticism as he opts for a more important victory wrought by the Quakers of Voluntown, Connecticut. He tells of their noncooperation in prison, how they refuse to eat
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or drink or wear clothing, and how they come close to madness as a result. He then speculates as to whether they give up prayers for the nation's forgiveness. Although he admits that "no one will know if they were ever made" and realizes "there are places no history can reach," he still concludes with affirmation. "But if the end of the March took place in the isolation in which these last pacifists suffered naked in freezing cells, and gave up prayers for penance, then who was to say they were not saints?" Like those American saints of Puritan times, they embody within themselves the burden of their nation's history. Who then is to say that America is all but lost? "And who to say that the sins of America were not by their witness a tithe remitted?" (AN 319). By trusting in the novelist's instincts, Mailer thus decides the battle's ultimate outcome.28 And by drawing upon his own literary heritage, he chooses a suitable way in which to end his book. The image is of gestation - an America in labor reminiscent of Thoreau's emerging larva. The cry is for reclamation. "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" exclaimed Whitman when giving his "sign of democracy."29 "Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse," prays Mailer a hundred years later (AN 320). Some fault Mailer's approach as blurring the thin, but distinct, line that separates fact and fiction, history and literature. Yet The Armies of the Night points to the many similarities that history and the novel legitimately share. It shows them, for instance, as using the same sources: However much their treatments of events differ, Book One and Book Two still begin with those same events as subject. So, too, does the book show history and the novel employing identical rhetorical techniques. The tonal mimicking in which Mailer indulges plays with existing stereotypes of how history and the novel should sound, only to demonstrate that neither must conform to presupposed conventions. Perhaps most important, Mailer connects history and the novel in a functional way, in terms of how one facilitates the greater illumination provided by the other. When, at the beginning of Book Two, Mailer advocates building a tower to see the horizon best from a forest, he proposes that such illumination arises from a minimizing of obstruction. "So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study - at the greatest advantage - our own horizon" (AN 245). By sticking with his own responses in Book One, Mailer's history of the March can avoid the obstacles of newspaper accounts, television reports, and the like, which cloud reality by placing it at a greater remove from the observer. At the same time, however, Mailer as historian has his own unavoidable biases and limitations, and so the tower he erects can never stand perfectly straight. This slant causes Michael Arlen to criticize a writer's use of himself in reportage: "[W]ith his ego, he rules such thick lines down the edges of his own column of print. Nothing appears to exist outside the lines - except that, of course, it does." Likewise, Charles Brown declares, "Mailer's truth is surely not everyone's truth." But neither is that of any historian. Mailer at
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least reminds us, as Thoreau did years before, that "it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking." Moreover, Mailer provides compensation for the errors of the personalized "I" - and with that same ego to which Arlen so objects: "[O]ur intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories?" (AN 245). Because he feels "It's important to be able to decide whether I'm perceiving well or where I'm perceiving badly," Mailer deliberately places "History as a Novel" before "The Novel as History." By familiarizing himself in Book One, Mailer allows the reader to judge with greater insight the conclusions drawn in Book Two.30 Furthermore, the very writing of Book One enables Mailer to come to those conclusions in Book Two. Although earlier in his career Mailer acknowledged the truth one finds through writing, and found in Advertisements for Myself the truth in writing about oneself,31 it is not until The Armies of the Night that he discovers the truths that writing about oneself can reveal about one's time. Emerson anticipated the connection. Presuming that each individual is "one more incarnation" of the "universal mind," he found that "Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises." For Mailer, the "flashes" occur through the act of writing. By recording as faithfully as possible his own experiences in Book One, Mailer can begin to understand his own history; and by understanding his part in the March, he can write the more incisive novel of the March itself. The rite of passage Mailer undergoes in the Occoquan jail allows him to invoke the rite of passage on the Pentagon Mall. The fast he begins at the Lincoln Memorial enables him to discuss the hunger strike started by the Voluntown Quakers.32 Ultimately, though, even the novel cannot yield a complete explanation of the March itself, for the March, like everything else for Mailer, has its roots in mystery. And because mystery never can be explained - indeed, according to Mailer, even to attempt as much is blasphemous - the novel must anchor itself in metaphor rather than equivalency. Book Two then opens with a chapter entitled "A Novel Metaphor" and closes with one called "The Metaphor Delivered." In between, the metaphors delivered in this novel are precisely those metaphors established in the earlier history. Mailer uses his football histrionics of Book One to describe the array of Pentagon M.P.'s in Book Two (AN 285). The Matthew Brady photographs he recalls in his history come to life in his novel. Finally, the chinook salmon of Robert Lowell's poem, "nosing up the impossible stone," find their correlatives in the starving Quakers wandering around the Washington, D.C., jails (AN 144, 318). In a larger sense, then, The Armies of the Night concerns how one writes a novel in times hardly propitious to such an endeavor. Rather than mourning its premature death, The Armies of the Night affirms its ongoing life as the most effective means of penetrating modern reality. As the transcriber of that reality, the new participant-novelist grows doubly in stature. "As he writes, the
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writer is reshaping his character," Mailer declares in Cannibals and Christians. "He is a better man and he is worse, once he has finished a book. Potentialities in him have been developed, other talents have been sacrificed" (107). Yet these remarks apply as much to Mailer the Prisoner as they do to Mailer the Author. As a writer, he receives the Pulitzer Prize for his work — a boost to his ego. As a man, he receives a far greater gift. He learns that he has fulfilled more than he has shirked, and so awarded to himself the gift of self-respect. The End of an Era Mailer entered the 1960s with the hipster as his model. The Armies of the Night signals a new conception of heroism that Mailer proposes as the decade draws to a close. The Fugs's Tuli Kupferberg refuses to sign a written promise not to return to the Pentagon for six months; he serves his five days in jail instead. But this form of uncompromised commitment becomes one that Mailer finally denies. He recognizes it to be a position impossible to support continually, and hence an untenable one. "Seen from one moral position - not too far from his own - prison could be nothing but an endless ladder of moral challenges. Each time you climbed a step, as Kupferberg just had, another higher, more dangerous, more disadvantageous step would present itself. Sooner or later, you would have to descend" (AN 219). Mailer substitutes instead a more modified form of heroism, best reflected in what he feels upon leaving jail: "The sum of what he had done that he considered good outweighed the dull sum of his omissions these same four days" (AN 238). In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer reaches a similar conclusion after deciding not to march in protest against Hubert Humphrey's nomination. He thinks of the Black Belt of Chicago and the surrounding Polish neighborhoods through which the march will pass, and goes instead to a bar to contemplate his fear. Although he feels that in recent years he "had learned how to take a step into his fear," he ends once again by qualifying his earlier heroic maxims. Whereas Stephen Rojack claimed, " 'I think we have to be good,' by which I meant we would have to be brave" (AD 155), Mailer realizes in the Chicago bar that he cannot step into his fear at all times and comes to conclude "that the secret to growth was to be brave a little more than one was cowardly, simple as that. . ." (MSC 185). It might be easy to attribute this modified, perhaps even watered-down, conception of heroism to those middle years finally catching up with a young firebrand. Jean Malaquais, Mailer's early political mentor, found the change inevitable and asserted that sooner or later all hipsters are swallowed up by "the most conforming routine ever" (AM 333).33 Nevertheless, Mailer's later works of the 1960s suggest that the change in Mailer's vision results more from the demands of changing times than those of changing age. Mailer realizes, in retrospect, that the opening promise of Kennedy's heroism must be judged against the pointless suicides of Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe. The years that follow offer him little in the way of consolation. In The
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Siege of Chicago he admits that "no revolution had arisen in the years when he was ready" (MSC 188), one instance of bad timing compounded again and again throughout the book. In Of a Fire on the Moon he acknowledges how much those who should have become heroes did not fulfill his expectations. Like writers in the early 1950s who blamed themselves for not seeing clearly, Mailer blames himself and his contemporaries for not behaving properly in the 1960s: . . . for what was the product of their history but bombed-out brains, bellowings of obscenity like the turmoil of cattle, a vicious ingrowth of informers, police agents, militants, angel hippies, New Left totalists, . . . an unholy stew of fanatics, far-outs, and fucked-outs where even the few one loved were intolerable at their worst, an army of outrageously spoiled children who cooked with piss and vomit. . . . (FM 3 86) When he himself tries to reverse the trend by running for mayor of New York City on the same existential premise that he used to support Kennedy in i960, imploring the voters to forgo their "immediate security" for "setting out on an adventure whose end could not be foreseen" (EE 348), Mailer fails dismally. In the primary of 1969, he finishes fourth in a field of five. The moon shot later that year only verifies Mailer's belief that he had been "a poor prophet of the Sixties" as the existential hero with a face turns into an anonymous astronaut with a face mask and the end of the decade intimates to him the end of the century (FM 128-9). Mailer has no doubts that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins embark on perhaps the most dangerous mission of the century. The chapter entitled "The Psychology of Machines" shows that things can, and do, go wrong with NASA's precision-laid plans. The memory of Grissom, White, and Chaffee attests to the threat of death while still on earth; the explosion of the Challenger more recently reminds us now of the threat while in the air. Nor does Mailer doubt the essentially ambiguous nature of the moon shot itself. "For the first time in history, a massive bureaucracy had committed itself to a surrealist adventure, which is to say that the meaning of the proposed act was palpable to everyone, yet nobody could explain its logic" (FM 306). What Mailer detests, however, is the way that the Apollo 11 astronauts refuse to acknowledge the romantic postures they truly embody. Even though Mailer sees elements of ambiguity within their individual personalities, the astronauts subordinate those contradictions beneath one-dimensional composures of blandness. Nor could NASA's publicists inject any more life into them. For all their attempts to set Armstrong's formal manner against his skills as a "champion chug-a-lugger of beer" and Aldrin's computational prowess against the "suave urbanity" of graying sideburns and multi-ringed fingers, for all their efforts to show Collins's "Stay casual" stance hiding a past so "drifting and unfocused" that colleagues expected "he would never do anything special," the trio emerges as the "home and hearth" men that NASA finally wants without much difficulty. Armstrong drinks, "but is never visibly
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affected." Collins has martinis - "sometimes several of them" - but suffers "no apparent ill effects." Even Aldrin, problematic for being seen in Cocoa Beach cocktail lounges after midnight, remains inviolate because the alcohol that "oils his mouth real good" only causes this Boy Scout merit-badge counselor and Presbyterian Church elder to talk about business more than usual.34 And so these heroes of space travel confirm a prediction made long before by Mailer: "[F]inally we will send a man to Mars and the Martians will say, 'God, heisdull' " (PP 97). But the moon shot forces Mailer into a more serious reevaluation of his aesthetics because the moon shot makes literal everything that for Mailer previously has been metaphorical. The moon has always suggested to Mailer the depths of experience, or the abyss, that the hipster must confront in order to grow. Every significant encounter that Rojack has in An American Dream takes place under the auspices of the moon: his killing of four Germans, his seduction of Deborah, his near-suicide, his walk around the parapet. The moon speaks to him of what he must do in order to keep his soul alive, and therefore even the death it promises him at the beginning of the book is a clean death. More important, by housing the secrets of his gods, the moon functions as a repository of mystery for Mailer. The preliminary investigation of the Pentagon that the Mobilization Committee makes becomes comparable to "a reconnaissance of the moon" (AN 255), and The Armies of the Night documents the futile results of trying to enter it. For man actually to land on the moon is equivalent to man completing the Tower of Babel. The secrets of the gods can be plundered. In addition, the transcendence for which the hipster strives in confronting the past assumes a very literal shape. For the writer, this poses a very real problem. "The event was so removed, however, so unreal, that no objective correlative existed to prove it had not conceivably been an event staged in a television studio" (FM 119). Indeed, for Mailer the correlative has, in fact, become the event. And the metaphor has been actualized by those forces Mailer hates most, the WASP acquisitiveness he sees destroying the country and the technological knowhow he sees aiding in the task. If the metaphor delivered provided Mailer with the participant-writer's ego in The Armies of the Night, it is no wonder that the metaphor conquered leaves him with no ego at all in the beginning of Fire on the Moon, forced to hide behind the mask of "modest and half-invisible" Aquarius In an early review, Alfred Kazin recognized the artistic dilemma with which the book deals: "It is not exactly a book about the journey of the Apollo 11, not exactly a book about 'the Wasp,' all those dumb other reporters, the computer age. . . . It is a book about the allegory that is involved in trying to write instant history."35 But to continue to write history - whether instant or otherwise - Mailer remains with two choices in Of a Fire on the Moon: Drop a personal metaphysics that events have outdated or somehow redefine it to accommodate those same events. Trusting to the Hemingwayesque authority of his senses, Mailer investigates his own responses and discovers rather sur-
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prising things. He feels jealous at the launching, envious that he cannot go up in the rocket along with the astronauts. He feels happy when the landing actually occurs. And he feels proud of the accomplishment. In fact, when discussing it at a party with an antagonized black professor, Mailer comes to realize the limitations of the intuitive Colored People's Time (CPT) by which the White Negro lives and he admits to himself a certain value that the precision of white technology may have. "There was something to be said after all for arriving on time. CPT was excellent for the nervous system if you were the one to amble in at midnight, but Aquarius had played the host too often" (FM 126). In his literary exploration of the moon shot, Mailer understands the work ahead of him: "[O]ne was obliged to make a first reconnaissance into the possibility of restoring magic, psyche, and the spirits of the underworld to the spookiest venture in history, a landing on the moon, an event whose technologese had been so complete that the word 'spook' probably did not appear in twenty million words of NASA prose" (FM 120). In his metaphysical incorporation of the moon shot, he realizes that the opposite must be done - namely, that technology must be admitted into his own perspective. Mailer still posits a war between God and the Devil as the backbone of human history; he questions time and time again whether the astronauts voyage to look for God or to destroy God. But Mailer realizes here, perhaps from an unavoidable proximity to machines, that a system of unrefined opposites underlies the computer, not the visionary. He even discovers an implicit danger in such a system. "For if one could eventually define all existence by variations of 1 and o, how easy would become the next step - to dissolve the world" (FM 314). Furthermore, he sees that a Manichean relationship of mutual exclusion no longer applies to the historical situation at hand. Like the greater acceleration of history he viewed after World War II, and the greater obfuscation he linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Mailer sees greater moral confusion reigning after the tumultuous 1960s. The cosmological war between God and the Devil "had gone on for so long that nearly everything human was inextricably tangled. Heroism cohabited with technology" (FM 75). And so he begins considering a blending of antagonistic qualities, a compromise of sorts, whereby the Devil may not be uniformly evil and God may not be uniformly good. "What if God, aghast at the oncoming death of man in man-deviled pollution, was finally ready to relinquish some part of the Vision, and substitute a vision half machine, and half of man, rather than lose all?" (FM 411). Incorporating the mechanical into the human does not make for literary news. Nor does this part of his task present Mailer with much difficulty. The antiseptic astronauts, who, with typical hyperbole, described the view from outer space as "out of this world," 36 offer him more than enough material with which to work, and Part I of Fire on the Moon discusses the moon shot with the astronauts as focus. Humanizing the machine, however, requires more effort. Following the lead set in The Armies of the Night, Part II reviews the moon shot once again, but with the machine now at center stage. "For if
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machines have psychology, then technology is not quits with magic," and "if magic still exists amid machines, then the reign of technology could be ended at a stroke, for where there is a little magic, there can be a mighty magic . . . " (FM 147-8). Research shows Mailer that all the previous Mercury flights have had unexpected mechanical trouble. So, too, have the ten Gemini missions encountered every kind of malfunction, from short circuits to overshot landings to missed rendezvous to computer failures (FM 154-6). Finally, a detailed observation of the moon shot transforms the machine into both a vulnerable and a downright clumsy entity. The ship of space first looks to Mailer like "a brain on the end of a firecracker" (FM 197). The Lunar Module, or Lem, alternately recalls "a particularly nasty insect" and "the knotted body of a bug" (FM 209, 213). Without much surprise, Mailer concludes, "There it was - spaceship! An object without grace or unity of design . . . " (FM 213,). Neither does the celebrated walk on the moon display any more agility. The bulky space suits make it difficult for Armstrong and Aldrin to emerge from the ship's door. Their arms stand out like sausages (FM 353). They have trouble standing still; but with the equipment they must carry, they have just as much trouble walking. More to the point, Mailer discovers that the technology governing the moon shot is erratic, moody even. Collins describes the ship's fuel cells as "funny things," "like human beings" in that "they have their little ups and downs" (FM 239). Because of similar inconsistencies in the equipment, the time estimates for the moon walk turn out to be off by fifty percent. The astronauts begin it two hours late and even then lose an additional half-hour during the walk. And just as the Command Module of the orbiting Collins docks with the Eagle of Armstrong and Aldrin, "all hell broke loose," according to Collins, as the ships slap from side to side for about eight or ten seconds. As Mailer goes on to explain, "Hell was when the unforeseen insisted on emerging" (FM 377). Through his investigation, Mailer discovers that the technology governing the moon shot must answer to a source higher than Mission Control in Houston. Landing on the moon, and even walking on its terrain, may be planned and practiced by NASA, tested and retested, and even then go off course. But blasting off from the moon's surface occurs within the confines of the moon's power, in an atmosphere of pure vacuum. The flames that will elevate the ship - the fire of the book's title - remain beyond the reach of NASA's resources. "Who knew the dispositions of fire on the moon when the air we breathed was also the stuff of fire, and hydrogen and oxygen could make water or electricity or fire?" (FM 366). Because of this mystery, Mailer - with much qualification - will admit later that "technology may have begun to have transcended itself when we reached to the moon" (EE 6). Mailer finally takes a somewhat Machiavellian view of the subject he discusses whereby the technological means he despises may be necessary to re-
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store the mysterious end he desires. Even if the first step on the moon is taken by men who represent "some magnetic human force called Americanism, patriotism, or Waspitude, . . . who was to say it was not the first step back to the stars, first step back to joining that mysterious interior material of the stars, that iron of communion with cosmic origins?" (FM 279). There remains much about the venture Mailer detests and probably always will detest. One doubts that he will ever salute a plastic American flag stuck in the moon's surface. Never will one hear him talking in initials. These doubts notwithstanding, Mailer finally does view the space program as needed - and needed for the specific purpose of disposing with the subculture surrounding it: "[Y]es, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who knew that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure" (FM 412-13). The particular keys in which Mailer trusts for his own account are revealing. In scientific terms, he chooses physics. "If you stop to analyze it," he says in a later interview, "the equation sign is nothing but a statement of metaphor. When you say: 'y equals x2' you are in effect establishing a metaphor." With the study of physics returned to a "study of the order and courtliness and splendor and bewildering mystery of the rules of action in nature" (FM 161), to Newton's laws of motion Mailer ascribes qualities of aesthetics.37 The first invokes for him harmony and happiness; the second and third, severity in balance. In literary terms, Mailer decides on Melville. The massiveness of the rocket recalls a Leviathan, its whiteness brings to mind Moby Dick, and the "Iron of Astronauts" partakes of "the monomania of Captain Ahab" (FM 54, 92, 293).38 The image to which he returns most frequently, however, and the one that ultimately reflects Mailer's historical perspective at the end of the decade, is the image of birth. The inside of the spaceship looks like "a womb for triplets" (FM 214). The lift-off snaps its "umbilicals" (FM 186). The landing makes Mailer remember the birth of his first child (FM 105). And the moon rock he visits on the last page of the book exudes the presence of "a newborn calf" (FM413). It is this moon rock that gives Mailer the sign for which he looks. If, as he posited long ago, "we are in a sense the seed, the seed-carriers, the voyagers, the explorers, the embodiment of that embattled vision" of God (AM 351), and the moon shot literally carries that vision to the stars, "then it was legitimate to see all of human history as a cradle which had nurtured a baby which had now taken its first step" (FM 137). It becomes possible that "the real function of the Wasp had not been to create Protestantism, capitalism, the corporation, or a bastion against Communism, but that the Wasp had emerged from human history in order to take us to the stars" (FM 280). The one small step that Armstrong takes for man may in fact be that giant leap for mankind. But that particular step still follows on a path of great length. Mailer chooses to believe in the vulcanist interpretation of the moon whereby the moon is a
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product of its wanderings between the earth and Mars. As opposed to the classicists who attribute the moon to meteoric bombardments of years past, Mailer casts his lot with a pattern of evolution. So Aquarius, happy with this supervulcanism, would have the moon not only responsible for writing much of the record of its own history, but in fact could go so far as to search for evidence that the face of the moon might be a self-portrait which looked to delineate the meanings of its experience in that long marriage with the earth and its long uninsulated exposure to the solar system and the stars. (FM 260) In their spaceship, the astronauts extend this pattern a bit further as they orbit around a moon, which, in turn, orbits around an earth, which, in turn, orbits around a sun (FM 255). In a larger historical sense, then, the astronauts do take only one small step. Although he meditates a good deal on the Book of Revelation and considers the idea of apocalypse at great length, Mailer does not conclude with the moon shot as a historical end. After all, in years to come the satellite orbiting the moon may well have a satellite of its own. Nor does he see it as a true beginning. The moon rock may be an infant on earth, but it still has logged over three billion years in the galaxy at large. Rather, Mailer fits the moon shot into a historical continuum; in this context, it occupies a position in the middle. And as part of an American historical continuum specifically, it serves as one more errand into the wilderness. Critics may object to this vision as insufficiently conclusive,39 but Thomas Werge understands the greater truth that comes from viewing the moon shot as part of a morally ambiguous venture. That Mailer replaces clear resolution with tormented ambivalence and " 'sanctions' the voyage without minimizing its potential for evil" reflects, for him, "a hope for America and for man rooted not in sentimentality but in a moral realism that remains acutely conscious of the reality of the fall and the presence of the demonic" ("Voyage" 127). Indeed, "moral realism," to recall the term coined by Lionel Trilling, may be the most fitting way to describe the quality of patience that infuses Mailer's later work. At the end of Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer looks at the horrified daughter of Eugene McCarthy and thinks unspoken words of consolation. " 'Dear Miss,' he could have told her, 'we will be fighting for forty years' " (222-3). Of a Fire on the Moon closes with a longer period of waiting as Mailer observes the enclosed moon rock in Houston. "All worship the new science of smell! It was bound to work its way through two panes of glass before three and a half billion more years were lost and gone" (414). Mailer still has no answers as to exactly what the future will bring, but he who formerly had felt blank about the future can at least envision one coming forth. The ending of one decade thus heralds the opening of another. Although 1970 cannot embody for Mailer the unlimited range of possibilities of i960, it can show instead some of those possibilities fulfilled. During the administration of John F. Kennedy, Mailer wrote, "We have had our frontier already.
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We cannot be excited to our core, our historic core, by the efforts of new underdeveloped nations to expand their frontiers. No, we are better engaged in another place, we are engaged in making the destiny of Western man, a destiny which seeks now to explore out beyond the moon and in back into the depths of the soul" (PP 172). If the double exploration that Kennedy initiated failed to consume the 1960s, 1970 sees at least the former part realized. Man does reach the moon. And one out of two does not seem bad at all to Mailer, especially when the latter is still held in abeyance.
Chapter 3 Thomas Pynchon: An Interface of History and Science
As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see how this high will prevails without an exception or an interval, he settles himself into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, that every stone will fall where it is due; the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned, we need not interfere to help it on . . . and we need not assist the administration of the universe. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, "New England Reformers" (1844) Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. -Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961) At first glance, it may seem odd to consider the historical perspective of Thomas Pynchon after examining that of Norman Mailer. Whereas Mailer came to appreciate scientific processes only late in his career, Pynchon has shown a delight in them all along. But the two authors share more in common than initially might be suspected. "[T]here are three possibilities of Being," Mailer once posited. "There is Culture when one exists in a milieu, when one's life is obedient to a style - the peasant in his village lives in Culture like bacteria in a petri dish. There is History, the highest form of life; it has the turns and starts, the surprises, the speed of change and the fires of courage an animal knows on a long trip for food. And there is Chance. That is the life of an organism which has been deprived of the possibility to organize itself - it is the lowest form of active life, it is entropy. (A word to remember.)" (PP 275). Pynchon, in fact, remembers all three. As to the first possibility, he portrays a Culture devoted more to stylishness than style, Muzak instead of melody, tranquilizers instead of tranquillity, and ultimately to contraception instead of conception, insulation instead of intimacy. As to the second, he is heir to the Puritan legacy of his American ancestors, the earliest of whom came to the New World with Governor Winthrop in 1630 to establish the Massachusetts 72
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Bay Colony. But as an American in the twentieth century specifically, Pynchon also inherits a place within Mailer's third form of Being, living in an era in which Henry Adams saw "physics stark mad in metaphysics" (Education 382). According to Mailer's estimation, "Only Chance prospered in the Twentieth Century. . . . Chance was a purposeful stream moving the bodies of all millions of us away from roots, below history, out of grace. The progression was from man to merde . . . " (PP 276). Pynchon, however, is not so sure about these conclusions. Defining History in Adams's mathematical terms as providing "a common factor for certain definite historical fractions" (472), Pynchon reinvents "the purposeful stream" of Chance as a historical process itself. If the Puritans could see the preordained movement toward redemption as sacred history, the physicist now could see the predictable movement toward randomness as secular history. And once Pynchon makes this imaginative transformation of the entropic process, his fiction then seeks to examine how both religious and scientific versions of process can be used to account for our present-day situation. To return to Mailer's initial terms of reference, the fiction considers how History and Chance affect Culture. This double-edged historicism greatly affects any conclusions to which Pynchon himself comes. To be sure, the implications arising from each individual conception of time do differ. Puritan faith assumed that causal connections could be made between isolated events; modern science presumes no connections at all. But by posing both versions of historical continuity in his work, Pynchon questions the connotations with which Mailer had unequivocally endowed the movement of man through time. If one can progress simultaneously toward salvation and dissipation, how then is progress to be defined? And in what direction does it point? Certainly not toward merde - or at least not only toward merde. As a result, Pynchon can assuage the antagonism a man like Mailer has evinced toward science throughout most of his career. If, as Mailer has said, "Experiment
was conceived to protect the scientific artist from ambiguity"
(CC 308), the basic structure that underlies Pynchon's fiction restores an unavoidable ambiguity to both scientific and aesthetic thought. As time runs out and delta-t approaches zero, more than one alternative is attached to the moment of apocalypse. Finally, Pynchon also must deal with what possibilities, if any, remain "beyond the zero," as the first section of Gravity's Rainbow makes clear. In so doing, he must try to assuage the more serious doubts a man like Henry Adams had about any kind of historical continuity once the apocalyptic moment had been reached - and passed. Having chosen 1900 as a convenient point of departure,, Adams saw the twentieth century inundated with a new class of "supersensual forces" confounding prelate and physicist alike (486). Later in the century, quantum physics would identify them more clearly, but the original implications deduced by Adams remained the same. No longer could the laws of God account for greater releases of energy, taking such tangible shapes as x-rays, firearms, and ultimately dynamos. Nor could the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of motion explain discoveries like radium. If history for-
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merly had been considered a common denominator for numerous individual fractions, the denominator now seemed too narrow. Continuity snapped. The Education of Henry Adams concludes with no attempt to devise a new system of historical thought. Viewing his "Dynamic Theory of History" as a failure to uncover "Unity," Adams chose silence for himself while awaiting death, realizing that a nineteenth-century man weaned on eighteenth-century principles had no place in the upcoming century. For those born into the new era, he only could recommend developing "a new social mind" to deal with the changes ahead (498). That Pynchon, born in 1937, remains acutely conscious of Henry Adams can be seen from his earliest works. "Entropy," a i960 short story, presents a character named Callisto who compares his own awe over Thermodynamics with that of Adams before Power. V. directly juxtaposes the education of Herbert Stencil against that of Henry Adams. But Pynchon, unlike Adams, ends neither in horror nor futility. Gravity's Rainbow, on one level, can be read as a compendium of what can survive beyond the zero point of extinction. Whether the endangered species be dodos, Hereros, or Jews, Pynchon shows that nothing this side of the grave can be extinguished completely. Total integration remains a mathematical impossibility, with delta-t only approximating a function we can never take to the limit - no matter how hard we try. Thus, aerial stimuli of death continue to evoke sexual responses of life. Babies as well as bombs follow Poisson curves. Memory returns. "At its best, it does celebrate a flow," Pynchon writes of the map Slothrop keeps of his sexual exploits (GR 26). Perhaps, too, there exist in Pynchon's own construction the coordinates of flow, those from which can be deduced a new curve, "an equation for us too," as one character puts it, "something to help us find a safer place" (GR 62). And whether that safer place lies beyond, in front of, or directly above the zero, Pynchon - just by envisioning it - demonstrates what the "new social mind" can do, asserting what Henry Adams could not set forth himself, but hoped a future generation would state in his place. The Puritan Heritage Until quite recently, it was difficult to determine how much of Pynchon's outlook arose from his personal experiences in the 1950s since so little was known about those experiences. With the publication of Slow Learner, however, that situation changed as the introduction to the collection of short stories provides a picture of Pynchon in the 1980s looking back at Pynchon in the 1950s. Much like Mailer, he recalls a period of historical impasse, "a transition point, a strange post-Beat passage of cultural time"; unlike Mailer, he attributes much of that feeling to his having been, along with those of his younger generation, an onlooker for whom there were "no more primary choices" to be made (xviii). Moreover, within this autobiographical juxtaposition of "then" and "now," Pynchon also suggests how many of his present attitudes originated as reactions to those imbibed in the past. Critical now of
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the stress laid on eternal youth then, the older man reflects more and more on time's irreversibility; critical now of the pretensions of his apprentice work then, the professional writer exposes the flaws of his journeyman's efforts.1 This emphasis on the 1950s in Pynchon's introduction does not surprise, of course, because his previously published fiction already had attested to the tenacious hold that the 1950s in America has on his imagination. In one sense, the 1950s provides a backdrop against which his characters move, as in V. and the short stories, or against which they react, as in The Crying of Lot 49. In a more fundamental sense, the 1950s in America figures into Pynchon's work in terms of its relative position with regard to what has ensued both before and after it. Viewed from this perspective, the Cold War can be seen as the modern offshoot of a long-held hostility between the United States and Russia. The Peter Pinguid Society in Lot 49 takes its name from the American officer involved in the first military confrontations between those two powers in 1863. "But," as Mike Fallopian reminds Oedipa Maas, "the ripples from those two splashes spread, and grew, and today engulf us all" (33). At the same time, the paranoia from which Oedipa later suffers in the 1960s can be seen as the direct result of her earlier upbringing. Although she correctly places "Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph, those dear daft numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's so temperate youth" in "another world," she makes an equally correct evaluation as to the effect they have had on her adult life: "Among them they had managed to turn the young Oedipa into a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts" (76). What Pynchon recognizes from the start - and what Oedipa only comes to recognize at the end of the book - is the larger historical context that her i95Os-induced paranoia reflects. Redefined in Gravity's Rainbow as "a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible" (219), paranoia forms nothing less than the basis of Puritan historicism, a vision of continuity that encapsulated two forms of time - secular and sacred. Secular time pertained to the temporal events of everyday life; whatever significance those events possessed stemmed from their relevance to man's activities on earth. But because Puritan theology viewed all literal movement in spiritual terms, as related to the journey from the Fall of Man to the Incarnation of Christ, the events of secular history also had a place within the context of sacred or prophetic time. And it was within the confines of sacred time that those events gained their greatest significance because sacred history interpreted them with regard to a predetermined scheme for wordly salvation.2 Paranoia in Pynchon's work assumes, then, a still broader connotation as an index of utmost historical ordering; "it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination - not yet blindingly One, but at least connected . . . " (GR 820). If Pynchon wishes to examine American culture from this Puritan point of view, he also must adhere to a corollary of Puritan thought. For man, the connections would never be "blindingly One." Due to his mortal nature and
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limited vision, man only could partake of secular history. Believing in God, however, afforded him one means of access into the larger historical pattern of which he was, in some way, a part. Observing God's representative on earth offered him another. The Puritan biographer thus conceived of the public figure as more than just a government official. Looking backward, the statesman recapitulated the Biblical precedent of just government. Looking at the present, his life embodied within it the Puritan errand in America. And looking to the future, the progress of his life in Massachusetts reflected the progress of the Puritan venture in the City of Man, which, in turn, reflected the Puritans' progress toward the City of God.3 Pynchon adheres to a similar rhetorical strategy in order to apprehend a prophetic sense of time. In each of his works, he focuses on at least one character whose personal predicament is connected closely to that of his or her culture. Nowhere does he make the connections more explicit than in Gravity's Rainbow. There, Tyrone Slothrop becomes the type that radiates outward. "Whatever we may find," writes one character of him, "there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically, historically, a monster" (169). Whether he deserves the parting epithet remains to be seen, but the facts do prove that he is perhaps the most historically determined character in all of Pynchon's fiction. Even his erections have been preconditioned. Starting out as the heir of his Puritan forefathers, Slothrop soon becomes heir to the country they founded. "When Slothrop was discovered, late in 1944, by 'The White Visitation' - though many there have always known him as the famous Infant Tyrone - like the New World, different people thought they'd discovered different things" (98). As the book expands outward, so, too, do the connotations of his figure. "There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop," Pynchon muses near the end of the novel, "who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly - perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's assembly - and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn't" (860-1). Finally, Pynchon takes the typological process both one step backward and one step forward in this portrait of Slothrop. By imbuing Slothrop's family history with details of his own ancestry, Pynchon brings the character back to recast a literal, rather than a Biblical, precedent.4 Because that same history also determines Pynchon himself, Slothrop also radiates outward beyond the bounds of the book to incorporate his author's life into his own. Critics often view Slothrop recapitulating a pattern that is corrupt in its inception.5 Reconstructing the family history proves quite the contrary, however, and evaluating it in terms of Puritan precepts shows that the Slothrops have promised a great deal at first. The family comes to America with Governor Winthrop in 1630 aboard the Arbella. Congregationalists in religion, and so different from the Separatists of Plymouth Colony, they leave England of their own accord and come to America with the same purpose and prospects as their fellow colonists: the founding of a church-state to perfect Reformed Christianity in their time and prefigure the New Jerusalem in time to come,
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and the promise of being among those few Elect whom God would save from the oncoming conflagration in which a Preterite multitude would perish. With their spiritual mission thus directly aligned with their visible social function, the Slothrops begin propitiously enough as Berkshire fur traders. "They were still for the living green, against the dead white" (312). The potential of their enterprise is reflected in the potential of their surroundings, "when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct" (250). Slothrop, then, can think back nostalgically to earlier days of universal order, "days when in superstition and fright he could make it all Jit, seeing clearly in each an entry in a record, a history: his own, his winter's, his country's . . . " (729; Pynchon's ellipsis). Nostalgic reminiscence, however, remains the closest Slothrop comes to this prelapsarian vision of America. Once his ancestors achieve economic success, scenery is sacrificed to greenery - but greenery of an artificial mint. As more and more money is made, more and more is invested in timberland, creating a cycle that not only continues, but expands. "Slothrop's family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper" (644). Nature converts to toilet paper, banknotes, and newsprint. As Pynchon concludes, "Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate" (31). By manufacturing the Word in this manner, they do not violate the Word or, at least, not in terms of the Puritan outlook. Because their church-state wedded inner vocation and outer function, each could be used to justify the other. Specifically, the progress of each could be used to justify the progress of the other. If their venture, in fact, was financed by English entrepreneurs, it could be justified by the larger service they were performing for God. Territorial expansion could be viewed as the extension of God's Kingdom on earth. Paper could make Bibles as well as banknotes. So does free enterprise begin in seventeenth-century New England - a land where "religion and profit jump together," as scholars of Puritan culture have argued."6 Pynchon would agree. In "The Secret Integration," a 1964 short story, he recalls a costume party held in an old Berkshire mansion to which come "allegorical, garlanded girls named Free Enterprise, Progress, Enlightenment" (44). Similarly, the history of the Berkshire-born Slothrops can be read as a parable of mass marketing, a process that remains unswerving in time, however much the rates of exchange rise and the sources of income vary. When Slothrop finally uncovers the historical detail he has been denied all his life, the fact that his father financed his Harvard education by committing his Infant Slothrop psyche to impersonal Pavlovian testing, it is only a twentieth-century form of barter whatever its other implications. As the outraged adult Tyrone correctly concludes, "I've been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef" (GR 333). And because the Slothrops serve as types for Pynchon, the history of the family also recounts the history of the country. Gravity's Rainbow may have the
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United States begin as a "gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati" or as one of the "cosmic forms of practical jokesterism" invented by Benjamin Franklin (684, 773). In either case, between the time of its Founding Masonic Fathers and the Missouri Mason Harry Truman there occurs a shift in priorities. "By the time Bland joined up, the Masons had long, long degenerated into just another businessmen's club" (685). "The Secret Integration" links the dampening of mystery in the Berkshires to the arrival of Jay Gould and Jubilee Jim Fisk. The Crying of Lot 49 just brings the entrepreneurial process up-to-date. Pierce Inverarity, California real estate mogul and "founding father" of Yoyodyne aerospace industry, buys human bones to be reprocessed as cigarette filters (14). A modern-day Winthrop Tremaine, this time - sells swastikas in government surplus outlets. Finally, Pynchon recasts this Puritan vision of America over the entire history of the world. The image of early Slothrops killing off trees in Gravity's Rainbow becomes paradigmatic of the way in which an Elect race deals with those it considers Preterite inferiors. In seventeenth-century Mauritius, the Dutch ancestors of Katje Borgesius slaughter dodos. In the Siidwest of 1904, Germans slaughter Hereros. And in Europe during the twentieth century, Nazis slaughter Jews. So, too, is the doctrine of Manifest Destiny superimposed upon other countries. In the story of Francisco Squalidozzi, the myth of the West is transferred to Argentina. Cowboys change into gauchos; prairies turn into pampas; and the expansion of Eastern control becomes the extension of Buenos Aires hegemony. The paranoid Slothrop may think that the hand of Providence is giving him the finger, but, in point of fact, "The stately Finger twirls among them all" (660).7 Connecting all is the economic denominator. Joel Barlow in The Columbiad foresaw "the spirit of commerce" opening "an amicable intercourse between all countries" (9.499-500; note 47), and the selling of Slothrop a century later testifies to a dynamic in full swing, involving an international set of relations, from Lyle Bland of Boston; to the Hugo Stinnes operation in Germany; to Stinnes connections in Brazil, the East Indies, and the United States; to Laszlo Jamf of the Grossli Chemical Corporation in Switzerland; to Psychochemie AG, a cover operation for IG Farben, in Zurich; and back to Shell Oil. With these connections repeatedly bypassing known political alliances, it becomes clear that the war in progress has little to do with politics and everything to do with money. As Walter Rathenau predicted, it will yield "neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority" (GR 192).8 When the novel moves into the postwar period, it merely sees that future realized as even genocide becomes a marketable commodity in the Zone: "Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves, tickled and shivering with guilt" (GR 529). Given this evidence on display, one might infer that over time the Slothrops, the United States, and the world all have degenerated markedly.9 Certainly, Pynchon provides much support for the belief that changes in the qual-
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ity of life have occurred over time. "Under the Rose," a 1961 short story that was refined as the third chapter of V., nicely summarizes the specific differences that Pynchon later portrays in the novels. Set in 1898, the story focuses on Porpentine, a British operative presently stationed in Alexandria in order to keep abreast of the developing crisis in Fashoda. More important, the story concerns the growing awareness of Porpentine that the twentieth-century world he is about to enter bears little resemblance to that in which he has lived all his life. Once upon a time, he recalls, human identity remained fixed. The individual human being had an undeniable value simply by virtue of existing. And because he was imbued with such potential, an individual had the strength to effect social and historical change, as exemplified by the actions of Machiavelli's prince, "the single leader, the dynamic figure whose virtu used to be a determinant of history" (V. 444).10 But as identity has become more and more protean, it also has become less and less definable. Instead of viewing himself and his covert cohorts as "comrade Machiavellians," Porpentine has resorted to using "veteran spy" as a means of designation because at least "the label was a way of fixing identity in this special haute monde before death - individual or collective - stung it to stillness forever" ("Rose" 228, 223-4). Clothing and appearance take the place of names. One agent becomes the "man wearing blue spectacles," another the "fat man," and a third the "man with the whiteblotched face" (V. 81-2). With the power of man thus diminished, no one man can effect much change, let alone determine history, in a world "where the events of 1848 and the activities of anarchists and radicals all over the Continent seemed to proclaim that history was being made no longer through the virtu of single princes . . . " ("Rose" 227-8). Georg Lukacs saw the events of 1848 transforming history into a "mass experience" on a European scale (23);11 "virtu" in The Prince translates into a union of force and ability, "if, by force, one means human, not mechanical, force" (x). Over the course of time, then, hu-man has turned into mass man, and Machiavelli falls by the wayside as even those mass men of the future become more and more mechanical. Bongo-Shaftsbury, Pynchon's exponent of the brave new world, has a miniature electric switch sewn into his arm. Moreover, if spying, by definition, presumes that interpersonal connections exist between men, the world that Porpentine is about to enter negates any such assumption. After seeing a bell-shaped curve in the sky, Porpentine only can "curse himself, silent, for wanting so to believe in a fight according to the duello, even in this period of history. But they - no, it - had not been playing those rules. Only statistical odds. When had he stopped facing an adversary and taken on a Force, a Quantity?" ("Rose" 249). Porpentine never finds out. But then again Porpentine really has never stopped believing that he faces a human, and hence an identifiable, adversary. In the end, maintaining such outdated beliefs leads to more than imprecation. It literally kills him. Turning around at the close of the story to tell Moldweorp "You have been good
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enemies" leaves those enemies just enough time to shoot him dead ("Rose" 250).
Although Porpentine's final act may be sacrificial, intended to save the lives of his companions, his death is rendered meaningless in the kind of world that Pynchon portrays in which the individual counts for nothing. In Gravity's Rainbow, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick concerns himself with Slothrop's welfare, warning the American to beware of Katje Borgesius, even making an embarrassed offer to help if necessary. Shortly afterward, this upholder of human connectedness disappears. And when Slothrop asks Bloat for help in finding Tantivy, reminding him "You're his friend," Bloat only shrugs (234). The basis for Slothrop's request is as anachronistic as the object of his search. Now the individual has become expendable. Under these conditions, the inviolability of the individual person also becomes a matter of little consequence. In V., Foppl compares a double line of Herero and Hottentot women carrying rails with the older chain gang formation: "[I]f one woman fell it meant only a fractional increase in the force required per carrier, not the confusion and paralysis resulting from a single failure in one of the old treks" (250). When one woman does fall and brings down the whole line with her, Foppl's heart leaps up with joy: "[H]ere was a fragment of the old past, revealed as if by a parting in the fog" (251). But the appeal is both nostalgic and momentary. After determining that her leg has been broken by an iron rail, Foppl drags the woman out and rolls her down the embankment. The trek goes on as before and the woman is left to die. Eventually, it takes no great leap in logic for mass death to be seen as a combination of meaningless individual deaths. V. provides a one-page listing of giant disasters, from earthquakes to train wrecks, floods to plane crashes, typhoons to explosions — in short, both natural and man-made catastrophes. Unlike Emerson, who viewed such incidents as Providential indiscretions, betokening a manner that was "a little rude" ("Fate" 331), Pynchon sees them as daily manifestations of twentieth-century life: "These were the mass deaths. . . . It happens every month in a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world which simply doesn't care" (270-1). These changes in the value of human life have connotations in the socially defined areas of human existence. In terms of political history, the movement in time is toward mob control and fascism. As the figure of V. grows older, she progressively incorporates more inert matter into herself. At the same time, she seeks to incorporate more and more land into reactionary hands. As Victoria Wren in 1899, she acquires her first political convictions in Florence and begins hating anarchists (151). As V. in 1913, she leaves Paris with a mad irredentist, thus favoring the integration of neighboring regions into Italy (390). As the metallic Veronica Manganese in 1919, she has a glass eye and a sapphire navel; she also has ties with Mussolini and those who want Italian hegemony in Malta (445). And as Vera Meroving in 1922, she installs a watch into that eye, makes her home in Munich, and consorts with early supporters of Hitler (219).
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In terms of actual historical events, the movement is toward escalation, in which differences in quantity do produce differences in quality. History in Pynchon's work does not follow, as some have claimed, an endlessly repeating pattern. 12 Even those events deliberately designed to recast precedents do not conform to intended models. Foppl's Siege Party is staged to re-create von Trotha's campaign of slaughter, but the events of 1922 cannot be like those of 1904. Foppl's massacre of African Bondels has at its disposal aerial means of bombardment. And those events that make no attempt at perfect reenactment have even more disastrous consequences. Between 1904 and 1907, von Trotha kills sixty thousand Hereros, Hottentots, and Berg-Damaras in Africa. "This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good" (V. 227). In Europe, between 1939 and 1945, Hitler does much better. The spiritual result of this movement is the feeling characters have of being farther and farther away from God and closer and closer to apocalypse. The Crying of Lot 49 traces that feeling back to the War between the States; if the book gauges the health of a nation by the operations of its postal service, America's Civil War becomes more traumatic than ever, coinciding as it does with the postal movement's suppression of independent routes. V. locates its cataclysmic moment in any number of incidents. In 1899, characters wonder if the world had "gone mad" with Fashoda (81). Yet similar questions arise over von Trotha's carnage of 1904 and the 1919 June Disturbances in Malta. In 1922, Old Godolphin considers World War I to have destroyed "the privacy of dream" forever (230). But in 1956, McClintic Sphere views World War II as equally disruptive. "That war, the world flipped," he decides. "But come '45, and they flopped" (273). Gravity's Rainbow brings the sense of apocalypse most up-to-date. Referring backward in time to the effects of World War I, containing within itself the devastation of World War II, it radiates into the future to suggest the most recent source of catastrophe. Like Mailer, Pynchon views the hope of modern America to have rested with Kennedy. While remembering the loss of his harmonica in the Roseland men's room, Slothrop wonders where "Jack Kennedy, the ambassador's son" had been. - say, where the heck is that Jack tonight, anyway? If anybody could've saved that harp, betcha Jack cduld. [. . .] Jack . . . might Jack have kept it from falling, violated gravity somehow? Here, in this passage to the Atlantic, odors of salt, weed, decay washing to him faintly like the sound of breakers, yes it seemed Jack might have. For the sake of tunes to be played, millions of possible blue lines, notes to be bent from the official frequencies, bends Slothrop hasn't really the breath to do . . . not yet but someday . . . (75; Pynchon's ellipses) Living in the 1940s, Slothrop cannot have the historical perspective needed to assess Kennedy in this way. Therefore, as Mark Siegel suggests, this evaluation must come from the presence behind Slothrop. 13 If Kennedy could have been "one of them Immortal Lightbulbs," Pynchon sees him illuminating the
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land in much the same way that Mailer does (GR 802). For Mailer, the terms of reference involve the American frontier, with Kennedy incorporating into himself the roles of sheriff and outlaw. For Pynchon, the vision originates in the more elemental terms of white and black, which then expand into the union of Elect and Preterite, marketing and mystery. The men's room of Roseland becomes the one place where "Shit 'n' Shinola" come together, where Malcolm X, shoe-shine boy, can meet Jack Kennedy, Harvard senior. If one catches the eye of the other, Pynchon then can wonder, "did Red suspend his ragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just enough gap in the moire there to let white Jack see through, not through to but through through the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slothrop's shoes?" (GR 802). Like Mailer speculating on Kennedy's potential, however, Pynchon receives no answer. He has no choice but to end the passage by saying, "Eventually Jack and Malcolm both got murdered." This is not to suggest that Pynchon is preaching the end of the world or a break in history. On the contrary, the very number of apocalypses in his work only proves that the ultimate moment of apocalypse has not yet arrived. As he says in Gravity's Rainbow, "Our history is an aggregate of last moments" (173). "Under the Rose" confirms this notion. The story begins with a possible apocalypse at Fashoda; it ends with a character going to check on another at Sarajevo. Furthermore, in Pynchon's world the very idea of apocalypse takes on a very subjective meaning, and historical breaks are in the eye of the beholder. In 1922, Old Godolphin thinks back to 1913, but Vera Meroving thinks back to 1904. In 1945, Slothrop cannot possibly envision Kennedy's death, but he certainly can be affected by that of Roosevelt. Most important, Pynchon implies no break in history because he still operates very much within a Puritan sense of history. His musings on apocalypse are only twentieth-century versions of those earlier exhortations with which his ancestors were quite familiar. Perry Miller has interpreted those jeremiads as psychological purgations that actually encouraged their listeners to persist in whatever heinous conduct they were performing; as such, the jeremiads forced Puritans to dispense with Old World assumptions that simply did not fit New World conditions (Errand 9). Sacvan Bercovitch, however, views the harangues as affirmations of original intentions, "the ritual[s] of a culture on an errand - which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process," whose function was "to create a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless 'progressivist' energies required for the success of the venture" (Jeremiad 23). The apocalyptic admonitions, then, implied no break in either Puritan precepts or historical continuity. God still stood as the center of control. Although any disruptions that occurred - such as crop failures, epidemics, Indian raids, even unworthy children - had to result, by definition, from God's will, they were punitive in order to be corrective, "Fatherly Chastisements," as John Higginson put it, intended "to prove us, whether, according to our Profession, and his Expectation, we would keep his Commandments, or not" ("Attestation" 65, 69). Thus, when a great tempest of wind and
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snow followed a day of general fasting in 1638, and caused the loss of many lives and much property, the Puritans did not see their day of devotion as having been futile, but decided to keep another day of fasting <4to seek the Lord better, because he seemed to discountenance the means of reconciliation" (Winthrop, Journal 291). The events of temporal history became subsumed into the redemptive scheme; a people grown lax accepted punishment so that they might reform and complete the task for which they had been chosen. In times of doubt, Pynchon's characters resort to this kind of long-range historical thinking. As Fausto Maijstral's diary in V. states, "History's serpent is one; what matter where on her body we lie" (290). Felipe, one of the Argentines in Gravity's Rainbow, comes to a similar realization, "that history as it's been laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible fraction" (714). For both Puritans and Pynchon, the process takes precedence over the portion. World War I, then, becomes "not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware," but rather one part, albeit one especially visible part, of a continuing pattern: "There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself" (V. 431-2). In much the same way, World War II becomes, as in Mailer's work, "only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there" (GR 751). Believing that the historical process was ongoing in time and directed toward redemption, the Puritans reflected their vision in the images they used - a favorite being the wheel within a wheel, with secular and sacred history interacting as a circle within a spiral. But because Puritan theology also viewed that spiral as necessarily ascending over time, there remained no way that present events could recapitulate past ones exactly. Nor could future events perfectly recapitulate present ones. Change was an inevitable part of the process. When Gravity's Rainbow, then, invokes the Blitz by saying, "It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now," there should be nothing to compare it to now (3). In the end, this built-in accommodation for change created a convenient loophole for Puritan believers. If temporal changes seemed for the better, they easily could be fitted into the idea of an approaching salvation. No contradiction in thought arose. If temporal changes seemed for the worse, there still arose no contradiction in thought, for they could be subsumed as temporary aberrations within the larger unseen pattern that ultimately would come to pass. Threatened by "witches" who aimed to "reduce a World into a Chaos" and yet skeptical of whether his fellow townsmen "did not kill some of their own side in the Smoke and Noise of this Dreadful War," Cotton Mather took comfort in recalling the "Inexplicable Matters" into which no human could penetrate (Magnalia 332, 336). Therefore, although all the changes over time that Pynchon sees have unpleasant, if not horrifying, implications, they do not prove any rupture between Pynchon's sense of history and that of the Puritans. Whether conditions in the present seem better than those in the past becomes irrelevant because
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either possibility could be integrated within the Puritan mind. What causes strain in reconciling Pynchon's historicism with a redemptive vision has to do with other matters, primarily those that are twentieth-century in nature. The Puritans assumed that God had priority. Gravity's Rainbow now invokes Them. They may be the new controllers of history. And, like God, They are "patient, committed to the Long Run" (GR 16). The result is confusion over the foundation of history. "Each plot carries its signature," Pynchon says. "Some are God's, some masquerade as God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only more complex" (GR 540-1). What becomes more frightening than the idea of an indifferent controller or a malevolent controller is the idea of no controller at all. "Providence, hey Providence,'9 yells Slothrop, "what'd you do, step out for a beer or something?" (GR 439). If so, that which provides order to the whole structure may be disordered itself, and it becomes increasingly difficult to make sense of history when history simply may not make sense. In V., Pynchon recalls an ancient Egyptian incident in which drunken elephants, intended to trample Jewish prisoners, turned on guards and spectators instead. "If there is no telling what a drunken human will do, so much less a herd of drunken elephants. Why put it down to God's intervention?" (66). Why, indeed. When the Hereros nearly get exterminated centuries later, they can find no comfort in the "Will of God Theory"; the slaughter has been so large and senseless as to defy reason (GR 421). And if reason no longer operates in the world, perhaps the world of the twentieth century really is different from its predecessors. As Dorothy says in the epigraph to "In the Zone," "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more. . . . " (GR 325; Pynchon's ellipsis). Even worse, we may never have been in Kansas. The world of the twentieth century may be all there ever was, in which case all previous ways of imagining its history are rendered not only obsolete, but wrong. Pynchon's characters find themselves stripped of all that previously defined them. Oedipa has her men taken from her one by one. Slothrop literally is left without even the shirt (Hawaiian) on his back. Neither one can believe that things have turned against them all so quickly. Anxiety increases. Nalline Slothrop writes a letter to Ambassador Kennedy asking for reassurance that the sky is not falling, that "pieces of the Heavenly City" do not rain down on her in Boston (GR 795). The promise of unfolding revelations is never delivered; instead of an increase of illumination, the "world experiences a decrease. Benny Profane's flashlight goes out in K's sewers. The Paranoids burn fuses in Lot 49. Moreover, characters start speculating about permanent extinguishment. Pirate Prentice looks at the sky above him, "afraid because the light looks like it's going to go away forever this time, and more afraid because the failure of light is not a private thing, everyone else in the street has seen it too . . ." (GR 638; Pynchon's ellipsis). Slothrop compares the warm, springtime light from the Aspinwall Hotel Fire with the harsh, winter light from the Blitz. "But what Lights were these?" he wonders of the latter. "What ghosts in
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command? And suppose, in the next moment, all of it, the complete night, were to go out of control and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at. . . . " (GR 33; Pynchon's ellipsis). Oedipa Maas is denied even this possibility. The Crying of Lot 49 ends by closing all the windows and shutting out the sun. When such a radical questioning of historicism occurs, none of the old solutions affords much consolation. Gravity's Rainbow provides a list of heroes who have saved the day in the past only to show they no longer prove effective - not the Lone Ranger, not Philip Marlowe, not Superman, Plasticman, or any other "-man." " 'Too late' was never in their programming" (877). And both programming and lateness are exactly the issues in question. Pynchon has programmed his work upon a seventeenth-century model of history, but the disparity between factual and figurative has grown to the breaking point. The Puritans resolved a problem like this very easily. "When, accordingly, they felt that history was undermining their ideal, they had no choice but to explain history away," as Bercovitch points out (Jeremiad 69). For Pynchon, this remains an unsatisfactory solution. Too much has happened recently that defies explanation. When Fausto Maijstral, facing daily bombardment, confronts this dilemma in V., he decides "that the old covenants, the old agreements with God would have to change too" (310). For a seventeenth-century Puritan, this would have meant dispensing with covenants entirely. For Pynchon, it means fitting "old covenants" to new circumstances. With God no longer ordering movement, he shifts to a movement of no order. With redemption no longer the direction, he points to randomness. In short, Pynchon moves from the sacred to the secular - from a religious to an entropic vision of history. An Entropic Theory of History Essentially, this is the same shift in thought that scientists had to make between the time of Sir Isaac Newton and the late nineteenth century.14 Henry Adams, for one, recognized that "None of the astronomers were irreligious men; all of them made a point of magnifying God through his works. . . . Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor Newton, any more than Constantine the Great - if so much - doubted Unity" (Education 484). When Newton formulated his three laws of motion and law of universal gravitation, he only defined in physical terms what the theologians already had defined in religious terms. Although operating of their own accord, these laws of motion never denied the idea of a Mover who originally set them in action. The force of gravity corresponded to the will of God. And by considering all motion to result from the relationship of mass, force, and acceleration, Newtonian physics linked together everything in the universe. But linking together the universe in this manner does not mean accounting for all that occurs within it, and in certain areas Newtonian physics proved
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deficient. For instance, although gravity might tell the operation of one force, more than one force operates in the universe. When General Cummings considers the asymmetrical curve of a fired projectile in The Naked and the Dead, he acknowledges this very plurality. "If only gravity were working, the path would be symmetrical," he muses (444); nevertheless, he fully understands that gravity remains only one of two forces determining the projectile's path - wind resistance serves as the other. Furthermore, in realizing that the effect of both forces is proportional to the square of air time, the general also recognizes a factor that Newtonian physics did not. Although the laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation could tell how motion arose and accelerated, they could not tell in which direction it flowed with time. For Newton himself, movement without such direction ultimately became movement without purpose. In 1693, n e suffered a mysterious depression and spent the last years of his life perusing the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. As Perry Miller sees it, Newton was a Puritan by inheritance and a theologian by temperament who needed to find "human significance something more satisfying to the soul, if not to the mind," than the "inhuman" abstractions of scientific formulas could provide (Errand 228). Pynchon's characters may be less plagued by needs for specifically divine significance, but they still face the problem of direction in time. If Seaman Bodine echoes Newtonian linkage by finding everything "some kind of a plot," the answer he receives suggests a shortcoming of that view: "And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways" (GR 702-3). The introduction of thermodynamics at the end of the nineteenth century ousted the Mover while giving the movement direction in time. It also made it possible to conceive of a historical theory in physical terms. The first law of thermodynamics, that of energy conservation, made the process dynamic. As Wernher von Braun states in the opening epigraph to Gravity's Rainbow, "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation" (1). The third law of
thermodynamics, the unattainability statement, gave the process continuity. On the Kelvin scale of temperature, absolute zero could never be reached, only approached. But it was left for the second law of thermodynamics to provide direction in time and so lay the foundation for an entropic theory of history. Although the term entropy was introduced by Rudolph Clausius in 1865, it was not until later years that its relationship to time was fully accepted. In 1929, Sir Arthur Eddington popularized the connection by conceiving of increased entropy as giving direction to "time's arrow." With the publication of Ludwig Boltzmann's H-Theorem, the term grew beyond its thermodynamic framework and applied more readily to other areas. By the time of "Entropy," Pynchon's i960 short story, Callisto can state the second law in a totally nonscientific way: "[Y]ou can't win, things are going to get worse before they get better, who says they're going to get better" (282). In the end, nobody does, if by "getting better" one means getting saved. The second law of thermodynamics makes no attempt to provide the "human significance" Newton sought; all it posits over time is what results when a leveling of free
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energy in the universe occurs. Less and less energy is available for work, and the universe moves toward a state of increasing disorder or entropy. Within this secular view of historical process, what occurs over time can be ordered only in terms of sequence, in terms of when events occur, and even here change outdistances chronology. In Gravity's Rainbow, the attempts of Brigadier Pudding to write a political history can never keep up with the events themselves. Starting his work with the assumption that Ramsay MacDonald can die leaves him with so many consequences to work out that, in the interim, Ramsay MacDonald does die. In no way can what occurs over time be ordered in an explanatory way, in terms of why or how events occur, because each individual event occurs by accident or chance. The Englishmen with whom Henry Adams associated worked from just these premises, believing that "History, like everything else, might be a field of scraps, like the refuse about a Staffordshire iron-furnace" (Education 221). The scraps continue to accumulate; the refuse defies sorting. And this is exactly the situation that Roger Mexico encounters in Gravity's Rainbow when assembling data on the bombs being dropped by the Germans during the Blitz. Although the pattern of hits follows a Poisson distribution over London, subsequent hits defy prophecy. Mexico can determine the odds of certain areas being struck given an arbitrary number of total strikes, but the emphasis still lies on probability. Precedent proves irrelevant, for (the Monte Carlo fallacy notwithstanding) the odds of an area being bombed in the future have nothing to do with how many times it has been bombed in the past. As the statistician Mexico tells the Pavlovian Pointsman, "Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning" (64). Neither does similarity serve as a criterion for relatedness. Although the map that Slothrop keeps matches up square for square with the map that Mexico keeps, Slothrop's sexual exploits do not determine where bombs will fall on London; the pattern of his liaisons only coincides with that of German decimations. The stream of history then becomes what happens to have happened over time. Throughout Pynchon's work, that experience is portrayed in many ways. "Under the Rose" places it in the context of a Baedeker world we all tour in which "any itinerary, with all its doublings-back, emergency stops, and hundredkilometer feints remained transitory or accidental" (232). V. conceives of a movement of yo-yoing from one place to another, and Vheissu, toward which everything finally moves, exists as a land of continual and independent change. "No sequence of colors is the same from day to day. As if you lived inside a madman's kaleidoscope. . . . Not real shapes, not meaningful ones. Simply random, the way clouds change over a Yorkshire landscape" (155). And, within the paradigm of war that Gravity's Rainbow offers, war turns into "the absolute rule of chance" ( i n ) . With history seeming to follow a course more purpose/ess than purposeful, certain decisions must be made as to how one copes with an inevitable entropic slide. Pynchon's earlier short stories delineate the primary choices available in situations that become increasingly chaotic, if not dangerous. In "Mortality
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and Mercy in Vienna," the feasibility of salvation in a secular world is considered in explicitly religious terms. Cleanth Siegel, half-Catholic and halfJewish, finds himself the only sober guest at a Washington, D.C., party. Through the host's abrupt departure, Siegel also finds himself an unwitting confessor to a very drunken flock. Most important, he remains the only person aware that theflockis about to be pumped full of bullets by a psychotic Ojibwa Indian. "And then the enormity of it hit him," Pynchon writes. "Because if this hunch were true, Siegel had the power to work for these parishioners a kind of miracle, to bring them a very tangible salvation" (212). The Jesuit in him embraces this possibility; the Jew sings prayers for the dead, "realizing however that this kind of penance was as good as any other" (213). In the end, Siegel strolls out the door and walks down the stairs, reaching the street in time to hear the first round of fire. In the face of inevitable destruction, he decides that nothing ultimately can be done. The most one can do is save oneself and mourn for others. "Entropy" provides an alternative possibility in the way its host responds to another party that is becoming more and more disorderly. Meatball Mulligan stands and watches his already wild (into its fortieth hour with the story's first sentence) lease-breaking party disintegrate even further after the arrival of the U.S. Navy, the noise reaching an "ungodly crescendo" (291). Like Siegel, he then has two choices. He can lock himself in a closet and hope everybody goes away or he can try to calm everybody down, one by one. Like Siegel, he, too, speculates about the relative merits of each choice: "(a) was certainly the more attractive alternative. But then he started thinking about that closet. It was dark and stuffy and he would be alone. . . . The other way was more a pain in the neck, but probably better in the long run" (291). And so, unlike Siegel, Meatball decides to keep his lease-breaking party from "deteriorating into total chaos" (291). Rather than just admit to the inevitability of chaos, one can delay its arrival by imposing some order. And unlike Siegel, who only can think of the extreme possibilities - either save everybody else or save nobody else, Meatball contents himself with a qualified form of salvation. His actions will not prevent the fact of destruction, but they will reduce the damages suffered by his guests. Living in the midst of an ongoing party proves difficult for most of Pynchon's later characters as well. Geli Tripping may advise Slothrop to "flow along with it" (GR 342), but Slothrop finds living in the Zone this way too painful. "If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long" (GR 506). Intimations of senselessness - as regards the nature of quests, love, and even life itself- trouble characters continually. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas cannot accept an edition of The Courier's Tragedy that leaves out the word "Tristero"; she needs to know that the assumptions she makes about one version have relevance to all versions. In Gravity's Rainbow, Franz Pokier cannot admit that the daughter who visits him yearly may be a different Use each time, that the
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"only continuity has been her name" (492). Tchitcherine cannot deal with the finality of death. For these characters, the second alternative of Meatball means establishing some purposeful sequence for themselves, and so restoring - in their minds, at least - a sense of purpose to the universe. As van Wijk says in V.y it means keeping "an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos" (216).15 It even may mean persisting in paranoid fantasies.16 So, if Inverarity leaves Oedipa a "scatter of business interests," she "would give them order, she would create constellations" (L 65). If the Germans give Pokier "the moving image of a daughter," he will make of separate frames a continuous movie (GR 492). If death threatens Tchitcherine, he will turn to a "Theory of History" - Marxist theory in this case - that allows him to "make sense of it" (GR 821). Admittedly, these imaginative constructs seem little different from that of the Pavlovians in Gravity's Rainbow whose "No effect without cause" theory dictates "a clear train of linkages" (102). But crucial distinctions exist between these self-styled forms of order and those of the villainous scientists. Motive is one. The Pavlovians seek correspondence between events to exert control over events, specifically control that results from conditioning that they establish over time - not only do the experiments on Slothrop conform to this motive, but so do all the experiments in "The White Visitation." If the scientists then worship their Book with religious dedication, it should come as no surprise because, in essence, they have erected themselves as gods. In contrast, far from being a means "to glorify God and one's own godliness" (V. 44), the self-styled forms of order imagined by Pynchon's other characters bring little exaltation and much frustration. For Stencil, the search for V. remains grim and joyless. Slothrop's paranoia torments him. Furthermore, the behaviorists err on more fundamental grounds, first, in assuming that their way of interpreting history is the only way of interpreting history, and, second, in assuming that their way is empirically correct. In order for the other imaginative systems that are created by characters to work, there can be no such assumptions. If paranoia provides order through plot, Pynchon repeatedly emphasizes that the Zone can support many plots. More important, he continually warns against thinking that the order one fashions for oneself has any objective validity in the outside world. In this last regard, Pynchon's characters tread a delicate mental tightrope to maintain their balance. Once they are seduced by the promise of universal correspondences, they fall - and in much the same way that the Pavlovians do, from hybris. Oedipa makes this mistake in Lot 4Q, thereby earning her Greek name, when she attempts to link together Pierce Inverarity, Tristero, and The Courier's Tragedy. Director Randolph Driblette tells her the play is not literature and does not "mean" anything, that its only reality lies in his head, but still she persists in her quest. In V., Stencil falls prey to the same temptation when proposing the elusive V.'s activities as underpinning for a century of upheaval. Eigenvalue, another character, recognizes the flaws of such reasoning:
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Pynchon ends the passage by speculating how much better things would be if we lived on a crest and could see farther, but he also understands the futility of this wish. Being a time-bound creature makes it impossible for a mortal to obtain that kind of vision. Only an immortal can view the whole process - or a god. Maintaining one's order while still at the bottom of a fold then becomes similar to maintaining religious belief. In V., Evan Godolphin believes in Vheissu as "a kind of communion" even though he doubts the land's existence (178). In Gravity's Rainbow, the search for the A-4 Rocket becomes the pursuit of a "holy Text," even though none of the pursuers is sure it survives (606). But with God no longer presiding over an entropic universe, maintaining such belief grows in difficulty. If Oedipa thinks the clues she finds of Tristero's existence may compensate for having lost "the direct, epileptic Word," the very terms she employs belie her assumption (L 87). Compensation is not restoration; the substitute can never equal the original. Whatever the forms of order the characters now propose, none receives communal support. More often than not, each exists as a solitary pursuit. As the makeshift Christmas choir tells Mexico and Jessica Swanlake, it is "the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark" (GR 159). Knowing in advance these conditions of belief makes the very act of believing that much harder; it becomes, as Pynchon puts it, "the forcible acquisition of faith" (L 102). And persisting in such faith becomes tantamount to an act of courage. In "The Secret Integration," the children continue to plot against the adult world for three years even though they never seem to make any real progress, "as if," according to their author, "there were something basically wrong and self-defeating with the plot itself" (44). There is. If the world does not defeat them, their increasing age soon will. Courage then results from persevering in their efforts despite the known inevitability of failure. If an entropic theory of history forces these characters to adopt religious artifacts, does it differ that much from a Puritan theory of history that promotes the same sort of behavior? Not really. True, certain differences in emphasis exist. Because the Puritans had God at the controls and redemption in sight, the idea of beginnings and endings had great significance, linked as these points were to specific events ordained by God. The apocalyptic moment in particular had special importance; while it would bring the end of the world, it also would herald the millennium to come for chosen Puritans. By removing God from the world, an entropic theory of history depersonalizes the idea of beginnings and endings. The most recent events of our time only contribute to this shift. When the world can end itself with a bang, the end is worth
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hardly a whimper. Consequently, an entropic theory of history has no choice but to concentrate on the intermediate process instead. With regard to this intermediate process, however, Puritan and entropic historicism share many similarities.17 Both reflect man's attempt to deal with the universal forces around him. Henry Adams recognized as much in 1900 when describing the Cross and the dynamo as "interchangeable if not reversible" (Education 381); he reaffirmed that belief four years later in the interchangeable terms with which his "Dynamic Theory of History" recounted their origins: "To the highest attractive energy, man gave the name of divine, and for its control he invented the science called Religion, a word which meant, and still means, cultivation of occult force whether in detail or mass" (476). Both processes predicate themselves upon necessary changes over time. Just as war can be seen as an economic outlet, "a celebration of markets," that confirms the Puritan promise, it also can be seen as a scientific product, "dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . , by something that needed the energyburst of war," that attests to thermodynamic transformation (GR 122, 607). Perhaps most important, both processes encapsulate two forms of time - one short-range, the other long-range. In "Entropy," Callisto envisions his apartment as a permanent "enclave of regularity in the city's chaos" because he has been able to maintain its "ecological balance" thus far (279). But when the noise from Meatball's party shatters the hermetic seal of his neighbor's abode, the movement toward order that Callisto has initiated is exposed as temporary at best - even if "temporary" lasts as long as seven years, as it does for Callisto. Pynchon's use of calculus delineates the precise relationship between Puritan and entropic historicism. Mathematically, calculus originates in response to the curve. A curve, though, can take on various shapes depending upon its length. In its shortest form, the parabola, it traces the arc of a rainbow or the path of a rocket. In its longest form, it can trace an entire spiral. Pynchon sees the one as a part of the other. The parabola becomes the shape of "no second chances, no return" under which we all move - in short, the life process itself (GR 244). As Katje tells Slothrop, "Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life" (GR 243-4). The spiral only extends that movement over a greater period of time, beyond the span of a single life or a single trajectory, to depict a continuing process. In neither case can the basic structure be altered. "You can't fight the law of averages," Grover informs Tim in "The Secret Integration," "you can't fight the curve" (36). What integration then seeks to investigate is what exists beneath the curve, specifically the space underneath, in order to determine its area. Historical theory, too, investigates the area beneath the curve, or what occurs over time, with the hope of amalgamating it into some system. When the curve is graphed onto an x—y axis, any point of integration yields a straight line extending from the curve to the x-axis. The area under a curve can be calculated at many points, however, and so more than one line can
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emerge depending on how many points of integration are chosen. Similarly, a historical theory can be posited at many points in time. More often than not, its terms of reference will reflect the period in which the historian lives and the culture in which he operates. Living in the seventeenth century, Puritans employed a religious context. In the nineteenth century, scientists used physics. By the time the twentieth century arrived, the terms used often derived from historical models themselves. Georg Lukacs, for example, based his view of history upon an already Marxist foundation. But one crucial factor remains to obviate these differences of expression: No matter when in time a theory actually is postulated, the theory itself should be capable of accounting for whatever happens over all time. Because this goal underlies all theories of history, the relationship between different approaches need not be one of mutual exclusion. Grover thus defines integration as the "opposite of differentiation" ("Integration" 51). At the same time, because differences in expression also negate perfect sameness, the relationship between various theories must lie somewhere "Between congruent and identical" (GR 774). Returning to a mathematical model establishes what the relationship is. As Leni Pokier tells her husband, the lines of integration run parallel to each other. Because parallel lines stay separate, one need not interfere with the other. The curve under which they run provides any necessary unity; delta-t approaching zero provides any necessary direction. And so, as Leni says, "It all goes along together" (GR 186). A similar situation defines the relationship between a Puritan theory of history and an entropic theory of history. For Puritans, the prophecy of redemption moved history toward the moment when "all the whole Mystery of God be finished, and Time shall be no longer."18 For physicists, the third law of thermodynamics moves all toward zero on the Kelvin scale. Although Puritan thought saw history as eventually reaching this point and thermodynamics sees it as impossible, both modes of thought view humanity as being in the middle of an ongoing process. Thus, the period of time that characters inhabit in Pynchon's highly technological world is no different from the "Inter-Sabbatical Time" proposed by Cotton Mather. Oedipa Maas must learn that she lives in an "excluded middle," however disagreeable that seems (L 136). Roger Mexico already knows this. Dealing with probabilities has made him aware of, and taught him to survive within, the area between zero and one. The only problem that results involves reconciling one direction of movement with two opposed connotations. Puritan history flows toward an ordered end into which any borders are treated as temporary aberrations. Entropic history flows toward a disordered end in which any instances of order are but passing. As such, each process may seem the reverse of the other, adding one more example to the list of reversible processes found in Pynchon's work: time and "reverse-time" in V. (36), movies running backward and forward in hot 4g, and geographic reversals in Gravity's Rainbow — English Slothrops coming to America, American Slothrops returning to England; European Death discovering America, American Death resettling in Europe (842). But
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- and it is a crucial distinction - as those who deal with V-2S moving faster than the speed of sound know, "the reality is not reversible. Each firebloom followed by blast then by sound of arrival, is a mockery (how can it not be deliberate?) of the reversible process . . . " (GR 163). Just as time itself is oneway and ongoing, so does any history disclose an irreversible movement. In dealing with reversible processes one usually must determine which process proves most favorable. When outside referents exist, this becomes easier to do. For example, because mirrors characterize the voyeur in Pynchon's world, an ethical consideration turns "mirror-time" into artificial time (V. 36). When no reference points exist, however, such determination becomes more difficult. Saure Bummer, then, wonders in Gravity's Rainbow, "Why do you speak of certain reversals - machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being 'ass backwards'? . . . Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying 'ass forwards,' if backwards is what you mean" (796). With regard to Pynchon's use of Puritan and entropic historicism, one must pose an equivalent question. If the same curve provides form for each, and if both processes have equal validity, does one move "up" the spiral toward redemption or "down" the spiral toward randomness? The end of V. serves as a case in point. The last chapter sees the 1919 June Disturbances erupt in Malta, but on the final page Pynchon brings the situation more up-to-date. In 1956, the issue of Maltese self-rule still remains open, although politically the island has moved closer to British influence. Does Maltese history then progress or regress? One problem lies in the use of words like "progress" and "regress," imbued as they are with human value judgments. For Pynchon, a "progression" toward order has no more intrinsic merit than a "regression" into chaos. If anything, quite the contrary holds true. As Henry Adams recognized, "Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit" {Education 249). Furthermore, when considering the Maltese situation, one must determine which year serves as representative and which year serves as anomalous. Does the year of rioting promote the historical process or does the year of peace? When two historical processes of equal validity run parallel to each other, it becomes impossible to decide on any one answer. Indecision turns especially painful when characters must consider an end to history, or what the point of zero implies. In its simplest terms, movement in time means movement toward death, the "Great Irreversible" (GR 870). As Mehemet states in V., "Early and late we are in decay" (433). Oedipa Maas comes to a similar conclusion in Lot 49 when she realizes that the tattooed sailor she meets in a flophouse doorway is slowly dying: "It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process" (95). But Puritan and entropic visions endow this termination with different connotations. Puritan theology saw death as being transfigured by the apocalyptic moment and the millennium to follow; indeed, this historical ending gave meaning to the tribulations of the process. "That was always the charm and the danger of eschatology," says Perry Miller, "destruction must be seen as a positive act, increasing the fund of existence; but what if it should prove a reversion to nonexistence?" (Errand 234).
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For the physicist, this latter possiblity is exactly what zero implies, the inanimate replacing the living until, "like any dead leaf or fragment of metal," a person finally becomes "subject to the laws of physics" (V. 301). Maximum entropy implies a minimum of free energy. Perfect zero only means perfect equilibrium, the point of time when a body of mass is acted upon by forces that cancel out each other. The end of time just means an end of movement. Living as they do under the curve, Pynchon's characters inhabit an area in which either possibility can result, neither being an odds-on favorite. Determined as they also are by the curve's length, they inhabit an area where finality must be confronted. In a process of "no second chances," it becomes especially important to consider one's wager carefully. But when one cannot distinguish between a game of chance and a game already rigged, placing one's bet becomes difficult. It becomes even more difficult when the time comes to cash in one's chips. The stakes of belief then increase tremendously as all rolls on a final spin of the wheel. Fifty-fifty odds provide little comfort to Pynchon's characters as they approach the zero, whether individually or collectively. All they can do is search frantically for proof that something exists beyond that point of no return. Pavlovians look for lost responses. Mediums contact the dead. Even one character hesitantly considers a "kindness-reflex" that "now and then, also beyond the Zero, survives extinction. . . . " (GR 832; Pynchon's ellipsis). Mediating Between the Strands This kind of gambling does not take place in the Casino Hermann Goering of Gravity's Rainbow. Run by Past History, that casino operates on antiquated odds. Dealers shuffle precedent-stacked decks. Dice are loaded with "frequencies already observed" (243). The establishment in which the characters now play conforms to the latest specifications. Designed by the firm of Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Born, the Casino Uncertainty operates on a more equitable basis. House rules of quantum physics determine odds of probability alone. Predictions yield not one result, but two completely different results and the odds of observing each. That is all. With these guidelines, card spotting helps as much as rabbit's feet. Those who wish to play "Beyond the Zero" remain with three options: Learn the odds and try to beat them, ignore odds entirely and just gamble, or work out some combination play. In deciding between the endings of Puritan and entropic historicism, the characters can fight the direction in which time moves them, disregard history entirely, or create some new theory from both historical strands. The efforts of those who try to elevate themselves above history show the limits of transcendent thinking. Yearning to "break out - to leave this cycle of infection and death" with his lover (GR 844), Lieutenant Weissmann renames himself "Blicero" from the German word for death, begins staring at the sky, immersing himself in trances, and reading the poetry of Rilke in preparation for the vehicle that will take him from war-ravaged Germany to the
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mythical regions of space, his "Ur Heimat" (GR 566). The Zone-Hereros who work for him either mimic or mock his efforts in their own attempts to escape time. Enzian and the Schwarzkommando follow their master's model as the war ends and search for missing rocket parts in an effort to reassemble a ship that "will have no history" and bring them to a state in which "Time, as time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside this new one" (GR 370). Josef Ombindi and his Empty Ones reject European death in favor of tribal death and seek to restore the "Eternal Center" of their native culture through a negative birth rate. But none succeeds. Weissmann's Rocket is betrayed to Gravity. Enzian's may simply be a sham, part of an operation engineered by firms like Krupp and Farben to cover up more ominous dealings. Worst of all, Ombindi's plan yields not tribal dignity but tribal suicide, because choosing to do nothing, not even procreate, amounts to willful victimization, with results no different, or more sensible, than those inflicted by the hands of European colonialists.19 Nor are the efforts of those who just forget about history any more successful. Living in the midst of chaos, Slothrop tries to forget linkages of past, present, and less-and-less certain future. "Once upon a time Slothrop cared. No kidding. He thinks he did, anyway. A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now" (GR 23). In this sense, he may be the most advanced product of his ancestors' efforts - after all, they have made their living from the severing of roots. When he later tries to recapture that past, going as far back as 1634 to reclaim his heritage, his attempts are both too little and too late. He may wonder how much better the country might have been under the "Slothropite heresy" (GR 648), but looking to retread that road never taken provides no help in negotiating the Zone. Rather than lead pigs as his predecessor William did, Slothrop becomes a pig himself: From a Rocketman he degenerates into a Plechazunga. Neither does present reparation make up for ancestral sins: All it leaves him doing is apologizing to trees. Yet when Slothrop gives himself up to the stream of chaos, he fares even worse. In contrast to Tchitcherine, who rejects canine companionship in favor of the next best thing - "an albatross with no curse attached: an amiable memory" - once Slothrop surrenders his Puritan heritage and stops acting paranoid, he turns into "one plucked albatross" (GR 817, 830). He then cannot help but succumb to the Zone rapidly. "All his hopeful cards reversed," he who has descended from Elect stock moves hopelessly toward Preterite multitude: scattered beyond recognition, a joke with no discernible punch line, consigned to "a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity (not only in his life but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too . . .)" (GR 861; Pynchon's ellipsis).20 These unsuccessful efforts reinforce the point that some recognition of historical processes must be maintained, however imperfect or subjective the orderings approved may be. According to Norbert Wiener, Pynchon's early intellectual mentor, it was the capacity for this very type of thinking that characterized man as a highly evolved life form. Having found the "biological individuality of an organism" to lie in "a certain continuity of process" and in
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"the memory by the organism of the effects of its past development," Wiener distinguished man, who possessed the physiological equipment for memory, from the insect, whose "physical strait-jacket" was directly responsible for its "mental strait-jacket" (Human Use 108, 65-7). In much the same manner, those living under Pynchon's curve distinguish their individuality to the degree that they adhere to the tenets of another proponent of continuity, Kurt Mondaugen: "Personal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth." As the law that bears his name goes on to explain, "Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "At" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. (GR 593) As Slothrop's experiences demonstrate, though, that "sense of N o w " cannot be envisioned only as a passage to Puritan salvation or only as a passage toward entropic randomness. Some way of dealing with both possible routes must be considered.21 Synthesizing both possibilities into a new historical theory arises as an obvious solution. Henry Adams, in fact, viewed synthesis as that upon which historical thought relied throughout the years as more and more occurred that needed incorporation. Yet Adams also recognized that past efficacy proved useless when present circumstances strained the limits of earlier historical models. Evolution was becoming change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual, electrolytic — who knew what? - defying science, if not denying known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again. (Education 401) With so much being forced into a single continuum, Adams had to conclude that eventually "a point must always be soon reached where larger synthesis is suicide" (402). Moreover, thinking in terms of synthesis means thinking dialectically, and thinking dialectically proved equally inappropriate in the world that Adams was entering. Assuming that mutually exclusive concepts cannot exist simultaneously, dialectical thought begins with a thesis that generates an antithesis, and fuses from them a new third. True, the movements of Puritan and entropic historicism generate the kind of opposed implications that are amenable to such machinations - only the world in which they now function admits to opposition. In fact, as defined by quantum physics and, in particular, Bohr's principle of complementarity, that world can sustain opposed possibilities with no problem. What it cannot entertain is that for which dialectic strives - one clear resolution. As a result, dialectical thought proves too restrictive a
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model in dealing with the twentieth century - or, if not too restrictive to deal with modern phenomena, its inability to sustain opposition makes it too weak. In Gravity's Rainbow, the dialectically arisen Counterforce fails. Henry Adams realized as much when considering the new kind of mind needed to deal with twentieth-century events: "Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law" (497-8). If Adams previously saw the historian providing a common denominator for numerous historical fractions, the new chronicler must provide something more. From the "either-or" of dialectic, he must move to the "and" of paradox. To use the psychological terms ofGravity's Rainbow, he must seek not the "transmarginal leap," where "ideas of the opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness," but rather the "interface," "a meeting surface for two worlds" (57, 778).22 And in dealing with both a Puritan movement to salvation and an entropic slide to randomness, the historian must provide that interface himself. Gravity's Rainbow presents many instances of interfaces - formed by pairs as disparate as coal and steel, Dora and Nordhausen, even lovers in bed. Only in one instance does Pynchon provide an active "interfacer" - and, appropriately enough, that figure of connection flits from one work of fiction to another. Maxwell's Demon came to birth in the last half of the nineteenth century, the brainchild of James Clerk Maxwell. Conceived in 187I as a theoretical challenge to the second law of thermodynamics, this tiny intelligence operated as an atomic gatekeeper, sorting the random vibrations of atoms, allowing through those that created order while blocking those that increased disorder. In this way, the Demon violated nature's tendency toward entropy.23 In the Nefastis Machine of Lot 49, Pynchon places the Demon in one of his more common situations, in a box of air molecules, and in the midst of one of his more common tasks, dividing the faster-moving molecules from the slower ones. Within this particular model, however, Pynchon complicates the role of the Demon. As John Nefastis tells Oedipa, two distinct kinds of entropy exist in his construct, one having to do with heat-engines and the transfer of energy, the other having to do with communication and information flow. Like the spiraling paths of Puritan and entropic historicism, the two systems share one form. "The equation for one, back in the '30's, had looked very like the equation for the other." And, like Puritan and entropic historicism, the systems function independently of each other. "It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell's Demon" (77). While providing this interface, the Demon interacts with both systems. Most important, in facilitating the operations of each system, he allows opposite results to ensue. "As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where" (77). When considering the opposed implications of Puritan and entropic movement, then,
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all that seems needed is a historically minded Demon, one who will mediate between parallel processes of history as Nefastis's being mediates between similar equations of coincidence. But Nefastis informs Oedipa that the Demon in his box has a helper. When dealing with information flow as well as energy flow, she must remember that "Communication is the key" (77). The activity of sorting changes a bit, and Nefastis goes on to outline the new allotment of responsibilities: The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The Demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. (77) Leaving aside the cybernetic terms of reference, the kind of dynamic that Nefastis posits has merits of its own in suggesting the working relationship between author and reader. In David Lodge's words, "The writer expresses what he knows by affecting the reader; the reader knows what is expressed by being receptive to affects. The medium of this process is language" (Language 65). If what a writer wishes to express is a simultaneity of opposition, however, a specific kind of language is required, a language of interface. Nefastis realizes as much. "Entropy is a figure of speech, then," he concludes, "a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both" (77). If Pynchon's own construct - his fiction - uses the world of Puritan thought and the world of entropic flow, his Machine must operate in much the same way as that of Nefastis. With Pynchon as Demon and language the medium, the metaphor becomes the message. Leni Pokier has known this all along. Attempting to show her myopic husband how astrological movements reflect human movements in time, she tries various approaches: "Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know . . . " (GR 186; Pynchon's ellipsis). Indeed, mapping different systems onto the same set of coordinates runs throughout Gravity's Rainbow: Slothrop's trysts map onto Gwenhidwy's births, which map onto Mexico's bombs. Activities of different consequences retain the same image, and so Pirate's bananas, Slothrop's phallus, and German rockets all show the same resiliency. With a single metaphor - one set of coordinates, one shape - Pynchon literally maps out the entire human condition from conception to death. And with this stylistic device, a single movement can be attributed with opposed implications.24 Pynchon's portrait of the countdown nicely illustrates the mechanism at work. Unlike "ass backwards," the term linguistically incorporates two opposed movements - "count" being an additive process, "down" reversing that trend. The Kabbalists view the process as a movement backward, a return to God's soul. The scientists view the process as moving forward, to start the Rocket's trajectory. Yet the Kabbalists, armed with magic and faith, understand how the countdown can function in both ways. "So although the Rocket
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countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel" (GR 879). Furthermore, as movement toward zero specifically, the countdown also must be apprehended within its larger context as movement through time. Metaphor then attributes to this single movement opposed historical connotations as the Rocket's path that it triggers traces a historical interface as well. Those with faith in an ordered salvation view this arc as movement toward redemption. For the Puritan-descended Slothrop, the Rocket draws him toward "a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long as he can remember" (GR 362). For the German Franz Pokier, it answers the "special destiny" for which he has been saved, the circle in the Ellipse of Uncertainty (GR 503). For the Zone-Hereros, it symbolizes the "Eternal Center," the "special destiny" for which von Trotha passed them over (GR 371). In fact, as Gravity's Rainbow progresses, and as more and more characters seek the Rocket, "Holy-CenterApproaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pastime" (593). Those who look for light in other parts of the book - be it the Kirghiz Light for Tchitcherine or the Light of Revelation for Slothrop - find all the illumination needed in the flames of its ascent. And those who seek salvation find great promise in the image of its descent. John Krafft recognizes that Puritan conversion by grace is pictured accurately as a great bright hand reaching out of a cloud ("Puritan Themes" 60). A great white rocket coming out of a cloud serves just as well. While in the air, however, the Rocket steadily loses energy and moves toward a point of equilibrium. As it approaches zero, then, it also satisfies the conditions of entropic history. At first, the vehicle withstands this process, becoming in its ascent "an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature . . . " (GR 377). As fuel continues to burn, though, the process proves too strong to resist. Rather than proclaiming a transformation of mass, the continuing loss of fuel begins to stabilize mass, until "at Brennschluss it is done - the Rocket's purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, has submitted. All the rest will happen according to laws of ballistics" (GR 260). So it does. Change ceases; movement does not. The Rocket stays subject to the power of another force. Gravity rules. When the Rocket touches ground again, the zero point of its target reached, Final Zero is attained as all movement and all change cease. Through this use of the Rocket, his "erect elect" according to Sanford Ames ("Ecriture" 171), Pynchon suggests a new way of dealing with technological advances. As Richard Poirier says, "not content with recording the historical effect of these, he is anxious to find our history in them" ("Rocket Power" 175). And through this use of metaphor, Pynchon suggests that our history can move toward an ordered end and a disordered end simultaneously. Nefastis, for one, places great faith in the power of metaphor and what he who employs it can achieve. In his estimation, "The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true" (L 77). Has Pynchon then
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succeeded in finding what his characters miss - the one theory that delineates all temporal movement? Can a metaphorical union of Puritan and entropic thought serve as the final word on all historical thought? That depends - first, on how much truth exists to be apprehended, and, second, on how much of that truth a metaphor can convey. Earlier writers concerned with history, primarily those of the nineteenth century, could frame their works around events they knew to be objectively true. Thackeray could use Waterloo for Vanity Fair, Eliot could use the Reform Bill of 1832 for Middlemarch. Even less monumental events possessed a solidity of apprehension. Flaubert could fashion Madame Bovary from a newspaper clipping. Goethe could build Faust around an infanticide. In no way did any doubt exist as to the relative importance of facts and fiction. As Goethe stated, "History is merely the nail on which I hang up my portraits." 25 In contrast, Pynchon has more interest in history but less confidence in its solidity. The sheer amount of facts that he includes, and the accuracy of his research into them, show Pynchon to view history as more than a supportive "nail." 26 In the twentieth century, however, a lack of coherence among different facts has created a dilemma in apprehending facts. In V., Kurt Mondaugen, a communications expert, compares Foppl's Siege Party with its 1904 exemplar. Watching the rooftop rioters who, in turn, watch the slaughter of Bondels, Mondaugen wonders: Had a new phase of the siege party begun with that dusk's intrusion from the present year, 1922, or was the change internal and Mondaugen's: a shift in the configuration of sights and sounds he was now filtering out, choosing not to notice? No way to tell; no one to say. (257) In 1921, Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for his theory of relativity. In Pynchon's world one year later, reality has become as relative as time and space. What Mondaugen sees can signify a real change in historical processes, a change that is but temporary and a function of human short-sighted vision, and no change at all - only an overactive imagination. But the matter grows even more complicated. Mondaugen makes his observations while suffering from scurvy. When one adds the effects of illness and drugs on perception, as Pynchon's work often does, it becomes impossible to find one historical truth for one historical event. Given this lack of empirical reality, one may question the claims that Nefastis makes for his Demon. How can a metaphor be made "objectively true" when no such truth exists? The same question also must be asked of what Pynchon forges from metaphor. What truth value can be attached to a metaphorical version of history? Pirate Prentice suggests an answer when advising Mexico to forget about verisimilitude: "We don't have to worry about questions of real or unreal. . . . It's the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it" (GR 743). In other words, although the universe itself may be unknowable, a closed system within that universe can be ascertained. Better still, to combat a universe that defies apprehension, one can manufac-
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ture that closed system oneself. Oedipa wonders, "Shall I project a world?" (L 59), and creates within her consciousness the Tristero system. Nefastis makes his more concrete and builds a boxlike apparatus. Pynchon goes further still and writes a book. Within these projected worlds, an "objective reality" does reside, but of the kind described by Stencil Senior, which "only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment" (V. 174). Those who "happen to be in on" Pynchon's work find this proven again and again. Whereas earlier fiction arose from the facts of outside life, Gravity's Rainbow repeatedly shows how facts can arise from fiction. Operation Black Wing originates as an Allied propaganda scheme to shatter Aryan complacency with the threat of black interlopers. "Who could have guessed there'd be real black rocket troops? That a story made up to scare last year's enemy should prove to be literally true . . . " (320).27 So convinced is Gerhardt von Goll that his film has brought into being the Schwarzkommando that he wants to repeat his success with Argentine anarchists as subject - and the Argentines find appeal in such cinema-conceived truth. "There are worse foundations than a film" (452). In the cases of Bianca and Use, von Goll has made conception even more cinematically true, the one conceived while her mother is raped on screen, the other while her father reenacts that scene at home. Under these conditions, what passes for truth just depends on where one sits in relation to the screen. And what passes for history, as Manfred Ptietz suggests, "depends more than we incline to believe on the position and the synthesizing grip of the observer" ("Tristero System" 127). The value of a metaphorical version of history, then, becomes a function of its context. Oedipa later realizes, "The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost" (L 95). In other words, within the confines of a closed system, a metaphor can be made "objectively true." All one needs is faith in the maker. Nefastis believes in the Demon. For him, the Demon does connect the world of thermodynamics and the world of information flow. When that connection is made complete, chaos retreats, information flows, and work gets done. But this results as much from sensitive participation as Demonic operation. When Oedipa, a skeptic, watches the box, nothing happens. When Nefastis, a sensitive, looks on, a piston moves. In reading Pynchon's work, one must perform a similar act of faith, a "willing suspension of disbelief" to recall Coleridge's term. One need not consider whether Pynchon's metaphorical view of history has validity outside the confines of fiction; but within that fictional framework one must participate as a sensitive. The requirements are few: "The true sensitive is one that can share in the man's hallucinations, that's all" (L 79). One must suspend disbelief and take part in an admittedly subjective system. In so doing, however, one reaps the same benefits as Nefastis: Information flows and chaos is pushed back a bit. Work may not progress - pistons may not rise - but there remains a way in which history does. Although Pynchon's view of history suggests two im-
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plications, the form in which it is manifested suggests only one - progress in an undeniably affirmative way. In terms of language, history moves from linguistic equilibrium to metaphoric dynamism.28 The former condition displays itself in communicative stasis. Information cannot pass from one person to another because their concentrations of words are of equal meaning. Characters in "Entropy" work in government communications, yet they speculate on qualitative differences between Sal Mineo and Ricky Nelson. Conversations in V. show little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, and philosophical cliches. And Slothrop exhibits the worst use of language of all. Whyzat? Because he speaks in comic-book lingo. No kiddin'. A-and he stutters most of what he sez. By the end of Gravity's Rainbow, he cannot even speak. Sheee-oo/ "The word is, in sad fact, meaningless," declares Fausto, "based as it is on the false assumption that identity is single, soul continuous" (V. 287). If not meaning/ess, words hardly become meaningjul based as they are on single meanings. And because "words are only an eyetwitch away from the things they stand for" (GR 116), the decay of one implies the decay of the other. When the word "America" suggests to Oedipa either "a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. . . . Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none," she remains with no nationality worth having if the obvious ensues: "[I]f 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" (L 136-7), into a word with multiple meanings, into "Tristero." Pynchon realizes that this situation did not always exist in the country. Oedipa herself can remember listening to drifters, "Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in . . . " (L 135). Indeed, America was founded on the potential of the word. "Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word," Emory Bortz tells Oedipa (L 117). Driblette reminds her of the same thing when comparing her interest in Tristero to the Puritan interest in the Bible. But when he equates the two as being "So hung up with words, words" (L 56), Driblette turns a correct comparison into an incorrect equivalency. Linked as words were to scriptural words, Puritans were "hung up" on language - but not in the way that Oedipa is at this point in the book. Oedipa devotes herself to one word "Tristero" - having one meaning and corresponding to one version of reality. In contrast, precisely because they linked their words to Scripture, Puritans attributed to their language as many meanings as they attributed to the Bible. Speaking plainly for them did not imply speaking simply, but rather opening up language to the linguistic richness of the Old Testament. Far from curtailing the use of image and metaphor, the Puritan view of language encouraged it. When Oedipa wonders "how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?" (L 136), she questions a historical degeneration of language as much as a historical degeneration of landscape, art, and citi-
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zenry, all of which show a similar degree of uniformity. Critics of Puritan culture interpret this change in different ways. Sacvan Bercovitch sees it occurring over time as linguistic multiplicity gave way to social conformity and personal interpretation was precluded by literalism (Puritan Origins i n ) . Larzer Ziff cites the addition of authoritative vestments and rituals that domesticated the potential for protest that the printed word initially had (Puritanism in America 4-7). And Charles Feidelson sees the problem built-in from the start; though grounded in typological thought, Puritans feared the very kind of symbolic thinking necessary for its propagation (Symbolism 90). Ultimately, no matter how they differ with regard to cause, all these critics agree on the result: Between first settlers and successive generations, a linguistic decay has ensued. As Feidelson says, "Whereas the original Puritans had retained a vital symbolism in everyday experience and even, however unconsciously, in the structure of their system, meaning for their descendants was either rational or nonexistent" (96). Mailer would add "scientific" in that "Metaphor had been replaced by gross assay" (CC 309).
Loss of the word involves more than just a traditional loss of religion. In Pynchon's work, it means a loss of ambiguity and a concomitant loss of all those things communicated through ambiguity. When Tchitcherine goes to Central Asia in Gravity's Rainbow, to a land where "a lot of emotional attachment to the word" still exists (411), he learns that the New Turkic Alphabet (NTA) he is to institute, strict in its correspondence between sounds and characters, cannot replace what the native tongue leaves silent. "They are silences NTA cannot fill, cannot liquidate, immense and frightening as the elements in this bear's corner - scaled to a larger Earth, a planet wilder and more distant from the sun. . . . " (396; Pynchon's ellipsis). For this reason, he understands that the new language can never translate properly the aqyn's verses, although someone eventually will "and this is how they will be lost" (415). And when someone finally does, Tchitcherine himself, they are lost in the worst way possible, through stenographic shorthand. A loss of ambiguity, then, means a loss of all those things that can be communicated only through ambiguity, through the relations between words and what they signify rather than through the words themselves. History is one. In Lot 4Q, Randolph Driblette recognizes that the history of The Courier's Tragedy is less a printed page and more a spirit to be recalled; if Oedipa wishes to uncover its historical author, she is well advised to start with him. Love is another. "Tell a girl: 'I love you,' " says one character in "Entropy." "No trouble with two-thirds of that, it's a closed circuit. Just you and she. But that nasty four-letter word in the middle, that's the one you have to look out for. Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even" (285). By the time of V., even that facility seems surrendered. "There's no magic words," McClintic Sphere tells Paola. "Not even I love you is magic enough" (343). Not everyone has forgotten the charm, however. For those who use it properly, the word need not be lost; on the contrary, the word itself can save. In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon distinguishes the printers' union from the other
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German guilds. Although all the other unions fell right in line with Hitler, the Buchdrucherverband refused to cooperate. "It touches Slothrop's own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made printer's ink" (666) - and so it should. It is a printer's daughter who saves him from capture when policemen break up the Schweinheldfest near Wismar. Similarly, it is the chant of Geli Tripping that saves Tchitcherine from Enzian. And it is the guidance of the aqyn that turns a singing duel into a proposal of marriage. The magic works in these cases because it is used by characters who never have abandoned it, who depend upon its power - the girl arranging letters, the witch reciting spells, the wanderer singing tales. Through their love - of words, first - they can ensure a love of people afterward. For Pynchon, this renewal of love has great importance in a world moving steadily toward the zero. As Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake discover, love is one means of withstanding the movement of time, of "seced[ing] from war's state" and finding "the beginnings of gentle withdrawal" (GR 47). The aqyn knows of another way. Mediating in the verbal battle of others, he averts a larger social catastrophe, transforming what "might have been a village apocalypse" into a "comic cooperation" (GR 416). In the verses he composes himself, he achieves still more. Singing about the Kirghiz Light removes the need to witness light. In its place, the aqyn grants his listeners a different kind of illumination. Rather than reach "the time of the final days" through journey, they return to "childhood days" through song (GR 417). Although it cannot stop time from passing, the song can grant a temporary stay. Therein lies the magic of its words. But the aqyn is an artist — perhaps the only real artist in Pynchon's work - and so his words possess a power not found in those of others. What he achieves through language suggests what any real artist can do. And so the song of the Kirghiz Light has an analogue in another song of light, the one that closes Gravity's Rainbow. What the aqyn brings to his audience, Pynchon brings to his reader. "There is a Hand to turn the time, / Though thy Glass today be run" (887) - and it belongs to Pynchon. Critics often think otherwise. They see Benny Profane at "the end of his Street, on the edge of his own 'Day of Doom,' " Oedipa looking "nowhere but back on the stages of her own history," and Gravity's Rainbow ending "with its own destructive tail in its mouth." 29 But all that ends in Pynchon's work is pagination. History does not end because movement still continues, and this despite every ominous sign imaginable, despite every failure of illumination. The lights go out in V., but Benny runs on "momentum" (428). The sun is blocked in Lot 49, but Oedipa awaits the crying. The screen goes blank in Gravity's Rainbow, but the Rocket does not yet strike - it remains a delta-t away. And, ultimately, whatever is actually withheld does not matter very much. History will not end if Benny finds V. or Oedipa uncovers Tristero or the Rocket hits the theater because of what these events would signify. The magic here is metaphor, countering ruin with rebirth. Vheissu becomes a "gaudy dream" and a "dream of annihilation" (V.
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190). The letters of Tristero carry Words as well as warnings. The Rocket shows off a bleaching of colors, death, and a coalescence of colors, a rainbow. In this use of metaphor, Pynchon has precedents, most notably Melville. The dream of Vheissu and the color of the Rocket suggest nothing that is not embodied already in the great white whale.30 But Pynchon goes further than his predecessor in sustaining what Melville only considered. When Ahab looks at a doubloon shining in the sun, he concludes that "some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher . . . " (Moby-Dick 332). Pynchon faces both possibilities at the same time, that history is both an empty cipher and a repository of meaning. Because time seems to favor the one, Pynchon chooses to assist the other - and so as history approaches the zero, literature amalgamates the infinite. Rather than presaging the end of the world or the death of the novel, Pynchon restores a life of ambiguity. After all, the light may not have gone out in the projector of Gravity's Rainbow — the film may just have broken. So when Pynchon asks us to join in at the end, he gives us something for which to sing.
Chapter 4 John Barth: Clio as Kin to Calliope
"We'll be moving out again. Infantry always gets the worst of it." The lieutenant lit a cigarette. "But, God, I wish the campaign was over." "What for? We'll just have to write the history when it is. That's always the worst time." - Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948) "I'm Morehouse Professor of Latent History at the Osmond Institute. . . . This professorship deals with events that almost took place, events that definitely took place but remained unseen and unremarked on, . . . and events that probably took place but were definitely not chronicled. . . . One of the major thrusts of latent history is to avoid a narrow purview. We're presently assembling evidence about the French Revolution indicating that a dissident faction of the sans-culottes used to assemble secretly under cover of dark for the sole purpose of wearing culottes. . . . It's axiomatic that people in the Middle Ages went to bed early. We're studying this to learn what effect it had on the Hundred Years' War dragging on for as long as it did. Latent history never tells us where we stand in the sweep of events but rather how we can get out of the way." - Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (1973)
"Historians have always known that history and the narrative of history never wholly coincide," says J. Hillis Miller ("Narrative and History" 461). So have novelists. If those of the twentieth century view history as an ongoing process, they also realize that any written account of history conveys only parts of that process. And if Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon show the difficulty of apprehending those parts, John Barth confronts the initial difficulty of deciding which parts to apprehend. Existence may precede essence in the twentieth century, but it no longer confers essence - man does. By this token, no deeds are intrinsically great enough to merit preservation. Any historical account reflects the judgment of what its author felt needed to be preserved. In the very act of selecting his subject, then, the historian moves from being a chronicler to an evaluator of events. 106
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Charting such a course leads the historical vessel into fictional waters. Barth realized as much early in his career when speculating on the building of ships: It always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with just one big flat open deck on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn't be moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks. They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and then they'd have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they still happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they'd have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. (FO 7) The Floating Opera as ship here serves as metaphor for The Floating Opera as novel. But within the novel called The Floating Opera, the character who actually makes these observations is considering how to present the history of his younger years, one act of his own play as it were. Moreover, that account of his own life that Todd Andrews prepares to make coexists with another historical study he plans, "An Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Self Destruction of Thomas T. Andrews, of Cambridge, Maryland, on Ground-Hog Day, igjo (More Especially into the Causes Therefore)," which, in turn, forms part of a third investigation, "An Inquiry into the Life of Thomas T. Andrews, of Cambridge, Maryland (1867-1930), Giving Especial Consideration to His Relations with
His Son, Todd Andrews (1900) . " What Barth expects to make with fictional materials, then, has relevance to what Todd Andrews expects to fashion from historical ones. Acknowledging this similarity in his first novel makes Barth attuned to the limitations of any crafts his later narrator-chroniclers may construct. Spectators will be afforded but one point of view; although all survey the same show, those on one side of the shore will see a different version from those on the other. None will be able to see the entire production, just separate parts of an ongoing drama. And even those parts will remain imperfectly understood, subject to breaks in the performance. Yet if the historical vessel stays tied to the anchors of fiction, it also can be rigged with that narrative's strengths. Because the show must go on in any event, the builder can help to smooth rough edges. Factual holes can be plugged with imaginative putty. Senseless sequences can be shaped by familiar stories. If the history that men and women live through comes laden with the accoutrements of fiction, at least it still comes. This infusion of fiction into the investigative process would have falsified the historical product in earlier times. Ironically, it was the condemner of poets who first began to refute such a view. According to Plato, all fictions lied in representing reality, but some fictions - namely those with claims to complete verisimilitude - went further to lie about what they were doing as well. Barth, a self-confessed Platonist,1 makes certain that the historical investigators of his works make no such error. The methodology of his first researcher exempli-
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fies the approach that his later ones eventually adopt. Although undergirding his study with verifiable information, punctuating his memoirs with dates, documents, even notes and outlines of twenty years past, Todd recognizes the limited aid these tools can afford in reconstructing the past. He understands that in order to derive any significance from his father's life — and, in particular, his father's death - he must make a leap from factual examination to speculative causation, fully aware that "causation is never more than an inference; and any inference involves at some point the leap from what we see to what we can't see" (FO 214). Most important, by opening an Inquiry into his own life as prelude to the Inquiry into that of his father, Todd remains attuned to the subjective element behind any biographical study. In point of fact, all Todd's various Inquiries are prefatory studies, preludes to the most difficult inquiry of all: his "Letter to My Father/' an attempt to remedy the problem of "Imperfect communication" (FO 216). As well they should be. Communication of history is the key, for Barth, to history itself. Experience unattended by human consciousness of itself is for him innocent experience - at best yielding ignorance, at worst proving fatal. Experience rendered into words, however, necessarily invokes consciousness of itself. As Jake Horner asserts in The End of the Road, "Articulation! . . . To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking" (119). That Jake cannot profit from his own observations until it is too late has to do with the level of discourse at which he stays - speech, a medium as unstable as Jake himself. To benefit from his history, that history must be rendered into a more permanent form - into writing. In LETTERS, the Doctor will have Jake practicing Scriptotherapy. And when the written account relies upon the devices of fiction, instead of impeding historical awareness, fiction actually promulgates it. Although such a view attributes great importance to literary techniques, it also places great demands on literary progress. If Barth's first novels affirm the need for fictional tools to convey historical knowledge, and his later books illustrate their use in conveying American history specifically, his most recent works consider what occurs when those tools no longer prove adequate to the task. As time increases, so does the history to be passed, both in amount and in complexity. The narrative means of transport must advance accordingly. If they do not, or cannot, keep apace, rather than portraying history they end up betraying history - by easy simplification or endless recapitulation. Once literary artifacts themselves become components of literary history, they too become part of what needs conveyance. The strain on the vehicular form increases as literature must find a way of representing itself without repeating itself. A resultant literature of exhaustion then assumes great significance for Barth because the possibility has ramifications that extend beyond aesthetic bounds.
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The death of the novel may not bring an end to history, but it will reduce knowledge o/history, and so affect later actions in history. Perseus discovers this all too painfully in Chimera. Although desiring "as both protagonist and author . . . to overtake with understanding my present paragraph as it were by examining my paged past, and, thus pointed, proceed serene to the future's sentence" (88-9), Perseus cannot advance as protagonist until he has advanced as author. Until he assimilates his past, both paged and otherwise, into new pages, his future sentence truly will imprison, condemning him to a life of meaningless repetition, both literally and literarily. When Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg consider the future of narrative, they offer as solution the permutation and combination of existing forms (Nature of Narrative 159). Having begun his career as a musical orchestrator, interested more in arrangement than in performance or composition, Barth approaches the future of narrative from a similar perspective, deliberately returning to antedated forms - eighteenth-century picaresque fiction, the epistolary novel, even Greek myths - as models for his work. To go forward, he asserts the need of first going backward. To be sure, the course he follows is tricky. It allows critics to accuse Barth of moving backward only to stay there, endlessly arranging and rearranging past literature, even his own, without producing anything new. But such charges predicate artistic innovation upon historical isolation. The past becomes a burden to be dispensed with so that the present can flourish alone. For Barth, quite the contrary holds true. Choosing for his image the chambered nautilus, a marine animal that creates its shell as it moves along, Barth sees the past as fortifying the present. "He wears his history on his back all the time," he says of the crustacean, "but it's not just a burden; he's living in it. His history is his house. He's constantly adding new spirals, new rings - but they're not just repetition, for he's expanding logarithmically." 2 Shortened in Giles Goat-Boy to "Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny" (43),
this law of natural history forms the basis of Spielman's law as well, the law of the storyteller. Thus, past literature can be as useful as past history. More specifically, past literature can be used as a vehicle for past history, and a most appropriate vehicle at that. "The key to the treasure is the treasure," Barth has said often enough (C 16). Literary history opens the door to a knowledge of history. And far from being a burden to be shed, the literature becomes a treasure unto itself. Eden Revisited "Though I was not a patriotic writer, I had feelings about America," Barth once confessed when discussing his early narrative endeavors. "In the late 1950s, which means my late twenties, I had a feeling comparable (but ironically) to the one Virgil must have had about Rome in those sections of the Aeneid where he describes, lovingly, the marsh that was originally there. I was deep into the idea of the mythical America by that time." To translate
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that feeling into fictional terms, he projected a series of one hundred tales, to be called the Dorchester Tales, set in the tidewater Maryland area, and chronicling all periods of its history, . . . from the Indians (I was thinking of Faulkner, I'm sure) through the Revolutionary War (perhaps - for it wasn't an especially interesting war in Maryland), the War of 1812 (a very interesting one in Maryland - I'm still fascinated by that subject), the Civil War (which split the state in half), down to the present (that being 1951 or 1952), and perhaps even into some kind of imagined future.3 Considering the periods chosen, this intended study of Maryland's history promised an examination of American history as well, with Maryland providing the most natural focus for an author born and matured within its confines. Yet personal familiarity tells only part of the reason for Barth's selection. Being a tidewater state, and so maintaining a fluctuating physical boundary between land and water, Maryland's terrain serves Barth well in portraying the cosmological dynamic in which he sees all men on this "blind rock careening through space" ensnared (SWF 27). Facing the elements of Maryland's topography, each literally "Chance's fool, the toy of aimless Nature" (SWF 372), people in the Revolutionary age seriously believed they could be pushed back into the ocean at any moment. At the same time, these facts about Maryland's landscape that suggest a precarious state of the universe appeal to Barth even more in suggesting a precarious state of the union. "I love that phase of our history," he says of Maryland's colonial period, "and I remember it with pleasure because of the apocalyptic feeling we all have about America at the moment." 4 As a result, the historical periods he finally did examine do not conform perfectly to those he originally planned for the Dorchester Tales; the projects that were completed and published portray only those relevant to the present and, thus, only those that delineate times of turmoil: in chronological order, the colonial period in The Sot-Weed Factor, the War of 1812 in LETTERS, and the 1950s in Giles Goat-Boy. LETTERS, in fact, examines all three periods and adds the late 1960s as a most recent time of unrest. 5 As a Maryland native, though, Barth's single American heritage partakes of two mythic ideals. Being a border state as well as a tidewater state, Maryland straddles North and South as much as it does land and water: The Western Shore and the Baltimore area subscribe to Northern values, the Eastern Shore to Southern ones. His work reflects both influences. Giles Goat-Boy translates a Puritan scheme of salvation into academic terms. Elect and Preterite become Passed and Failed, the Last Judgment turns into Final Exams, and the Millennium begins at Commencement Day. Yet its Puritan allegory also comes attached to a second myth, and one quite different in outlook - a Southern myth of Eden. Whereas the Puritans viewed America in spiritual terms, as part of scriptural prophecy, the settlers to the south viewed it in secular terms, as a Utopian paradise. Whereas the former saw the land as a temporary outpost on the way to a final destination, the latter saw America as that final destination
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itself, a place where human institutions could be perfected in this life rather than in any life to come. Coming from the Eastern Shore himself, it is this Southern myth of America to which Barth returns most often, the New World as udefiled virgin, "Mary's land," "A glorious house and history still unmusicked for the world's delight!" (SWF 83). He casts it onto his settings, onto Maiden in The Sot-Weed Factor and the goat-farm in Giles Goat-Boy, later onto "Marshy-Hope" State University in LETTERS. He embodies it in his characters, the virginal Ebenezer Cooke, the orphaned Henry Burlingame, the virginal and orphaned GoatBoy. And he uses both settings and characters to reflect larger concerns. Drawn from the genes of "all studentdom," George the Goat-Boy contains within himself an entire populace (GB 696). Because Barth qualified his feeling about a mythical America as having been an ironic one, however, all forays his books make into the way that myth of Eden is confirmed by the actuality of Maryland are attuned to the disparity between the ideal and the real. Any Edenic splendor the land has lies solely in the characters' imaginations. In The Sot-Weed Factor, Ebenezer's innocence rests more on technicality than truth. Experiencing the slings and arrows of pirates, prostitutes, and pimps, he is saved from complete surrender by outrageous fortune alone. Walden inverts to Maiden with a twist, squatting among weeds, smelling of too many hens, depleting the soil with sot-weed, and giving rise only to opium dens and brothels. Institutions in the province prove corrupt: Law succumbs to bribery, trade to smuggling, peace and tranquillity to factionalism and ferment. Slaves revolt and Indians attack. Protestants battle Catholics, Englishmen fight Frenchmen. Counterplots succeed plots. Indeed, Cambridge, Maryland, looks all too much like Cambridge, England, the New World little different from the Old. The situation in Giles Goat-Boy seems even more precarious, in part because its academic veil thinly masks a recognizable picture of a more recent America (85-102). The Second Campus Riot has ended with the defeat of Nazi Bonifacists and Japanese Amaterasus. In its place, a "Quiet Riot" prevails as American Informationalists engage Russian Student-Unionists in a computer arms race. "Wizard hunts" begin in the West, and liberal Secular-Studentists remain with few options: Protest gets them labeled "fellow-learners" or "pink-pennant pedagogues"; silence gets them sacked. A third Campus Riot hovers overhead. But if these conditions seem more threatening than those in The SotWeed Factor, the reason does not lie in familiarity alone. In point of fact, conditions in Giles Goat-Boy simply are more dangerous than those in the earlier book. Control of one's fate is no longer possible and computers now can EAT at whim. Newspapers proclaim an escalating series of catastrophes: "TENSION MOUNTS ALONG POWER LINE; THOUSANDS MASSACRED IN FRUMENTIAN INTRAMURAL RIOTS; F A M I N E SPREADS I N T ' A N G ; F L O O D W A T E R S RISE I N S I D D A R T H A ; N T C
4 POINTS" (308). The EAT whistle howls more and more often. An end to the university seems imminent. The question then arises as to how an apocalyptic view of America has sup-
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planted an Edenic view. If myths, by definition, posit undeniable truths applicable for all time, how has mythical America degenerated to "poor shitten Maryland" in The Sot-Weed Factor? (318). How has an Adamic George killed Redfearn's Tom within the pasture of Giles Goat-Boy? In short, how have things reached such a stage of "Inside-outhood?" (GB 598). When the Goat-Boy inquires about his own moral decline, his tutor Max gives him a ready reply: "[W]ho you are, nobody knows: not me, not George, not anybody. But what you are - that's what you got to hear now. It's the history you got to understand" (85). And after hearing part of that history from Max, he returns for further investigation to the land of his birth, the course of action taken by Barth's other protagonists. Ebenezer sails from England back to Maiden; Burlingame searches the Chesapeake. In essence, they all undertake historical quests, returning to the past to understand better the present, and the results of their excursions turn the novels into historical studies of those earlier periods. Ebenezer and Burlingame clarify the founding of Maryland in the early seventeenth century, George the emergence of America into the twentieth. But because the present times the characters inhabit - the late 1600s of The Sot-Weed Factor, the allegorized 1950s of Giles Goat-Boy - are still past periods for Barth, the novels make two historical forages, one into the earlier times the characters go to study, another into the present times in which the characters live themselves. The paradigmatic investigator in both books is Oedipus Rex. Updated in Giles Goat-Boy to Taliped Decanus, complete with loyalty oaths, increasing tuitions, and decreasing enrollments, the story of Oedipus is invoked by Barth to suggest the manner in which history must be approached and the way it should be viewed. Like Sophocles, Barth links together the history of his country and the history of his protagonists. "As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself - and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture - followed demonstrably - in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion - the life-pattern of its least new freshman" (GB 300). Thus, the present state of the country cannot be alleviated until the past of its protagonists has been ascertained, and, as in Oedipus Rex, that past must be certified in the most personal way possible. As Anna tells Burlingame in The Sot-Weed Factor, "A man's father is his link with the past: the bond 'twixt him and the world he's born to" (34). Until he finds his grandfather's journal, Burlingame can do nothing for his country; without the secret of the Sacred Eggplant to prove his claim to the Ahatchwhoop throne, he literally remains impotent to save the colonies from Indian attack. Similarly, George cannot lead others to Commencement Gate until he has matriculated himself. Nor can he change WESCAC's AIM without returning to the Belly of his progenitor; bringing peace to the world depends on making peace with his father. Oedipus, of course, never gets such a chance. Once he discovers the identity of his father, he blocks out his eyes. Barth, in contrast, asserts how important clear sight is to historical study at all times. In fact, through his use of mirrors and lenses, Barth affirms the importance of clear sight because of the ultimate
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inability to see anything clearly. Although both the cerebral Dr. Eierkopf ("Egghead") and the prophetic Dr. Sear ("Seer") add refinements to George's stick to aid him in his research, the devices they attach obscure as much as they clarify. The lenses that Eierkopf mounts enlarge that which is small and bring closer that which is distant, but their concave and convex shapes distort in the process. Dr. Sear clips on a mirror to afford George more knowledge, but, being concave on one side and convex on the other, it only shows how another way of viewing things always exists. "However, I was not to infer that because all lenses distorted . . . nothing could be truly seen," the Goat-Boy learns when talking to Eierkopf, "all that was necessary was to compensate for optical error, and for this he relied, in his own work, on the lens in his hand, which he knew to be accurate" (GB 478-9). This suggestion of what Mailer says about the "tower" he builds in The Armies of the Night has an added punch line, though: The lens in Eierkopf's hand is accurate because he believes in its accuracy. Therefore, everything one sees comes refracted through at least one distorting lens, the lens of one's own retina. When George looks into the mirror on his stick, "All I saw, actually, was the magnified reflection of my eye . . . " (GB 404). At the end of the book, he tells time with a "self-wound" watch (GB 755). Because there exists no way to ascertain the accuracy of what one sees, a measure of belief must be granted to any observation made. Even assertions of identity become "acts of faith, impossible to verify," as Burlingame well knows (SWF 141). And because, by extension, historical investigations depend upon a myriad of such observations, a measure of faith must be brought to any historical study. Giles Goat-Boy thus opens with a "Publisher's Disclaimer" that asks for credulity: "The reader must begin this book with an act of faith and end it with an act of charity" (xi). At the same time, however, this inability to verify what one sees provides no free license to invent what one sees - quite the contrary. Precisely because the end product is bound to be skewed, one must guard against adding any more distortion. As Eierkopf informs George, "Contrary to what one might suppose, . . . an image twice refracted in certain complementary ways was not always thereby restored to its original state . . . : sometimes it came out doubly distorted . . . " (GB 478). For this reason, especially, the past must be approached with as open an eye as possible and a willingness to face whatever it shows no matter how much it may disillusion. It is an injunction especially useful for Barth's characters, for all that they discover about the past attests to an ignominious, rather than an exalted, heritage. Intending to write an "epic to out-epic epics" and so portray a province "splendid in her past, majestic in her present, and glorious in her future" (SWF 83-4), Ebenezer finds the facts of Maryland's past anything but splendid. Indeed, he discovers that the very conditions that so disillusion him in the late 1600s have characterized the province since its initial founding in 1607. Continuous discord is the theme that Maryland's history discloses, as religious turmoil, boundary disputes, and Indian attacks at home combine with the ef-
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fects that civil wars in England have. Political alliances shift from Charles I to Oliver Cromwell to Charles II. Religious affiliations alternate from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic again. Charters switch hands accordingly. And this only chronicles a half-century of Maryland's past. If Henry Adams saw history as "a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough" (Education 302), history in The Sot-Weed Factor defies unraveling, allowing Barth to extend Adams's point and declare, "the world's a tangled skein, and all is knottier than ye take it for" (69). If the Courier's Tragedy that Pynchon invents depicts an incomprehensible political past, the history that Barth presents goes one better in being equally incomprehensible but factually correct.6 And if Pynchon's play at least rises to some climax, Maryland's history has none, as the "Author's Apology" makes clear. In 1715, it takes the fifth Lord Baltimore exactly one month to obtain the kind of charter his grandfather had not managed to get in twenty-five years. The image of entanglement is particularly important as it suggests the kind of historical process that Barth delineates in his work. Rather than reflecting any kind of history that moves in a linear and progressive manner, the number of times that Maryland changes hands suggests a kind of circular path that history follows over time. "Cycles on cycles, ever unwinding . . . ," says George in the tapes onto which Giles Goat-Boy presumably is recorded. "Unwind, rewind, replay" (755) - but with a difference. The movement o/time produces changes in time. George may think he has "rewound the very tape of time" when returning to the goat-farm of his youth (742), but the situation he finds does not conform exactly to the one he has left. Instead of Redfearn's Tom, he meets Tommy's Tommy's Tom. Ebenezer may feel he has come "full circle" to Maiden at the end of The Sot-Weed Factor (750), but the prodigal son now brings with him additional baggage - the pains of knowledge and responsibility. The circular movement of history opens into a spiraling movement in which events reenact themselves without repeating themselves. Unlike Pynchon, who sees such movement in both entropic and Puritan terms, endowing it with degenerative and regenerative possibilities, Barth maintains a singular view: "There is an entropy to time, a tax on change: four nickels for two dimes, but always less silver" (GB 763). Whether considered as a "downward-spiral" in The Sot-Weed Factor or a "tragic view" in Giles Goat-Boy, whether expressed in terms of "Sex and Temperament" or "Marriage and Parenthood" in Chimera or "Anniversary," "Ideology," or "Alphabetical Priority" in LETTERS, history follows a steadily deteriorating course.7 As the "Cover-Letter" to Giles Goat-Boy states, "Nothing 'works,' in the sense we commonly hope for . . . everything only gets worse, gets worse . . . " (xxi). The cyclic periods grow shorter and shorter, a scholar in The Sot-Weed Factor observes (737), and Giles Goat-Boy shows the ante rising. The colleges of East and West Campuses continue to dispute their boundary and continue to resolve their disputes, but each crisis is a little more critical, each truce a little less stable.8 Given, then, this kind of deterioration that Barth sees occurring over time,
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the supplanting of an Edenic view of Maryland by an apocalyptic reality becomes not surprising, but inevitable. And given the feeling his characters have of being trapped within this ongoing process, their escapist responses are understandable. Thinking, in Giles Goat-Boy, that "the past was a-gumming us up," Peter Greene seeks "to wipe clean the troubled slate of his past and start anew" (289, 387). So do many of the Sot-Weed Factor characters, Joan Toast wanting to "begin anew in England" (504), Anna to replant a Garden in Maiden, Burlingame to move to Pennsylvania. That the past cannot be disposed of is clear from the start - that the paradise of one woman serves as purgatory to the other is comment enough on Edenic restitution. But Barth raises the larger question of whether one even should consider disposing of the past. The lack of history that Maryland first offers proves both a blessing and a curse. As Burlingame realizes, "It makes every man an orphan like myself, that freedom, and can as well demoralize.as elevate" (SWF 181). As he does not realize, it also can endanger. With no ties to his own past, Burlingame can fade into "realms of complexity" (SWF 613) - another Slothropite dispersal. With few to civilization, he can destroy the colonies as easily as save them. If a past then may help to preserve the present, does it always "gum it up"? Which motto in LETTERS holds more truth: "Praeteritas juturas fecundant" or (
(14-15). Does the past fertilize the future or manure the future? And the answer: only if one's view of the past is founded on manure, as indeed it is for most of Barth's characters. If looking at the present dispels their vision of Eden, returning to the past destroys it altogether. Looking at their own histories, they find they never were innocent - as fraternal twins Ebenezer and Anna commingle as far back as the womb. Looking at that of the country, they discover it never was pastoral: Upon landing in Maryland, John Smith sees before him "forsooth Earths uglie fundament, a place not fitt for any English man . . . " (SWF 602).9 In short, the Edenic ideal has never corresponded to the actuality, and mythical America has been an imaginary land all along. The view of the past that these glorified visions bequeath manures in cultivating expectations about what the present should be like, expectations doomed to disappointment. Like the Tower of Truth in LETTERS, they rest on a faulty foundation. And so rather than mourning any decline over time, a more appropriate response would be to ask how the mythic ideal ever was conceived at all, let alone promulgated over the years. The Literary Legacy What distinguishes Barth's novels is their recognition of how much of Maryland's mythical foundation was set in written form. "It is a living pastoral," Frank McConnell says of the American Eden, "a land got by book as is no other political entity in the Western world" ("Key to the Treasure" 139). In particular, it is a land begotten by European books, beginning with More's Utopia and Shakespeare's The Tempest, moving on to the poems of
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Waller, Marvell, and Chapman, extending into the prose of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, and surviving as late as Kafka's Amerika.10 Because he explicitly considers the effect such written works have had upon Maryland's history, Barth moves beyond the scope of most novelists concerned with history. His books prolong their excursions into the past with examinations of the interrelationship between literary history and American history. In pursuing these latter examinations, Barth focuses on writings that pretend to be other than what they are, histories that pretend to be chronicles, novels that pretend to be histories, and the effects such disguised writings have on their audiences. The first, which he finds exemplified by the writings of John Smith, aspire to factual reportage, yet omit facts in the telling. "Then follow'd an adventure, w ch I cannot well include among my Histories," writes Captain Smith in the Secret Historie of the Voiage Up the Bay of Chesapeake that
Barth ascribes to him (SWF 278). No surprise greets us here, for the "Courteous Reader" of Smith's 1608 True Relation already has been informed by its publisher that "somewhat more was by him written, which being as I thought (fit to be priuate) I would not aduenture to make it publicke" (4) - the author in question being a certain Thomas Watson. But even in those Histories published under his own name, Smith omitted information. Smith wrote four versions of his capture by the Indians, and not until the third did he make any mention of his rescue at the hands of Pocahontas in January 1608. The 1608 True Relation says nothing about a rescue, only a passing reference to Powhatan's ten-year-old daughter as "the only Nonpariel of his Country" (38). A 1616 letter to Queen Anne, which raises the child's age to twelve or thirteen and extends her service to the preservation of the colony, was not published until eight years later (Generall Historie 530, 532). The New Englands Trials of 1622 contains a sentence (263). Finally, the 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles tells the story in the second chapter of its third book.11 Even worse than the distortions of truth resulting from Smith's omissions, according to Barth, are the lasting effects produced by what he did include. By leaving out parts of his story, the more corporeal parts in Barth's view, Smith preserved his public record as a "greate Generall Historie" (SWF 611), an account of bravura deeds in a brave New World. He also left the public record a fictionalized document, not because of what it presented, but because of how it presented itself - as unadulterated truth.12 Although the discrepancies in his works later would cause critics to number Smith among the "American historical liars,"13 during the time in which The Sot-Weed Factor takes place, his undisputed testimony allowed others to chart their courses by his model. The path that Ebenezer follows in America is essentially that traveled by Smith. Furthermore, as providing the first reference to Pocahontas, Smith's Historie gave birth to what Philip Young has called "one of our few, true native myths" ("Mother of Us All" 392), enduring over time because of the multiple roles its protagonist filled: a woman predating all those dark-haired heroines thrown
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over by American men - after all, Smith never got around to marrying her (and, according to fellow Virginians Richard Pots and William Phettyplace, never intended to); a paean to respectability after her return to England with husband John Rolfe and establishment as Lady Rebecca; "the guardian angel of our oldest colony" for tradition-starved Americans in the early nineteenth century; "the great American Earth Mother" for poets like Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Hart Crane in the early twentieth century.14 Similarly influential effects in Barth's work derive from the second kind of writing upon which he focuses: picaresque novels. Just as the historians Barth cites denied the fictive qualities of their works by claiming to be writing chronicles, so did the novelists he cites deny the fictive qualities of their own works by claiming to be writing histories. Fielding did so through title, designating Tom Jones as The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling and Joseph Andrews as The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, And of his Friend Mr. Abraham
Adams. Cervantes did so through documentation, Don Quixote basing itself on scrolls, annotations, even the published version of its own first part. All proclaimed the verity of their narratives. Committing himself to true observation, presumably in contrast to Pamela's improbabilities, the narrator of Joseph Andrews declares his work an "authentic history" (14). The narrator of Tom Jones makes it equally clear that truth distinguishes his writing from that of "idle romances" (126). And Don Quixote opens with the admonition to keep "strictly to the Truth in every Point of this History," lest its tale about Knight-Errantry be mistaken for one o/Knight-Errantry (2). With these literary artifacts, however, the problem lies not in the written texts but in the textual readers, specifically with the way that Barth's characters interpret them. The prologues on history in Tom Jones actually betray the book's fictive nature. The Arabic language of its documents calls into question Don Quixote's credibility. But readers of little sophistication cannot make such judgments. Ebenezer has lived on the parental estate for most of his life; the Goat-Boy has stayed sequestered on the farm. Both lack almost every quality that Tom Jones cites for a critical analysis of history: "invention" for "quick and sagacious penetration," "judgment" to discern differences, "learning" specifically of history and ('belles-lettres'' - to direct the mind, and "conversation" in worldly affairs (411-13). Precisely because they have no experience of a world outside of themselves, they cannot distinguish between the actual and the imagined. If anything, they give the imagined more credence. Ebenezer "very well knew, for instance, that Trance is shaped like a teapot,' but he could scarcely accept the fact that there was actually in existence at that instant such a place as France . . . " (SWF 9). Precisely because they are so familiar with "belles-lettres,}> they remain impervious to history, unable to separate art from life. "I was disposed to approach the events of history as critically as those of fiction," says George, which means uncritically (GB 116). Likewise, to Ebenezer, "The sum of history became in his head no more than the stuff of metaphors" (SWF 11). Moreover, neither feels any real need to make such
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distinctions, as these products of the imagination provide all the sustenance they desire: When hungry for more knowledge, George just eats a few more pages. But being unconscious of history does not protect them front history, and in this sense their meals of manuscripts fill them with more than they realize. Enlisting Calliope in her aid, Clio exacts her vengeance in the effects of literary history upon these characters.15 George may feel totally self-determined, declaring "I had invented myself as I'd elected my name" (GB 693), but the identity he invents for himself is based on past literary models, notably fables, medieval romances, and classical scripture - a fitting fate for someone who literally is delivered from a booklift by a booksweep as an infant. The weight of past literature hangs even heavier on Ebenezer. Like George, he proclaims his freedom from historical constraints: "Preserv'd, my Innocence preserveth Me / From Life, from Time,fromDeath,fromHistory^ (SWF 66). Nevertheless, as for George, the constraints of literary history continue to determine his life. He reads Batchiler's Virgins Pattern and Fisher's Wise Virgin, and later decides to stay a virgin himself. As a "Don Quixote tilting for his ignorant Dulcinea," he throws himself at the feet of Joan Toast (SWF 65). Knowing Paradise Lost "inside out," he reenacts in America Adam's adventures (SWF 11). And when American reality undermines one literary model, he just turns to the conventions of another. 'TChrist, that some god on wires would swing down and fetch me off!" he cries, moving from Biblical lore to Greek drama (SWF 487). The literary past becomes especially relevant in The Sot-Weed Factor because within that novel Ebenezer acts as poet as well as participant. Because he writes as the Poet Laureate of Maryland, it is in his verses that the province's history will survive. Yet given the aesthetic manifesto he espouses, the history to be immortalized in his verses has no hopes of being any more accurate than that contained within John Smith's journals. In his art as in his life, he wants no historical intrusions. " 'Tis the present poem alone, methinks, that matters, not its origins," says this precocious New Critic, "and it must stand or fall on's own merits, apart from maker and age" (SWF 133). Yet just as he cannot see how the literary past affects his actions, neither can he see how his writing derives from past literature. Using as his references the works of John Milton and Samuel Butler, Ebenezer immortalizes Maryland in epic verses of Homeric allusions - a conceit of composition if ever one existed: Belike Ulysses, wand'ring West From Ilions Sack, in Tatters drest, And weary'd of his ten-year Roam O'er wat'ry Wilds ofdesart Foam, Beholding Ithaca at last (SWF 250)
Unfortunately, the view he presents is not his own - indeed, at this point of the book he still sits on the boat - but that of an ancient hero reaching an ancient land as told by an ancient poet. His words have no basis in fact, as his later adventures will show, and they have little connection with his own imag-
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inative faculties. Instead, they derive from a tradition to which Ebenezer is glued even more in his art than in his actions. In his own experience of Maryland he can shift from one model to another; into his poetic view of the land he cannot incorporate change. The idea of switching ships from the Poseidon to the Morpheides threatens Ebenezer by threatening the integrity of his verses. As a result, he comes to his Writing predisposed in the worst way - with no sense of Maryland's history and an overly developed sense of literary history. The artistic product ends up depicting a false ideal with antedated tools. It cannot be called historical because it bears no semblance to reality, it cannot be called epic because it hardly sounds grand, and it cannot be called mythic because its contents are not true. In fact, it cannot be called much of anything, just a "poor shitten Marylandiad." The implications of such inaccurate, not to mention abysmal, verses are important as they relate to the way that information about the past is transmitted from one generation to another. If it is in verses such as Ebenezer's that Maryland's history is to survive, it makes little difference whether one turns to literary or historical writing for information about the past because the past contained in both comes coated with a fictional veneer. The history of the province, and by extension the country, generates a literature that follows it through time. Perhaps nowhere is this interrelationship seen more clearly than in the biography of Peter Greene that Giles Goat-Boy presents. Like Mailer's "The Man Who Studied Yoga," which encapsulates within one man's life the history of the twentieth century, the history of Peter Greene encapsulates within itself the history of America. Born in 1900, his younger years compress those earlier ones of the nation. Declaring an early independence from his parents and his patrimony, he embarks upon life "a rebellious orphan with an undistinguished past but great hope for the future" (GB 274). With "small resource but large resourcefulness," he depletes natural resources to secure that future, beginning, like the Slothrops of Gravity's Rainbow, by cutting down trees, and moving onward to drain the wilderness, dam the watersheds, and pollute the waters (GB 274). By the end of his adolescence, his own history has caught up with that of the twentieth century. Having moved already from the frontier to the city, Greene and his wife succumb to post-Riot hysteria in the twenties, learning to drink cocktails, drive fast motorcycles, and "practice contraception," all of which ends abruptly when a sudden loss of self-confidence depresses him at twenty-nine (GB 281). At the same time, Peter Greene's biography compresses into itself American literary history as well as American history. Confessing "My life is an open book" (GB 265), he begins describing his life in terms that recall early American literary models. Running away at fourteen from a drunken Paw and Godfearing Maw, he lights out to the wilderness on a homemade raft with an escaped black slave - not quite Huckleberry Finn, but close enough. Courting Miss Sally Ann, he acts as every Western hero does from James Fenimore Cooper's tales onward: He abandons his dark-skinned mistress for the civilizin' ways of the Eastern schoolmarm. His later years only partake of later
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literary models. Rocking in his chair like Barth's own Jake Horner, he responds to existentialist malaise. Going "on the road" in his fifties, he breaks loose from a life he finds dull. He even goes so far as to incorporate into his life literary criticism in these later years. "But friends is all,99 he says of his relationship with Old Black George, vowing to horsewhip "them smart-alecks that claim we wzsjunny for each other" (GB 271), and so prove once and for all he neither went nor came back to the raft of his honey. Because Barth shows the history of the country to follow a steadily deteriorating course, this alliance in Peter Greene between America's history and its literary history has unpleasant artistic connotations. At its worst, it implies that the state of the arts degenerates as surely as the state of the union. At its best, it implies that the past entraps the poet as much as it does the patriot. Barth refutes the idea of artistic apocalypse, however. "Entropy may be where it's all headed," he says in LETTERS, "but it isn't where it is; dramaturgy . . . is negentropic, as are the stories of our lives" (768). For him, art still provides one of the few means available of transcending the barbs of time, the others being sex and procreation. Yet Barth also acknowledges how increasingly difficult this endeavor becomes over time. Those who wish to write about the present and in the present inevitably must work within the confines of past literature. Ebenezer does so without even knowing he does. The Author of The Sot-Weed Factor knows he does, but still cannot break loose. His crimes against Clio he readily dismisses at the end of the book: "Thus much for the rival claims of Fact and Fancy, which the artist . . . may override with fair impunity." His debt to Calliope remains outstanding, as he recognizes all too well: "However, when the litigants' claims are formal, rather than substantial, they pose a dilemma from which few tale-tellers escape without a goring" (805-6). So he continues on with his history, relating the endings of all his characters' lives in accordance with eighteenth-century practices, even though the story of Ebenezer Cooke rightfully has ended with its bridal-chamber climax and denouement. Still, it is knowledge of the past that finally makes the difference between a past that manures and a past that fertilizes. Just as the country must be viewed as a product of its history, so must its art. True, an author's consciousness of his heritage may result in self-consciousness and end bad writing by ending all writing. As Barth realizes, "the more he knows, the better an artist he can theoretically become, and yet the knowledge he acquires is overwhelming - it places him in competition with the accumulated best of human history."16 And Barth's works show no end to characters paralyzed by what they know, the early image of Jake Horner bound like Laocoon being most exemplary. Considering the alternatives, however, no other viable choice remains. Using troll stories, as the Goat-Boy does, to depict the historical present is as successful as returning to Eden to escape it. To break free of past constraints, the past must be accepted with all the weight it bears. Then, once that initial irony is accepted, the final irony can emerge: The onus of the past can be made into an aid.
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In The Sot-Weed Factor, it is easy to see how past history provides aid in the present. Maryland averts disaster only because of an olden document; containing the recipe for the Sacred Eggplant on one side and a record ofJohn Coode's confiscations on the other, the Privie Journall of Henry Burlingame I enables his grandson to restrain the Indians and the governor to repress the insurgent. It also is easy to see how past history can generate stories for the present. The book is filled with characters all too happy to tell the stories of their lives. Joan Toast turns her seduction into the "Tale of the Great Tom Leech." Henrietta Russecks makes an "Edouardiad" from her family history. But if "the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt" (SWF 805), it is not so easy to see how the clay of the present can be sculpted with tools from the past to form a monument for the future. Yet Ebenezer must do just this: He must find a way of working within the confines of past literary traditions to transcribe faithfully the present state of Maryland. His first attempts to do so in epic can never succeed. Not only do they leave him writing a bad imitation of an epic instead of an epic, they leave him using the wrong form. As Scholes and Kellogg argue, epics arise out of cultures that do not distinguish between history and myth and they act to preserve ideal societies (Nature of Narrative 57-8). Thinking at first that he writes of such a culture, Ebenezer makes no such distinction either. Thus, to account for "The Hist'ry of this bare-Bumm'd Race," his verses resort to every myth imaginable, tracing the Indians back to sunken Atlantis and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, moving to Biblical Eden and Ovid's Golden Age, even looking to Oriental and Norse folklore (SWF 408-10). And while this may be an appropriate form for Ebenezer to use considering his own imperviousness to history, it hardly proves suitable to describe the land he finds or the inhabitants he encounters. When he finally awakens to both Maryland's sordid history and his own sordid history in Maryland, he realizes that he must change what he writes in his poem: "He would versify his voyage to Maryland from beginning to end, as he had planned before, but so far from writing a panegyric, he would scourge the Province with the lash of Hudibrastic as a harlot is scourged at the public post, catalogue her every wickedness, and expose her every trap laid for the trusting, the unwary, the innocent!" (SWF 494). At the same time, he realizes that he also must change the form within which he will portray his sentiments. If the epic preserves the ideal society, he must find a form attuned to the actual - or better yet, a form attuned to the difference between the two. So, "I shall make the piece a fiction!" he exclaims. "All my trials I'll reconceive to suit the plot and alter just enough to pass the printer!" (SWF 494). Just as he inverts what he writes, from acclamation to defamation, so does he invert the form in which he writes. Relying upon his literary heritage, he creates a new work of literature. From his knowledge of panegyric he writes in Hudibrastic. Turning epic on its head, he designs a "Satyr." Out of his own Marylandiad he fashions "The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland" (SWF 498).
History then does repeat itself as farce, even if Marx never knew in just how
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many ways. In Ebenezer's poem, Maryland's history is repeated in farcical form, the forms of literary history are repeated farcically, and a new kind of historical fiction comes to birth. Yet the entrapment of literary traditions is not always escaped quite so easily. If Ebenezer, writing in the eighteenth century, can update epic into satire, how does an author like Barth, writing in the twentieth, update satire? How portray history now in literature when it already has been portrayed as farce? In other words, how perform a third encore? In a novel like Giles Goat-Boy, Barth does not have to do so. Intending to write a "souped-up Bible" that also would "follow the patterns, parody the patterns, satirize the patterns" of Greek myths,17 Barth chooses literary models that originate as serious artifacts. To modernize them, he only need treat them comically. Kicked out of the pasture, or butted as the case may be, George leaves the Garden. Killing his kid brother who literally is a kid, he takes upon himself the shame of Cain. To portray the novel's theme regarding the need for knowledge and the perils of too much knowledge, Barth only has to add a few letters: "Universe" becomes "university." The rest follows easily: Hemispheres turn into campuses, countries turn into colleges. And once he has this central image, depicting history in the 1950s and early 1960s becomes a matter of extending what already exists. When university officials and political figures have become interchangeable, it takes very little to see Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy as Chancellors Hector and Rexford. Similarly, when the use of computers has increased tremendously, it becomes appropriate to place an energy source in one. While Barth's continued reliance on this one metaphor may make his novel a one-joke book that happens to stretch over seven hundred pages, the modernization of his forms comes easily enough. Because he can treat his models farcically, he can portray contemporary American history as farce. Returning to eighteenth-century conventions in The Sot-Weed Factor also serves Barth's theme well. The rationalism of the earlier period can be used ironically to portray "a world which in its attitudes and ideas is unmistakably a reflection of the flux and uncertainty of the twentieth century," as Barbara Ewell realizes ("Artist of History" 43). Furthermore, the conventions serve Barth well in delineating the particular part of the world in which he is most interested. They arise from a time when "the idea of progress was being formulated," Gordon Slethaug recalls, "and when America was thought to be proof that such idealism and progressivism could obtain" ("Refutation" 15). Finally, they allow Barth to satisfy his own desire of creating a plot more complex than that of Tom Jones}* But in choosing a form already farcical for his model, namely the eighteenth-century picaresque novel, Barth faces a problem that he can avoid in Giles Goat-Boy. How can a form be repeated as farce when it already exists as farce? LETTERS provides a clue in a set of analogies posed: "Iliad : Aeneid :: Aeneid : Marylandiad, the second an imitation of the first, the third a parody of the second" (48). And if LETTERS is correct, then Marx's dictum delineates only one part of a larger process, one turn of the spiral as it were. In terms of
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narrative history, literature first repeats itself in an imitative way; only afterward does it move into farce. The history of The Sot-Weed Factor illustrates the process at work perfectly. A first version belongs to a historical figure named Ebenezer Cook(e), was published in 1708, revised and reissued in The Maryland Muse twenty-two years later, and tells the tale of his Maryland misfortunes.19 A second belongs to a fictional character named Ebenezer Cooke and constitutes the Hudibrastic verses he writes while recuperating at Maiden. Finally, a third belongs to John Barth, furnishing the novel published in i960, revised in 1966, and reissued in 1967. Yet each version of The Sot-Weed Factor owes a debt to its literary predecessor. As Philip Diser has shown, the poem written by the fictional Ebenezer Cooke derives almost entirely from that of his ancestral namesake ("Cooke" 53). Because Barth deliberately blurs its date of publication, saying only that Ebenezer receives a printed copy in 1709, he allows for the possibility that his character's poem succeeds the original. As such, the second Sot-Weed Factor is an imitation of the first. And in developing the incidents of Ebenezer's poem at greater length, the novel Barth writes renders those adventures in a comic manner. The third Sot-Weed Factor then does become parody to the second. Deciding what label to give this third version has yielded different critical responses, from "contemporary mock-epic" to "historical romance" to "philosophical novel" to the all-inclusive "eighteenth-century picaresque novel and the eighteenth-century philosophical tale . . . with the picaresque form which many twentieth-century existential novels have taken."20 But deciding what label to attach to Barth's version just depends on where one wishes to view it in terms of an ongoing narrative continuum. In terms of the novel's relatively short history, it occupies a secondary stage, becoming, by Barth's own admission, a novel "which imitate[s] the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author" ("The Literature of Exhaustion" 33). In terms of an older tradition, like the epic, it extends the analogy of LETTERS into additional components: Iliad : Aeneid :: Aeneid : Tom Jones :: Tom Jones : The Sot-Weed Factor. Homeric epic repeats itself as "synthetic epic," a "romance in epic's clothing," as Scholes and Kellogg put it, which, in turn, repeats itself as a "comic epic-poem in prose" or "comic romance," to recall Fielding's own description.21 And where does it go from there? As practiced by Barth, it moves into "pastiche," the word with which he labels his own work.22 In so doing, Barth may be charged with playing out a form ad infinitum. "All my temperamental inclinations are to the other view," he would counter, "that forms die out and exhaust themselves." He also may be charged with repeating what others have done ad nauseam. Quite the contrary holds true. Imitation, by definition, is a derivative practice. But so is parody (a fact easily forgotten); parody just imitates its model in a humorous way. Pastiche, in contrast, is derivative without being imitative. As Barth defines the term, it describes "something that was partly a parody but mainly an echo and not an imitadon."23 Ironically, the echo can sound as clear as the original. In both The Sot-
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Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, the forms intended to update original literary models can validate the originals' practices. Ebenezer does get his deus ex machina when Governor Nicholson steps in to intervene. The twentieth-century novel does end in the double marriage of romance. The ancient tricks still work. "Vm Nobody," claims George, going past his Cyclopsian guard (GB 639). In some cases, the echo even anticipates the original. Although echoing Fielding in form, The Sot-Weed Factor predates him in sound, Barth deliberately making his dialogue more Elizabethan than Restoration because eighteenth-century colonials spoke an older kind of language than eighteenth-century Englishmen.24 With even greater irony, the forms intended to deflate myths end up turning myths to fact. Vowing "to smirch her name in verse to his children's children's children" (SWF 655), Ebenezer's verses bring fame to Maryland's name - and more, as the "Author's Apology" makes clear: "Maryland, in part because of the well-known poem, acquired in the early eighteenth century a reputation for graciousness and refinement comparable to Virginia's, and a number of excellent families were induced to settle there" (SWF 818). The taped trials of George produce a reel religion - "Gilesianism" (GB 756) - and a transcribed text, a Revised New Syllabus. In both books, the fiction facilitates the fact. Having pretended to the title Poet Laureate, Ebenezer receives the title Poet Laureate. Having pretended to be a Grand Tutor, George becomes a Grand Tutor; from a George he becomes a GILES. Is it then appropriate to view such consequences as ironic? Linguistically, the trope of irony is doubly negational, inspiring second thoughts about the subject of its characterization as well as its own ability to characterize that subject adequately. Historically, irony was the favored mode of those Enlightenment philosophers writing at precisely the time in which The Sot- Weed Factor takes place.25 In their cases, however, the ironic cast to their work derived from an insistence on regarding the products of reason and those of the imagination as antagonistic, and then extending that antagonism as the basis of all their work. When investigating history, they approached their task as rationalists. Armed with the laws of Newtonian science, and looking at the past in terms of cause-and-effect operations, they saw each period of time resulting from two forces in operation, reason and fancy. When recording history, they strove to maintain an equally strict separation in their writing. Thus, Voltaire defined "History" as "the recital of facts represented as true" and "Fable" as "the recital of facts represented as fiction."26 But when the evidence before them, both of the past being studied and their own age being observed, confronted them with an intermixture of reason and fancy, their only recourse was to doubt the validity of any model based upon the opposition of those forces, even if it meant doubting their own constructs - hence, the skepticism and irony pervading their work. According to Hayden White, European historical thought never recovered from the ironic stance into which the Enlightenment writers plunged it and that culminated at the end of the nineteenth century in what has been called the "crisis of historicism" (Metahistory xii). John Barth, writing a century later,
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offers an alternative stance in The Sot- Weed Factor. Founding his work upon a mutuality of fact and fiction, Barth arrives at conclusions that are decidedly nonironic and so allow him to escape the endless skepticism of his predecessors. "Rhyme me such a rhyme," Ebenezer is told upon accepting his commission, "make me this Maryland, that neither time nor intrigue can rob me of; that I can pass on to my son and my son's son and all the ages of the world!" (SWF 102). Ebenezer's verses do just that. From an incorporation of history, they go on to make history, translating history experienced into fiction to be read, which then translates into more history to be experienced and read. A new relationship between fiction and history emerges — symbiotic in the sense of mutual support, but sustaining in the sense of mutual generation. And if anything spins out endlessly in Barth's work, it is what this new reciprocity can produce. A Nonrevolutionary Novel While delineating this interplay between fiction and history, Barth made no secret as to where his early affinities lay. Brashly proclaiming God a dated realist, Nature a botch, and the cosmos a sloppy invention, he extolled art that manufactured its own universe instead of art that mirrored the one already made (FB 13-25). "What the hell," he scoffed, "reality is a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there," adding, "and literature never did, very long." Certainly his own literature never did. Deciding after The End of the Road that he had lost interest in writing "realistic fiction - fiction that deals with Characters From Our Time, who speak real dialogue," he envisioned The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy as "relatively fantastical or irrealistic." If he began those works by countering the ideal with the actual, he ended them by supplanting the actual with the artificial. Having thus fulfilled his novelist's urge to "re-invent the world" and "make up your own whole history of the world," he showed how Realism could be displaced by Reelism.27 So long as the imagined history stays a half-step behind its factual progenitor, invention can be favored because the inventing can continue; what occurs in the real world can fuel its imagined counterpart. The gap between transpiration and transcription remains a blank the writer can fill. Thus, in the second half of The Sot- Weed Factor, characters tell stories of what happens to them in the first. In Giles Goat-Boy, Hedwig Sear speaks of painting George and Stacey as "Figures on a vase" (235). Historicity is viewed as hope. Once the artifact catches up with the actual, however, and the gap between the two narrows, problems arise. The imagination is thrust back on itself more and more because it has less and less upon which to draw from the real world. At the same time, there remain fewer and fewer things to say because, in Barth's estimation, there existed only a finite number of things to say in the first place. Historicity turns fatal. The resultant threat is not so much a "literature of exhaustion," but "a literature of exhausted possibility" ("The Literature
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of Exhaustion"29). In short, there remains nothing about which one can write. Although Barth's essay on the subject did not appear until 1967, Giles GoatBoy anticipates the problem that "The Literature of Exhaustion" discusses. From its earlier image of Keatsian transposition, the book moves into the perils of self-reflection. In, appropriately enough, the Circulation Room of Tower Library, George asks directions of a librarian "involved in" a large novel. "Simple answer to a simple question," he exclaims of her reply, "but lacking which this tale were truncate as the Scroll, an endless fragment!" "—less fragment," I thought I heard her murmur as I stooped through the little door she'd pointed out. (725) Lost in the Funhouse, Barth's first work after his 1967 essay, provides an even better image of a literature closing in on the history that has generated it. "My first words weren't my first words," says the story entitled "Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction" (33). They are not: "You who listen give me life in a manner of speaking" are the words that open the piece (33). By the time the piece concludes, though, its words have caught up with its history almost; "my last words will be my last words" are its final words (37), but the future tense of the verb keeps its fiction from being contemporaneous with its life. Barth recognizes, of course, that the threat of "ultimacy" that he describes is hardly unique to twentieth-century writers. In his later "Literature of Replenishment" essay (1980), he offers the example of an Egyptian scribe seeking "phrases that are not known" and "utterances that are strange" out of despair over those that have grown "stale" to him in 2000 B.C. (FB 206). Yet, much like Mailer portraying the havoc of the atom bomb and the concentration camps on the liberal psyche in "The White Negro," Barth concerns himself more with the feeling of artistic "ultimacy" rather than the fact of it in "The Literature of Exhaustion." He also proposes a solution: Faced with a feeling of creative "ultimacy," the artist can use "ultimacy" as his subject and write about the threat it poses (31). In Lost in the Funhouse, "Title" follows this advice to the letter: "To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new" (106). If Barth then adds, "What a nauseating notion," he accurately evaluates not the idea, but the particular piece presenting it because "Title" displays the least imaginative way of talking about "ultimacy." It simply takes the words of Barth's essay and transposes them - verbatim - into a piece of fiction. Barth exhibits a more creative approach in a story like "Menelaiad" and all the works in Chimera in which he invests orally transmitted stories with contemporary authorial concerns. As a result, Scheherazade's problem of finding new tales to amuse her husband mirrors Barth's own artistic dilemma - "this is a good one you've got going," says Shahryar to his wife, "with its impostures that become authentic . . ." (11). In a sense, this proposed solution does not differ very much from that ad-
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vanced in Barth's earlier work: return to the past in order to move into the future. But the past now is a literary past, and in returning to it for his answer, Realism must be reconsidered. Therefore, although Scheherazade may be Barth's prototype, his (iav ant-gardiste," in wanting - needing! - to create something new, she cannot be his prototype in wanting to create something new in writing. Although Barth sees her problem as every storyteller's problem, "to publish or perish," it is not. 28 Coming from a culture that transmits its stories orally, she only need repeat the tales of her ancestors, tales that survive in memory alone. Barth faces a more difficult task. He must employ that which exists in written form, in other words, literature that has gained an ontologically "real" status of its own. And that includes his own work of the past. The earlier historical model of Oedipus gives way to the later one of Aeneas. When Oedipus returns to the past to move into the future, he performs a task largely investigative. He seeks knowledge of history. Aeneas, in contrast, already has knowledge of the past. In fact, not only does he know his past, but so does everybody else. Dido already has built it into her frescoes and so transformed his history in the Trojan War into a very real artifact. As Barth sees it, when Aeneas recognizes his own face in those murals, "a perfectly hair-raising moment" ensues in Virgil's poem. He sees his story already translated into another medium of art, and it's not even finished yet. I mean the frescos literally aren't finished; Dido is still building her city. And of course Virgil is only in the second book of the Aeneid, and Aeneas has not yet completed his wanderings.29 If Aeneas is to act in the future on the basis of examining his past, he must examine a past that exists not only in memory, but in very tangible form as well. So must Barth. Whether he wishes to or not, he must confront the real world in which the literary past survives. It still may not be a place in which he would want to live, but he must make a longer visit nonetheless. Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera begin this confrontation by examining the effect that written artifacts have on authors. Stories like "Menelaiad," "Dunyazadiad," "Perseid," and "Bellerophoniad" have as their subjects the written accounts of their heroes, the "-iad" parts of their titles, as much as they do their heroes' lives. But in every case Barth shies away from the implications of his design. For instance, "Perseid" borrows Virgil's image of artistic transfiguration and multiplies it. A first series of murals, already finished, depicts the first half of Perseus's life. A second series, still in progress, is depicting the half he now lives. As Perseus brings Calyxa up-to-date on the second half of his life, his celestial companion, in turn, brings her murals up-to-date with his story. Given his own rate of exposition as compared with her rate of transformation, Perseus foresees an inevitable conjunction between his history and Calyxa's murals: "It followed that soon - any day now, perhaps - the marmor history must arrive at the point of my death and overtake my present transfiguration" (C i n ) . If Calyxa replies, "I'm not ready to answer that tonight," neither is Barth.
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Rather than reach that point of contact, he swerves at the last moment. Calyxa decides she can stretch out her art ad infinitum by dividing its historical subject into smaller and smaller portions. Perseus's history then can "forever approach a present point but never reach it" (C i n ) . And by elevating Perseus into a star, Barth negates any possibility of their meeting; he partakes of an "escapeclause" that allows everyone to escape, not the least himself (C 113). In "Bellerophoniad," he just takes a different route to freedom. By dealing with the literary past of an imitation hero as transmogrified by an imitation artist, Barth only need create what an imitation artist would - bad art. Scenes from The Floating Opera and The End of the Road can be recycled with name changes and nothing more because an imitation artist would do nothing more. 30 Thus, like his figures of Proteus and Polyeidus, Barth spends a great deal of time shapeshifting. As "Title" suggests, "All this is just fill in. Hang on" (LF 102). In a very literal way, Chimera was a "fill in" for Barth, the project he began while "mired in" LETTERS, part of which, "Perseid," he intended as the center for the longer work. Therefore, however different they seem in form, the earlier retelling of Greek myths and Arabic tales serves as prelude to the later novel of epistles. Chimera deals with midpoints, in mathematical terms .500, times when the past approaches the present; LETTERS reaches the Phipoint, .618, when past and present meet, and goes beyond it to a later stage. Chimera signals a return to Realism, LETTERS an extended stay. Based on his understanding that "myths themselves are produced by the collective narrative imagination (or whatever), partly to point down at our daily reality," Barth's renditions of Greek myths point to a very recognizable reality. Perseus aches from blisters, frets about impotency, and hates his twenty-kilo paunch. Sibyl grows thick-thighed and hairy-lipped. Even Pegasus must suffer a garbage dump, however palatial. Moreover, these renditions of Greek myths point to a recognizable literary reality: Barth's previous works, Campbell's abstracted patterns, Bellerophontic letters. Yet owing to Barth's subsequent realization that "everything we do, everything we express comes around to those empty spaces between the letters," his next work approaches reality in a more direct way. 31 The Author of LETTERS thus declares the novel's three-part intention: Here's what I know about the book so far. Its working title is LETTERS. It will consist of letters (like this, but with a plot) between several correspondents, the capital-A Author perhaps included, and preoccupy itself with, among other things, the role of epistles — real letters, forged and doctored letters — in the history of History. It will also be concerned with, and of course constituted of, alphabetical letters: the atoms of which the written universe is made. Finally, to a small extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself, the third main sense of our word letters: Literature, which a certain film nut is quoted as calling "that moderately interesting historical phenomenon, of no present importance." (654) That the Author makes this declaration at the Phi-point of the book - .618 through its length, in the sixth of its seven sections - shows him to have full
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awareness that literature has caught up with its historical progenitor. It also shows his faith that literature will survive into the future: Moving into a seventh section attests to the fact. Still, the larger question remains as to how it survives. Can literature continue to derive sustenance from a history it has overtaken? And, if not, has the time come for literature to break free of history entirely? Given this larger concern, it is fitting that Barth focus on the War of 1812 to examine the role of epistles in the history of History, for this "Second War of Independence," as Americans then called it (LET. 407), poses participants who reflect the present-day impasse of literature and history. A colony, now grown into a country, fights the country that spawned it; an offspring caught up with its parent seeks to dissolve their mutual ties. Yet the letters written by Andrew Burlingame Cook IV and forwarded by Andrew Burlingame Cook VI show just how strong those ties remain and just how great a role written epistles have played in shaping the course of events. Real letters fall prey to the perils of posting, "the slowness & unpredictability of the mails," as A. B. Cook IV notes, "which I am convinced have alter'd & re-alter'd the course of history more than Bonaparte & all the Burlingames combined" (LET. 288). On 19 May 1812, Lord Castlereagh receives the St. Cloud Decree, stating that France has lifted its embargo against American merchant shipmen, thus leaving Britain no reason not to do the same and so forestall the impending war. "But ah, the mails" (LET. 410). Unaware that the embargo is likely to be revoked, James Madison delivers his Second War Message to Congress on 1 June. Unaware that Madison has signed a Declaration of War on 18 June, the British ministry revokes the embargo on 23 June. Forged and doctored letters fall prey to their authors' designs. A. B. Cook IV uses his letters to ensure a haven for displaced persons, whether it be an Indian Free State in the North or a Louisiana Project in the South. When America looks to expand into Canada, he promotes through his correspondence a distraction - a war with England (although slated for 1811). He purchases the letters of others to influence Congress: From John Henry he buys documents that prove the British plot with New England Federalists. He forges his own epistles to inflame the American press: Based on a real letter of 1782, he drafts another telling of Americans massacred at the hands of British-instigated Indians. When the end of the war aborts this plan and makes Pacific expansion inevitable, he just switches to another tactic: He forges letters to sneak Napoleon into America to govern a proposed new empire. And when that plan, in its turn, also fails and is supplanted by other Utopian visions, his descendants write appropriate letters to block whatever imperialist moves look threatening. In 1914, Andrew V transmits false messages in an attempt to link upheavals in Zapata's Mexico and Sun Yat-sen's China with wars in the Balkan states. In the late 1940s, Andrew VI leaks "atomic secrets" to Russia (LET. 363). In the early 1950s, he gives implicating materials to Joe McCarthy. And in 1969, he mails letters to the Author. Not only do written epistles shape the course of events, and thus make his-
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tory, they also re-make history. Napoleon begins his self-conceived martyrdom by "the living out of a romantic fiction" (LET. 585), and ends it by transcribing that fiction. As A. B. Cook IV realizes, "What better chance, then, to bend the world in his favor, than to turn his exile into public martyrdom, by writing his memoirs on St. Helena & smuggling them out for publication? He had made history: he could now re-make and revise it to his pleasure!f) (LET. 605). Addressed
"to History," they preserve in written form tales of great heroics while allowing great crimes to drift from public memory. Much the same occurs when Francis Scott Key drafts "The Star-Spangled Banner" on the back of a letter from Cook. The "rockets' red glare" and "bombs bursting in air" do give proof that the flag is still there, but not that it also is "cannon-riddled," "sodden," and "limp" (LET. 521). Above all else, however - above the making of history and the faking of history - these letters often serve as the sole retainers of history. When the British burn the Capitol in 1814, they also destroy the Library of Congress upstairs and the Supreme Court's law library below - in other words, all the files, documents, and archives of the country. "There will be great joy in the United States on account of the destruction of all their public and national records," writes a British newspaper, "as the people may now invent a fabulous origin. . . . " (LET. 510; Barth's ellipsis). But they cannot, at least not completely. Housing the patent models and thus considered private property, the Post Office is spared. And because most of its letters eventually get delivered, it is in the letters that the country's history stays preserved. If, then, "History is a code which, laboriously and at ruinous cost, deciphers into HISTORY' (LET. 332), Barth's examination of alphabetical letters seeks to determine where the loss occurs. Lost in the Funhouse shows a stranded minstrel creating these symbols as "coded markings to record the utterance of mind and heart" (186). LETTERS returns to an earlier and more mystical tradition. During a dream the Author recounts in the first section of the book, he goes back to the root of his name and the root of the written word: "beebeta-beth, the Kabbalist's letter of Creation, whence derived, like life itself from the marsh primordial, both the alphabet and the universe it described by its recombinations" (LET. 47). In keeping with Kabbalist tradition, the universe described by the individual letters comes with all its mystery intact. The whispered "O" of Jane Mack captures fully all she cannot say at the moment of orgasm. "Then I understood," says Todd Andrews, "and wondered why Bach didn't pause, the bridge traffic, all the constellations, to hear that O" (LET. 276). Arranging those letters into words still retains their magic. In Chimera, Scheherazade knows this all along: "It's in words that the magic is Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the rest," most of all the storyteller's "as if" (15). So does Ambrose in LETTERS. It is of the assembling of letters into words that he speaks when accepting his honorary degree, "how spelling is r e l a t e d t o m a g i c , as i n spellbound,
(LET. 377).
a n d author t o augur,
a n d pencil
t o penis
..."
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What he does not mention is the concomitant loss sustained in that formation. According to Kabbalist tradition, . . . the letters of the Hebrew alphabet had originally refused to submit to the spelling out of a Torah which dealt in commandments and prohibitions; that just as the primordial universe of the Greeks was a Chaos of atoms which later formed themselves into the Cosmos, so the primordial Torah was a jumble of letters which arranged themselves into words and sentences only as the events they set forth came to pass. . . . (LET. 329). By forging these linguistic atoms into words, historical events turn them into a code, a system of secretive communication, but a system nevertheless. If magic still remains, mystery also is lost, for words cannot fully recapture all that they signify. In Chimera, "Melanippe knows a private, un-categorizable self impossible for her ever to confuse with the name Melanippe - as Perseus, she believes, confused himself with the mythical persona Perseus, Bellerophon Bellerophon . . . " (247; Barth's ellipsis). Arranging those words into sentences allows man to impose his own design; "drawing out these chains of symbols," as the Anonymous minstrel does, to "preserve and display my tale" formalizes it further (LF 186). In turning words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into prose, he forces letters into more and more of his own patterns - grammar, punctuation, syntax - that dilute more and more the mystery they originally contained. Like Polyeidus, the more he understands about his art, the less potent it becomes. The whole comes to equal far less than the sum of its constituent parts. At the same time, however, the loss of mystery is offset by a gain in knowledge. Ambrose may find history "a scattered sibyl whose oak-leaf oracles we toil to recollect, only to spell out something less than nothing: e.g., WHOL TRUTH, or ULTIMATE MEANIN" (LET. 332), but the conclusion he draws concentrates on what is not transmitted rather than what is. Ambrose looks for missing letters; Barth looks at nearly completed words. Things do get lost in translation, Barth realizes, but "that does not mean that nothing gets through. It may be garbled, it may be deformed, but something there resembling what was there originally to some extent must get through."32 Indeed, with no linguistic patterns at work, everything gets through but nothing gets understood. The Chaos of atoms that letters comprise communicates little because it communicates too much. In LETTERS, the letter "B" can signify an insect, a transitive verb, the name of a woman, and an initial of a name. The epistles signed by that initial that the mother of A. B. Cook IV receives can come from Henry Burlingame IV, Joseph Brant, Joel Barlow, Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, or Harman Blennerhassett. Those amended by "J" do not clarify authorship much more. The "J.B." who writes the "CoverLetter" to Giles Goat-Boy could be John Barth - but it could just as easily be James Baldwin or Jorge Luis Borges (the latter a choice Barth might relish). It also could be, in chronologically receding order, Jimmy Breslin, James Barrie,
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James Boswell, or John Bunyan. And if one wishes to consider candidates of no fictional fame - and with no other background information one must - the list opens up to John Barrymore, John Belushi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Jack Benny, Jean-Paul Belmondo, John Bull, James Buchanan, Jim Bouton, John Wilkes Booth, Joey Bishop, Jacques Brel, Jim Backus, Joseph Blotner, Joan Blondell, various Browns (Jerry, James, John, and Joe E.), and, last but not least, those heirs to the Bourbon and Scotch dynasties, Jim Beam and Jay N. Beigh. In short, some form of linguistic patterning proves necessary to derive any precise information about the world. As Jerome Bray tells his parents, "the mails aren't safe, but don't reset every time you see a pattern, or these letters will be a meaningless jumble of you-know-whats . . ." (LET. 425). If the formation of letters into words provides some of this order, still more must be added. Ebenezer may feel " Tis your name that links you with your forebears" (SWF 143-4), but the number of "Smiths" in The Sot-Weed Factor suggests the denotative precision of names. Lost in the Funhouse gives more credence to a birthmark; its artist is named Ambrose, but everyone calls him "Honig" (32). Words must give way to sentences, and sentences to written sentences. If Lady Amherst then finds "there is no non-disturbing historiography," she makes a correct evaluation; "to put things into words works changes, not only upon the events narrated, but upon their narrator" is a statement with which Barth agrees (LET. 80). Yet it is only through such changes that a narrator may discover history at all. As Todd Andrews says, "I could not know what I thought till I saw what I said" (LET. 96). Once one reaches this stage of linguistic sophistication, one cannot recapture the original letters' magic; to do so is like trying to regain an alphabetical Eden, an effort doomed to fail.33 Saying that WESCAC harnesses the NRG of the universe trivializes by abbreviation. Nor can these alphabetical units be disposed of entirely. Reg Prinz, the nonverbal filmmaker looking to supplant words with images, is suspected of being a "vacuum," "a clouded transparency, a . . . film" (LET. 218; Barth's ellipsis). Todd later calls him a "cipher," not the key to a code, but the symbol in the code denoting zero (LET. 270). To recapture the universe at this point in time, one must employ the trappings of sophistication and render as close a copy as possible. In Chimera, Polyeidus no longer can turn himself into a chamber to escape his cell guards, but he can try to turn himself into a message - "I am a chamber" - spelling out his wish (215). He thus employs his enemy's strength to his own advantage. To be sure, something gets lost in translation - in this case, Polyeidus himself, who turns into a Chimera instead of a kamara - but something magical remains, the Chimera of his imagination, which then dissociates itself. Given its debt to epistles that contain history but distort it, and to letters that retain history but cannot be understood* the "phenomenon of literature," the third subject of Barth's examination, truly is phenomenal. On the one hand, it results from a number of man-made patterns imposed upon alphabetical constituents, over which conventional orders of grammar and punctuation the author then adds his own stylistic ones. On the other hand, these final
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impositions can liberate instead of entrap. At one point in LETTERS, A. B. Cook IV copies a missive concerning the Roman Bonapartes, but finds that none of his forger's expertise helps in trying to determine its author. The key to the code finally lies in the calligraphy of its initial, a "G" that Cook cannot be sure he has duplicated accurately. The style of its writing remains something so personalized that even the ubiquitous Cook cannot reproduce it perfectly. And so, "The key to the anagram is ANAGRAM" (LET. 757). In the artist's transposition of letters, a new word or sentence is formed. Mystery returns to it, but a mystery that now can be ascertained. When the artist uses alphabetical letters to transpose historical ones, a new kind of history is formed. If history translates into HISTORY with a loss, HISTORY translates into LITERATURE with a gain. Such translation depends upon one type of letter spurring on another into new practices. When the epistles of history, the alphabetical units of history, and literary history all reach the same point of maturation, however, the future direction of all remains uncertain. One possibility is revolution. Thus, Barth presents three characters, each of whom seeks to change the course of letters in a different way. A. B. Cook VI chooses to revolutionize history with " 'action historiography': the making of history as if it were an avant-garde species of narrative" (LET. 72-3). Jerome Bray seeks a Novel Revolution in a Revolutionary Novel. Reg Prinz opts for a revolutionary medium - film. All divest themselves of ideological concerns. As Cook declares, "the Second American Revolution was to be a matter, not of vulgar armed overthrow - by Minutemen, Sansculottes, Bolsheviki, or whatever - but of something quite different, more subtle, less melodramatic, more . . . revolutionary" (LET. 423-4); Barth's ellipsis). While it may feed on political upheaval and end in transforming political institutions, the Revolution itself remains social and cultural. All propose a dissolution of letters. Burning the Library of Congress serves as the climax to Prinz's film. "An end to letters! ZZZZZZZ!" buzzes Bray (LET. 528). And all fail. For one thing, none of their schemes is particularly revolutionary. Cook's family plots Second Revolutions since the eighteenth century. Bray's plan for "the 1st genuinely scientific model of the genre" derives from an 1822 prospectus
and admits to contain "nothing original whatever" (LET, 32). The inception of television makes Prinz's medium obsolete by comparison. Moreover, none can break free of ordering devices. Bray relies on computer programming. Both he and Cook chart out Five-Year Plans and Seven-Year Plans respectively. In particular, none can escape the orders imposed over history. Although Barth understands that, ultimately, "categories come from us and not from out there,"34 his characters do not. Cook spends most of the book trying to break his family pattern of sons turning against fathers only to have his own son denounce him at the end of the novel. Finally, all these characters fail because of their own animus toward letters. By posing themselves against letters, none can define exactly what he wants to accomplish. Cook's description of his revolution trails off into ellipses. Bray
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keeps resetting LILLY VAC. Prinz's film meanders into self-relfection. More important, despite their claims to destroy letters, all their ill-formed schemes depend upon letters. Cook relies on written correspondence to his son to effect his Second Revolution. Prinz bases his film on the Author's literary endeavors. Bray's "Complete & Final Fiction, to the end of producing an abstract model of the perfect narrative" derives from all the literature previously written (LET. 145). When he shifts from NOVEL to NOTES to NUMBERS in an attempt to revolutionize his medium further, his literary derivation just shifts from all of past literature to one past piece of literature - Borges's "Library of Babel." In the end, all meet their downfalls in appropriate ways: Cook defeated by the "script of history" (LET. 73), Prinz by the script of Ambrose, Bray by the script of Lady Amherst. When his muse finally declares, "The revolutionary future belongs neither to Pen nor to Camera, but to one . . . two . . . ," Bray's
statement of intent is transcribed alphabetically instead of numerically (LET. 555; Barth's ellipses). Part of Barth's point is that revolutions cannot be promulgated at this stage of time. But the most important part of his point is that movements that seek to break with the past entirely constitute rebellions, not revolutions. "Rebels sought to negate, thwart, and destroy," says Sacvan Bercovitch when discussing an earlier American movement, "the Revolutionaries were agents of the predetermined course of progress" (Jeremiad 134). In his attempt to treat history as if it were an "avant-garde species of narrative," Cook's desire certainly is destructive - he seeks to divest himself of all that has occurred in the past. In his attempt to make history as if it were an "avant-garde species of narrative," his desire is nothing less than Faustian. He seeks to determine the course of history, not in accordance with any ordained or spiritual scheme of progress, but in accordance with his own scheme of progress. And while his efforts can influence historical movements, they cannot control them; finally they reduce to "Theatre of the Absurd" (LET. 75). History is not narrative and cannot be treated as such. Far better to expend energy on what can be controlled than dissipate it on what cannot. Instead of treating history as narrative to further historical progress, why not consider narrative history and further literary progress? To do so with the avant-garde in mind yields results comparable to those of Cook. The story of Consuelo del Consulado shows what happens to authors who seek to be one step ahead of their times: They end up writing Cajun Neo-Realism or Gumbo Gothic (LET. 497). But to further the progress of literature in a worcrevolutionary way makes success a more viable possibility. LETTERS, then, asks the question: "Can a played-out old bag of a medium be fertilised one last time by a played-out Author in a played-out tradition?" (550). As
portrayed by Lady Amherst and Ambrose Mensch respectively, it seems unlikely at first. She appears unwilling: "My whole romantic life . . . has, like the body of this letter, been digression and recapitulation; it is time to rearrive at the present, to move into a future unsullied by the past" (LET. 224). Nor may she be able. Her uterus she finds a relic. Her plea to the Author is ex-
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haustion. In contrast, he begins quite willing. "I'm drawn to has-beens," he says. "The exhausted. The spent" (LET. 336). Yet he may not be able - potency without fertility does not an issue make. Neither does potential without purpose. Much of the problem lies in the way that each views the medium to be fertilized. Lady Amherst insists on seeing herself as a historian. She refuses to embody Literature for the Author. She declines the part of Great Tradition. She will not be the Muse of the Realistic Novel. "I simply report the news," she says (LET. 363). "But I shan't write," she writes the Author, "not to you; only summarise" (LET. 372). She does a good deal more than summarize, however. By writing the Author once a week, she writes more letters than any other character in the book, filling up more pages than any other as well. And because the Author only has asked her to be a Character in his novel, she denies a role never requested of her. Indeed, this Lady doth protest too much. Her claims to mere reportage recall those of an earlier Barth heroine who, in fact, does more than report. "I don't invent," insists Scheherazade in Chimera, "I only recount" (37). Furthermore, the allegiance Lady Amherst swears to history must be set against her own history. After an early debauch at the tip of H. G. Wells's (capped) fountain pen, she embarks upon a series of liaisons with past literary masters Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, to name a few. (Even she cannot get more than three words with Samuel Beckett.) Her attraction to these men of belles-lettres arises from her own interest in belles-lettres. In one of her most honest moments in the book, she admits to being a failed novelist. In another, she admits to having retained hopes of such a career still. The carbon copies she makes of her letters to the Author are not to give them a more official look, but to give them a morefictitiouslook, to make it seem "as if I were a writer writing first-person fiction, an epistolary novelist composing - and editing, alas, in holograph . . . " (LET. 378). If Lady Amherst links herself too closely to history and not enough to literature, Ambrose links her too closely to literature and not enough to history. It is he - the Author's persona, and not the Author - who envisions her as "Literature Incarnate, or The Story Thus Far" (LET. 40). So anxious is this prodigal novelist to return to the written word, to " 'rescue' Fiction from its St. Helena by transforming it altogether" (LET. 189), that he seeks to move with her
into the future without retaining any vestiges of her past, even though it is because of her past that he first becomes attracted to Lady Amherst. In much the same way, by going over what he feels to be the pattern of his own romances, he hopes to divest himself of their hold. But no matter how often he examines his sperm count or how far away he hides her pessary, conception remains elusive under these conditions. Outfitting Lady Amherst in the latest attire gets her ridiculed, not pregnant. He must learn to take her as she is, as an emblem of literary history, not just literature. And in taking her this way - in climaxes and denouements - he learns that all past literature truly is germaine to his cause. She must accept her
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attraction to literature. Instead of fearing its encroachment over her life, she must concede to literature already having caught up with history - Ambrose catches up with her as early as the book's second section. Once they both come to a full understanding of how each relates to the other, they can pass from early passions and middling trials to settle into a warm and lasting partnership. He can tape the letters, she transcribe them. Only then can conception ensue. "Dear God," Lady Amherst cries, "I wanted to conceive by him, to get something beyond my worn-out self!" (LET. 441). That she does conceive the novel makes clear. Her pregnancy embodies "the living decipherment of our mingled codes" (LET. 238). Into what those codes decipher the novel does not say. It does not have to. She pleads ignorance: "[N]ot until the spring of the new year, the new decade, shall we know, Ambrose and I, what this old womb and those exhausted sperm have combined to make" (LET. 678). But they, in the end, remain characters in a book. Despite all their protests to the contrary, they cannot step beyond the cover that contains them. The reader, in contrast, holds that book in his hand. What eludes the characters does not him, and thus he can foresee the results of their union. In one sense, they combine to make the story that Ambrose writes, the "Perseid" he composes of their life together. In a larger sense, they combine to make the novel itself. As LETTERS progresses, so does Lady Amherst through the oeuvre of the Author's work; it is that egg that is fertilized as much as hers. From his own past literature, the Author begets a new work. Six stories intertwine to produce a seventh, and the issue is called LETTERS. This issue is a second for Lady Amherst, however. Although calling herself childless, she has given birth once before in the past. This daughter of two expatriate novelists and a man dedicated to the new have produced between themselves a child she calls "my Finnegans Wake" (LET. 74). The child she has borne, then, is Modernism. The child she carries later is conceived because of her first. It was Andre, she realizes, who has made her vulnerable, three decades later, "to his pallid echo, Mr. Mensch" (LET. 72). And while the implication that follows clearly is presumptuous, Barth quickly diminishes its impact. If, in fact, she bears a new literary movement, he does what anyone inclined to "rebel along traditional lines"35 would do: He has its parents get married and so legitimize its claim.
Conclusion: "Subjective Historicism
Your two eyes are an accurate stereoscopic camera, sure enough, but the process by which the upsidedown image on the retina takes effect on the brain entails a certain amount of unconscious selection. What you see depends to a great extent on subjective distortion and elimination which determines the varied impacts on the nervous system of speed of line, emotions of color, touch values of form. Seeing is a process of imagination. — John Dos Passos, "Satire as a Way of Seeing" (1937) Seeing, to John Dos Passos, was also an imaginative process whose subjective components could be successfully tempered. Writing over twenty years later about the problems of finding "elbow room" within an increasingly bureaucratized society, he asserted the need for looking at American institutions with "fresh understanding, untrammeled by prejudice or partisan preconceptions," and advanced objective observation as the preferred means of discovery. "Observing objectively demands a sort of virginity of the perceptions," he explained. "A man has to clear all preconceived notions out of his head in a happy self-forgetfulness where there is no gap between observation and description." In so falling into "the uneducated man's naive and ignorant frame of mind" and meeting each new phenomenon "with a clean slate as if you had never heard of it before," it was possible to "see things as they are, instead of as we were told they ought to be" (Occasions 72-3, 75). Writing in an age of mass communications, Dos Passos was aware of the difficulty of seeing "things as they are," or, as he put it, "the difficulty of discovering the truth in order to tell it." Aware, as well, that falsification and fabrication are built-in aspects of man's mental makeup, he also understood that the truth "can never entirely prevail." Nevertheless, by observing reality "without preconceived ideas" and studying the world "with the cool and eager eye of young Darwin examining a cuttlefish or an insect," he did see the ascertainment of truth, however small it might be, as possible (Occasions 282, 285-6). Indeed, according to Dos Passos, it was the writer's responsibility to uncover and make known that truth. Having proclaimed as early as 1936 that 137
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a writer's freedom was the "freedom to search for the truth" and having applauded the writer who "writes straight" as an "architect of history," he continued in his later years to unveil the truths about the world he found to be self-evident (Occasions 14, 8). Thus, having assumed that a direct correlation existed between facts observed, history recorded, and History experienced, he could propose in 1964, for instance, that "the Communist conspiracy by which the formulae for atomic explosions were filched from the American laboratories and transmitted to the Soviet Union" was a "fact" and, hence, part of the "established history of our times." And after endorsing an alert civil defense as one of the most effective deterrents to Soviet nuclear aggression, he also — in a chillingly prescient forecast of the Star Wars strategy of today - could propose "the successful development of antimissile missiles, or of methods of disrupting the electronic controls of hostile rockets" as another (Occasions 296, 300).
Although these 1960s' conclusions overturned his 1930s' political claims completely, the degree of certainty that Dos Passos accorded words like "truth" and "fact" remained consistent in both decades. The personalized prose of his early "Camera Eye" sections must be set against his later assertion that the eyes themselves formed "an accurate stereoscopic camera." Therefore, although the "protests scrawled on the margins in pencil" that made up his U.S.A. did deviate from the "publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks" that constituted the officially sanctioned version (vii), the account of American history that he presented within his trilogy's pages was offered as an incontrovertible account of American history itself. American novelists today feel no less a sense of responsibility than Dos Passos did years ago. Whether expressed by E. L. Doctorow as "The Passion of Our Calling" or assumed by Robert Coover as "that most solemn and pious charge placed upon this vocation" or even embodied by Norman Mailer in the concept of karma that permeates his most recent works, the notion of responsibility, metaphorical debts and payments, underlies the pages of contemporary fiction. * Nor are the writers of this fiction any less aware that the recording of history is one means of discharging their obligation. In Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, for example, the ledgers that Blue undertakes to keep are the only means of certifying the frontier town's existence, as he himself realizes. Yet short of a frontal lobotomy, these writers see the kind of historiography that Dos Passos advocated as not only impossible to achieve, but not even desirable to achieve. The requisite objectivity that enabled Dos Passos to see the world "with a fresh eye as if it were the morning of the first day of creation" is not a kind of vision that John Barth wants: "I hate the kind of primitivism that ignores history. . . ," he says. "I respect complexity, particularly the complexity which comes of realizing that no action is simple in the light of the history of ideas and actions." The facts perceived in a state of "primeval happiness" do not make for an intelligible version of history to Robert Coover. "It is not enough to present facts," he maintains, " - something has to happen in time and space, observed through the imagination and
CONCLUSION
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the heart, something accessible and yet illuminating. . . . " And the written history into which those facts combine is not synonymous with History itself, as Norman Mailer understands. "This book does its best to be a factual account of the activities of Gary Gilmore and the men and women associated with him in the period from April 9, 1976 . . . until his execution a little more than nine months later in Utah State Prison," he writes at the end of The Executioner's Song, adding, "This does not mean it has come a great deal closer to the truth than the recollections of the witnesses."2 "Subjective historicism" is the term that best describes the approach that informs the efforts of these post-modern authors. Admitting that bare facts are of limited service and recognizing, like Mailer's Charles Eitel, that "nothing is more difficult to discover than a simple fact" anyway, these authors do not feel compelled to limit themselves to facts alone when re-creating the past in their works. Doctorow bluntly states he is neither a scholar nor a journalist and insists that his research is "very haphazard." Barth goes so far as to find too many facts capable of cluttering up a storyteller's plot.3 Similarly, viewing truth as an elusive quality and understanding, like Pynchon's Oedipa Maas, that the most they can hope to gain are "compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself," post-modern authors substitute phrases like "artistic truth," "folk truth," and "radical truth" when describing what they hope their portraits of the past will reveal.4 Finally, through their own transmissions of those qualified truths to their readers, these authors bequeath a vision of history in which knowledge of the past promotes ethical behavior even though knowledge of the past must remain incomplete at best. In The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Robert
Coover attests to the premise upon which the subjectivity of their approach rests. "[Y]ou can take history or leave it," Henry asserts, "but if you take it you have to accept certain assumptions or ground rules about what's left in and what's left out" (49). Post-modern American writers accept many such assumptions when it comes to the written artifacts in which history is presumed to reside. When Kurt Vonnegut looks at the Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two, he finds in all of its twenty-seven volumes hardly a word about the bombing of Dresden that he experienced. When Norman Mailer reads the newspaper accounts of the 1967 March on the Pentagon that he attended, he finds no specific mention of The Wedge that brutalized those who remained on the Mall steps.5 Because these human accounts stay subject to human frailties, post-modern authors bring to any piece of writing a critical - and questioning - mind. In LETTERS, Lady Amherst even looks at freshman composition papers and interoffice memos with suspicion. All have good reason, as the written accounts that they themselves fabricate show. Most chronicles of history base themselves on documents even less trustworthy than themselves. In The Floating Opera, no one can determine which of Harrison Mack, Sr. 's seventeen wills is most valid. Conversely, in The Sot- Weed Factor, no one can determine which of the Poet Laureate com-
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missions is least valid - all the forgeries base themselves on an original drafted by an imposter. And, if not based on unreliable documents, these chronicles of history are composed by unreliable authors. Either their authors doubt their own identities, in which case anything they produce becomes equally doubtful, or else they feel so certain of their own identities that anything they produce becomes self-serving. "In a sense, I am Jacob Horner," begins the account called The End of the Road (i), and how much credence can be granted a history whose first sentence calls into question its own authority? Yet, by extension, how much more can be granted the "narrative" that J. Edgar Hoover constructs for "The Crime of the Century" when, as portrayed in The Public Burning, the entire reputation of the FBI rests on the Rosenberg trial? (163-5). Or, to use a more recent example, how much can be placed in the newspaper accounts quoted in The Executioner's Song when all their authors use the story of Gary Gilmore to further their own ambitions? "By God," wonders journalist Barry Farrell, "was Gary like Harry Truman, mediocrity enlarged by history?" (805). Most of all, historical chronicles are treated as untrustworthy because of what they attempt to do: They seek to order on paper the disordered movements of time, under the assumption that they can succeed. If Coover discredits Time magazine in The Public Burning by making it the National Poet Laureate, he discredits the New York Times even more. Like the brainchild of Mother Luce, the Times betrays the objectivity that it affects. The execution of a housepainter in Berlin is placed beside an item on wall coverings and shower curtains. News of escaped prisoners of war is printed next to an advertisement for United Hunts. As Coover then concludes, " 'Objectivity' is in spite of itself a willful program for the stacking of perceptions. . . . " For what purpose? he asks. To create a "charter of moral and social order. . . . And why not? How else struggle against entropy?" (238). By accepting as given the persistence of entropy, reply post-modern writers. Admittedly, it remains a difficult acceptance to make. "You will want cause and effect," Pynchon tells his reader - and he is correct (GR 772). Causeand-effect presumes a universe that operates in accordance with reason, a universe that maintains a moral logic to balance whatever horrors it offers. "He done no wrong! He didn't deserve to git killt like that!" cries Clara Collins in The Origin of the Brunists after her husband dies in a mine cave-in. "Ifn he died like that, they must be a reason! The Good Lord would not take Ely away ifn they weren't no reason!" (95). As a result, when Coover's Brunists later use that cave-in as the basis for their religion, they support spiritual beliefs with mathematical constructions. As their chief "mystagogue" reminds their chief mathematician, "if that blot, what she called 'density' or the 'force of darkness,' were indeed mindless and random, how did he account for the very mathematical system he himself employed? If all were haphazard, where did order, however tenuous it might seem, come from?" (312). As Ralph Himebaugh knows in his better moments, however, that order comes from his own mind; the objectivity of his numerical tools is offset by
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the subjectivity of their employer. If Ralph steadily forgets this as he becomes more and more involved with the movement, most of the Brunists never realize it at all. Clara Collins links together the final message of her husband, his partnership with Giovanni Bruno, a story in the newspaper, a Christmas gift from her daughter, and the killing of a cat. All serve as portents to her of a Spirit at work. But the events bear no relationship to each other. The newspaper editor is a cynic. The cat is killed as a children's prank. Mrs. Collins connects them all only after the cave-in, when she needs to make sense of her husband's death. Like the splinter groups of various religions that join to form the Brunists, they share no common interests. Instead, they stay banded together in an attempt to explain the mining disaster, to fit it into some rational historical scheme. Gravity's Rainbow presents the clearest response to such an impulse. "They're the rational ones," Osbie Feel says of the British bureaucrats. "We piss on Their rational arrangements" (744). And so he does - quite literally. Postmodern writers realize that the external world does not operate by rules of logic, but rather by those of coincidence and chance. "V.'s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth," writes Pynchon (V. 423). "What a shameless, marvelous dramatist is Life," muses Barth, "that daily plots coincidences e'en Chaucer would not dare, and ventures complications too knotty for Boccacce!" (SWF 690). If these authors then go on to posit their own forms of temporal order, they do so in very tentative ways. Todd Andrews takes the "Tragic View of Order" in LETTERS, whereby he sees patterns everywhere but remains skeptical of their significance (255). Ambrose Mensch takes an even more tragic approach, realizing "that our concepts, categories, and classifications are ours, not the World's, and are as finally arbitrary as they are provisionally useful" (648). "Useful" they certainly are. When the Times Square communicants in Coover's Public Burning have removed from them the order of Uncle Sam's guiding hand, darkness descends, terror terrorizes, and visions of V-2S and gas ovens, wolfpacks and vampires, Bolsheviks and bootleggers, King Kong and Al Capone run riot - "not exactly Cotton Mather's vision of Theopolis Americana!" (613).6 Bereft of any sense of order from the start, convinced that everything has gotten worse save smut and weaponry, and awaiting disaster to befall him throughout Something Happened, Bob Slocum fulfills his own prophecy when something in fact does happen and a car careens through a shopping center window; so certain has he been all along that his son will die that he accidentally smothers the barely injured boy in a panicked embrace. Yet if authors offer any alternatives to the state in which Heller's protagonist lives, "provisional" remains the key. This is not to say that the works of these post-modern authors are unrelated to the world's workings. Unlike nineteenth-century novelists who shied away from outright connection while speaking of a fiction that presents "another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie," writers today depend upon the strong ties their works have to events in the real world.7 Doctorow may change
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the names of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to Paul and Rochelle Isaacson in The Book of Daniel; Coover may use the actual names themselves in The Public Burning. Both still expect the same historical recognition from their readers. Mailer may call himself Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night and Aquarius in Of a Fire on the Moon. Still he assumes that his audience will bring to both works its knowledge of the single public person to whom he refers. Despite such deliberate correspondences, however, the universes novelists make are finally not the universes in which they live. The two kinds of creations remain "cousins," as Barth says, in much the same way that the authors of each remain "siblings" (FB 29). Differences in nomenclature, then, matter very little, for while pointing to factual counterparts in one respect, the people who exist within the words of a printed page are, in the end, "spell-bound," as Coover puts it - no more "real" than any other characters in a work of fiction (Pricksongs 30). The accused atom-bomb spies named Paul and Rochelle Isaacson are no more or less "real" than the writers named Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell their son sees sitting on the steps of the Justice Department within the same book. The Norman Mailer who parades through the pages of The Armies of the Night is no more or less the Norman Mailer who writes The Armies of the Night than the Dante who journeys through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso is the Dante who writes the Commedia. Therefore, although the temporal orders that authors today impose upon the world's workings rely upon components from that world in their portrayals, the laws that govern the worlds within post-modern fiction are not laws that prevail within the world beyond its covers. To ensure against any possibility of confusion, novelists are quick to break their fictional frames and affirm the artifice of their constructs - not just in the prefaces of their books, as their nineteenth-century predecessors were wont to do, but throughout their entire works. Unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim views World War II movies backward and forward and backward again, in which planes suck in shells, bombs are shipped back to factories, and American fliers turn into the high school students they once were. But just as Billy is ready to suppose Adolf Hitler a baby and have all humanity returned to the perfection of Adam and Eve, Vonnegut interrupts his Slaughterhouse-Five reveries with the barking of a dog - a reminder of the world in which shells already have exploded, bombs already have dropped, and Hitler already has worked his carnage (73-5). With facts like these a fact of twentieth-century history, comfort is not a commodity that contemporary novelists dispense in large doses. They avoid reassurances of ordained endings because they find the solace such promises offer to be false: In a world that operates by chance or coincidence, neither the shape nor semblance of any end can be predicted. As the narrator of Barth's "Title" declares, "one has no idea, especially nowadays, how close the end may be, nor will one necessarily be aware of it when it occurs" (LF 104). At best, writers offer probability. Henry Waugh can found a baseball history upon rolls of the dice, but his games depend on odds. Todd Andrews can consider what he might do if a new urge to suicide should arise, but his thoughts remain
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speculative: "Possibly I would on some future occasion endeavor once again to blow up the Floating Opera, my good neighbors and associates, and/or my mere self; most probably I would not" (FO 246). With probability as its support, the view of historical processes taken by post-modernists admits to little certainty. "History," writes Coover, "in the end, you can never prove a thing" (UBA 224). And characters in post-modern fiction must learn to live with such inconclusiveness in all areas of life, no matter how painful it may be. Pynchon's Roger Mexico already knows how to live with the uncertainty of bombs; what he finds far more difficult to live with is uncertainty in his love for Jessica Swanlake. Coover's Henry Waugh understands that the rules that he establishes stay subject to rolls of the dice "That was how it was. He had to accept it, or quit the game altogether" (UBA 40); still, knowing what he must accept does not make acceptance any easier when those dice declare his favorite ballplayer dead. But, then, post-modern authors have no interest in easy solutions of how to deal with time because they acknowledge how difficult it is to live in time. Ragtime's opening stills of an era without Negroes and immigrants dissolve as the rest of its film unrolls, showing Negroes hurling firebombs, immigrants beaten by industrialists, and anarchists shooting politicians. Recognizing, as well, the futility of escaping time's changes, these authors depict every attempt at retreat as failing. Sealing off the Broadview Avenue house in Ragtime lasts only until Houdini enters it. Flying off into the Loon Lake clouds affords Lucinda and Penfield transcendence - but only at the cost of their lives. Choosing, like Oedipa Maas, to accept a doubtful place in the "excluded middle," post-modern authors deliberately leave the conclusions of their works open, waiting, like her, "if not for another set of possibilities . . . , then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew" (L 136). When an earlier author like Faulkner attributed an open ending to a fabricated historical process, his fiction itself ended in deadlock. "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished/' Quentin Compson wonders in Absalom, Absalom! "Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical watercord to the next pool which thefirstpool feeds, has fed, did feed . . ." (261). Yet the
pools do not extend infinitely, and on the last page of the book their ripples cease. "You've got one nigger left," Shreve McCannon reminds Quentin, after which he goes on to take Faulkner's historical theory to its logical conclusion: "I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere" (378). But the Canadian cannot grasp the implications of what he has said - because he is Canadian. And the Southerner cannot accept the validity of those remarks - because he is from the South. A stalemate results. In contrast, when novelists today depict an open-ended process, they allow the serial form that they delineate to expand outward as a never-ending spiral - no matter what kinds of ramifications their designs may include. For Mailer, that form manifests itself in an advancing frontier, from a Pacific island in The Naked and the Dead to an Alaskan wilderness in Why Are We in Vietnam? to the
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moon itself in Of a Fire on the Moon. Brought back down to earth in The Executioner's Song, the errand in Mormon wilderness recasts an earlier Puritan mission, with Utah in 1976 serving as the closest facsimile of the theocracy upon which America was first founded. For Pynchon, that spiraling form manifests itself in the continued interaction between a Puritan movement toward redemption and an entropic movement toward randomness. Suitably, once Oedipa has her initial glimpse of Tristero, additional "revelations" come crowding in "exponentially" (L 58). And for Barth, that exponential expansion assumes an expressly mathematical function in the very writing of history. If he defines Lost in the Funhouse as "neither a collection nor a selection, but a series" (ix), he predicates Chimera on one series in particular - the Fibonacci series of numbers, a structure he admits having chosen before he knew what he wanted to say. As Perseus looks back upon his past, the discoveries he makes increase in accordance with that sequence; as Barth looks back upon his writing of Chimera, the novellas of the book increase in the same way, each being 1.6 times as long as the one preceding it. 8 Thus, instead of concentrating on when history will end or what will happen once it renews itself, post-modern American writers consider the idea of historical process itself. This is exactly what Henry Waugh does when he decides to compose a compact league history of the Universal Baseball Association's first fifty-six years. It was all there in the volumes of the Book and in the records, but now it needed a new ordering, perspective, personal vision, the disclosure of pattern, because he'd discovered . . . that perfection wasn't a thing, a closed moment, a static fact, but process, yes, and the process was transformation. . . . (211-12)
When viewed from one angle, the implications of such a historical perspective can be frightening. Because its foundation rests on process, history simply may continue on a course of steady deterioration. "It was as though we'd all been given parts to play decades ago," says Richard Nixon in The Public Burning, "and were still acting them out on ever-widening stages" (447). America then extends into the future a pattern first set in its past - and because The Public Burning is written with the events of Watergate already behind it, the book partakes of a future already realized. So does LETTERS. "What exploitable convulsions lie ahead," claims A. B. Cook VI. ". . . The American 1950's and 1960's, that McCarthy-Nixon horror show, will seem in retrospect a paradise lost. The 1980's and 90's will be called the New Ice Age - and who can say what will be crystallized therein?" (749). But because the emphasis of their perspective lies on transformation, history holds out the prospect of hope for post-modern writers. The crystallization need not be chilling. When Max looks at the allegorized 1950s in Giles GoatBoy, he sees a relatively young campus and an even younger student body in short, a world going through its teenage traumas with respect to all of past time. "By George, I think the odds for survival are pretty good," he concludes.
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"Some kids don't make it through adolescence, but most do" (301). When Mailer looks at what that era has matured into ten years later, he is reminded of a different kind of trauma - one filled, perhaps, with more perils, but one retaining, for certain, more promise. "She is heavy with child," he says of America, and the issue of her pregnancy remains unknown. If she may give birth to "the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known," she also may bring forth "a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild" (AN 320). The artist can help in bringing such history to birth, but he must understand how much of a role he can play. He can have little say in determining outcome. "Ah well: a r t . . . not as lethal as one might hope," sighs Arthur Miller in The Public Burning, realizing that changing the ending of The Crucible will not change the ending of the Rosenberg trial (606; Coover's ellipsis). Nor can the child of a writer's imagination displace the one that history is to bear. "[S]upposing I do attain it, supposing I find the right understanding," wonders Warren Penfield in Loon Lake, "what then what happens outside me how do I help Local 10110 of the Western Federation of Miners, Smelters, Sheepdippers, and Zenpissers . . ." (138). What the artist can do, however, is aid in the delivery process and reduce the pangs of labor. For these reasons Barth considers art a treasure, "which if it could not redeem the barbarities of history or spare us the horrors of living and dying, at least sustained, refreshed, expanded, ennobled, and enriched our spirits along the painful way" (C 25). And at some few, very special moments, art may still do more. By forcing us to remember those barbarities of the past, it may help prevent their recurrence in the future. If so, the artist can allow a healthier child to come forth. It is in this respect that knowledge of the past places limits on subjective vision. Just as a point exists where reason succumbs to entropy, there exists a point where subjectivity gives way to ethics. "Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it's started?" SHROUD asks Benny Profane in V. (275). But there are. To post-modern authors, the standards remain humanitarian ones. If Todd Andrews hopes Drew Mack will return from radicalism to "good old Stock Bourgeois-Liberal Tragic-Viewing Humanism" at the end of LETTERS, it is not for the ideological values such a view proposes, but for the ethical concerns at its base (735). Similarly, although the subjective historicism of contemporary authors does allow for different re-creations of history, all promote within their artifacts the same kind of conduct. It is, perhaps, the one remnant of their liberal heritage that remains — and it is, perhaps, the one remnant of that heritage most worth keeping. By re-creating the past, as they do, through the lenses of remembrance and reflection, they replace the sight of the eyewitness with the insight of the more mature writer. Perhaps nowhere is the point made better than in E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. Set in 1967 after a New Left had arisen, the novel looks back upon the demise of 1930s radicalism in 1950s America. Published in 1971 after that latest radical movement had split into an alphabet soup of initialed off-
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shoots, the novel examines the efficacy of any political solutions in a country whose history is depicted as a succession of revolutionary movements, not inappropriate for a nation that came to birth from one such movement, and a succession of reactionary reprisals - a dubious distinction for a nation committed, on paper at least, to the right of individual dissent. In concentrating on the children of accused "atom bomb spies" instead of dramatizing the defendants' lives themselves, the novel immediately brings the issue of continuity into focus. Yet in differentiating between the political stance of one child and the historical stance of the other, the novel also presents two different ways of dealing with a diseased past and the consequences of each. For Susan Lewin, knowledge of the past means repressing history as a child and romanticizing it as an adult. It also means paying the price exacted by each pose. By never talking about her parents as a child, she regresses to bed-wetting and tantrum-throwing. By raising her Old Left parents into martyrs and establishing a Foundation for Revolution in their names as an adult, she supports a New Left that considers her parents the inventions of J. Edgar Hoover, remains willing to take any money from any donor in any name - even that of Ronald Reagan (166, 169) - and, for all its talk of social change, believes in stasis more than anything else. As Artie Sternlicht, the book's Abbie Hoffmanesque theorist, declares, "EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IS ALL THE SAME!" Although no more anxious to confront the past than his sister, the nature of Daniel's doctoral research forces this reluctant heir to the Old Left into the kind of investigation that Susan avoids. When Daniel considers the history of twentieth-century communism, he adopts a methodology that places individual historical events within the context of a long-range historical framework. No defender of a party that erased his parents' names from its records within twenty-four hours of their arrests and then published their death-house letters when the propaganda value became clear, Daniel views the sacrifice of his parents as one in a series of expedient ploys, no different in kind from the purges in Russia and Spain during the 1930s. Looking at Russia's refusal to support a leftist coalition in Germany, its manipulation of the Popular Front, and the nonaggression pact with Hitler as products of an internationally aimed movement that was forced to restrict itself to nationalist interests, he finds Stalin to have headed a movement already doomed at its inception. So he concludes: "[N]o revolution is betrayed, only fulfilled" (66). When Daniel turns to the history of his own country in particular and considers "an interesting phenomenon in American life in the years immediately after a war" (33), he adopts a similar approach. Judging the postwar prosecution of his parents with respect to similar events that followed an earlier world war reprisals to the strikes of 1919, the Palmer raids of 1920, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti — Daniel realizes that the execution of his parents was hardly a unique phenomenon in American political history: "In the councils of government fierce partisanship replaces the necessary political coalitions of wartime. In the greater arena of social relations - business, labor, the community - violence
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rises, fear and recrimination dominate public discussion, passion prevails over reason. Many historians have noted this phenomenon" (33). One historian who has noted that phenomenon is Richard Hofstadter, who sees the "interesting phenomenon" that Daniel uncovers as evidence of a "paranoid style in American politics," which emerges in times of prosperity when what he terms "status politics" predominates over "interest politics." As he explains: During depressions, the dominant motif in dissent takes expression in proposals for reform or in panaceas. . . . In prosperity, however, when status politics becomes relatively more important, there is a tendency to embody discontent not so much in legislative proposals as in grousing. . . . Therefore, it is the tendency of status politics to be expressed more in vindictiveness, in sour memories, in the search for scapegoats, than in realistic proposals for positive action.9 The actual circumstances surrounding the sentencing and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg certainly attest to the thesis expounded by both Doctorow and Hofstadter. In pronouncing his penalty for the crime he deemed "worse than murder" in 1951, Judge Irving R. Kaufman established a causal connection between the act of "putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb" and "the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000." When reporting on the Rosenbergs' final appeal for clemency two years later, newspapers laid claim to a similar conflation of events. Next to its story on "Court Hears Spy Debate," the New York Times of 19 June 1953 printed articles detailing the deaths of 129 servicemen in an air crash on their way back to Korea, a "Red Plot" mounted to kill Senator McCarthy, the Soviet execution of a West German painter in East Berlin, and the freeing of over twenty-five thousand prisoners of war in South Korea that threatened to stall the truce talks. 10 The next day's issue reinforced the need for continued vigilance. Elevating the crime for which the Rosenbergs had just been executed from "conspiracy to betray the secrets of the atomic bomb to Soviet Russia" to "espionage" itself, the Times recalled the evidence presented at their trial that proved that "just a month after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki a sketch and detailed description of the terrible weapon was in the hands of the Russians." Reporting on "7 in Hawaii Guilty of Red Conspiracy," the paper reminded its readers that there still existed people dedicated "to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States Government by force and violence." 11 When Doctorow judges the giving - or not giving, as the case may be - of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union from a perspective of hindsight, however, he comes to quite a different conclusion. As Daniel discovers, "Secretary of State Acheson will testify some years afterward that never in the counsels of the Truman Cabinet did anyone seriously regard Russia as a military threat even after they got their bomb" (254). With Doctorow's broader historical
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sensibility providing Daniel in 1967 with a more realistic sense of proportion than that available in the early 1950s, the magnitude of any crime committed dwindles. As Daniel states, "The Isaacsons are arrested for conspiring to give the secret of television to the Soviet Union. . . ." (131; Doctorow's ellipsis).
As Daniel - and, by extension, Doctorow - omits to say, never was there any doubt even some years earlier about the fact of Russia eventually getting an atom bomb. Nobody involved in atomic research had any illusions about the secret of "S-i," as the atom bomb project was called, remaining America's exclusively. The "Prospectus on Nucleonics" prepared by the Manhattan Project scientists in July 1944 blatantly stated that "it would be surprising if the Russians are not also diligently engaged in such work." Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and chairman of the National Defense Research Committee respectively, informed Henry Stimson that "all the basic facts" needed to build an atom bomb were already known to physicists before work on the "S-i" project began; believing that any nation with "good technical and scientific resources" could reach America's stage of development in three or four years, they acknowledged it "the height of folly for the United States and Great Britain to assume that they will always continue to be superior in this new weapon." And the secretary of war, in turn, concurred, warning President Truman that "it is practically certain that we could not remain in this position indefinitely." Therefore, when the Russians did explode their first atom bomb in September 1949, the reactions indicated shock at the speed but not the fact of production. As D wight D. Eisenhower said, "I see no reason why a development that was anticipated years ago should cause any revolutionary change in our thinking or in our actions."12 With a relativistic analysis raising the question of how much of a secret there was to be revealed, the crime of exposing any information becomes subject to an equally relativistic interpretation. Throughout his narrative, Daniel does just this as he examines various conceptions of treason in relation to the appropriate punishments for them. In the old English monarchic government, drawing and quartering constituted the punishment for the infraction, "its definition being determined by the King's courts for the King's convenience" (86). In sixteenth-century Japan, treason was determined by the refusal of Christians to walk across an image of Christ painted on rice paper and planted on the ground, whereupon those found guilty were hung upside down over a slowburning sulfur fire. In all European nations until the nineteenth century, heretics were burned at the stake. Finally, in the Constitution of the United States, "Treason was defined as an action rather than thought or speech. Treason again[st] the U.S. shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid & Comfort. . . .' " (183; Doctorow's ellipsis). In a twentieth-century age of suspicion, however, treason becomes defined in exactly the opposite manner in America, not as action but as intention conspiracy to commit. And when the punishment it carries straps people into
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chairs, pastes electrodes on shaven heads and legs, and forces bodies to perform spastic dances of death, one wonders how far we have progressed from monarchic England and sixteenth-century Japan in both our actual conceptions of and punishments for treason. Edgar Allan Poe may well be America's "master subversive," as Daniel claims, for giving the lie to all those fine phrases about Virtue and Reason and Natural Law upon which the nation was founded (193-4). Considering the modern-day relationship between crime and punishment, one even may wonder whether we have not, in fact, regressed. In both the factual and fictionalized versions of the Rosenberg trial, the defendants were tried for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. Yet, in being tried for the seemingly less serious offense of conspiracy to commit treason, rather than for the actual offense of treason itself, the defendants were placed in a much more precarious position. "Since espionage itself does not have to be proved, no evidence is required that we have done anything. All that is required is evidence that we intended to do something. And what is this evidence?" Rochelle Isaacson asks. "Coincidentally enough under the law the testimony of our so-called accomplice is considered evidence" (206). As the prosecutor's burden of proof becomes less and less, the punishment grows proportionally larger and larger. It is easy to see this sense of a topsy-turvy universe characterizing the McCarthy era of thirty years ago. "This is the way it must feel to be committed to a madhouse through some medical mistake," said James Wechsler, "everything is turned upside down." Choosing not to incriminate oneself by invoking one's constitutional rights left one open to the label "Fifth Amendment Communist"; speaking out about former associations, honestly abandoned, left one liable to the charge of "implied treason." But however maddening and illogical these conditions seem in retrospect, it would be mistaken to attribute any paranoid style in the history of American politics to one paranoid man. Despite undeniable elements of personal paranoia witnessed in the Wisconsin senator by those called to testify, many attested afterward to an approach that was nothing less than bloodless. "He is usually described as a reckless political gambler and a wild-swinging bruiser who charges into a brawl without sizing up the situation," said Owen Lattimore, the man accused by McCarthy of being the "top Russian espionage agent" in the United States. "The truth is that every move he makes is coldly calculated, and that he is the master of a formidable technique."13 Nor would it be any more appropriate to attribute collective paranoia to one particularly paranoid time. Even after the Army-McCarthy hearings had seen to the senator's demise, fears of subversive activities continued unabated. In August 1954, a Gallup poll revealed that thirty-six percent of all Americans still had unshaken faith in McCarthy, believing, like him, that communists lurked everywhere, causing every national trouble by their conspiratorial endeavors. Likewise, even after the Rosenbergs had been executed, those pledged to defend their innocence invoked the same alarms as those whose sentence they were protesting had. In August 1956, the House Committee on Un-
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American Activities published a report on the National Committee to Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell. In the introduction to their report, the authors listed the eight objectives for which this national campaign was "clearly" established: 14 (1) To vilify the United States and its institutions and spread the lie that its Government is bent on annihilating minority groups and suppressing genuine political dissent; (2) To provide additional funds for the overall Communist program of subversion and propaganda; (3) To recruit new members and sympathizers for the Communist apparatus, crumbling under the impact of the Korean war, official pressure, and the exposure of Communist infiltration in government, education, and labor; (4) To refurbish the badly tarnished reputation of the Communist Party; (5) To create and exploit divisive anti-Semitic propaganda; (6) To bolster the Communist campaign to capture American churches; (7) To divert attention from anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and Soviet satellite nations; (8) To discredit American courts and judicial procedures, and cast doubt on all investigations and convictions of Communists. With the Iran-Contra hearings recently concluded, one is reminded that the fears giving rise to such assessments still remain. At the same time, one also sees the lengths to which people continue to go in their ongoing efforts to contain - if not manipulate - those anxieties. In Doctorow's novel, this trend toward alleviation is encapsulated in Disneyland, in which every aspect of American culture has been laid out: "the American West, called Frontierland; current technology, which is called T o morrowland; nursery literature, called Fantasyland; and Adventureland, which proposes colonialist exploration of wild jungles of big game and native villages. . . . In the center of the park, where all the areas converge, there is a plaza; and the fifth thematic area, an avenue called Main Street USA, a romantic rendering of small-town living at the turn of the century, leads like the birth canal from the plaza to the entrance to the park" (301-2). Yet the patriotic pill dispensed at Disneyland is of the freeze-dried variety, granting " a b breviated shorthand culture for the masses, a mindless thrill, like an electric shock, that insists at the same time on the recipient's rich psychic relation to his country's history and language and literature" (305). The danger of this rationale lies in its distortion of history, language, and literature in order to achieve that "psychic relation." Seemingly realistic sights mask simulated foundations: Plants and animals on the banks of jungle rivers are made of plastic, rocks of the Grand Canyon are painted reproductions. Testaments to history sanitize the past that they portray: One hundred fifty years of commercial harassment are glorified as "Pirates of the Caribbean." And monuments to literary chronicles edit out the authors who first created them: Life on the Mississippi turns Mark Twain's century of slave-trading into a ten-minute
CONCLUSION
151
boat ride. The only true reality existing in this environment is the handling of its crowds. Lulled into submission, accepting a distillated heritage and a drastically reduced past, its members opt for the ease of compliance over the efforts of examination. It is a small world, after all - shrinking more and more with each transposition. Such shrinkage bypasses political considerations of right or left. Indeed, the character in Doctorow's book who suffers the most from a narrowed historical perspective is the one who proclaims herself the most radical. Adopting the legend of the Isaacsons in lieu of her actual legacy, Susan Lewin suppresses all semblance of her self, becoming, in the end, a catatonic starfish, waiting for the final release of death. When she finally does die, Daniel knowingly attributes her death to "a failure of analysis" (317). In contrast, it is her brother, the unpoliticized and seemingly uncommitted Isaacson child, who survives into the future with both his heritage and his identity intact. For Daniel, knowledge of the past means remembering as much as he can of his parents' lives, and then trying to remember more. It means evaluating those recollections as honestly as possible, and then evaluating even more honestly his own responses to them. It means recognizing that, despite his best efforts, "The truth was beyond reclamation" (312). Finally, it means passing from frightened impotence over what he cannot do, like burn his draft card, and guilt-ridden consciousness over what he can do, like change his name, to begin a new kind of activity - writing the history, not only of his parents' lives, but of his own life in response to theirs, a Book of Daniel as told by Daniel. To be sure, it is a task involving as much pain as irony. He first must realize that his father betrayed his mother, and then he must realize that what one parent did to the other was no less culpable than what both parents did to both their children. He must acknowledge all the forces that have determined his life since birth. And he must take upon himself the full weight of history - his country's as well as his own. Yet it is only by accepting the full weight of the past that he can rid himself of its burden. When student radicals then take over Columbia University on the last pages of the novel, Daniel can respond in but one way to the student who informs him that he has been liberated: "I have to smile. It has not been unexpected" (318). Daniel has been moving toward an emotional liberation since the beginning of his narration, or, to be precise, since the beginning of his composition. But the work he writes is more than just a single-subject endeavor. It is "A Life Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctoral Degree in Social Biology, Gross Entomology, Women's Anatomy, Children's Cacophony, Arch Demonology, Eschatology, and Thermal Pollution" (318). By taking upon himself all the history to which he is heir, Daniel can free himself of many a past burden. The curse of his heritage can be turned into consciousness. The future can be faced with hope instead of hatred. And the book can come, finally, and with no looking back, to a close.
Notes
Introduction 1 2
3 4
5
6
7 8
For Coover's designation of The Public Burning as a "Historical Romance," see his interview with Frank Gado in First Person: Conversations on Writers & Writing 154. Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction 32; William A. Johnsen, "Toward a Redefinition of Modernism" 543; Ihab Hassan, "POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical Bibliography" 29. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History" 224; idem, "The Transcendentalist" 89. Henry James, Sr., "Democracy and Its Uses" 103. British critics in particular have charged Americans with an antipathy to the past. "The world is a great dodger," said D. H. Lawrence, "and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves" (Studies in Classic American Literature 1). More recently, Stephen Spender reiterated the same point when describing the fund of moral guilt that Americans have always possessed and always attempted to relinquish (Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities 129). Yet American critics have also commented upon these Adamic predilections. The seminal work, of course, is R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. For a discussion of Adamic tendencies in the twentieth century, see Ihab Hassan's Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. See Raymond M. Olderman, Beyond the Waste Land: A Study of the American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties 9, for a discussion of the way that contemporary writers discard the ideal of innocence. See, for example, Irving Howe's contention about the origins of modernism. Admitting that "the internal evolution of a form can significantly affect its nature and dress," he goes on to argue that "there must also occur some overwhelming historical changes for a major new cultural style to flourish" ("The Culture of Modernism" 52). William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 11; Henry James, Sr., "The Social Significance of Our Institutions" 118. Compare, for instance, the autobiographical remarks of two authors of different nationalities who worked in the post-World War I period. Writing from Paris, Joyce described history as "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (Ulysses 34). Recalling Paris during that same period, Hemingway described a dream come true: "We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other" (^4 Moveable Feast 51). 153
154 9
10
11 12 13 14
NOTES TO PAGES 6 - l 8
Leslie A. Fiedler, An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics 48. See, for example, Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing 23, "Faulkner in the 50's"; Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade - And AJier: America, IQ45—60 112; and, somewhat later, Chester E. Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties 4. For examples of allegations of "conformism," see Irving Howe, "This Age of Conformity" (1954), rpt. in A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics 253-4; John W. Aldridge, In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity (1956) 4; and Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (1959) 264, "Fifth Advertisement for Myself." For various interpretations of the reasons for the "conformism" cited, see Howe, "Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction" (1959), rpt. in A World More Attractive 86-7; Mary McCarthy, "The Fact in Fiction" (i960) 455; and Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction" (1961), rpt. in Reading My selfand Others 120, for discussions of the unreality of daily events; John W. Aldridge, AJier the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (1951) 240, on valuelessness; and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel (1976) 7, on new communication technology. Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers 151-60; Thomas Pynchon, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" 208; Joseph Heller, Catch-22 293; John Barth, The Friday Book 51. Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myselj"351; Heller, Catch-22 184. Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians 220; Barth, The Friday Book 159; Robert Coover, as qtd. in Gado, First Person 148. Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men 436.
Chapter 1 A Disruption of Sensibility 1 John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World 13; Norman Mailer, Barbary Shore 89; John Dos Passos, Nineteen Nineteen 344. 2 Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing 23; Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade - And AJier: America, ig4^—ig6o 112; C. P. Snow, "Science, Politics, and the Novelist" 16. 3 As John W. Aldridge has noted, "The point about the Cold War is precisely that it 15 cold and not hot. It is by definition a state of action withheld, of participation avoided . . . " ("The War Writers Ten Years Later" 36—7). In contrast, for examples of what participation during this period yielded, see Joseph J. Waldmeir, "Only an Occasional Rutabaga: American Fiction Since 1945" 471-5, which designates American novels of the late 1940s and 1950s as either "accommodationist" or "beat." 4 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter 38; Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Fugitive Slave Law" 861; idem, "New England Reformers" 451; Henry David Thoreau, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" 236; Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Society and Solitude" 745. 5 Increase Mather, "The Mystery of Israel's Salvation" 243; Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom line 418; Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society 190. 6 Trilling, The Liberal Imagination ix, 277. 7 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party 46—7; idem, The German Ideology 59; Karl Marx, letter to P. V. Annenkov, 28 Dec. 1846, 670; idem, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 20; idem, The Poverty of Philosophy 151.
NOTES TO PAGES 1 8 - 2 5 8
9 10
11 12
13
14 15 16
17 18
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Karl Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 Apr. 1871, 681; Frederick Engels, letter to J. Bloch, 21 [-22] Sept. 1890, 692; Karl Marx, Capital 1: 372; idem, letter to Frederick Engels, 25 Mar. 1868, rpt. in On History and People 103; Frederick Engels, The Origin ofthe Family, Private Property and the State 455-6. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France 294-5; Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 528-9; Louis Fischer, Untitled, The God That Failed 203. William Z. Foster, qtd. in Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters: A Year ofthe Slump 15-17; Melvin P. Levy, "Class War in Kentucky," in National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields 20— 1. Joseph Freeman, letters to Daniel Aaron, 16 June 1958 and 28 June 1958, qtd. in Aaron, Writers on the Left 270-1. History, at times, even graciously abetted these writers in their tasks. When John Reed sought to convey the hind of historical process the Bolsheviks accelerated when they took over the Smolny Institute in 1917, he did not have to imagine the religious significance of their act because the building in which they made their headquarters in fact had religious significance, having served previously as a convent school for daughters of the Russian nobility (Ten Days 54). When, over fifteen years later, Dos Passos sought to re-create in words the kind of vision that had inspired Reed, he did not have to go far to find words to describe Smolny "rolling out men nations hopes millenniums" for Smolny, by definition, was a place from which millennial hopes had issued (Nineteen Nineteen 17). Once the initial metaphors had been established, the rest followed naturally enough: Reed could depict an apocalyptic "sea of flame" yielding a "Day of the People" in Russia (147, 228); Dos Passos could show characters reading about the Revolution and declaring it "the dawning of The Day" in America (441). Because physics sought to order the universe of space in much the same way that historical patterns ordered that of time, it served a particularly useful analogical function over the years. Cotton Mather, for instance, found the study of physics to "Render the Knowledge of the World, as well more Perfect as more Usejitl," and so "advance the Empire of Man over the whole visible Creation" (Magnalia 265). Whitman pictured the immutability ofjustice in the law of gravity and he portrayed limitless time and space in the image of expanding solar systems ("Great Are the Myths" lines 52-4; idem, "Song of Myself" 45.1183-6). And, having found the study of physics conducive to a sense of metaphysical security, Emerson counseled "obedience" to those "divine circuits" that rule the world for eternity as countering any impatience with the specific conditions of the present ("New England Reformers" 467). Trilling, The Liberal Imagination 290; Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters 312-13; Richard Wright, Black Boy 150. Michael Gold, Jews Without Money 135-6, 142-3; James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan 35-6; idem, Judgment Day 465. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History 194; Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the lg^os 239; Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, "Images of Socialism," in A World More Attractive: A View ofModern Literature and Politics 237. John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel 125; idem, Three Soldiers 376; idem, Nineteen Nineteen 129; idem, The Big Money 460. V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature 462; Dos Passos, The 42nd
156
19 20
21
22
23 24
25
26
27
28
NOTES TO PAGES 2 5 - 3 O
Parallel 350; idem, Nineteen Nineteen 420; Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains 226. Max Eastman, qtd. in Theodore Draper, The Roots ofAmerican Communism 129. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original ofour Ideas ofBeauty and Virtue (1725), rpt. in Collected Works (Hildesheim, 1971) 163-4, qtd. in Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence 150. Lewis Mumford, "The Corruption of Liberalism," New Republic 29 Apr. 1940: 573; Chester E. Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties 87. Diana Trilling went so far as to claim, "had our opinion-forming class not for so many years blindly played the Soviet Union's game, Russia would not only not have achieved her present strength in Europe; she might not have been able to back North Vietnam as she did and there would have been no Vietnam War for us to have become engaged in as unwisely as we did" (We Must March My Darlings: A Critical Decade 58). Richard Wright, American Hunger 124-5; Wilson, The American Jitters 183; Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls 418. See Wright's The Outsider (217-21) for a fictional treatment of the kind of trial he recounted in American Hunger (123-6). John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers 400, 421; idem, The 42nd Parallel 324; idem, Nineteen Nineteen 390; idem, The Big Money 535. Reed, Ten Days 166, 238, 311-12; Maxwell Stewart, "Twenty Years of Progress," Nation 13 Nov. 1937: 523; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 86. Lionel Trilling ascribed his blindness to Whittaker Chambers's spying to a lack of imagination: "The foreign connection required that I admit into consciousness the possibility, even the probability, that he was concerned with something called military intelligence, but I did not equate this with espionage - it was as if such a thing hadn't yet been invented" (Introduction, Middle of the Journey xv—xvi). "The Week," New Republic 26 Aug. 1936: 57; "The Trial of the Trotskyites in Russia," New Republic 2 Sept. 1936: 88; "Another Russian Trial," New Republic 3 Feb. 1937: 399-400; "Moscow Loses Caste," New Republic 16 Mar. 1938: 151; "Is Leon Trotsky Guilty?: A Symposium," Modern Monthly Mar. 1937: 4-6. "The Week," New Republic 26 Aug. 1936: 58; "Another Russian Trial," New Republic 3 Feb. 1937: 400; "The Purge Goes On," New Republic 5 Jan. 1938: 241; " 'Old Bolsheviks' on Trial," Nation 22 Aug. 1936: 201; "Behind the Soviet Trials," Nation 6Feb. 1937: 143. "Americans and Russia," New Republic 15 Jan. 1940: 71; " 'Old Bolsheviks' on Trial," Nation 22 Aug. 1936: 201; "Behind the Soviet Trials," Nation 6 Feb. 1937: 144; "Russia and Mr. Chamberlain," New Republic 24 May 1939: 60-1; Oswald Garrison Villard, "Issues and Men," Nation 2 Sept. 1939:247; Louis Fischer, "Soviet Democracy: Second View," Nation 22 Aug. 1936: 205-7; " 'Old Bolsheviks' on Trial," Nation 22 Aug. 1936: 201; "The Soviets Accept a Challenge," Nation 31 Oct. 1936: 508-9; "Common Sense About Russia," New Republic 15 Nov. 1939: 99. "Was the Bolshevik Revolution a Failure?" Modern Quarterly n . i : 7-9, 13-14, 26. The eleven respondents who clearly felt that the Bolshevik Revolution did not achieve its proletarian objectives were: Norman Thomas, Max Eastman, Max N o mad, John Chamberlain, Benjamin Stolberg, Joseph Zack, Paul Mattick, William Knickerbocker, David P. Berenberg, Gorham Munson, and Herbert Zam. The only one who positively felt that the Revolution had achieved its proletarian objectives was Charles Malamuth. The nine respondents who qualified their replies with regard to the "World Proletarian Revolution" were: Norman Thomas, Max Eastman, Ernest Sutherland Bates, John Chamberlain, Joseph Zack, Liston M. Oak,
NOTES TO PAGES 3 O - 3 I
157
Paul Mattick, Theodore Brameld, and Herbert Zam. Excerpts quoted are from the replies of Eastman, Bates, Chamberlain, Zack, and Brameld, respectively. 29 Norman Thomas, "The Moscow Trials," Modern Monthly Mar. 1938: 4; Louis Fischer, "Russia - Twenty-two Years After," Nation 10 Feb. 1940: 183; Max Lerner, "The Left: End and Beginning," Nation 10 Feb. 1940: 165; "America and Russia," New Republic 15 Jan. 1940: 71. 30 Dwight Macdonald, Politics Past 148 (Dec. 1944). See Virginia Spencer Carr, Dos Passos: A Life 357—77; Wright, American Hunger 130-5; Louis Fischer, "Russia Goes West," Nation 23 Sept. 1939: 310; and Macdonald, Politics Past 138-46 (Oct. 1944). See Aaron, Writers on the Left 312, for an extensive list of incidents that led to similar recognitions on the part of communist sympathizers. 31 "The Shape of Things," Nation 11 Feb. 1939: 163; "Rediscovery of Russia," Nation 1 Apr. 1939: 364; "Russia and the World," Nation 13 Nov. 1937: 521; Malcolm Cowley, - And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History, igi8—igj8 152.
32
33
34
35
36
"Persecution Complex," New Republic 6 Dec. 1939: 179; "Communist Imperialism," Nation n Nov. 1939: 512; Louis Fischer, "Soviet Russia Today: II. Foreign Policy: Geneva to Helsinki," Nation 6 Jan. 1940: 9; Ralph Bates, "Disaster in Finland," New Republic 13 Dec. 1939: 221; Villard, "Issues and Men," Nation 4 Nov. 1939: 499Reinhold Niebuhr, "Ideology and Pretense," Nation 9 Dec. 1939:646; Lewis Corey, "Marxism Reconsidered," Nation 17 Feb. 1940: 245; Granville Hicks, "The Blind Alley of Marxism," Nation 28 Sept. 1940: 267. See Granville Hicks, "The Failure of Left Criticism," New Republic 9 Sept. 1940: 346. For similar uses of public forums to confess the errors of one's ways, see the remarks of Ralph Bates ("Disaster in Finland," New Republic 13 Dec. 1939: 225) and Louis Fischer ("Soviet Russia Today: III. Death of a Revolution," Nation 13 Jan. 1940: 41). For examples of the literary effects that Wilson's private retractions had, compare the jubilant response "The International" evokes from communists leading a hunger march in his 1932 American Jitters (41) with the near tedium the passage suggests when reworked in his 1958 American Earthquake (209). Wilson's revision of "The Best People" (chap. 27) as "Mr. and Mrs. X" leaves out those paragraphs that portray the American bourgeoisie as a self-styled aristocracy of wealth and capitalist society in America as "a vast system for passing the buck" (Jitters 288-9, 29J» 2 93~ 6; Earthquake's, 437, 438-9). Finally, the last chapter of The American Jitters, "The Case of the Author" (chap. 28), which opens by acknowledging how much Marx's predictions are in the process of coming true, and closes with Wilson's call for the abolition of the "class of owners," is omitted entirely from The American Earthquake. The term "The Irresponsibles" was coined by Archibald MacLeish. Philip Rahv defined as "truant" those connected with Partisan Review who were "escaping for a while from the harshness of whatever practical reality would claim them again." Reinhold Niebuhr referred to "The Soft Utopians" in Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics (i960), after having intimated the phrase as early as 1940. See Archibald MacLeish, "The Irresponsibles," Nation 18 May 1940: 618-23; Philip Rahv, qtd. in William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals 12-13; a n d Reinhold Niebuhr, "An End to Illusions," Nation 29June 1940: 778—9. Waldo Frank, "Our Guilt in Fascism," New Republic6 May 1940: 607; idem, qtd. in "On 'The Irresponsibles,' " Nation 1 June 1940: 679—80; Cowley, Writer's Trade 139; William Barrett, The Truants 122.
I58
NOTES TO PAGES 3 2 - 4 O
37 James T. Farrell, "The Cultural Front," Partisan Review 7.2 (1940): 140; Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself439; idem, Barbary Shore 117; Fischer, Untitled 225; John Dos Passos, qtd. in "The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions," Partisan Review 6.4 (1939): 27. 38 "Whither the American Writer (A Questionnaire)," Modern Quarterly 6.2 (1932): 11-19; "The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions," Partisan Review 6.4 (1939): 29, 36, 51, 123. The twelve writers who felt, in 1932, that a writer should participate in the social crisis were: John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, C. Hartley Grattan, Edwin Seaver, John Chamberlain, "Anonymous," Rudolph Fisher, Malcolm Cowley, Percy H. Boynton, Newton Arvin, Granville Hicks, and Clifton Fadiman. The twelve writers who felt, in 1939, that politics was an area writers entered at their own risk were: John Dos Passos, Allen Tate, James T. Farrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein, John Peale Bishop, Henry Miller, Louise Bogan, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, and Horace Gregory. Excerpts quoted are from the replies of Tate, Porter, Miller, and Gregory, respectively. 39 Louise Bogan, qtd. in "The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions," Partisan Review 6.4 (1939): 107; Villard, "Issues and Men," Nation 2 Sept. 1939: 247; Lerner, "The Left: End and Beginning" 166; qtd. in Granville Hicks, "New Directions on the Left," New Republic 17June 1940: 816; Wright, The Outsider 353. 40 For Mailer's discussion of Advertisements for Myself &s "the watershed book" and a brief reference to the influence of Henry Adams on him, see his interview with Hilary Mills, "Creators on Creating: Norman Mailer," Saturday Review (1981), rpt. as "The Mad Butler" in Pontifications 145, 149. For a more extended discussion of the unconscious influence that Adams's Education had on the writing of The Armies ofthe Night, see Mailer's interview with Barbara Probst Solomon, "A Conversation with Norman Mailer," El Pais 4 Oct. 1981, rpt. as "To Pontificate on America and Europe" in Pontifications 186-7. 41 For Pynchon's acknowledgment of the influence that Mailer's work, and in particular "The White Negro," had on him in the 1950s, see Slow Learner xvi. Chapter 2 The Transition to Post-Modernism: Norman Mailer and a New Frontier in Fiction 1
2 3 4 5
The prominence of war in Mailer's work has been noted by critics before, each of whom looks at the metaphor from a different perspective, interprets it in a different way, and ascribes it a different degree of importance. See, respectively, Richard Poirier, Norman Mailer 1-26, and John Michael Lennon, "Mailer's Cosmology" 23-4, for examples of the broadest and narrowest interpretations. My reading of the metaphor reflects a dual perspective: In terms of Mailer's personal life, it sees the centrality of war originating in Mailer's early experience with Marxist dialectics; in terms of Mailer's position among other American writers, it places his portrayal of war alongside those of other novelists working during the same period of time. Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers 159; idem, Advertisements for Myself 258, 354, 302. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist" 103; idem, "Idealism" 204. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" (1844) 421; idem, "Idealism" 204, 202; Norman Mailer, Barbary Shore 194; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 26. Earlier criticism questions the maintenance of a Hip pose amid a domesticating
NOTES TO PAGES 4 O - 4 4
I59
culture. See, for example, Irving Howe, "A Quest for Peril: Norman Mailer" 127, and George Alfred Schrader, "Norman Mailer and the Despair of Defiance" 88. Later criticism simply questions whether the hipster exists at all. Lawrence Goldman thus finds Mailer's hipster a product of "a desperately Utopian consciousness and little else" ("The Political Vision of Norman Mailer" 135). In much the same manner, Jean Radford finds him to exist "only in the world of Mailer's fictional imagination" (Norman Mailer: A Critical Study 92). 6 "Looking back on it, I can give you a good and bad motive that I had for killing Hearn at that point," Mailer recalled in 1981. "The good motive was that it seemed to me that it was about as powerful a way to show what death is like in war as anything I could do in that book. The shoddy motive was I wasn't altogether sure in my heart that I knew what to do with him, or knew how to bring him off." Having been unsure even of how to kill off the character, he also admitted here to having stolen Hearn's surprise death "directly" from E. M. Forster's The Longest Journey. See Mailer's interview with Joseph McElroy, "A Little on Novel-Writing," 7
8
Columbia: A Magazine ofPoetry and Prose 6 (1981), rpt. in Pontifications 179—80. See, respectively, Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future 67; Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth 21; and Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima 485-8. For further discussion of the cycles of nuclear alarm and nuclear apathy, see Paul
Boyer, By The Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age 352-67. 9 Here, too, Mailer's presumption is hardly original. Five years earlier, Ralph Ellison dramatized a similar mode of survival in the way that Invisible Man portrayed its "men of transition" living "outside the groove of history." In contrast to Mailer's certainty, however, Ellison could do no more than speculate on the great potential of the stance he proposed: "[W]ho knew but that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious?" (381-3). 10 In delineating historical progress with reference to sexual metaphors, "The White Negro" only follows the lead of The Deer Park, which ends by defining Time as "the connection of new circuits" and linking Time as Sex (327). The most immediate product of the essay's impact on Mailer's thought can be found in his short story, "The Time of Her Time," in which the narrator, once again Sergius O'Shaugnessy, strives to bring a young woman to her first orgasm (Advertisements for Myself 440-65). 11 The allegations of primitivism and present-orientation come, respectively, from Stanley T. Gutman, Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer 84, and Robert J. Begiebing, Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Arche-
type in the Works of Norman Mailer 48. More recently, Joseph Wenke has added his voice to those of these critics by viewing the "myth of primitivism" that he finds underlying "The White Negro" as an attempt "to regain for oneself an identity of Adamic innocence . . . that was all but irremediably lost to history," an attempt that has "its symbolic source in the Adamic tradition of American literature" (Mailer's America 77-8). Other critics who have ascribed a spiral shape to the dialectical path that Mailer delineates are Laura Adams, Richard Poirier, and Howard M. Harper, Jr. See Adams, Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer 28—9; Poirier, Norman Mailer 52; and Harper, Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike 118. 12 For a discussion of Mailer's cosmology as compared with that of American Roman-
160
NOTES TO PAGES 4 4 - 4 7
tic writers, notably Melville, see John Michael Lennon, "Mailer's Cosmology" 1829. For a discussion of Mailer's cosmology as the product of Elizabethan metaphysics and Einstein's modern physics, see Richard D. Finholt, " 'Otherwise How Explain?' Norman Mailer's New Cosmology" 375—86. 13 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, qtd. in Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam 12-13; Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam 164. 14 Asserting that he began An American Dream about eight weeks before Kennedy's assassination, Mailer contends - somewhat ingenuously - that any similarity in names between Barney Oswald Kelly and Lee Harvey Oswald resulted from "psychic coincidences'' (Cannibals and Christians 173). In his later review of Mark Lane's Rush
to Judgment, Mailer offers his own hypothesis regarding the assassination of the president. Focusing less on the assassination itself and more on the events that followed, Mailer admits "there may have been no formal master plan to murdering Kennedy, just coincidences beyond repair and beyond tolerance" or "Kennedy may have been killed by a conspiracy which was petty to its root." Alleging that Oswald served as a petty undercover agent for a number of espionage agencies, Mailer is far more certain about the premeditated cover-up that he feels occurred after Oswald's arrest when "the power of several master conspiracies may then have been aroused to protect every last one of us against the possibility of discovery, against the truth, for no one in power in America knew what that truth was" (Existential Errands 281). See "A Harlot High and Low" for an application of these theories to the 1972 Watergate break-in, to which Mailer finds more than one plot to have contributed (Pieces 203). See, in addition, the series of connections he offers when proposing Marilyn Monroe's death in 1962 as "the seed of assassinations to follow" (Marilyn 15
242). See Lewy, America in Vietnam 4-5; FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake 91, 597, 404; and Don Oberdorfer, Tetl: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War 81. Figures cited for the
dollars spent on the war in Vietnam vary somewhat from source to source. In proposing $1,063 and $1.33 billion for the year 1954 respectively, Lewy and FitzGerald are close in estimating the United States to have financed between 78 and 80 percent of the French war effort. Arguing instead that American expenditures had only reached a total of approximately $954 million in 1954, in contrast to French spending of close to $11 billion between 1946 and 1954, Bernard B. Fall explicitly refutes the myth that American taxpayers financed the French in Indochina (Street Without Joy 314). 16 See Boyer, By The Bomb's Early Light 11 —12, 83, for discussion of the link between the atomic bomb and Eros in postwar America. 17 It is in neglecting this creative component of Mailer's sense of sexuality that feminist critics most often err. Judith Fetterley, for instance, cites Rojack's destructive sexual instincts twice: She quotes Rojack's description of raiding life when in bed with a woman, and she quotes his description of lovemaking leaving him with murderous sensations. Significantly, she omits this passage in which Rojack experiences sex with Cherry as a most creative and satisfying communion. See "An American Dream: 'Hula, Hula,' Said the Witches" 167, 173. For a contrasting argument that relates sexual creativity and artistic creativity in Mailer's work, see Jessica Gerson, "Norman Mailer: Sex, Creativity and God" 1-16. 18 Anyone familiar with Mailer's work is aware of the recurrent condemnation that his conception of violence has received. For representative examples, see Robert Ehrlich, Norman Mailer: The Radical as Hipster 10; Samuel Hux, "Mailer's Dream of
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Violence" 157; and Grace Witt, "The Bad Man as Hipster: Norman Mailer's Use of Frontier Metaphor" 207. See, for instance, Mailer's feelings about capital punishment as expressed in The Presidential Papers. Although most in favor of a law that would abolish such punishment completely, Mailer proposes a new form of execution for those states that would insist on keeping the practice: hand-to-hand combat between executioners and criminals of equal size in public arenas. As he explains, "Since nothing is worse for a country than repressed sadism, this method of execution would offer ventilation for the more cancerous emotions of the American public" ( n ) . In The Armies of the Night, he advances a limited battle between three divisions of American Marines and three divisions of Chinese communists as preferable to the unlimited carnage of the war in Vietnam (212-13). Although Witt likens Rojack's strangling of Deborah to Croft's machine-gunning of a disemboweled soldier in The Naked and the Dead ("The Bad Man as Hipster" 215), the character in that first novel that Rojack most brings to mind is Hearn, for after Deborah's death he gauges himself with reference to the same evolutionary scheme that Hearn has used to gauge his own identity earlier. The difference is in the degree of progress that each attributes to himself. Hearn compares himself to a kelp, a Darwinian throwback that has had to stay behind in water. Rojack compares himself to a creature that has been able to make the move to land: "[Y]es, I felt just as some creature locked by fear to the border between earth and water (its grip the accumulated experience of a thousand generations) might feel on that second when its claw took hold, its body climbed up from the sea, and its impulse took a leap over the edge of mutation so that now and at last it was something new, something better or worse, but never again what it had been on the other side of the instant. I felt as if I had crossed a chasm of time and was some new breed of man" (An American Dream 80). R. Gordon Arneson, Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, 31 May 1945, and Leslie R. Groves, Report on Alamogordo Atomic Bomb Test, 18 July 1945, rpt. in Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and The Grand Alliance 302, 312; Paul Tibbets, The Atomic Cafe, dir. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, Archives Project, Inc., 1982; Edward Teller, qtd. in Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers 167. Robert M. Kipp, "Counterinsurgency from 30,000 Feet: The B-52 in Vietnam," Air University Review 19.2 (1968): 17, qtd. in Lewy, America in Vietnam 96. See Lewy 96 for further discussion of American tactics in Vietnam as extensions of those employed in World War I and World War II. The statistics quoted appear in Oberdorfer, Tet! 92—3, 96. For a discussion of the continuing racial element in this history of domination, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War 147-80. FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake 3 60-1. See Marvin E. Gettleman et al., eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History 238-9; Lewy, America in Vietnam 385. The labels that critics have assigned to Book One and Book Two continue to vary. For representative examples of those who see Book Two as a journalistic account or a work of history and focus on its objectivity of tone, see Ehrlich, Norman Mailer 115; Gutman, Mankind in Barbay 189-90; Jennifer Bailey, Norman Mailer: QuickChange Artist 94; and Begiebing, Acts of Regeneration 151-2. Ronald Weber, in contrast, sees both Book One and Book Two as novelistic ("Recording Angel and
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Amateur Philosopher" 82). And John Hellmann ascribes elements of both the historical and the novelistic to both books ("Journalism as Metafiction: Norman Mailer's Strategy for Mimesis and Interpretation in a Postmodern World" 41). Both Josh Greenfeld and Robert Solotaroff see subsequent events, like the Paris peace talks, invalidating the credibility of Mailer's conclusions. From a May 1968 perspective, Greenfeld finds it "difficult to conceive of that Washington Weekend as more important than a footnote" ("The Line Between Journalism and Literature: Thin, Perhaps, but Distinct" 363). Solotaroff criticizes Book Two for having presented a prophecy that proved false and so becoming "a fiction in a way that Mailer did not intend it to be" (Down Mailer's Way 233). Certainly, the impact of the March can now be seen as limited. Yet Mailer's intention in The Armies of the Night is not to present the 1967 March as a penultimate historical event. Nor is his hope at the end anything more than tentative. Hardly prophetic, it is, finally, historical, part of the history of 1967 when people reasonably could feel a certain way that they could not in other years. Henry David Thoreau, Walden 221; Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" 24.501-2, 506. For a detailed comparison of Mailer's resistance in The Armies of the Night and Thoreau's resistance a hundred years earlier, see Barry A. Marks, "Civil Disobedience in Retrospect: Henry Thoreau and Norman Mailer" 144-65. Michael J. Aden, "Notes on the New Journalism," Atlantic Monthly May 1972: 47; Charles H. Brown, "Journalism Versus Art," Current June 1972: 37; Thoreau, Walden 7; Norman Mailer, as qtd. in Laura Adams, "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer" 209. See Mailer's interview with Steven Marcus, "An Interview with Norman Mailer" 40. In Existential Errands, Mailer explains in detail what writing about oneself affords: "If a man is writing an accurate narrative about himself with real people and their real names, and this narrative arises because some imbalance or pressure or obsession or theme persists in dogging the man through all his aesthetic or moral nature until he sets to work, then he is willy-nilly caught in the act of writing into the unexplored depths of himself, into those regions which are as mysterious to him as other people. So he can comprehend, no, rather he can deal with himself as a literary object, as the name of that man who goes through his pages, only by creating himself as a literary character, fully so much as any literary character in a work of undisputed fiction. That is the only way a man in mid-career can begin to approach the mysterious forces which push him to write about these matters in the first place. He is off on a search" (180). For an evaluation of self-creation as an instrument for self-analysis, seej. Michael Lennon, "Mailer's Radical Bridge" 179-80. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History" 222. For a thorough discussion of the relationship between Book One and Book Two of The Armies of the Night, see Robert Merrill, Norman Mailer 110-28. For two far less sympathetic appraisals of Mailer's growing conservatism, see Robert Merideth, "The 45-second Piss: A Left Critique of Norman Mailer and The Armies of the Night" 433-49, and Robert Merrill, "After Armies: Norman Mailer's Recent Nonfiction" 452-4. "The Crew of Apollo n : What Kind of Men Are They?" New York Times 17 July 1969: 31, 39. When asked to comment on the reserve of the Apollo 11 astronauts, even flight director Clifford E. Charlesworth had to admit, "This particular crew is just not talkative" ("Apollo 11 Coasts Toward Moon Past the Midpoint; Rocket Fired to Refine Its Course," New York Times 18July 1969:12). Tom Wolfe attributes
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much of this renunciation of romanticism to a shift from "the right stuff" to "the operational stuff," from a conception of the individual as hero to a conception of technology as hero, a shift he sees reflected in the move of the aeronautics industry from Edwards Air Force Base to Cape Canaveral to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. See The Right Stuff, chap. 2 (21-43), as compared with chap. 13 (352-86). Alfred Kazin, "The World as a Novel: From Capote to Mailer" 30; Kazin's ellipsis. "Excerpts From Conversations Between Apollo 11 and Houston Mission Control," New York Times 18 July 1969: 12. Norman Mailer, as qtd. in David Young, "Norman Mailer on Science and Art" 336. For a specific comparison of Mailer's "science poetry" in Of a Fire on the Moon to Emerson's "universal poetry" and Whitman's "catalogue poems," see Norman Weinstein, "Norman Mailer's Space Odyssey" 231-4. For an extended discussion of the literary influence of Melville on Mailer, see Michael Cowan, "The Americanness of Norman Mailer" 95-104, 109-11. See, for instance, Philip H. Bufithis's remark about the final view of Mailer "sniffing away at a small moon rock hermetically sealed within two layers of glass": "A nebulously intuitive ending, it leaves us unsatisfied. . . . We would like to depend on more than Mailer's nose to understand the significance of the greatest odyssey man has ever undertaken" (Norman Mailer 102). Chapter 3
Thomas Pynchon: An Interface of History and Science
1 In the even more recent "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" Pynchon adds his voice to the other disparaging ones reflecting upon the literature produced in the 1950s. Extolling the virtues of the science fiction written in the decade after the bombing of Hiroshima, he finds the works of that genre as important as the works of the Beat movement, and "certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years" (41). 2 For the most sustained, and illuminating, discussions of Puritanism in Pynchon's work, see John M. Krafft, " 'And How Far-Fallen': Puritan Themes in Gravity's Rainbow" 55-73; Scott Sanders, "Pynchon's Paranoid History" 139-59; and, more recently, Marcus Smith and Khachig Tololyan, "The New Jeremiad: Gravity's 3
Rainbow" 169-86. See Savan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Selfi—34, for a detailed
discussion of the way in which the Puritan biographer conceived of his subject. 4 For details of Pynchon's ancestry, see Mathew Winston, "The Quest for Pynchon" 251-63. 5 For criticism of Slothrop's family origins, see, for example, Mark Richard Siegel, Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow 98, and Joseph W. Slade, Thomas 6
Pynchon 196. Edward Winslow, "Good News," qtd. in Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World 48. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American feremiad, for a
discussion of Puritan culture that is underscored by the claim for free enterprise beginning in seventeenth-century New England. 7 Compare the horror with which Slothrop's suspicion fills him to the sense of "allcontrolling and all-permeating wonderfulness" that "The Finger of God" suggests to Melville's Pierre, not to mention the even greater joy he receives from his belief that "it is not merely The Finger, it is the whole outspread Hand of God; for doth
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NOTES TO PAGES 7 8 - 8 9 not Scripture intimate, that He holdeth all of us in the hollow of His hand?" (Pierre 168). As Khachig Tololyan has pointed out, Rathenau was no stranger to the importance of integrated, and extended, economic interests during wartime, having served as president of the German General Electric Corporation (AEG) and as a member of the board of eighty-six corporations during World War I. Indeed, after the Treaty of Versailles limited the reorganization of the German army, the legal rearmament of the military was predicated upon the General Staff being reconstituted in the form of a business company ("War as Background in Gravity's Rainbow" 55). For samples of the various ways in which critics have portrayed this historical decline, see Lance W. Ozier, "Antipointsman/Antimexico: Some Mathematical Imagery in Gravity's Rainbow," for a mathematical consideration (74); Joel D. Black, "Probing a Post-Romantic Paleontology: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow," for a geological approach (239); and Thomas S. Smith, "Performing in the Zone: The Presentation of Historical Crisis in Gravity's Rainbow," for a presentation of "reverse Hegelianism" (247). The other literary exemplar for the story, as Pynchon has admitted in Slow Learner, is Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. Along with the spy novels of John Buchan, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Helen Maclnnes, reading Wilson's and Machiavelli's books helped to formulate the question that Pynchon sees underlying the entire story: "[I]s history personal or statistical?" (xxix). A sampling of the 1848 events to which Lukacs alluded are revolutions in Paris, Vienna, Prussia, Germany, Prague, Lombardy, Venetia, Sardinia, and Hungary. Perhaps the most emblematic of these European changes was Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte becoming president of the French Republic on 20 December 1848. Interestingly enough, Henry Adams also cited 1848 as the year when "the eighteenth century, as an actual and living companion, vanished," so allowing for the onslaught of the new century. In Adams's case, however, the choice of year had more to do with personal than political matters, seeing as it did the death of his grandfather, John Quincy Adams (Education 20). See, for instance, Tony Tanner, "Caries and Cabals," for a discussion of history as "a scenario which the participants are unable to rewrite or avoid" (24). Siegel, Creative Paranoia 47. David Thorburn suggests another reason why Slothrop cannot fully appreciate what occurs in the Roseland men's room. The episode derives from the third and fourth chapters of The Autobiography ofMalcolm X, 2. text with which Pynchon could be familiar but that Slothrop could not possibly know ("A Dissent on Pynchon" 70). In tracing this shift in scientific thought, I am greatly indebted to Alan J. Friedman for providing me with a manuscript copy of "Science and Technology" prior to its publication in Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow (69-102). For a much shorter summation of this evolution in thought, see Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel 14—19. For a discussion of its ramifica-
tions with regard to perception and subjectivity, see Robert L. Nadeau, "Readings from the New Book of Nature: Physics and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow" 454-9, and Lance Olsen, "Pynchon's New Nature: The Uncertainty Principle and Indeterminacy in The Crying of Lot 4g" 153-7. And for a discussion of its effect on the arts, see Douglas Angus, "Quantum Physics and the Creative Mind" 212-20. 15 For readings of Pynchon's work that take an opposing stand with regard to his advocacy of sequential historical ordering, and which assert that Pynchon recog-
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nizes man's "rage for order" but frustrates it nevertheless, see Linda A. Westervelt, " 'A Place Dependent on Ourselves': The Reader as System-Builder in Gravity's Rainbow" 85-7, and T. Smith, "Performing in the Zone" 247-8, as representative examples. Critics have long been divided over the relative merits of paranoia in Pynchon's work. Those who view it favorably often have R. D. Laing in mind (Manfred Puetz, "Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: The World is a Tristero System" 137). But critics who affirm paranoia generally move on from this psychoanalytic angle to view paraonia as a functional device for systematizing information (Richard Poirier, "The Importance of Thomas Pynchon" 28; William M. Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon 191). Critics who denounce paranoia admit to this organizing function, but find various faults with the kind of framework it fashions. Some view the structure as imprisoning (Lance W. Ozier, "The Calculus of Transformation: More Mathematical Imagery in Gravity's Rainbow" 196; Carolyn S. Pyuen, "The Transmarginal Leap: Meaning and Process in Gravity's Rainbow" 43; and Douglas A. Mackey, The Rainbow Quest of Thomas Pynchon 43). Others see the organization of information as inevitably solipsistic and unnecessarily mystifying, leaving the individual separated from the community as a consequence (Sanders, "Paranoid History" 157; Joseph W. Slade, "Escaping Rationalization: Options for the Self in Gravity's Rainbow" 33-4; and Nadeau, "Readings" 460). For a list of analogues between Puritan and entropic thought, see Sanders, "Paranoid History" 154. For a specific discussion of Puritan metaphysics and statistical probability models, see John R. Holmes, " 'A Hand to Turn the Time': History as Film in Gravity's Rainbow" 11. Samuel Torrey, An Exhortation Unto Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: 1674) 1, qtd. in Bercovitch, Puritan Origins 43. For.an opposing view of the Schwarzkommando, see Thomas H. Schaub's interpretation of Enzian's goals - however unachieved - with respect to Eliade's myth of "eternal return" (Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity 83-8). For an interpretation that still sees a transcendence of death as a realizable ideal in Pynchon's work, see Ozier, "The Calculus of Transformation" 193-210, which discusses "time transformed into the timeless" (199) with reference to mathematical imagery. As much as critics divide over paranoia in Pynchon's fiction, so do they divide over Slothrop's final moments in Gravity's Rainbow. The following samples may be taken as suggestive. Those condemning Slothrop see him forgetting his past to pursue mindless pleasures in the present (Edward Mendelson, "Gravity's Encyclopedia" 183). Critics moving toward a more laudatory view see Slothrop achieving some sort of Rilkean transformation, despite their own qualifications (Plater, The Grim Phoenix 196; Siegel, Creative Paranoia 70; and Slade, "Escaping Rationalization" 36). Finally, critics who applaud Slothrop's end see his last moments signifying everything from a counterculture salute to a sacred apotheosis (George Levine, "Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon's Fiction" 134—5; Frank D. McConnell, "Thomas Pynchon and the Abreaction of the Lord of Night" 180; and David Co wart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art ofAllusion 47). In what is perhaps the best book-length study of Pynchon to date, Molly Hite also argues for the need of dealing with "multiple partial, overlapping, and often conflicting" Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (10). In her chapter "The Arc
and the Covenant: Gravity's Rainbow as Secular History" (95-157), she applies her thesis to ideas of historical order specifically and proposes a model of history that is
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spatial and static, achieved in Pynchon's novel through "networks of associations" (152). As the remainder of this chapter will illustrate, the historical process that I see Pynchon advancing is linear and evolutionary, achieved in his novels through metaphor rather than resemblance. See, as well, Kathryn Hume's section on "Binary Oppositions and Mediations" for discussion of the way in which other kinds of antinomies within Gravity's Rainbow should be considered {Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow 118-35). Additional alternatives to dialectical thought are proposed by Pyuen and Schaub, but neither argument follows through with the conditions set forth in its opening thesis. Pyuen finds Gravity's Rainbow demanding that the reader first use his reasoning to sort out its "basic ideas," and then apply his "non-reasoning sense" to perceive "a holistic moment of connectedness" ("The Transmarginal Leap" 45), yet her phenomenologically based argument does not discuss exactly how the novel provokes the reader to reach the final union she cites - namely, the interface within his own mind that combines these two modes of thinking. Likewise, when Schaub comes to apply the "condition of simultaneity" that he introduces at the beginning of his book to the act of reading Pynchon's work itself, he defines for the reader a position "between those points which coincide, all of which exist in Pynchon's art on the same vertical axis of imagination," thus suggesting the uncertainty of alternation rather than the simultaneity of combination (Voice ofAmbiguity 4, 107). For the most complete discussion of Maxwell's Demon, see Anne Mangel, "Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49" 87-92. Although nineteenth-century scientists had no way of disproving the Demon's existence, twentieth-century physicists have found loopholes in its operations. Discussions of these loopholes in Maxwell's hypothesis can be found in Peter L. Abernethy, "Entropy in Pynchon's The Crying ofLot 49" 24; Charles B. Harris, "Death and Absurdity: Thomas Pynchon and the Entropic Vision" 97; Mangel, "Maxwell's Demon" 91-2; and Poirier, "The Importance of Thomas Pynchon" 26. W. T. Lhamon, Jr., offers a Pentecostal language of tongues as an alternative linguistic device, but admits to its limitations in portraying opposition - its esoteric function can expand too easily into an exoteric one. Too much is included within its scope, and discrete opposition then tends to blur. See Lhamon, "Pentecost, Promiscuity, and Pynchon's V.: From the Scaffold to the Impulsive" 78-84. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, qtd. in Lion Feuchtwanger, The House ofDesdemona or The Laurels and Limitations ofHistorical Fiction 37. Manfred Ptietz thus makes an important point when distinguishing Pynchon from the fabulist writers of his time ("Tristero System" 132). For additional readings that see Pynchon's writing compelling a return to the real world outside of the text, see C. E. Nicholson and R. W. Stevenson, " 'Words You Never Wanted to Hear': Fiction, History and Narratology in The Crying of Lot 49" 105-8, and T. Smith, "Performing in the Zone" 254-5. F° r a contrasting argument that sees Pynchon advocating the artifact over the actual, and which ascribes to Pynchon a Nabokovian set of priorities, see David Cowart's chapter, " 'Making the Unreal Reel': Film in Gravity's Rainbow" (Art ofAllusion 31-62). Propaganda schemes of this sort are not Pynchon's invention, but were in fact employed by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the course of World War II. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory 328. For discussions of Pynchon's use of language that see only a destruction of linguistic systems in his novels, see Louis Mackey, "Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition" 22—
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9, and Charles Russell, "Pynchon's Language: Signs, Systems, and Subversion" 251-72. For discussions of Pynchon's use of language that see multiple meanings generated, see Dwight Eddins, "Paradigms Reclaimed: The Language of Science in Gravity's Rainbow11 77-80, which focuses on technological and mathematical terminology; and Maureen Quilligan, The Language ofAllegory: Defining the Genre 4 2 -
6, 204—23, 261-78, which argues for the "possibilities of language in the realm of action" (215), and later treats the choices offered a reader of narrative allegory. 29 The judgments quoted come from Raymond M. Olderman, "The Illusion and the Possibility of Conspiracy" 125; Plater, The Grim Phoenix 49; and Michael Seidel, "The Satiric Plots of Gravity's Rainbow11 197. See T. Smith, "Performing in the Zone" 256; Russell, "Pynchon's Language" 271; and Joel D. Black, "Pynchon's Eve of De-struction" 33-4, for similar arguments regarding Pynchon's historical helplessness. 30 Pynchon's symbols may contain contradictory meanings, but it is worthwhile to consider the way that Melville employed his symbols one hundred years earlier. In the chapter entitled "Moby Dick," Melville speaks of the ubiquity of the whale, noting "that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time." In "The Whiteness of the Whale," he discusses its color in a manner that predates Pynchon. As Melville speculates, "Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?" thus prefiguring Vheissu. And when continuing with the question, "Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors . . . ?" he prefigures the Rocket as well (Moby-Dick 152, 163). Chapter 4 John Barth: Clio as Kin to Calliope 1 According to Barth, he came to this conclusion after rereading the opening words of The Thousand and One Nights: "There is a book called The Thousand and One
2
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Nights in which it is written. . . ." As he says, "At that moment I realized that while I thought I was an Aristotelian, I am in fact a Platonist, and that all novelists are practicing Platonists. Because if that book exists anywhere, it is in the heaven of ideas." See his remarks in James McKenzie, "Pole-Vaulting in Top Hats: A Public Conversation with John Barth, William Gass, and Ishmael Reed" 141. For a discussion of Barth's early experience as a musical orchestrator, see Charlie Reilly's "An Interview with John Barth" 10-11. For Barth's remarks about the service that the image of the chambered nautilus affords him, see his interview with Frank Gado in First Person: Conversations on Writers & Writing 129. John Barth, as qtd. in Gado, First Person 118, 115. John Barth, as qtd. in Gado, First Person 118. To date, two kinds of criticism have taken a historical approach to these works of Barth. The first, which details Barth's use of his source materials, is exemplified by Alan Holder, " 'What Marvelous Plot. . . Was Afoot?' History in Barth's The SotWeed Factor11 596-604; Philip E. Diser, "The Historical Ebenezer Cooke" 48—59; and Joseph Weixlmann, "The Use and Abuse of Smith's Generall Historie in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor11 105-15. The second, which discusses the issue of historiography, is exemplified by Linda S. Bergmann, " 'The Whys and Wherefore's oft': History and Humor in The Sot-Weed Factor11 31-7; Barbara C. Ewell,
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"John Barth: The Artist of History" 32-46; and Thomas S. Gladsky, " The Sot- Weed Factor as Historiography" 37-47. None, however, considers the relationship between literary history and American history that shall be my focus here. The only piece to date that does display such concerns is an illuminating treatment of LETTERS, Max F. Schulz's "Barth, Letters, and the Great Tradition" 95-115. 6 For a discussion of the kinds of research that Barth performed in order to write The Sot-Weed Factor, see David Morrell, John Barth: An Introduction 45-6. Barth, how-
ever, consistently refers to these endeavors as "homework," and, in removing The Sot-Weed Factor and LETTERS from the genre of "historical fiction," repeatedly emphasizes that he performed "a novelist's homework, not a historian's" when investigating the past periods of the regions in which his works are set. See his 1979 essay, "Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or, About Aboutness" in The Friday Book 180—92. 7 For references to these various ways of delineating the path that history follows, see The Sot-Weed Factor (740), Giles Goat-Boy (766), Chimera (53, 156), and LETTERS
(431, 720, 98). For a more straightforward assessment of the way he sees history moving, see Barth's declaration in "The Future of Literature and the Literature of the Future": "The only view of history that squares with my experience, education, and intuitions is the tragic view; I see no reason not to extend it to the future as well" (The Friday Book 162). 8 For an excellent discussion of cyclic visions of history in Barth's work, see Gordon E. Slethaug, "Barth's Refutation of the Idea of Progress" 11-29. 9 Even in his public accounts, Smith was forced to admit that "so much scorned was the name of Virginia, some did chuse to be hanged ere they would go thither, and were"; yet he also insisted that the conditions that contributed to that early impression were part of New England's past. Indeed, in his efforts to gain investors in the colony, and so obtain money for the colonial royal navy he desired, Smith implored his audience to think of Virginia as having great potential profits: "Therefore (honorable and worthy Countrymen) let not the meannesse of the word Fish distaste you, for it will afford as good gold as the mines of Guiana or Tumbatu, with lesse hazard and charge, and more certain tie and facilitie" (New Englands Trials 263, 272).
10 For a list of such works, see Robert B. Heilman, "The Dream Metaphor: Some Ramifications" 7. For further discussion of the effect that printed literature has had on the formation of an American mythology, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology
of the American Frontier, 1600—1800 18—24; f ° r
discussion of the European literature that contributed to the formation of a Southern mythology during the time in which The Sot-Weed Factor is set in particular, see 192-4, 213-22.
n
See Jay B. Hubbell, "The Smith-Pocahontas Story in Literature" 282; Joseph Weixlmann, "The Use and Abuse of Smith's Generall Historie in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor" i n ; and Phillip Young, "The Mother of Us All: Pocahontas Reconsidered" 397. 12 See the "Preface of foure Poynts" to the Generall Historie, which opens with Smith's declaration that "This plaine History humbly sheweth the truth" (278). 13 Albert Bushnell Hart, qtd. in Hubbell, "The Smith-Pocahontas Story" 280. 14 Young, "The Mother of Us All" 395-6; Hubbell, "The Smith-Pocahontas Story" 298. Among the works that elevate Pocahontas to such stature are Carl Sandburg's "Cool Tombs," Vachel Lindsay's "Our Mother, Pocahontas," and Hart Crane's
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The Bridge. See Young 399-409 and Hubbell 284-300 for histories of how the story of Pocahontas has been treated in literature. Critics who thus see Ebenezer's problem only as an overdependence on imaginative constructs underestimate the extent of his difficulty. It is one thing for Ebenezer to be "used" by metaphors, as Charles B. Harris points out (Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth 73); it is another thing for him to be "used" by metaphors not of his own creation. Similarly, it is certainly a "pitfall of mythopoesis" when the "problem of fictionalizing life turns into the problem of living fictionalizations," as Manfred Piietz recognizes ("John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor: The Pitfalls of Mythopoesis" 144); but the pitfall becomes a pratfall when the fictionalizations lived derive from a mind that is not one's own. John Barth, as qtd. in Gado, First Person 138. John Barth, as qtd. in John J. Enck, "John Barth: An Interview" 8, and Joe David Bellamy, "Having It Both Ways: A Conversation Between John Barth and Joe David Bellamy" 13. See Enck, "John Barth" 7, for Barth's admission of this desire. Over ten years later, Barth evaluted the results: "Whatever the merits and demerits of the novel (I wouldn't presume to compare it to that novel of Fielding's which I love a great deal), I think it does have a better plot, not in the sense of human value, but in the sense simply of baroque complications neatly sewed up" (McKenzie, "Pole-Vaulting" 137). For a sketch of the historical figure's life, see Philip E. Diser, "The Historical Ebenezer Cooke" 49, which draws upon information provided by Lawrence C. Wroth in the introduction to a facsimile edition of The Maryland Muse. For a discussion of the murky elements in Wroth's own introduction, see Linda S. Bergmann, " The Whys and Wherefore's o f t ' : History and Humor in The Sot-Weed Factor' 33See, respectively, Russell H. Miller, " The Sot- Weed Factor: A Contemporary MockEpic" 88—9; Jac Tharpe, John Barth: The Comic Sublimity of Paradox 34; and Richard
W. Noland, "John Barth and the Novel of Comic Nihilism" 249—50. Tharpe also adds to "historical romance" and "philosophical novel" a number of other labels he finds appropriate: "historical novel," "pastoral," and "Bildungsroman." 21 Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative 70; Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews 7. In clarifying the purpose of his "Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) in his later "Literature of Replenishment" (1980), Barth makes explicit the need to evaluate the history of literature in such a relativistic manner: "I like to remind misreaders of my earlier essay that written literature is in fact about 4,500 years old (give or take a few centuries depending on one's definition of literature), but that we have no way of knowing whether 4,500 years constitutes senility, maturity, youth, or mere infancy" (The Friday Book 205). 22 John Barth, as qtd. in McKenzie, "Pole-Vaulting" 151. Barth himself has changed labels over the years. In 1958, he called The Sot-Weed Factor a "philosophicalpicaresque extravaganza." In 1959, he called it an "ideological farce." And a few years after the book was published, he called it a "moral allegory cloaked in terms of colonial history," a phrase he later came to regret after it was printed on the rear cover of the novel when it was released in paperback. See Morrell, John Barth 46, 4923 For both statements of Barth, see "Second Conversation with John Barth" 249—50, in Evelyn Glaser-Wohrer, An Analysis of John Barth's Weltanschauung: His View of Life and Literature.
170 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31
32 33
34 35
NOTES TO PAGES
See McKenzie, "Pole-Vaulting" 151, and Glaser-Wdhrer, "Second Conversation with John Barth" 250. For a complete discussion of irony in Enlightenment historiography, see Hay den White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe 45-80. Voltaire, Works, X61, qtd. in White, Metahistory 50. John Barth, as qtd. in Enck, "John Barth" 11; Gado, First Person 132; Enck, "John Barth" 8. John Barth, as qtd. in Enck, "John Barth" 6; John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion" 33. John Barth, as qtd. in McKenzie, "Pole-Vaulting" 137. In point of fact, the scene that Barth cites occurs in the first book of the Aeneid, lines 456-93. Compare Chimera 201-2 with Jane Mack's seduction of Todd Andrews in The Floating Opera (25-6) and with the beginning ofJake and Rennie's affair in The End ofthe Road (99-100). John Barth, as qtd. in Evelyn Glaser-Wohrer, "First Conversation with John Barth" 231; Bellamy, "Having It Both Ways" 8; and Glaser-Wohrer, "Second Conversation with John Barth" 240. John Barth, as qtd. in Glaser-Wohrer, "First Conversation with John Barth" 224. In his penetrating study of language in Barth's novels (Passionate Virtuosity), Charles B. Harris makes much the same point (see, especially, his discussion of "Echo" 110-16). Aware, on the one hand, that words, "no matter how skillfully or originally combined, can go only so far in speaking the unspeakable" (145-6), and still knowing, on the other hand, how much language acts as "the filter through which our 'realities' are perceived" (119), he attributes to Barth a "language of reality" that reveals the world rather than represents it, and thus admits to the world's ontological existence while recognizing the need for an ordering human perspective to make that world accessible (185, 190). For a contrasting argument that replaces a mediation between art and the world with a greater impact that events in the world have on the formation of art, see Gerald Graff, "Under Our Belt and Off Our Back: Barth's Letters and Postmodern Fiction" 150-64. John Barth, as qtd. in Glaser-Wohrer, "First Conversation with John Barth" 216. See Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion" 30. Conclusion:
1
124-39
"Subjective Historicism"
See E. L. Doctorow, "The Passion of Our Calling" 21-3; Robert Coover, "Dedicatoria y Prologo a don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra" in Pricksongs & Descants JJ; and Norman Mailer, "Existential Aesthetics" in Pontijications 88-9. 2 John Dos Passos, Occasions and Protests 75; John Barth, as qtd. in Frank Gado, First Person: Conversations on Writers & Writing 137; Robert Coover, The Public Burning 397; Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song 1020. 3 Norman Mailer, The Deer Park 327; E. L. Doctorow, as qtd. in Charles Ruas, Conversations with American Writers 203; John Barth, The Friday Book 48. 4 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 4g 69. For references to these various kinds of "truth" that post-modern authors seek, see John Barth, "Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or, About Aboutness" in The Friday Book 190; and Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. 233. As Shah Zaman tells Dunyazade in Chimera, "They're too important to be lies. Fictions, maybe - but truer than fact" (61).
NOTES TO PAGES I 3 9 - 5 O 5 6
7 8 9 10
11
12
13
14
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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five 191; Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night 317. Ironically, the actual Times Square crowds polled after the executions ofJulius and Ethel Rosenberg had taken place were "devoid of comment." See "Thin Crowds in Times Sq. Indifferent About Spies," New York Times 20June 1953: 6. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man 190. See Barth's remarks in James McKenzie, "Pole-Vaulting in Top Hats: A Public Conversation with John Barth, William Gass, and Ishmael Reed" 137, 151. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays 53-4. Irving R. Kaufman, qtd. in Louis Nizer, The Implosion Conspiracy 3 56; "Court Hears Spy Debate; Rules Today," "129 Servicemen Die in Japan Air Crash, Worst in History," "Red Plot Alleged to Slay McCarthy," "U.S. Insists Rhee Retake P.O. W.'s; Reds Accuse US, See Test of Faith; West Condemns Soviet on Berlin," New York Times 19 June 1953: 1. "Court Hears Spy Debate," New York Times i9june 1953:1; "Rosenbergs Executed as Atom Spies After Supreme Court Vacates Stay; Last-Minute Plea to President Fails," New York Times 20 June 1953: 1; "Spy Case a Story of Legal Battles," New York Times 20 June 1953: 6; "7 in Hawaii Guilty of Red Conspiracy," New York Times 20 June 1953: 1. Zayjefferies et al., "The Prospectus on Nucleonics," qtd. in MartinJ. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance 120; V. Bush and J. B. Conant, Memorandum to the Secretary of War, 30 Sept. 1944, rpt. in Sherwin 287; Henry L. Stimson, Memo Discussed with the President, 25 Apr. 1945, rpt. in Sherwin 291; Dwight D. Eisenhower, qtd. in William L. Laurence, "Soviet Achievement Ahead of Predictions by 3 Years," New York Times 24 Sept. 1949: 2. Two days later, Senator Walter F. George of the Foreign Relations Committee was reported as having stated that American policies of defense had been deliberately framed with the expectation that Russia would have the bomb "in a matter of time" (New York Times 26 Sept. 1949: 1). James A. Wechsler, The Age of Suspicion 272; Emile de Antonio and Daniel Talbot, Point of Order! A Documentary of the Army-McCarthy Hearings 7; Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander 208, vii. Fred J. Cook, The Army-McCarthy Hearings 61; The Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Trial by Treason: The National Committee to Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell 2.
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Secondary
Texts
NORMAN MAILER - CRITICISM
Adams, Laura. "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer." Partisan Review 42 (1975): 197-214. . Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976. , comp. Norman Mailer: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1974. -, ed. Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1974. Aldridge, John W. "An Interview with Norman Mailer." Partisan Review 47 (1980): 174-82.
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. "From Vietnam to Obscenity." Harper's Feb. 1968: 91-7. Rpt. in Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work. Ed. Robert F. Lucid. Boston: Little, 1971. 180-92. Anderson, Chris. "Norman Mailer: The Record of a War." In Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Aden, Michael J. "Notes on the New Journalism." Atlantic Monthly May 1972: 43-7. Bailey, Jennifer. Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. New York: Barnes, 1979. Begiebing, Robert J. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. . "Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?: The Ritual of Regeneration." American Imago 37 (1980): 12-37. Berthoff, Warner. "Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics." New Literary History 2 (1971): 311-27. Rpt. in Fiction and Events. New York: Dutton, 1971. 288-308. Bloom, Harold, ed. Norman Mailer. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Braudy, Leo, ed. Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1972. Breslin, James E. "Style in Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night.1' Yearbook of English Studies 8 (1978): 157-70. Brown, Charles H. "Journalism Versus Art." Current June 1972: 31-8. Bryant, Jerry H. The Open Decision: The Contemporary American Novel and Its Intellectual Background. New York: Free, 1970. 369—94 and passim. Bufithis, Philip H. Norman Mailer. New York: Ungar, 1978. Cowan, Michael. "The Americanness of Norman Mailer." In Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Leo Braudy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1972. 143-57. Rpt. in Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? Ed. Laura Adams. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1974. 95-112. Ehrlich, Robert. Norman Mailer: The Radical as Hipster. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1978. Fetterley, Judith. "An American Dream: 'Hula, Hula,' Said the Witches." In The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. 154-89. Finholt, Richard D. " 'Otherwise How Explain?' Norman Mailer's New Cosmology." Modern Fiction Studies 17 (1971): 375-86. Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers 73. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968. Rpt. in Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work. Ed. Robert F. Lucid. Boston: Little, 1971. 21-59. Geismar, Maxwell. "Frustration, Neuroses and History." Saturday Review 26 May 1951: 15—16. Rpt. in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958. 173-4. Gerson, Jessica. "Norman Mailer: Sex, Creativity and God." Mosaic is.2 (1982): 1—16. Goldman, Lawrence. "The Political Vision of Norman Mailer." Studies on the Left 4.3 (1964): 129-41. Gordon, Andrew. "Why Are We in Vietnam?: Deep in the Bowels of Texas." Literature and Psychology 24 (1974): 55-65. Grace, Matthew. "Norman Mailer at the End of the Decade." Etudes Anglaises 24 (1971): 50-8. Rpt. in Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? Ed. Laura Adams. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1974. 10-22.
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Greenfeld, Josh. "The Line Between Journalism and Literature: Thin, Perhaps, but Distinct." Commonweal 7 June 1968: 362-3. Gutman, Stanley T. Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1975. Harper, Howard M., Jr. Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. 96-136. Hassan, Ihab. "Focus on Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?" In American Dreams, American Nightmares. Ed. David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. 197-203. Hellmann, John. "Journalism as Metafiction: Norman Mailer's Strategy for Mimesis and Interpretation in a Postmodern World." In Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 35-65. Hollowell, John. "Mailer's Vision: 'History as a Novel, The Novel as History.' " In Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 87-125. Howe, Irving. "A Quest for Peril: Norman Mailer." Partisan Review 27 (i960): 143-8. Rpt. in A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics. New York: Horizon, 1963. 123-9. . "Some Political Novels." Nation i6June 1951: 568. Hux, Samuel. "Mailer's Dream of Violence." Minnesota Review 8 (1968): 152-7. Jameson, Fredric. "The Great American Hunter, or Ideological Content in the Novel." College English 34 (1972): 180-97. Kaufmann, Donald L. "Catch-23: The Mystery of Fact (Norman Mailer's Final Novel?)." Twentieth Century Literature 17 (1971): 247-56. . "Mailer's Lunar Bits and Pieces." Modern Fiction Studies 17 (1971): 451-4. . Norman Mailer: The Countdown (The First Twenty Years). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Kazin, Alfred. "The Alone Generation: A Comment on the Fiction of the 'Fifties.' " Harper's Oct. 1959: 127-31. . "The Decline of War: Mailer to Vonnegut," and "The Imagination of Fact." In Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. 1973. New York: Delta, 1974. 69-94, 207-42. -. "The Literary Sixties: When the World Was Too Much with U s . " New York Times Book Review 21 Dec. 1969: 1-3, 18. -. "The World as a Novel: From Capote to Mailer." New York Review of Books 8 April 1971: 26-30. Kellman, Steven G. "Mailer's Strains of Fact." Southwest Review 68 (1983): 126—33. Klein, Jeffrey. "Armies of the Planet: A Comparative Analysis of Norman Mailer's and Saul Bellow's Political Visions." Soundings 58 (1975): 69-83. Leeds, Barry H. The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. New York: New York University Press, 1969. Lennon, John Michael. "Mailer's Cosmology." Modern Language Studies 12.3 (1982): 18-29. Lennon, J. Michael. "Mailer's Radical Bridge." Journal of Narrative Technique 7 (1977): 170-88. . "Mailer's Sarcophagus: The Artist, the Media, and the 'Wad.' " Modern Fiction Studies 23 (1977): 179-87. -, ed. Conversations with Norman Mailer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.
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Index
Aaron, Daniel, 155 n i l , 157 n3O Abernethy, Peter L., 166 n23 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 3, 5, 143 Acheson, Dean, 147 Adams, Henry, 3, 5-6, 13-14, 19, 34, 73-4, 85, 87, 91, 93, 96-7, 114, 158 n40, 164 n i l Adams, John Quincy, 164 n i l Adams, Laura, 159 n i l , 162 n30 Adams, Samuel, 19 Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow), 5 Adventures ojHuckleberry Finn (Twain), 5, 119 Advertisements for Myself (Mailer), 8, 32, 34, 38, 40, 41-3, 47, 58, 63, 69, 154 nio, 158 n4O, 159 m o Aeneid, The (Virgil), 109, 122-3, 127, 170 n29 Aldridge, John W., 154 nio, 154 n3 Aldrin, Edwin E., Jr. (Buzz), 65-6, 68 Alighieri, Dante, 142 All the King's Men (Warren), 3, 11 "Ambrose His Mark" (Barth), 132 American Communist Party, 20 American Dream, An (Mailer), 37, 45—8, 49, 50, 53-4, 64, 66, 160 ni4, 160 ni7, 161 n2O American Earthquake, The (E. Wilson), 157 n34 American Hunger (Wright), 28, 156 n22 American Jitters, The (E. Wilson), 21—2, 24, 28, 31, 155 nio, 157 n34 American Revolution, 9, 19-20, 27, n o , 129, 133, 134 Amerika (Kafka), 116 Ames, Sanford S., 99 anarchism, 7, 24, 79, 80, 101, 143 Anderson, Sherwood, 24, 25-6, 158 n38 - And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (Cowley), 30, 31 Angus, Douglas, 164 ni4 "Anonymiad" (Barth), 130—1 apocalypse (see also end; historical disruption),
203
6, I O - I I , 16, 19, 35, 70, 73, 81-2,
90,
93,
104, n o , 111-12, 114—15, 120 Apollo 11, 65, 66, 162 n34 Arbella, 76 Aristotle, 167 m Aden, Michael J., 62-3 Armies of the Night, The (Mailer), 3, 10, 38, 46, 50, 53, 56-64, 66, 67, 113, 139, 142, 145, 158 n4O, 161 ni9, 161-2 n27, 162 n28, 162 n29, 162 n32 Armstrong, Neil, 65-6, 68, 69 Arnold, Benedict, 131 Arvin, Newton, 19, 158 n38 atom bomb, 15, 41-2, 46, 48, 126, 129, 138, 142, 146, 147—8, 159 n8, 160 ni6, 163 n i , 171 ni2 Atomic Cafe, The (Rafferty et al.), 161 n2i "Attestation" (Higginson), 82 "Autobiography" (Barth), 126 Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, The (Steffens), 16 Autobiography of Malcolm X (Little/Haley), 164
Bacon, Sir Francis, 13 Bailey, Jennifer, 161 n27 Baldwin, James, 131 Balfour, Arthur, 13 Barbary Shore (Mailer), 14, 32, 33, 38, 40 Barlow, Joel, 78, 131 Barrett, William, 31, 157 n3 5 Barth, John, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 33, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 170 n4, 171 n8; on alphabetical letters, 128, 130-3; "Ambrose His Mark," 132; "Anonymiad," 130—1; on artistic transfiguration, 109, 121-4, 125-8, H 0 * J33» !34> J 36; "Autobiography," 126; on the avant-garde, 127, 133—4; "Bellerophoniad," 127-8, 132; Chimera, 109, 114, 126, 127-8, 130-1, 132, 135, 136, 144, 145, 170 n3O, 170 n4; Dorchester Tales, n o ;
204
INDEX
Barth, John (cont.) "Dunyazadiad," 126, 127, 130, 135, 145, 170 114; "Echo," 170 113 3; End of the Road, The, 5, 33, 108, 120, 125, 128, 140, 170 1130; Floating Opera, The, 33, 107-8, 128, 139, 142-3, 170 1130; Friday Book, The, 8, 9, 10, 11, 125, 126, 142, 168 n6, 168 117, 169 n21, 170 n3, 170 114; "Future of Literature and the Literature of the Future, The," 168 n7; Giles Goat-Boy, 8, 109, 110-15, 117-18, 119-20, 122, 124, 125-6, 132, 144-5; and Greek myths, 109, 122, 127-8; "Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs," 168 n6, 170 n4; on historiography, 8, 9—10, 106—9, 112-13, 116-17, 118-19, 121, 124, 130, 132, 133, 135-6, 139, H4, 167-8 n5, 168 ni2, 170 n4; interviews, 109-10, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 133, 138, 167 m , 167 n2, 169 ni8, 170 n24, 171 n8; LETTERS, 9, 108, I I O - I I , 114, 115, 120, 1223, 128-36, 139, 141, 144, 145, 168 n5, 168 n6; and literary history, 9, 11-12, 108-9, 115-25, 127-8, 133, 134-6, 168 n5, 168 nio, 169 n2i; "Literature of Exhaustion, The," 108-9, 123, 125-6, 136, 169 n2i; "Literature of Replenishment, The," 126,
Blitz, 83, 87 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 141 Bogan, Louise, 32, 158 n38 Bohr, Niels, 94, 96 Bolshevik Revolution, 7, 14, 16, 19, 25, 26, 29-30, 31, 155 ni2, 156-7 n28 Bolshevism, 14-15, 22, 23, 26, 29, 133, 141, 155 ni2 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 86 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 129, 130, 164 m l Book of Daniel, The (Doctorow), 3, 142, 1459, 150-1 Borges, Jorge Luis, 131, 134 Born, Max, 94 Boyer, Paul, 159 n8, 160 ni6 Bradford, William, 26 Brady, Matthew, 63 Brando, Marlon, 39, 40 Braun, Wernher von, 86 Bridge, The (Crane), 168-9 ^14 Browder, Earl, 16 Brown, Charles H., 62 Buchan, John, 164 nio Bufithis, Philip H., 163 n39 Burr, Aaron, 131 Bush, Vannevar, 148 Butler, Samuel, 118
169 n2i; Lost in the Funhouse, 126, 127-8, 130-1, 132, 142, 144, 170 n33; on Maryland, 8, 110-12, 113—15, 116, 118-19, 121-2, 124-5; "Menelaiad," 126, 127; and metaphor, 2, 107, 117, 122, 169 n 15; and narrative history, 109, 122-3, r34> 169 1121; "Perseid," 127-8, 131, 136, 144; and realism, 125, 127-8; Sabbatical, 8, 11; on selfreflection, 126, 134; Sot-Weed Factor, The, 10, 110-15, 116-19, 120, 121-5, 132, 13940, 141, 167-8 n5, 168 n6, 169 ni5, 169 ni8, 169 n20, 169 n22; on subjectivity, 2, 108, 112-13, 126, 132, 141; "Title," 126, 128, 142; on ultimacy (artistic), 108-9, 120, 125-6, 134-6 Bates, Ralph, 31, 157 n34
Bay of Pigs, 44-5 Beckett, Samuel, 135 Begiebing, Robert J., 43, 1 5 9 m l , 161 n27 Bell, Daniel, 7 Bellamy, Edward, 24 Bellamy, Joe David, 169 n 17, 170 n3i "Bellerophoniad" (Barth), 127-8, 132 Bellow, Saul, 5, 33, 36 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 82, 85, 103, 134, 163 n3, 163 n6, 165 ni8 Bergmann, Linda S., 167 n5, 169 ni9 Big Money, The (Dos Passos), 20, 24-5, 26, 28 Billy Budd (Melville), 4 Black, Joel D., 164 n9, 167 n29 Black Boy (Wright), 22 Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne), 13
Calverton, V. F., 25 Campbell, Joseph, 128 Cannibals and Christians (Mailer), 9, 38, 39, 44, 45, 47, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63-4, 73, 103, 160 ni4 Capital (Marx), 18 Capone, Al, 141 Carr, Virginia Spencer, 157 n30 Catch-22 (Heller), 5, 8, 36, 72 Cervantes, Miguel de, 12, 117 Chamberlain, John, 29, 30, 156-7 n28, 158 n38 Chambers, Whittaker, 23, 156 n24 Chapman, George, 116 Charles I, king of England, 114 Charles II, king of England, 114 Charlesworth, Clifford E., 162 n34 Chateaubriand, Franqois-Rene de, 116 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 141 Chimera (Barth), 109, 114, 126, 127-8, 130-1, 132, 135, 136, 144, 145, 170 n30, 170 n4 Civil War, American, 5, 6, 19, 81, n o Civil War in France, The (Marx), 19 "Class War in Kentucky" (Levy), 19-20 Clausius, Rudolph, 86 Cold War, 8, 36, 75, i n , 154 n3, 163 m Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 101 Collins, Michael, 65-6, 68 Columbiad, The (Barlow), 78 Commedia (Dante), 142 Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives (HUAC), 149-50
INDEX communism, 10, 69, 78, 138, 146, 147, 14950; American attraction to, 7, 14, 16; American Communist Party, 20; American disillusionment with, x, 6, 9, 16-17, 23-4, 27-32, 157 n3o; as Americanism, 6—7, 16, 18-21; Bolshevik Revolution, 7, 14, 16, 19, 25, 26, 29-30, 31, 155 ni2, 156-7 n28; Bolshevism, 14-15, 22, 23, 26, 29, 133, 141, 155 ni2; Cold War, 8, 36, 75, i n , 154 n3, 163 ni; Communist International (Comintern), 20; Communist Party, 6-7, 14, 17, 20, 22, 24, 28, 150; Engels, Frederick, 6, 18-19, 24, 31; Lenin, V. I., 19, 28; Marx, Karl, 6, 7, 16, 18-19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31, 121-2, 157 n34; Marxism, 6-7, 17, 1819, 23, 29, 30, 31, 39, 56, 89, 92, 158 ni; as millennialism, 4, 6, 9, 16, 21-3, 155 ni2; Moscow trials, 7, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 146; Nazi-Soviet Pact, 7, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 146; as philosophy of history, 6, 18-19, 22-3, 31; as political ideology, 6, 16, 17-18, 31; Popular Front, 7, 20, 146; as religion, 6—7, 16, 22—3, 31; revolution, 6, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 28, 65, 146, 164 n n ; Soviet Union, 6-7, 8, 16-17, 20, 23, 24, 25-6, 27-9, 30, 31, 42, 75, i n , 129, 138, 146, 147-8, 149, 150, 156 n2i, 171 ni2; Stalin, Josef, 15, 17, 23, 28, 30, 31, 146; Stalinism, 29, 30, 31, 40; Trotsky, Leon, 29; Trotskyism, 7, 23, 29, 40 Communist International (Comintern), 20 Communist Party, 6-7, 14, 17, 20, 22, 24, 28, 150 Conant, James B., 148 concentration camps, 41—2, 78, 126 Confidence-Man, The (Melville), 3-4, 141 conformity, 6, 154 nio Constantine I (the Great), emperor of Rome, 85 Constitution, U.S., 20, 148 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A (Marx), 18 Cook, FredJ., 171 ni4 Cook(e), Ebenezer, 123, 169 ni9 "Cool Tombs" (Sandburg), 168 ni4 Cooper, James Fenimore, 119 Coover, Robert, 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 138-9, 140, 141, 142, 143, 170 n4; "Dedicatoria y Prologo a don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra," 12, 138; interviews, 1, 9; Origin of the Brunists, The, 11, 140—1; Pricksongs & Descants, 12, 138, 142; Public Burning, The, 1, 8, 10, 138-9, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145; "Seven Exemplary Fictions," 12, 138; Universal Baseball Association, Inc., The, 139, 142, 143, 144, 170 n4 Corey, Lewis, 31 Coser, Lewis, 155 ni6 Cousins, Norman, 41 Cowan, Michael, 163 n38
205 Cowart, David, 165 n2O, 166 n26 Cowley, Malcolm, 23, 25, 30, 31, 158 n38 Crane, Hart, 117, 168-9 1114 Cromwell, Oliver, 114 Crucible, The (Miller, A.), 145 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 9-10, 11, 75, 78, 81, 84-5, 88-90, 92-3, 97-9, 1001, 102-5, 114, 139, 143, 144 Cuban Missile Crisis, 44 "Cultural Front, The" (Farrell), 32 Culture and the Crisis (League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford), 14 Daley, Richard, 57 Dangling Man (Bellow), 33—4, 36 Daniel, Book of, 86 Darwin, Charles, 18, 137 Day of Doom, The (Wiggles worth), 16 de Antonio, Emile, and Daniel Talbot, 171 ni3 Declaration of Independence, 21, 27 "Dedicatoria y Prologo a don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra" (Coover), 12, 138 Deer Park, The (Mailer), 33, 37, 40, 58, 139, 159 nio Defoe, Daniel, 42 DeLillo, Don, 106 Dellinger, David, 56, 60-1 "Democracy and Its Uses" (James), 4 Depression, 14, 119 Descartes, Rene, 85 dialectic, 40, 43, 96-7, 158 n i , 159 n i l , 166 n22 Diser, Philip E., 123, 167 n5, 169 n 19 Dispatches (Herr), 56 Doctorow, E. L., 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 138, 139, 141-2, 145, 147-8, 150-1; Book of Daniel, The, 3, 142, 145-9, 150-1; interviews, 139; Loon Lake, 143, 145; "Passion of Our Calling, The," 138; Ragtime, 143; Welcome to Hard Times, 138 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 41, 117, 118 Dorchester Tales (Barth), n o Dos Passos, John, 7, 14, 17, 20, 24-5, 26, 28, 30, 32, 35, 137-8, 155 ni2, 158 n38 Dower, John W., 161 n24 Draper, Theodore, 156 n 19 Dream of the Golden Mountains, The (Cowley), 23, 25 Dreiser, Theodore, 24, 29 "Dunyazadiad" (Barth), 126, 127, 130, 135, 145, 170 n4 "Dynamic Theory of History, A" (Adams, H.), 3, 74, 85, 91 "Earth's Holocaust" (Hawthorne), 3, 44 Eastman, Max, 26, 30, 156—7 n28 "Echo" (Barth), 170 n33 Eddington, Sir Arthur, 8, 86 Eddins, Dwight, 167 n28
206
INDEX
Eden, 4, 5, 10, 19, 110-12, 114-15, 120, 121, 122, 132, 142 Education of Henry Adams, The (Adams, H.), 3, 13-14, 73-4, 85, 87, 91, 93, 96-7, 114, 158 1140, 164 n i l Ehrlich, Robert, 160 n 18, 161 n27 Einstein, Albert, 100, 160 m 2 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 1, 51, 57, 122, 148 Eisinger, Chester E., 27, 154 n9 Eliade, Mircea, 165 ni9 Eliot, George, 100 Ellison, Ralph, 4, 28, 32-4, 37, 159 n9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2-3, 6, 15, 38, 63, 72, 80, 155 ni3, 163 n37 Enck, John J., 169 ni7, 169 ni8, 170 n27,v 170 n28 end (see also apocalypse; historical disruption): communist, 6, 10—11; "fictions of the," 10; to history, 10, 14-15, 16-17, 32, 37, 70, 82, 90-1, 92-4, 99, 104-5, I09> IXI » H2> 144; to ideology, 7, 31-2; of the novel, 108-9, 120, 125-6, 133; open, 143-4 End of the Road, The (Barth), 5, 33, 108, 120, 125, 128, 140, 170 n3O Engels, Frederick, 6, 18-19, 24> 3 1 Enlightenment, 4, 6-7, 23, 27, 77, 124, 149, 170 n25 Enola Gay, 48 entropy, 10, 72-3, 85, 86-7, 90-4, 96-8, 9 9 100, 114, 120, 140, 144, 145 "Entropy" (Pynchon), 74, 86, 88, 91, 102-3 epic, 113, 119, 121-3 Ewell, Barbara C , 122, 167-8 n5 Executioner's Song, The (Mailer), 8, 139, 140, 144 Exhortation Unto Reformation, An (Torrey), 92 Existential Errands (Mailer), 57, 68, 160 n 14, 162 n3i existentialism, 34, 37, 42, 44, 59, 61, 65, 120 Fable, A (Faulkner), 36-7 Fadiman, Clifton, 29, 158 n38 "Faith of Graffiti, The" (Mailer), 39 Fall, Bernard B., 50, 160 ni 5 Farben, IG, 77, 78, 95 Farrell, Barry, 140 Farrell, James T., 21, 22, 32, 158 n38 fascism, 20, 30, 31, 80 "Fate" (Emerson), 80 Faulkner, William, 5-6, 14, 36-7, n o , 143 Faust (Goethe), 100 Feidelson, Charles, Jr., 103 fellow travelers, 17, 22, 25, i n ; see also liberalism Fetterley, Judith, 160 ni7 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 166 n2 5 Fiedler, Leslie A., 6, 154 n9 Fielding, Henry, 117, 123, 124, 169 ni8 Finholt, Richard D., 160 ni2 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 136
Fischer, Louis, 19, 29, 30, 31, 32, 155 n9, 156 n27, 157 n32, 157 n34 Fisk, James (Jim), 78 FitzGerald, Frances, 51, 160 ni3, 160 n 15, 161 n25 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 37 Flaubert, Gustave, 100 Floating Opera, The (Barth), 33, 107-8, 128, 139, 142-3, 170 n3O Ford, Henry, ix Forster, E. M., 159 n6 42nd Parallel, The (Dos Passos), 24, 25, 28 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), 28 Foster, William Z., 14, 19 Fraas, Karl, 18 Frank, Waldo, 31 Franklin, Benjamin, 78 Freeman, Joseph, 19, 20 French Revolution, 106 Friday Book, The (Barth), 8, 9, 10, 11, 125, 126, 142, 168 n6, 168 n7, 169 1121, 170 n3, 170 n4 Friedman, Alan J., 164 ni4 frontier, x, 9, 36-7, 44, 45-6, 55, 60, 61, 701, 78, 82, 119, 138, 143-4, 150 "Fugitive Slave Law, The" (Emerson), 15 Fugs, 60, 64 Fussell, Paul, 166 n27 "Future of Literature and the Literature of the Future, The" (Barth), 168 n7 Gado, Frank, 153 ni, 1541113, 167 n2, i67n3, 167 n4, 169 ni6, 170 n27, 170 n2 Galileo (Galilei), 13, 85
Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, The (Smith, J.), 10, 116, 168 ni2 George, Walter F., 171 ni2 German Ideology, The (Marx and Engels), 18 Gerson, Jessica, 160 ni7 Gettleman, Marvin E., et al., 161 n26 Giles Goat-Boy (Barth), 8, 109, 110-15, 11718, 119-20, 122, 124, 125-6, 132, 144-5 Gilmore, Gary, 139, 140 Gladsky, Thomas S., 168 n5 Glaser-Wohrer, Evelyn, 169 n23, 170 n24, 170 n3i, 170 n32, 170 n34 God That Failed, The (Crossman), 19, 32, 155 n9, 158 n37 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 100 Gold, Michael, 21, 22 Goldman, Emma, 25 Goldman, Eric F., 14—15, 154 n9 Goldman, Lawrence, 159 n5 Goldwater, Barry, 55 "Good News" (Winslow), 77 Gould, Jay, 78 Grable, Betty, 55 Graff, Gerald, x-xi, 170 n3 3 "Grammar of Science, The" (Adams, H.), 13
INDEX Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon), 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 73, 74, 75-8, 80, 81-2, 83-5, 86-7, 88-97, 98-101, 102-5, I J 5 , I J 9 , H ° , 141. J 43, 164 1113 "Great Are the Myths" (Whitman), 155 ni3 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 4, 5, 37 Great Jones Street (DeLillo), 106 Greenfeld, Josh, 162 n28 Gregory, Horace, 32, 158 n38 Gross, Harvey, x Gutman, Stanley T., 43, 159 n i l , 161 n27 Hamilton, Alexander, 15 "Harlot High and Low, A" (Mailer), 160 ni4 Harper, Howard M., Jr., 159 n i l Harris, Charles B., 166 n23, 169 n 15, 170 n33 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 116 Hassan, Ihab, 1-2, 153 n4 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3-4, 6, 13, 15, 44 Hayworth, Rita, 46 Hazlitt, Henry, 17 Heilman, Robert B., 168 n 10 Heisenberg, Werner, 94 Heller, Joseph, 8, 36, 72, 141 Hellmann, John, 162 n27 Hemingway, Ernest, 14, 28, 64, 67, 153 n8 Henderson, Harry B., HI, x Henry, John, 129 Herr, Michael, 56 Hesse, Hermann, 135 Hicks, Granville, 17, 31, 158 n38, 158 n39 Higginson, John, 82 Hiroshima, 46, 48, 53, 163 m Hiss, Alger, 7, 15 historical disruption (see also apocalypse; end), xi, 5-6, I O - I I , 13-15, 16-17, 32, 41-2, 73-4, 81-5, 112, 153 n6 "Historical Fiction, Fictitious History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs" (Barth), 168 n6, 170 n4 historical novel, 8-9, 112, 122, 168 n6, 169 n2O historical process, 2, 6, 8, 9, 17, 19, 36-7, 57, 69-70, 73, 83-5, 87, 89-94, 95, 98, 100, 106, 114-15, 122-3, H 3 - 5 , J 68 n7, 168 n8 historiography, 3, 8, 9-10, 38-9, 57-64, 66, 106, 113, 139, 142, 106-9, 112-13, 116-17, 118-19, 121, 124, 130, 132, 133, 135-6, 137-40, 144, 146, 148, 151, 162 1131, 167-8 n5, 168 ni2, 170 n4 history: American antipathy to, ix, 4, 11, 53, 57-8, 94-5, 109, 115, 117-19, 134, 135, 153 n4; American idea of, 4; apocalyptic theories of, 6, 10-11, 16, 19, 90, 93; end to, 10, 14—15, 16—17, 32» 37, 7°, 82, 90—1, 92-4, 99, 104-5, 109, i n , 142, 144; narrative of, 106-8, 116-17, 135-6, 140, 144, 151, 168 n 12; philosophies of, 6, 9; serial models of, 2, 11, 143—4; theories of, 3, 10, 84, 85-6, 89, 90-2, 96, 100, 143; see also
207 communism; literary history; millennialism "History" (Emerson), 2, 63 Hite, Molly, 165-6 n2i Hitler, Adolf, 20, 30, 80, 81, 104, 142, 146 Hoffman, Abbie, 146 Hofstadter, Richard, 147 Holder, Alan, x, 167 n5 Holmes, John R., 165 ni7 Homer, 118, 123 Hoover, J. Edgar, 140, 146 Houdini, Harry, 143 House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne), 4 Howe, Irving, 23, 153 n6, 154 nio, 159 n5 Hubbell, Jay B., 117, 168 n i l , 168 n i 3 , 1689 ni4 Human Use of Human Beings, The (Wiener), 95-6 Hume, Kathryn, 166 n22 Humphrey, Hubert H., 64 Hutcheson, Francis, 27 Hux, Samuel, 160-1 ni8 Huxley, Aldous, 135 "Idealism" (Emerson), 38 ideology: anarchism, 7, 24, 79, 80, 101, 143; Bolshevism, 14-15, 22, 23, 26, 29, 133, 141, 155 ni2; communism, 6, 16, 17-18, 31; end to, 7, 31-2; fascism, 20, 30, 31, 80; liberalism, 6-7, 9, 15, 17-18, 23, 27, 2 9 30, 34, 39, 40-2, i n , 145; Marxism, 6-7, 17, 18-19, 23, 29, 30, 31, 39, 56, 89, 92, 158 ni; socialism, 7, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 30, 3i, 32; Stalinism, 29, 30, 31, 40; Trotskyism, 7, 23, 29, 40 Iliad, The (Homer), 122-3 impotence (as metaphor), 8, 33, 112, 151 innocence, 5, 108, i n , 115, 153 n4, 153 n5, 159 n i l "Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, An" (Hutcheson), 27 interface, 97-8, 99, 166 n22 Invisible Man (Ellison), 4-5, 28, 32-4, 37, 159 n9 Iron Heel, The (London), 24 "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" (Pynchon), 163 ni "Is Leon Trotsky Guilty?" (Modern Monthly), 29 "I Want to Be Counted" (Anderson), 24, 2 5 6 Jackson, Andrew, 15, 20 James, Henry, Sr., 4, 5 Jefferson, Thomas, 15, 20, 27 Jefferies, Zay, et al., 171 ni2 Jews Without Money (Gold), 21, 22 Johnsen, William A., 1 Johnson, Lyndon B., 55, 59, 61 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 117, 123
208
INDEX
Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe), 42 Joyce, James, 153 n8 Judgment Day (Farrell), 21, 22 Kafka, Franz, 116 Kant, Immanuel, 97 Kaufman, Irving R., 147 Kazin, Alfred, 66 Keats, John, 126 Kennedy, John F., 38, 39-40, 43-5, 57, 59, 64, 65, 67, 70-1, 81-2, 122, 160 ni4 Kennedy, Joseph, 84 Kepler, Johannes, 85 Kermode, Frank, 3, 10 Key, Francis Scott, 130 Khrushchev, Nikita, 7 Klinkowitz, Jerome, 1 Korean War, 31, 49, 56, 147, 150 Krafft, John M., 99, 163 n2 Krupp, 95 Kupferberg, Tuli, 64 Laing, R. D., 165 ni6 Lane, Mark, 160 ni4 "Last Night, The" (Mailer), n , 44 Lattimore, Owen, 149 Laurence, William L., 171 ni2 Lawrence, D. H., 43, 153 n4 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 38, 39, 54, 62, 155 ni3 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 85 Lenin, V. I., 19, 28 Lennon, J. Michael, 158 m , 159-60 ni2, 162 n3i Lerner, Max, 30, 32 LETTERS (Barth), 9, 108, 1 1 0 - n , 114, 115, 120, 122-3, 128-36, 139, 141, 144, 145, 168 ns, 168 n6 Levine, George, 165 n20 Levy, Melvin P., 19 Lewis, R.W.B., 153 n4 Lewy, Guenter, 160 ni3, 160 ni5, 161 n22, 161 n26 Lhamon, W. T., Jr., 166 n24 Liberal Imagination, The (L. Trilling), 16, 17— 18, 21
liberalism, 6-7, 9, 15, 17-18, 23, 27, 29-30, 34, 39, 40-2, i n , 145; see also fellow travelers "Library of Babel" (Borges), 134 Life, 46 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 150 Lifton, Robert Jay, 42 Lincoln, Abraham, 20 Lindsay, Vachel, 117, 168 n 14 Liston, Sonny, 57, 59 literary composition, 9, 11-12, 108-9, 11819, 120-4, 125-7, 133-6, 144, 151 literary history, 11-12, 108-9, 115-25, 1278, 133, 134-6, 168 n5, 168 nio, 169 n2i
literary history, American, 5, 62, 116-17, 119-20, 123, 159 n n , 163 n38, 168 nio "Literature of Exhaustion, The" (Barth), 108-9, 123, 125-6, 136, 169 n2i "Literature of Replenishment, The" (Barth), 126, 169 n2i Lodge, David, 98 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 51 London, Jack, 24 Longest Journey, The (Forster), 159 n6 Looking Backward (Bellamy, E.), 24 Loon Lake (Doctorow), 143, 145 Lost in the Funhouse (Barth), 126, 127-8, 1301, 132, 142, 144, 170 n33 Love and Revolution (Eastman), 26 Lowell, Robert, 63, 142 Lukacs, Georg, 79, 92, 164 n i l McCarthy, Eugene, 70 McCarthy, Joseph, 75, 129, 144, 147, 149, 163 ni McCarthy, Mary, 154 nio McConnell, Frank D., 115, 165 n20 Macdonald, Dwight, 30, 34 MacDonald, Ramsay, 87 McElroy, Joseph, 159 n6 McGovern, George S., 57 Machiavelli, Niccold, 68, 79, 164 nio Maclnnes, Helen, 164 nio McKenzie, James, 167 ni, 169 n 18, 169 n22, 170 n24, 170 n29, 171 n8 Mackey, Douglas A., 165 ni6 Mackey, Louis, 166—7 n 2 8 MacLeish, Archibald, 157 n3 5 McNamara, Robert, 49 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 100 Madero, Francisco Indalecio, 28 Madison, James, 129 Magnalia Christi Americana (C. Mather), 37, 83, 92, 155 ni3 Mailer, Norman, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 32, 33, 34-5, 72-3, 74, 81-2, 83, 103, 106, 113, 119, 126, 138-9, 142, 143-4, 145, 154 nio, 158 n4O, 158 1141; Advertisements for Myself, 8, 32, 34, 38, 40, 41-3, 47, 58, 63, 69, 154 nio, 158 n4O, 159 nio; American Dream, An, 37, 45-8, 49, 50, 53-4, 64, 66, 160 n 14, 160 n 17, 161 n20; Armies of the Night, The, 3, 10, 38, 46, 50, 53, 56-64, 66, 67, 113, 139, 142, 145, 158 n4O, 161 ni9, 161-2 n27, 162 n28, 162 n29, 162 n32; Barbary Shore, 14, 32, 33, 38, 40; Cannibals and Christians, 9, 38, 39, 44, 45, 47, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63-4, 73, 103, 160 ni4; on the corporation, 37, 46, 51-2, 69; cosmology, 37, 44, 58, 66, 67, 69-70, 159-60 ni2; Deer Park, The, 33, 37, 40, 58, 139, 159 nio; Executioner's Song, The, 8, 139, 140, 144; Existential Errands, 57, 68, 160 n 14, 162 n3i; and existentialism, 34, 37, 42, 44, 59,
INDEX 61, 65; "Faith of Graffiti, The," 39; on form, 39, 58—9; and the frontier, 9, 36—7, 44, 45-6, 55, 60, 61, 70-1, 82, 143-4; on the function of art, 37-8, 39, 58, 61, 62-3; on God, 8, 37, 44-5, 47, 53, 58, 67, 69; "Harlot High and Low, A," 160 n 14; on heroism, 37-8, 40, 42-4, 45, 64-5, 67; on the hipster, 40, 42-3, 54, 64, 66, 158-9 n5; on historiography, 3, 8, 9—10, 38—9, 57— 64, 66, 106, 113, 139, 142, 162 n3i; interviews, 37, 40, 63, 69, 158 n4O, 159 n6, 170 ni; on John F. Kennedy, 38, 39-40, 43-5, 57, 59, 64, 65, 67, 70-1, 81-2, 160 ni4; "Last Night, The," 11, 44; on liberalism, 9, 34, 39, 40-2; "Man Who Studied Yoga, The," 7, 119; Marilyn, 57, 160 ni4; the media and, 38, 55-6, 57, 58, 61, 62, 66; metaphor and, 2, 37, 45, 46, 47-8, 57, 63, 66, 69, 103, 158 n i ; Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 52, 57, 64—5, 70; Naked and the Dead, The, 36, 40-1, 46, 52, 55, 86, 106, 143, 159 n6, 161 n2o; Of a Fire on the Moon, 6 5 71, 142, 144, 163 n37, 163 n39; Pieces, 39, 160 ni4; politics and, 7-8, 36, 39, 40-1, 56, 59, 65, 162 n33; Pontifications, 37, 158 n4O, 159 n6, 170 ni; Presidential Papers, The, 5, 8, 37, 39-40, 43-5, 48, 57, 58, 59, 66, 70-1, 72-3, 161 ni9; Prisoner of Sex, The, 48; St. George and the Godfather, 50, 53, 57; on schizophrenia, 37, 43, 52-3; on science, 69, 72-3, 103, 163 n37; on sexuality, 37, 45. 46-8, 50-3, 54, 159 m o , 160 ni7; on subjectivity, 2, 3, 38, 41-2, 59-60, 62-3, 113, 126, 139, 162 1131; on technology, 46, 48-9, 51, 52, 66, 67-9; "Time of Her Time, The," 159 nio; on violence, 4 6 9, 50—3, 54, 160—1 ni8; on war (as historical process), 36-7, 44, 45, 58, 67, 83, 158 ni; on the war in Vietnam, 10, 36, 45, 46, 49-50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 160 ni5, 161 ni9, 161 n22; "White Negro, The," 34, 40, 41-3, 67, 126, 158 1141, 159 nio, 159 n i l ; Why Are We in Vietnam?, 10, 45-55, 58, 143 Making of Americans, The (Stein), ix Malaquais, Jean, 64 Malcolm X, 82 Mangel, Anne, 166 n23 Manhattan Project, 148 Manifest Destiny, 2, 43, 78 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels), 18 Mann, Thomas, 135 Manso, Peter, 40 "Man Who Studied Yoga, The" (Mailer), 7, 119 March on the Pentagon (1967), 38, 56, 57, 59-62, 63, 139, 162 n28 Marcus, Steven, 162 n3i Marilyn (Mailer), 57, 160 ni4
209 Marks, Barry A., 162 n29 Marshall, E. G., 59 Marvell, Andrew, 116 Marx, Karl, 6, 7, 16, 18-19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31, 121-2, 157 n34 Marxism (see also communism), 6—7, 17, 18— 19, 23, 29, 30, 31, 39, 56, 89, 92, 158 ni "Marxism and the American Tradition" (Partisan Review & Anvil), 19 Maryland Muse, The (E. Cook[e]), 123, 169 ni9 mathematics, 73-4, 83, 97, 109, 128, 140, 144, 164 n9, 165 ni9; calculus, 74, 91—2; statistics, 74, 79, 87, 92, 94, 142-3, 164 nio Mather, Cotton, 37, 83, 92, 141, 155 ni3 Mather, Increase, 16, 154 n5 Maxwell, James Clerk, 97 Maxwell's Demon, 97-8, 99, 100-1, 166 n23 Melville, Herman, 3-4, 69, 105, 141, 159-60 ni2, 163 n38, 163-4 n 7 , 167 ^30, 171 n7 Mendelson, Edward, 165 n2O "Menelaiad" (Barth), 126, 127 Merideth, Robert, 162 n3 3 Merrill, Robert, 162 n32, 162 n33 metaphor, 1, 2, 9, 32, 37, 45, 46, 47-8, 57, 63, 66, 69, 98-102, 103, 104-5, !O7, 117, 122, 138, 158 n i , 166 n2i, 169 ni5 Miami and the Siege of Chicago (Mailer), 52, 57, 64-5, 70 Middlemarch (Eliot), 100 Middle of the Journey, The (Trilling, L.), 5, 6, 17, 33, 156 n24 millennialism: as historicism, x, 2—4, 6, 9, 11, 16, 21-2, 34, 36, 90, 93; as religion, 2-3, 7, 17, 90, 93, n o ; renunciation of, 4-5, 7 8, 9, 16, 37 Miller, Arthur, 145 Miller, Henry, 32, 158 n38 Miller, J. Hillis, 106 Miller, Perry, 82, 86, 93 Miller, Russell H., 123, 169 n20 Mills, Hilary, 158 n4O Milton, John, 118 Moby-Dick (Melville), 69, 105, 167 n3O "Modell of Christian Charity, A" (Winthrop), 26—7 modernism: as a literary movement, x, 1—2, n , 35, 136, 153 n6; and order, 1-2 "Modern Man Is Obsolete" (Cousins), 41 Modern Monthly, The, 29 Modern Quarterly, The, 17, 24, 29—30, 32 Monroe, Marilyn, 64, 160 ni4 More, Sir Thomas, 115 Morgan, Lewis H., 18 Morrell, David, 168 n6, 169 n22 "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (Pynchon), 8, 87-8 Moscow trials, 7, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 146 Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway), 153 n8
210
INDEX
movies, i, 2, 10, 39-40, 57, 84, 89, 92, 101, 104-5, 128, 132, 133-4, 143 Mumford, Lewis, 27 Musa, Mark, 79 Mussolini, Benito, 48, 80 "Mystery of Israel's Salvation, The" (I. Mather), 16 Nadeau, Robert L., 164 n 14, 165 n 16 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 36, 40-1, 46, 52, 55, 86, 106, 143, 159 n6, 161 n20 NASA, 65, 67, 68 Nation, The, 28, 29-32 National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, 25, 155 nio National Committee to Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell, 150 National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, 56, 66 Native Son (Wright), 20-1, 22, 27 "Nature" (1844) (Emerson), 38 Nazi-Soviet Pact, 7, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 146 "New Adam and Eve, The" (Hawthorne), 44 "New England Reformers" (Emerson), 6, 15, 72, 155 ni3 New Englands Trials (J. Smith), 116, 168 n9 New Republic, The, 20, 28, 29-32 Newton, Sir Isaac, 69, 85—6 New Yorker, The, 39 New York Times, 140, 147, 162 n34, 163 n36, 171 n6, 171 ni2 Nicholson, C. E., and R. W. Stevenson, 166 n26 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 31, 157 n3 5 Nineteen Nineteen (Dos Passos), 14, 24, 25, 28, 155 ni2 Nixon, Richard M., 1, 57, 144 Nizer, Louis, 171 nio Noland, Richard W., 123, 169 n20 "Nunc Age" (Adams, H.), 6, 14 Oberdorfer, Don, 55-6, 160 ni 5, 161 n23 Obregon, Alvaro, 28 Occasions and Protests (Dos Passos), 137-8 Oedipus the King (Sophocles), 11, 89, 112, 127 Of a Fire on the Moon (Mailer), 65-71, 142, 144, 163 n37, 163 n39 Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradford), 26 Olderman, Raymond M., 104, 153 n5, 167 n29 Olsen, Lance, 164 ni4 "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (Thoreau), 15 Oppenheim, E. Phillips, 164 nio Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 48 Oregon Trail, The (Parkman), 36 Origin of the Brunists, The (Coover), 11, 1 4 0 1
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State, The (Engels), 18, 19
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 160 ni4 "Our Country and Our Culture" (Partisan Review), 6 "Our Mother, Pocahontas" (Lindsay), 168 ni4 Outsider, The (Wright), 5, 18, 32, 33, 156 n22 Ovid, 121 Ozier, Lance W., 164 n9, 165 ni6, 165 ni9 Paine, Thomas, 19, 20 Pamela (Richardson), 117 Paradise Lost (Milton), 118 paranoia, 75, 76, 78, 84, 88-9, 102, 147, 14950, 163 n2, 165 ni6, 165 n20 Parkman, Francis, 36 Partisan Review, 6, 32, 157 n35 Partisan Review & Anvil, 19 "Passion of Our Calling, The" (Doctorow), 138 Patterson, Floyd, 57 Pavlovian behaviorism, 77, 87, 89, 94 Pearl Harbor, 55-6 "Perseid" (Barth), 127-8, 131, 136, 144 physics, 8, 9, 21, 69, 72, 73, 155 ni3, 164 1114; Einstein, Albert, 100, 160 ni2; Newtonian, 3, 69, 72, 73, 85-6, 95, 99, 124; quantum, 9, 72, 73, 94, 96; thermodynamics, 73, 74, 86-7, 91, 92, 97-8, 100-1; see also entropy Pieces (Mailer), 39, 160 ni4 Pierre (Melville), 163-4 ^7 Plater, William M., 104, 165 ni6, 165 n20, 167 n29 Plato, 107, 167 ni Pocahontas, 116-17, 168-9 ni4 Podhoretz, Norman, 14, 154 n9 Poe, Edgar Allan, 149 Poirier, Richard, 99, 158 ni, 159 n i l , 165 ni6, 166 n23 politics (see also ideology): American disillusionment with, 6, 7—8, 16, 32; American tradition of, 6, 15 "Politics" (Emerson), 6 Politics Past (Macdonald), 30, 34 Pontifications (Mailer), 37, 158 1140, 159 n6, 170 ni Popular Front, 7, 20, 146 Porter, Katherine Anne, 32, 158 n38 post-modernism: as a literary movement, x xi, 1-2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 33-5, 136, 139, 140-5, 170 n4; and order, 1-2, 11 Poverty of Philosophy, The (Marx), 18 Power, Tyrone, 40 Presidential Papers, The (Mailer), 5, 8, 37, 3940, 43-5, 48, 57, 58, 59, 66, 70-1, 72-3, 161
ni9
Pricksongs & Descants (Coover), 12, 138, 142 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 79 Prisoner of Sex (Mailer), 48 Progressive Citizens of America, 8
211
INDEX Public Burning, The (Coover), i, 8, 10, 138-9, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145 Piietz, Manfred, 101, 165 ni6, 166 1126, 169 1115 Puritanism: Elect, 77, 78, 82, 95, n o ; free enterprise, 77-8, 82, 91, 163 n6; historicism, 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 73, 75-6, 82-5, 90-4, 96-8, 99-100, n o , 114, 144, 163 n2; imagery, 83, 99; jeremiad, 82-3, 163 n2; language, 102—4; mission, 21, 72, 76—7, 81—2, n o , 114; Preterite, 77, 78, 82, 95, n o ; Providence, 18, 27, 78, 80, 84; revelation, 84, 99, 144; theocracy, 76-7, 114; theology, 2, 75, 76, 83, 93; typology, 44, 62, 76, 77, 103, 163 n3; Word, 77, 90, 102-4 Pynchon, Thomas, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 35, 106, 114, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 158 1141; on apocalypse, 73, 81-2, 90, 93, 104; Crying of Lot 49, The, 9-10, 11, 75, 78, 81, 84-5, 88-90, 92-3, 97-9, 100-1, 102-5, I J 4 , 139, 143, 144; entropy and, 72-3, 85, 867, 90-4, 96-8, 99-100, 114, 144; "Entropy," 74, 86, 88, 91, 102-3; on free enterprise, 77—8, 82, 91; Gravity's Rainbow, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 73, 74, 75-8, 80, 81-2, 83-5, 86-7, 88-97, 98-101, 102-5, 115, 119, 140, 141, 143, 164 ni3; on historical process, 2, 9, 73, 76-8, 80-1, 83-5, 87, 8994, 95, 98, 100, 114, 144; "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?", 163 ni; on language, 98-105, 166 n24, 166—7 n28; metaphor and, 2, 98— 102, 104-5, l 6 6 n2i; "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," 8, 87-8; on order, 2, 75, 84-5, 87, 88-90, 91, 92-3, 95, 99, 164-5 ni5, 165-6 n2i; on paranoia, 75, 76, 78, 84, 889, 102, 163 n2, 165 ni6, 165 n2o; and physics, 9, 72, 73, 85, 92, 94 (see also Pynchon, entropy); Puritanism and, 9, n , 723, 75-8, 82-5, 86, 90-4, 95, 96-8, 99-100, 102—4, 114, 144, 163 n2, 163 n3, 163 n6; the Rocket, 90, 95, 98-9, 104-5, l 6 7 n 3o; "Secret Integration, The," 77-8, 90, 91-2; Slow Learner, 8, 74-5, 158 1141, 164 nio; on subjectivity, 2, 3, 82, 89-90, 95, 101, 139, 141; on systems, 2, 9-10, 74, 97, 98, 99, 100-1; on technology, 91, 92, 99; Tristero, 9, 88-9, 90, 101, 102, 104-5, 144; "Under the Rose," 79-80, 82, 87, 164 nio; V., 8, 74, 75, 79, 80-2, 83, 84-5, 87, 89-90, 9 2 4, 100-1, 102-5, 141, !45; on war, 83, 87, 91, 104 Pyuen, Carolyn S., 165 n 16, 166 n22 Quilligan, Maureen, 167 n28 Radford, Jean, 159 n5 Rafferty, Kevin, et al., 161 n2i Ragtime (Doctorow), 143 Rahv, Philip, 157 n35 Rathenau, Walter, 78, 164 n8
Reagan, Ronald, 146 re-creation, 6, 12, 34, 61, 81, 139, 145 Reed, John, 14, 22, 25, 26, 28, 155 ni2 reform, social, see politics Reilly, Charlie, 167 n2 reminiscence, 6, 12, 34 responsibility, 5, 17, 34, 37, 47-8, 114, 137-8 Revelation, Book of, 70, 86 revolution, 6, 9, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 28, 43, 65, 133-4, 146, 164 n n ; see also American Revolution; Bolshevik Revolution; communism Rideout, Walter B., 23 Right Stuff, The (Wolfe), 162-3 n34 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 94, 165 n2O Rolfe, John, 117 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 20, 82 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 1, 142, 147, 149, 171 n6 Rosenberg trial, 8, 10, 140, 145, 146-7, 149 Roth, Philip, 154 nio Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 116 Ruas, Charles, 170 n3 Rubenstein, Richard L., 42 Rubin, Jerry, 56, 60-1 Rush to Judgment (Lane), 160 ni4 Russell, Charles, 167 n28, 167 n29 Russia, see Soviet Union Sabbatical (Barth), 8, n Sacco, Nicola, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 20, 25, 146 St. George and the Godfather (Mailer), 50, 53, 57 Sandburg, Carl, 117, 168 ni4 Sanders, Scott, 163 n2, 165 ni6, 165 ni7 "Satire as a Way of Seeing" (Dos Passos), 137 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 15 Schaub, Thomas H., 165 ni9, 166 n22 Schell, Jonathan, 42 schizophrenia, 1, 37, 43, 52—3 Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg, 109, 121, 123 Schrader, George Alfred, 159 n5 Schrodinger, Edwin, 94 Schulz, Max F., 168 n5 Seaver, Edwin, 17, 158 n38 "Secret Integration, The" (Pynchon), 77-8, 90,
91-2
Seidel, Michael, 104, 167 n29 "Seven Exemplary Fictions" (Coover), 12, 138 Shakespeare, William, 115 Sherwin, Martin J., 161 n2i, 171 ni2 Siegel, Mark Richard, 81, 163 n5, 164 ni3, 165 n20 "Situation in American Writing, The" (Partisan Review), 32 Slade, Joseph W., 163 n5, 165 ni6, 165 n2O
212
INDEX
Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), 139, 142 Slethaug, Gordon E., 122, 168 n8 Slotkin, Richard, 168 n 10 Slow Learner (Pynchon), 8, 74-5, 158 1141, 164 nio Smith, John, 10, 115, 116-17, 118, 168 n9, 168 ni2 Smith, Marcus, and Khachig Tololyan, 163 n2 Smith, Thomas S., 164 n9, 164-5 nI 5» l 6 6 n26, 167 n29 Snow, C. P., 15 socialism, 7, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 30, 3i. 32 Socialist Party, 17 "Social Significance of Our Institutions, The" (James), 5 "Society and Solitude" (Emerson), 15 Solomon, Barbara Probst, 158 n4O Solotaroff, Robert, 162 n28 Something Happened (Heller), 141 "Song of Myself" (Whitman), 62, 155 ni3 Sophocles, 112 Sot-Weed Factor, The (Barth), 10, 110-15, 116-19, I20 » 121-5, 132, 139-40, 141, 167-8 n5, 168 n6, 169 ni5, 169 ni8, 169 n2O, 169 n22 Sot-Weed Factor, The (E. Cook[e]), 123 South, the American, 3, 19, 110-11, 143, 168 nio Southeast Asia, 7, 31, 45, 48 Soviet Union, 6-7, 8, 16-17, 2 ° , 23> 2 4, 2 5 ~ 6, 27-9, 30, 31, 42, 75, i n , 129, 138, 146, 147-8, 149, 150, 156 n2i, 171 ni2 Spanish Civil War, 28, 29 Spender, Stephen, 153 n4 Spinoza, Baruch, 85 spiral (as historical path), 2, 1 0 - n , 12, 32, 43, 83, 91, 93, 97, 109, 114, 122, 143-4, 159 n i l , 168 n8 Stalin, Josef, 15, 17, 23, 28, 30, 31, 146 Stalinism, 29, 30, 31, 40; see also Moscow trials; Nazi—Soviet Pact Steffens, Lincoln, 16 Stein, Gertrude, ix, 158 n38 Stewart, Maxwell, 28 Stimson, Henry L., 148 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 60 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), 43, 153 n4 Studs Lonigan (Farrell), 22; see also Judgment Day; Young Lonigan "subjective historicism," 9-10, 139-41, 145 subjectivity, xi, 2-3, 9-10, 13, 38, 41-2, 5960, 62-3, 82, 89-90, 95, 101, 108, 112-13, 126, 132, 137-41, 145, 162 1131, 164 ni5 Sun Yat-sen, 129 system: of belief, 2, 33-4, 90; closed, 97, 100-1; coordinate, 74, 98; of historical process, 2, 67, 74, 91, 164-5 ni5; of language,
130-3; mathematical, 140; of order, 2, 3 3 4 Tanner, Tony, 164 ni2 Tate, Allen, 32, 158 n38 technology, 6, 37, 46, 48-9, 51, 52, 66, 67-9, 91, 92, 99, 150, 154 nio, 162-3 n34 Teller, Edward, 48 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 115 Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed), 14, 22, 25, 26, 28, 155 ni2 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 100 Tharpe, Jac, 123, 169 n20 Thomas, Norman, 30, 156 n28 Thorburn, David, 164 ni3 Thoreau, Henry David, 15, 62, 63, 162 n29 Thousand and One Nights, The, 167 ni Three Soldiers (Dos Passos), 24, 28 Tibbets, Paul, 48 Time, 10, 38, 57, 140 "Time of Her Time, The" (Mailer), 159 nio "Title" (Barth), 126, 128, 142 Tololyan, Khachig, 164 n8; see also Smith, Marcus, and Khachig Tololyan Tom Jones (Fielding), 117, 122, 123 Torrey, Samuel, 92 totalitarianism: in art, 1, 2; in politics, 11, 31, 41, 145, see also Stalinism To the Finland Station (E. Wilson), 22-3, 164 nio Transcendentalism, 3, 4, is; see also Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Thoreau, Henry David; Whitman, Walt "Transcendentalist, The" (Emerson), 3, 38 Trial by Treason (HUAC), 150 Trilling, Diana, 156 n2i Trilling, Lionel, 6, 16, 17-18, 21, 70, 156 n24, 158 n38 Trotha, Lothar von, 81, 99 Trotsky, Leon, 29 Trotskyism, 7, 23, 29, 40 Truants, The (Barrett), 31, 157 n35 True Relation of Occurrences and Accidents in Virginia, A (]. Smith), 116 Truman, Harry S, 78, 140, 147-8 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 36, 37, 43-4 Twain, Mark, 150 Ulysses (Joyce), 153 n8 "Under the Rose" (Pynchon), 79-80, 82, 87, 164 nio Universal Baseball Association, Inc., The (Coover), 139, 142, 143, 144, 170 n4 U.S.A. (Dos Passos), 25, 138; see also Big Money, The; 42nd Parallel, The; Nineteen Nineteen Utopia, 6, 14, 23, n o , 115, 129, 159 n5 Utopia (More), 115 V. (Pynchon), 8, 74, 75, 79, 80-2, 83, 84-5, 87, 89-90, 92-4, 100-1, 102-5, H i , 145
INDEX Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 100 Vietnam, war in, 10, 36, 45, 46, 49-50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 156 n2i, 160 ni5, 161 ni9, 161 n22 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 29, 31, 32, 156 n27, 158 n39 Virgil, 109 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet, 124 Vonnegut, Kurt Jr., 139, 142 Waldmeir, Joseph J., 154 n3 Waldon (Thoreau), 62, 63, i n Wallace, Henry, 8 Waller, Edmund, 116 War of 1812, 9, n o , 129 Warren, Robert Penn, n , 158 n38 Washington Post, 57 "Was the Bolshevik Revolution a Failure?" (Modern Quarterly), 29-30 Watergate, 144, 160 ni4 Weber, Ronald, 161-2 n27 Wechsler, James A., 149 Weinstein, Norman, 163 n37 Weixlmann, Joseph, 167 n5, 168 n i l Welcome to Hard Times (Doctorow), 138 Wells, H. G., 24, 135 We Must March My Darlings (D. Trilling), 156 n2i Wenke, Joseph, 159 n n Werge, Thomas, 70 West, Nathanael, 50 "West and American Ideals, The" (Turner), 36 Westervelt, Linda A., 164-5 n I 5 Westmoreland, William, 51 White, Hayden, 124, 170 n25, 170 n26 "White Negro, The" (Mailer), 34, 40, 41-3, 67, 126, 158 1141, 159 nio, 159 m l
213 "Whither the American Writer?" (Modern Quarterly), 17, 32 Whitman, Walt, 8, 38-9, 54, 62, 155 ni3, 163 n37 Why Are We in Vietnam? (Mailer), 10, 45—55, 58, 143 Wiener, Norbert, 95-6 Wigglesworth, Michael, 16 Wills, Garry, 27 Wilson, Edmund, 21-3, 24, 28, 31, 155 nio, 157 n34, 164 nio Winslow, Edward, 77 Winston, Mathew, 163 n4 Winthrop, John, 26-7, 72, 76, 82-3 Winthrop's Journal: "History of New England" (Winthrop), 82-3 Witness (Chambers), 23 Witt, Grace, 161 ni8, 161 n2O Wolfe, Tom, 162-3 n34 World War I, 5-6, 7, 16, 36-7, 49, 81, 83, 146, 153 n8, 161 n22, 164 n8 World War II, 7, 8, 10, 30, 32, 36, 37, 40, 46, 49, 51, 67, 78, 81, 83, i n , 142, 161 n22, 166 n27 Wright, Richard, 5, 18, 20—1, 22, 28, 30, 32, 33, 156 n22 Wroth, Lawrence C , 169 n 19 Yalta, 7, 31 Young, David, 163 n37 Young, Philip, 116-17, 168 n n , 168-9 Young Lonigan (Farrell), 22 Zapata, Emiliano, 28, 129 Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud, 154 nio, 164 ni4 Ziff, Larzer, 103, 163 n6
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