Reminiscence and Re-creation in Contemporary American Fiction

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

The right of the University of Cambridge to print and sell all manner of books was granted by Henry VIII in 1534. The University has printed and published continuously since 1584.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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-

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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-

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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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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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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