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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. WHITE MAN’S BURDEN: AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE 1960s AND THE SUBJECT OF PRIVILEGE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

Emma Perry Loss, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2002

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Debra Moddelmog, Adviser

Professor John Hellmann

Professor Valerie Lee Approved by

Professor Marlene Longenecker

Adviser O English Graduate Program

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT

My dissertation reclaims for the progressive legacy of the 1960s American

literary texts from that decade responding to the impossible ideals and promised

privileges of white manhood. Refuting recent notions of a white male crisis traceable

simply to challenges posed by 60s political movements, I argue this "crisis" has

coordinates in ongoing yet historically transforming anxieties about race, gender, and

American democracy and the advent of subjectivity itself. I begin with a major mid

century manifestation of these anxieties in discourse surrounding the "adjustment" of

American soldiers, an event demonstrating white male ambivalence toward normative

manhood at an historical moment—the 1950s—when whiteness and masculinity

seemingly reigned.

Having begun to display the destructive structural and historical failure of white

masculinity to realize its impossible demands, I turn to four significant 60s texts as-yet

unrecognized for their staging of these tensions. First examining John Updike's Rabbit,

Run (1960), I show how the rebellion enacted by Rabbit's flight from postwar

normativity exemplifies resistant white masculinity's foundations in a melancholia that

animates but potentially compromises its efficacy as political protest. Next analyzing

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), I read Ken Kese/s novel as instantiating the

counterculture's renegotiation of American manhood, whereby the "Indian” is made to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. stand for an originary primitiveness appearing to free white masculinity of modem

demands while bearing an entitled, identity-affirming connection to the land. In

Michael Herr's writings on Vietnam, from late-60s magazine pieces to Dispatches

(1977), I trace the way one writer comes to disrupt the fantasy of American manhood

through his dramatization of white masculinity's simultaneous seductiveness and

violence. I conclude by interpreting Mario Puzo'sThe Godfather (1969) within the

context of early 1970s neoconservativism and cultural pluralism, finding a reactionary

allure that bespeaks post-60s white male American crisis but also reveals the long-

entrenched pathologies of individualism and capitalism informing normative manhood.

This study thus insists that unmasking white masculinity as an impossibility marked by

its failed, often violent, performances is a vital project for an American literary

discipline infused by critical race and gender studies and seeking to unearth the national

imaginary ever more fully.

iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dedicated to little Lilia

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first wish to thank my committee members for the feedback and support they

provided dining my completion of this project. Special thanks is due both to my

adviser, Debra Moddelmog, for her ever close and careful readings of my work, and to

Marlene Longenecker, for her consistent enthusiasm and encouragement.

I must next thank my graduate school compatriots, whose friendship and

intellectual engagement has also made this project possible. In particular, I thank the

various members of what I simply think of as my "diss group,'' especially its founder,

Janet Badia, and its most loyal members: Tara Pauliny, Kristin Risley, and Lisa

Tatonetti.

I also thank my parents, Archie and Suzanne Loss, for their aid, small and large,

in my graduate school endeavor.

Finally, I wish to thank the person most responsible for helping me see this

dissertation through to its end—Paul Eisenstein. Without the emotional and intellectual

sustenance he provided, this document and the ideas its contains are simply

unimaginable.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. VITA

March 29,1969...... Born — Bellefonte, Pennsylvania

1996...... M.A. English, Ohio State University

199 1...... B.A. English, Pennsylvania State University

1992 - 1994...... Secondary English Substitute Teacher, Erie, Pennsylvania

Summer 1993 and 1994 Writing Support Teacher, Johns' Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, Summer Program Sites in Los Angeles, California and Saratoga Springs, New York

1994 - present...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

1. Loss, Emma Perry. The First-Year Writing Handbook. Co-written and co edited with Janet Badia and Michael Lohre. Ohio State University, 1996.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... ii

Dedication...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita...... vi

Chapters:

1. Introduction...... 1

Rereading the 1960s Through the Lens of American Manhood ...... 8 The 1950s and (White) Masculinity Gone Awry: ’"Gentlemen: You are Mad!'"...... 17

2. Melancholia, Hysteria, and the Resistant White Male Subject: The Case of John Updike's Rabbit, Run...... 46

"Against Some Enemy Behind": Fleeing American Manhood ...... 51 Motions of Love, Notions of Self...... 76

3. Rejecting the Establishment, Resurrecting (Primitive) American Manhood: Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as Countercultural...... 90

Red Man's Burden: The Narrative Role of Chief Brom den...... 93 Meeting Man to Man, or The Fraternal C o n ...... 102 '"Who wawz that'er masked man?"': Pursuing the Big White Male ...... 114

4. Making a Spectacle of Man at War With Himself: Michael Herr's Writing on Vietnam from Esquire to D ispatches...... 132

The General and Michael Herr ...... 140 Illuminating the Fantasy of American Manhood ...... 153 '"Some terrible desperation'": The Ethics of Masculinity's Impossibility 169

vii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5. Relegitimizing American Manhood: Mario Puzo's The Godfather and Its Reactionary Allure...... 179

Neoconservativism and the Political Recoding of Race and Gender...... 180 Individualism, or The Crime of Great Fortune...... 185 It's the Culture, Stupid...... 197 "'I'm just one of those real old-fashioned conservatives'": Michael Corleone and the Relegitimization of White Male Privilege ...... 204 Coda: The Ends of American Manhood ...... 214

Bibliography...... 224

viii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

I begin by discussing the title of my dissertation—"White Man's Burden:

American Literature of the 1960s and the Subject of Privilege"—a title whose multiple

implications speak to my project in its entirety. The most obvious implication,

especially given the current tenor of cultural and literary studies, is the ironic one—that

the latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed an escalating identification by

white men with the notion that they bear the burden of (i.e., are victims of) their

whiteness and masculinity.1 This self-perception is one that depends precisely, of

course, upon the disavowal of any privilege garnered historically or in the present from

identifying as a white male; that is, this self-perception depends upon rejecting the

notion that one is, or has been, a subject of privilege.

Yet there is ample evidence that as a group, white men continue to benefit

socially, economically, and politically from identifying—actively and passively—with

dominant constructions of whiteness and masculinity, with the fiction that their bodies

bear the signs of their election. As research in critical race studies has made painfully

clear again and again, race remains an independent variable in life experience and

chance, a variable negatively effecting "minorities" in disproportionate numbers.2 Even

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. when controlling for factors such as income, education, and employment in comparison

to whites, racial minorities are significantly more likely to be exposed to toxic waste,

denied mortgage loans, and paid lower wages.3 The infant mortality rate for black

babies has stagnated around twice that of whites, while the rate for Native American

babies bom to women living on reservations hovers around seven times the national

average; meanwhile, an incommensurate proportion of the children who do survive

from these groups are likely to live in poverty during their childhood (Coontz 234,

Jaimes and Halsey 324).4 Certain racial minorities are also much more likely to be

convicted and imprisoned for the same drug-related crime committed by a white and to

be given a longer sentence for any like federal crime committed by a white.5 Women's

and gender studies work has made similar dynamics apparent with respect to gender and

the life experience and chance of women.6 The majority of poor adults are women

(Faludi,Backlash xiii). Although comprising approximately half the American

population, women are vastly underrepresented in every top legislative, judicial, and

executive position and vastly overrepresented in traditionally female (and low-paying,

benefitless) service and clerical jobs.7 Women are murdered by their male partners at

the rate of four per day (Coontz 3). These are just a few examples of the racialized and

gendered social structure in the contemporary United States. Made to overlap, these

statistics reveal the persistence of the distinctly privileged position of the white

American male.

Nevertheless, white men have increasingly come to identify themselves as

victims of racial and gender disenfranchisement, even while they continue to repudiate

the implications of a racialized and gendered social structure for those who are not

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. white and male. The contemporary genealogy for this identification begins perhaps

with the mid-60s political strategy of George Wallace, who succeeded in deflecting

public attention away from the sociopolitical injustices necessitating the enactment of

civil and women's rights and toward the notion that such measures were a violation of

(white male) working class interests devised by a liberal establishment. Such has been

the tactic of reactionary groups, from far right assertions of "white rights" and "men's

rights" to more seemingly moderate calls for a "color-blind" society and "family

values." Such has been the trend in recent Supreme Court cases and decisions, wherein

the rights of racial minorities and women have been dismantled on the grounds that the

liberal individual supersedes any group at the same time the court has argued in other

Q cases that the collective interests of whites and/or men have effectively been violated.

The initial motif announced in my title is also, however, quite sincerely intended

to evoke the idea that white masculinity—even during an apparent height of its prestige

in the decade following World War II — has been a burden, a weight that is difficult to

bear entirely. In making such a claim, my primary goal is not to generate pity for white

men, an objective that best characterizes the contemporary cult of white male

victimhood. Rather, I believe that to posit white masculinity as an insupportable

burden, and to discern various performances of masculinity (textual or actual) that

crumble under its weight, is to find decisive and fecund discontinuities in white male

imaginary identifications that ought also be a part of radical historical inquiiy and the

progressive democratic politics linked thereto. As such, this second implication of my

title is perhaps a less familiar one, for my intent is also to show how the cultural ideal of

white (hetero)masculinity has pitted white men not just against the oft-cited other but

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. against themselves in their striving, and failing, to coincide with an idealized selfhood.9

Thus, in keeping alive the notion that white, male bodies signify a natural set of

attributes and meanings and in insisting that the apparently visible characteristics of

white masculinity maintain a connection to those attributes and meanings that is

immutable, the cultural ideal of American manhood functions as a fantasy, as an

imagined solution that is fundamentally impossible to achieve and variously damaging

to all within its reach.10 Because the attributes and meanings of white masculinity have

transformed over time in the United States, as all cultural productions necessarily do, I

understand what I will call American manhood as a set of fantasmatic ideals that

attempt to enact "imaginary" solutions both to real ontological contradictionsand to real

sociopolitical contradictions.11

In this way, the phrase "subject of privilege" in my subtitle refers to a subject

position that I do not wish to regard as a fait accompli. Whiteness and masculinity

function as complex cultural fantasies and not as the fixed entities we have sometimes

assumed.12 Read literally, privileged subjects are, of course, those who enjoy material

advantages, which creates inequity that in turn has seemed foremost to necessitate

material remedies. But if we think of privilege first as anidea solving a more

fundamental contradiction pertaining to the very advent of being and subjectivity,

another—and I believe potentially more decisive—remedial point of intervention

appears. This point of intervention exists at the level of the idea or fantasy of American

manhood believed to guarantee and legitimize white men's privileged access to power

and to serve as one of the fundamental features of white male identity. While some

might find this appeal to subjectivity and subject-formation to be a dangerous and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seemingly ahistorical direction in which to take an examination of white male privilege,

I believe it is an imperative component of any project seeking to dislodge the material

and cultural power that white American men continue to wield today. The relative ease

with which the material remedies of the 1960s have been stymied and even reversed

pointedly suggest this.

Put another way, my own sense is that the more dangerous path involvesnot

imagining the subject prior to privilege—a choice that risks foreclosing those crucial

moments of radical agency when such subjects recognize (and testify to) the cultural

ideal of white manhood for the impossible fantasy that it is, in good part because not

imagining the subject prior to privilege veils the ideal in the naturalized essence to

which it lays claim. In her book National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the

Imagined Fraternity o f White Men, Dana Nelson has located this impossibility in the

basic antidemocratic structure of the United States, a structure given rise by the very

identificatory fantasies bringing the nation into being:

"White manhood" was a useful category for inventing national unity because it abstracted men's interests out of local issues and identities in an appeal to a nationally shared "nature." Its efficacy may also have followed from the way whiteness addressed capitalism's internal ambivalence: it simultaneously confirmed market logic (as a property that advantaged some) and seemingly defied it (in allocating "common" property). Former colonials of European descent, increasingly competitors in the market and political economies, could share collectively the exclusive property of "whiteness" [...] as it "democratically” wedded men to the new United States. (7)

Indeed, historically one of the key features of American manhood has been the way in

which the material advantages enjoyed by white men of the kind I illustrated earlier

depend crucially on unifyinga idea (i.e., a shared fantasy).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As Nelson points out, a meaningfully democratic American manhood simply

does not exist prior to the creation and deployment of this unifying idea: far from a fact

of nature, the election of white men in the name of American democracy is instead quite

clearly a product of discourse and the proliferation of images. This is evident from the

earliest acts of nationhood, beginning with the Articles of Confederation and their use

of the phrase "white inhabitants" for classifying population numbers in the estimation of

state taxes as well as with the aptly titled Naturalization Law of 1790, Congress's first

legislative action defining who could become an "American," and its declaration that

only free and "white" immigrants were eligible for citizenship (Nelson 6, Omi and

Winant 81). Thus, these ostensibly material determinations about who could and could

not be counted as a true citizen of the United States have set the stage for every struggle

thereafter concerning all potential citizens and their complete representation, not just

material and institutional but cultural and ideological as well. In a paraphrase and

extension of a key statement made by critical race theorist and historian Theodore

Allen, if racism and sexism were flaws within American democracy, "then the 'rise of

liberty’ would have been better off without [them]," but if racism and sexism facilitated

the 'rise of liberty,' then they were "not a flaw o f American bourgeois democracy, but its

very special essence" (Vol. 2, 256).13

In fact, the societal flaws resulting from how the United States has racialized

and gendered its citizens are precisely what began to be evident to the American public

in the 1960s through the dramatizations of inequity and injustice enacted by resistance

groups, through formal judicial and legislative changes undertaken by the state, and

through individual shifts of sociopolitical consciousness. Yet these flaws have been

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. largely understood as springing from the relationship democracy has bom to America's

marginalized others and not from the relationship democracy has bom to those who

occupy its privileged center: white American men. Clouding our ability to discern the

latter dynamic is our failure to address white masculinity’s anguished relationship to

itself, to recognize the internal dissonance that marks out the limits of fantasy. At the

same time, the legacy of 1960s has remained largely at the level of politics "proper"—

that is, at the level of mass movements in confrontation with the state and its dominant

institutions. This is an observation in no way intended to minimize the vast significance

of those movements and the contributions of the people who risked and gave their lives

demanding that the United States make good on its promises. Instead, this observation

is intended to force the recognition that when the 1960s is remembered exclusively as

politics proper, it follows that to the extent that a structural flaw in American

democracy is entertained, it will be seen as primarily involving the marginalized others

foreclosed from full citizenship. As James Baldwin replied in the summer of 1968 to an

Esquire interviewer who asked him "How can we get the black people to cool it?": "It is

not for us to cool it" (49). The very "success" of the cult of white male victimhood

since the 1960s is perhaps the most striking contemporary commentary on the failure to

realize American manhood as the fantasy around which dominant enfranchisement

structures itself. For until white masculinity is recognized as an impossible cultural

ideal that serves a very few people at the expenseall of the rest, including many "white

men," those who can aspire to American manhood will go on assuming and even

fighting for its guarantees as if it were the truth it claims to be.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Rereading the 1960s Through the Lens o fAmerican Manhood

My own reading of American manhood during the 1960s reveals the extent to

which many men never did really experience their identity as stable and immutable—

and tried, in more or less destructive ways, to make the ideal actual. As my discussion

of the early national period above suggests, I understand those aspiring to American

manhood as being embroiled in the contradictions of securing stable identity from the

beginning. Treatments of the 1960s, however, commonly conceive of white

masculinity, to the extent that they recognize it at all, as a formerly fixed identity that

came into crisis only when marginalized others began to stake their claims to power.

For the legacy of the 1960s emphasizing organized politics and resistance movements,

presented in a multitude of texts from television documentaries and dramas to general

anthologies of primary documents to works of history and sociology, has ultimately

forged a master narrative that not only clouds the politics of coming to dominant

subjecthood but that also frames activity by white men as abstract political participation

and cultural production while circumscribing the activity of blacks or women, for

instance, with the particulars of their identity.14 Granted, this narrative is in part the

effect of the kind of sociopolitical presence asserted by those on the margins who were

finally compelled to draw attention to the particulars of their identities in an attempt to

show how those particulars were made to function in oppressive ways. If those on the

margins had something to gain by naming the particular, however, those at the center

certainly had something to lose. As we have seen, white men have benefited greatly

from being visible in the sense of representing the normative and invisible in the sense

of having the particulars of their identity veiled by the universality that attends the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. normative.15 It does not follow, however, that simply because white men have had

something to lose by naming the particulars of their identity that their whiteness and

masculinity have not motivated them as sociocultural actors.

In fact, the assumption that whiteness and masculinity are motivating,

constructed features of identity is exactly what has driven the burgeoning scholarly

work in those areas, as well as more recent examinations of how the two terms intersect

specifically as white masculinity.16 As Sally Robinson states inMarked Men: White

Masculinity in Crisis, "White men, conflated with normativity in the American social

lexicon, have not been understood as practicing identity politics because they are visible

in political terms, even as they benefit from the invisibility of their own racial and

gender specificity" (2). Robinson's work is a vital corrective that places white men

inside the post-60s, "post-liberationist" political struggle over race and gender and

displays how the marking of white men as a racialized and gendered collective, instead

of as the normative individuals of liberal democracy, has in turn sometimes worked to

help reify white masculinity rather than destabilize it—most especially in the turn to

victimhood by white men themselves. Thus, Robinson devotes her critical energy to

dispelling the aftereffects of the master narrative I have outlined above.17

I want to make an additional key intervention by turning attention to the

"identity politics" that attended the maintenance of whiteness and masculinity in the

United States during the period prior to the post-liberationist sensibilities with which we

are so familiar. For in the post-WWII period and throughout the 1960s, there are any

number of cultural texts that display white men internally conflicted about the ideals of

white masculinity to which they are expected to accede and engaging in a politics of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. identity alongside marginalized groups. That is, these texts often reveal white men

seeking to resolve the contradictions inherent to the fantasy of American manhood

through the deployment of racialized and gendered notions of identity, but these texts

also usefully illustrate that the dissonance itself is not necessarily the result of an

encroaching disenfranchised populace. Privilege itself proves as discomfiting as

external threats against it, which is to say that, threatened or not, white masculinity is

experienced as unstable and mutable, as fantasy—and it is this experience of American

manhood as an impossible cultural ideal that I want to mine for the contributions it can

make to a progressive legacy of the 1960s. Indeed, if today's white male victimhood is

often fueled by nostalgia for a former, presumably complete, selfhood, I show that at its

core it is an unfounded nostalgia—i.e., that the scenario animating the nostalgia is a

fiction or (to borrow Gertrude Stein's famous maxim) that "there is no there there." If

our memory of the 1960s is steeped in the abstract political and cultural activity of

(white male) individuals, I suggest that it is activity often infused by the particulars of

that identity, an identity always already in anguished relationship to itself. And if

American liberal democracy is understood as being flawed only because of who it has

left out, I argue that there is a flaw at its center too.

Indeed, it is obligatory in discussing the 1960s to consider the response of

people of color, especially African Americans, to whites, whether neighbor to neighbor

or leader to leader, and their revolt against race as it was then understood. We have

several names for this phenomenon: the civil rights movement, the Black Power

movement, AIM,La Raza. Similarly, it has become de rigueur to note the response of

women to men, whether at home as housewives or in various movements, and their

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. revolt against gender as it was then understood. We have a name for this phenomenon:

feminism. Relatively little, however, has been said about whiteness and about

masculinity with reference to the decade. My emphasis here, of course, is on whiteness

not whites and on masculinity not men; perhaps enough has been written about the

normative individuals of liberal democracy doing this or that in the 1960s.

Nowhere is this more true than in literary studies. As commonly portrayed and

studied, the literary 1960s is populated with texts that are said to respond to "individual

alienation" and resist "social conformity."18 But what happens when we make

masculinity and whiteness terms of our discussion? Think of Allen Ginsberg'sHOWL,

Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,Jack Kerouac'sOn the Road, William

S. Burroughs'Naked Lunch, Saul Bellow'sHenderson the Rain King, Robert Lowell's

Life Studies, John Updike'sRabbit, Run, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Ken Kese/s One

Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer mysteries, Tom Wolfe's

The Electric Kool-AidAcid Test, Norman Mailer's Armies o f the Night, Mario Puzo's

The Godfather, or Michael Herr's Dispatches. With masculinity and whiteness as terms

of our discussion, it becomes difficult to skim this sampling of influential and popular

1960s literature without questioning what has been generally described as individual

alienation and social conformity. In fact, on reflection, these works begin to appear

more than a little invested in exploring the totems and taboos of mid-twentieth century

white masculinity. And the same can be said of the popular culture of the 1960s. From

Leave It to Beaver to Archie Bunker, Elvis Presley to Mick Jagger, andRebel Without a

Cause to Easy Rider, these other cultural texts also consistently reveal an implicit

interest in the issues of masculinity and whiteness. Yet important questions concerning

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the intersection of these phenomena—the 1960s, whiteness, and masculinity—remain to

be asked in American literary studies.

Indeed, the most basic question of how whiteness and masculinity are

represented in 60s literature has received little comprehensive or in depth treatment.19

Rather, critical work in post-1945 American literature has, in general, shifted its

primary focus to one of two emphases in considering the bodies of work that follow the

immediate postwar period: "postmodern" texts that work to decenter the subject (and

the capacity of language and/or literary form to render experience seamlessly) and

"multicultural" texts that attempt to treat the experiences of those who have occupied

the margins in American society.20 One need only peruse any of the major literary

anthologies currently on the market to observe this trend at work—a well-deserved

trend, if it need be said, due not only to the richness and variety of the literature itself

but to the wonderfully productive and necessary theoretical and disciplinary

conversations it has stimulated. We are at a place in this conversation, however, where

I believe it can be further enriched by infusing these categories with the identificatory

terms and positionalities they too often obfuscate: whiteness and masculinity. Such a

revision of our frame of reference opens up an important space for those works that

currently cannot be considered under the headings of either postmodernism or

multiculturalism—largely conventional narratives by and about white guys in particular.

Put in conversation with traditional postmodern and multicultural texts, from the work

of Thomas Pynchon and John Barth to James Welch and Alice Walker, these narratives

have the potential to show us both that the postmodern subject is not so abstract at all

and how the multicultural subject is addressing the center as much as the margin. Read

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. through the lens of American manhood, a multitude of literary texts from the 1960s are

shown to dramatize the powerful intersection of white masculinity's ongoing

construction and a historical moment in which the United States underwent a

fundamental shift away from the question of whether there should be racial and gender

equality and toward the question of how that equality should be achieved.

For some scholars of history, the change wrought during the 1960s in the United

States is comparable to that wrought by events such as the Great Depression, the Civil

War, and the American Revolution.21 Though this change by no means completely

originates or concludes within the exact calendar confines of the 1960s, with most

scholars treating the 1960s as spanning mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, a significant

amount of the social change was catalyzed during, and at the very least has become

identified with, that single decade. The civil rights movement, the counterculture, and

radical intellectualism certainly have their roots in the preceding decades, but their

questioning of society and its rules was just the beginning of the wave of interrogation

that would ensue. Student or worker, soldier or pacifist, liberal or conservative, male or

female—the wave of interrogation was exceptionally far-reaching and few were left

fully secure in the idea that the status quo in American society was either inevitable or

right. And whether directing their critiques at the legal system, corporatism, the

military-industrial state, governmental bureaucracy, the media, or the research

university, those questioning the status quo were fundamentally critiquing dominant

white masculinity as it was then understood; for to many, whether they would have

stated it as such, these were white masculinity's greatest expressions.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As I have already indicated above, however, I want to be careful to treat the

volatile politics of identity that come out of the 1960s as phenomenon resulting from a

gradual series of events and not characteristic of the 60s as a whole. The early and even

mid-1960s are frequently more akin to the 1950s in tone and sentiment than the

standard notion of the 60s still circulated today. A wonderful cultural example in this

vein as late as 1967 is the popular filmThe Graduate, which depicts the essentially

moderate rebellion against suburban conformity by high-achieving Stanford graduate

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffinan) that is utterly bereft of any link to larger

collective political movements. Indeed, it was only in the summer of 1967—the media-

celebrated "Summer o f Love"—that the average American was introduced to those

quintessential symbols of 60s cultural revolution: the hippie and LSD.22 And although

Betty Friedan had made "the feminine mystique" famous by 1964 and the National

Organization for Women (NOW) officially revived feminism in 1966, that most

enduring (and appropriately false) image of the bra-buming feminist did not become

part of the cultural discourse until the August 1968 Miss America pageant protest.

But one of the most significant examples of the relative quiescence of the early

1960s is to be found in turning to the civil rights movement. For while the civil rights

movement had been active throughout the postwar era and is rightly cited among the

foundational forces catalyzing 60s liberationist movements and identity politics, the fact

is that the leading civil rights organizations embraced a politics of assimilation in their

initial campaigns for integration in the South and through the passage of the 1964 Civil

Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. What this meant was that the most active

civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference

(SCLC)—emphasized a rhetoric of integration and calls for a "race-free" society. In

large part a tactical move aimed at achieving the most political gain in the shortest

amount of time, this politics of assimilation nevertheless had the effect of suggesting

that it was only certain institutions and policies that were racist and not the average

American, that racism was a problem of what was excluded from the societal structure

and not a problem of what was included in the individual and collective psychic

structure.23 While the latter critique surely underwrote civil rights efforts, it was only as

the insurgent black power movement eclipsed the civil rights movement that this

critique of the societal center was made more explicit.24 Subsequently embraced by

other liberation movements, this critique is what resides at the heart of the so-called

identity politics that are now burned into public memory as one of the defining national

traumas of the 1960s, however much the dominant discourse on identity politics has

succeeded in continuing to veil the impact of whiteness and masculinity on the

individual and collective psychic structure.

The literature I examine, then, will reflect just such an altering sociocultural

landscape and its shifting sensibilities and anxieties, a landscape wherein white

masculinity moves from a period relatively lacking in public self-consciousness into

one that is exceedingly self-conscious. And in that transformation, I contend, the

literature of the 1960s is supremely engaged in the cultural work of renegotiating

American manhood: sometimes to maintain existing balances of power, sometimes to

envision new ones, sometimes to break from demands on identity that have finally been

recognized as impossible to fulfill. I use the word "renegotiate" to suggest an ambiguity

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of means and ends, of stated intentions and felt desires—the kind of ambiguity that

always accompanies any encounter with power and its manifestations. Indeed, there is

a great deal of personal and cultural work to be done in maintaining such categories and

their definitional requirements. This work is foremost a matter of how one imagines

oneself and others, and perhaps nowhere is this fact more pointed than in the "real" and

"fictional" texts we produce, for there we find concrete instances of the attempt to

contest and reimagine identity and its consequences. Taking this as my premise, my

project thus makes the kind of critical assumption that Toni Morrison describes in

Playing In the Dark.

Living in a nation of people whodecided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedomand mechanisms for devastating [...] oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer. When this world view is taken seriously as agency, the literature produced within and without it offers an unprecedented opportunity to comprehend the resilience and gravity, the inadequacy and die force of the imaginative act. (xiii)25

In this way, my dissertation ultimately seeks to reclaim for the progressive legacy of the

1960s a series of significant American literary texts from that decade that testify and

respond to the impossible ideals and promised privileges of white manhood embedded

within the national imaginary and contested in its literature.

In preparation of my discussion of 1960s literature, I now turn to the post-WWII

period and its cultural attitudes towards whiteness and masculinity. I begin by

examining a major mid-century manifestation of these anxieties in the conflicted

discourse surrounding the "adjustment" of the American soldier, an event that bears

witness to the ambivalence toward normative manhood and its attendant privileges

experienced by white men at the very historical moment—the 1950s—when whiteness

and masculinity enjoyed a reign seemingly secure from those political forces for which 16

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the subsequent decade became famous. My focus here on white manhood's anguished

relation to itself prior to its more explicit destabilization later in the 1960s has two

related aims: first, to uncover the way that the very structure of subjectivity animates a

fantasy of American manhood; second, to begin displaying the necessity of exposing

the structural and historical failure of white masculinity to realize itself for the

impossible set of ideals that it is, the attempted fulfillment of which has left so much

violence in its wake.

The 1950s and (White) Masculinity Gone Awry: "'Gentlemen: You are Mad!"'

So social critic Lewis Mumford proclaimed in the accusatory title of his first

published article responding to the atomic bomb (Jamison and Eyerman 16). So one

might say in surveying the surface of any number of aspects of American life in the

1950s. Other social critics during the 1950s certainly did, and social critics and other

scholars since have had to agree—there was something if not mad then at least awry

about 1950s American society as it tried outwardly to imagine itself. Moreover, from

the rise of scientism, the military-industrial state, and the white-collar order to the

hegemony of the nuclear family to the fixation on the psychic deviance and normalcy of

individuals, this was a society that privileged (white) masculinity above all else and that

had very specific ideas about what constituted the masculine. I retain "white” in

parentheses above to suggest the often transparent manner in which whiteness informs

constructions of masculinity in the 1950s. Mumford's address itself suggests this if we

think of who he is addressing and what his audience would have almost invariably

assumed upon reading "Gentlemen." But as the pitched discourse over masculinity

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. characterizing 1950s society spawns its own resistance, and as the civil rights

movement increasingly threatens to disclose whiteness for the absent presence it is, the

extent to which American manhood at that time relies upon an assumed whiteness is

revealed also. Let's turn now, though, to American manhood in the 1950s and the

question of what was "mad" about the manner in which it attempted to imagined itself.

In scholarly work analyzing masculinity at mid-twentieth century, a common

starting point is the situation of returning World War II veterans. Statistics offered by

historian James T. Patterson in Grand Expectations: The United States, 1946-1974

suggest why this starting point makes such sense: "In all, 16.4 million Americans, the

vast majority of them young men, joined the armed services during World Warn.

More than 12.1 million of them were still in uniform in early August 1945. This was

nearly two-thirds ofall American men aged 18 to 34 at the time” (13). Yet Patterson's

discussion of returning- WWU veterans suggests something even more compelling with

respect to these men who would usher in the decade of the 1950s. It seems that the

soldiers and sailors of WWII, as well as the numerous wives and girlfriends they had

left at home, had to stage a campaign of sorts to get the GIs back to the states; only after

flooding Congress and newspapers with insistent pleas, even the occasional pair of baby

booties, did demobilization occur in any earnest (Patterson 14). The United States

government apparently needed time to prepare for the returning servicemen.

Yet there was a disquieted sense about American manhood even as the Second

World War was underway—enough so that congress actually held hearings to address

the question of whether the domestic front was threatened by the absence of fathers.

Part of these hearings was the proposal of a draft exemption bill that would relieve

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fathers of military duty. Supporters of the exemption saw the absence of fathers as

contributing to increased juvenile delinquency and national instability. Should the bill

not pass, supporter Senator Burton Wheeler claimed, the country would see a "complete

breaking down of the national morale and the morals of the boys and girls" (qtd. in

Kimmel 227). Those opposing the draft exemption bill argued that not only would the

military lose a valuable portion of the recruiting population, but that the masculinity of

these men denied the opportunity to fight would be seriously maligned. As General

Joseph McNamey put it, should the bill pass and fathers be exempted, then that

"particular class" of men "is not required to furnish any effort for the successful

completion of the war. If they see fit, they can still dress women's hair" (qtd. in

Kimmel 227). Within this context, the ultimate creation of a legislative bill to

accommodate demobilized WWU soldiers further suggests the envisioning of a very

specific kind of life for these returning men as well as for the visionaries themselves—a

life in which distinct gender roles were the foundation a solid American nation needed

to stand upon.26

In fact, just seven months after the United States joined the Allied forces of

Europe, the government had begun preparing for the prospect of its returning

servicemen, openly motivated in large part by the dismal employment situation of

demobilized American soldiers after World War I, the belief that a similar situation is

precisely what had wrought fascism in Germany and elsewhere, and the sheer numbers

of returning servicemen (Olson 17-18). Although there was initial resistance to the idea

behind the measure officially, and tellingly, titled "The Servicemen's Readjustment Act

of 1944" and then dubbed "the GI Bill of Rights,” the white middle- and upper-class

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. men making such decisions were eventually persuaded that such a measure was

necessary to forestall what Congressman Hamilton Fish believed would otherwise be

"chaotic and revolutionary conditions in America" were veterans made to "come home

and sell apples as they did after the last war” (Wilson 20). An unprecedented piece of

legislation, the creators of the GI Bill determined it would provide monthly stipends for

veterans pursuing higher education, loans for those starting a business, and financial aid

for those buying a home. Yet the word used by James B. Conant, President of Harvard

University, to describe his feelings about the pending GI Bill and its potential outcome

was "distressing": "We may find the least capable among the war generation. . .

flooding the facilities of advanced education" (Olson 23).

While much of the debate over the GI Bill had to do with various official

considerations, logistical and other, one is hard pressed not to read into the desire of the

government and other officials to determine the direction of the returning servicemen's

lives as prescient of other underlying tensions and anxieties. At the very least, the

discussion surrounding the GI Bill makes powerful suggestions about how class

structure and social mobility were imagined. In some ways, of course, the GI Bill was a

re-imagining of class wherein soldiers from the lower and middle classes of all religious

and ethnic backgrounds were invited to join "Protestant elites" at those institutions

which prior to the war "were largely finishing schools" and a sign of upper class status

(Sacks 310). Not the least of the suggestions made by this piece of legislation,

however, is that the very embrace of class structure and social mobility encouraged by

the GI Bill o f Rights was a proper expression of American manhood and its "rightful"

domain. Here we see gender thus functioning as a discursive entity aimed at securing

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. one type of masculinity so as to ward off the formation of other, potentially disruptive,

masculinities. For if the government had an outbreak of Fascism to fear, it certainly had

cause to fear a resurgence of interest in Communism as exemplified by politics between

the World Wars. At its core, then, the capitalist individualism prescribed for American

manhood by the GI Bill is also to be understood as a natural extension of the original

expression of "real" masculinity made by these men—the act o f going to war in defense

of one's country and its values.

It seems, however, that many of the men who fought in WWII were not

necessarily "heroic" or "patriotic” in the way the government had hoped, and in fact

insisted, they be. Surveys show that "in Europe, only 25 percent of American infantry

fired their weapons in battle; in the Pacific, the percentage was only a little higher" (qtd.

in Adams 96). Numerous other soldiers reported faking psychological disorders to

avoid battle, a strategy apparently sniffed out by the military, whose response was then

to conduct studies of the soldiers' battle experiences and to normalize them (Kimmel

225). In one instance, an entire supplemental volume of theBulletin o f the U.S. Army

Medical Department dedicated itself to research on battle-related psychological

problems. In an article entitled "The Normal Battle Reaction: Its Relation to the

Pathological Battle Reaction" and typical of the volume, psychiatrist Stephen Ranson

writes that "management [of a breakdown on the front] consists in pointing out to the

soldier that these sensations represent a normal response in combat. [...] Then the

soldier must return to duty, either immediately, or after a few hours' rest at the aid

station" (6). And if the average soldier’s actual experience o f battle did not replicate the

picture of heroism constructed for him, neither did his felt sense of patriotism

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. necessarily coincide with the ideal. Contrary to the grand narrative of freeing Europe

from fascism, 51 percent of soldiers still stationed in Germany who took a poll in

September 1945 agreed that while Hitler's decision to commence war was misguided,

he had done Germany "a lot of good" (Goulden 31). In sum, heroic and patriotic

portrayals of WWH veterans are often just that, portrayals; the real men who fought in

the war are more complex than that. But what better way to ward off any unmasking or

exploration of that complexity than by revivifying the dominant white masculine

imaginary? In this way, one avoids any symptomatic outbreaks o f what is perhaps the

truly frightening possibility here—American manhood's failure.

No doubt, fear of this failure is precisely what drove the policies of the military

even before WWU began. After all, the military, and the United States government

more broadly, knew an American man when they saw one and took their task of

maintaining that ideal seriously. For women who joined the service, then, this meant

that their units would not be considered part of the military at all. As a result,

servicewomen could not be defined as true veterans and were rendered ineligible for

Veterans Administration benefits such as those provided by the GI Bill (Sacks 312).27

Similarly, African Americans who joined the armed services found themselves in a

completely segregated institution that placed them in separate units under the command

of white officers. The subsequent treatment of black GIs by the military, however, is

what really clarifies who counted as an American man. For example, just as soldiers

were becoming eligible to benefit from the GI Bill, 39 percent of black soldiers, but

only 21 percent of white soldiers, were given dishonorable discharges (Sacks 312).98

In translation, this meant that 39 percent of black soldiers were denied the benefits of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the GI Bill outright since one had to be an honorably discharged veteran to take

advantage of them. If deemed eligible, African-American GIs then had to labor under

the racist realities of the U.S. Employment Service, the Veterans' Administration, hiring

practices, college admissions, business opportunities, and the housing market.29 That

comparable obstacles occurred for other racial minorities is certain.30 The sexuality of

soldiers was likewise of great concern. Any announced or discovered violation of

heterosexual norms was sure cause for discharge or denial of military service altogether.

Unlike its European counterparts, however, the United States military went as far as to

attempt measuring the potential latent homosexuality of its enlistees, by observing their

ease in undressing for a group physical and by evaluating their answers to questions

about their comfort with women (Berube 20-21). Thus the debate over the GI Bill and

the manner in which it was exercised display how the construction of American

manhood directly springs from the limits and significations of femininity, race,

sexuality, and class. Ultimately, we see two dominant white masculinities at work in

the GI Bill of Rights—one already privileged and powerful and the other in its incipient

version, encouraging veterans to seek that privilege and power which is "rightfully"

theirs should they be man enough to earn it and embody it.

Not surprisingly, then, the return of WWU veterans set into motion a concerted

effort to reassimilate these men into their supposedly proper societal place and to find

some place for women as well. And in consort with the postwar move toward

consensus and its psychological discourse was the cult of science and its positivistic

discourse, if the two can even accurately be distinguished. For as a result of the war,

the military, and thus also the government, had established intimate ties with science

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and technology, burgeoning into something of its own monolith—the military-industrial

state. Meanwhile, the seat of this monolith proved not only to be the growing corporate

world, but the increasingly corporate university as well, resulting in the birth of the era

of the expert and a highly influential form of resurrected paternal authority. As

historians Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman have summed up the situation:

By the late 1940s, the cognitive praxis of the 1930s had largely been transformed into an anti-ideology of anticommunism, on the one hand, and patriotic celebration of American greatness, on the other. [...] A critical cultural assessment of technology gave way to a technological culture of scientific expertise and economic abundance. And an innovative populism, seeking to bridge the gaps between intellectuals and the common people, was replaced by a reaffirmation of academic professionalism and a commercialization of popular culture. (12-13)

Important to note is how deeply this cult of science sought to embed itself in the cultural

landscape and then, as we have already begun to see, succeeded in doing so. Such

sentiments are in fact almost perfectly captured in a 1948 article by leading American

sociologist Talcott Parsons entitled "Social Science: A Basic National Resource,"

wherein he insists that "[s]cience is integrated intimately with the whole social structure

and with the cultural tradition. They mutually support one another—only in a certain

type of society can science flourish. Conversely, without a continuous and healthy

development and application of science, such a society cannot function properly” (41).

Everywhere and by the right specialists, the status quo was to be carefully maintained,

and the good citizen was to act on the advice of these specialists.

In no instance was the oversight of the government-sponsored specialist more

apparent than in the case of the returning WWU veteran. Such was the dynamic found

in women's magazines like House Beautiful, which told their readers that "he's head

man again ----- Your part in the remaking of this man is to fit his home to him, 24

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. understanding why he wants it this way, forgetting your own preferences" (qtd. in

Adams 151). And society was making it very clear what "this way” was, regardless of

whether the men and women really wanted it or not. In the words of The Woman’s

Guide to Better Living: "Whether you are a man or a woman, the family is the unit to

which you most genuinely belong" (qtd. in Biskind 251).

No doubt, this return to domesticity was in part catalyzed by an American desire

to establish and maintain some kind of cultural status quo after the prolonged hardships

of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Following such an extended

period of want, the opportunity, security, and, in many cases, affluence afforded by

postwar economic growth and technological advances were warmly embraced by many

Americans. And if the government said that any threat to the status quo was a threat to

the supposed fruits of American democracy, the population was more or less willing, or

at least compelled, to take them at their word. In the realm of politics, the standards of

behavior were strictly defined and the cost of transgressing the status quo was presented

as expensive indeed—from making the country's official Black List, to facing one's own

execution in the manner of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to suffering a nuclear holocaust

at the hands of the Russians (Evans 12). But the rules governing the supposedly private

lives of individuals and families were no less strict in their rules of membership and

prohibitions against transgression.

Certainly, the United States government took seriously its task of

micromanaging the lives of women once WWII had ended. Not only did the federal

government distinguish itself as the only one of twenty-one countries from the

Americas represented in the United Nations to not sign a 1948 statement advocating the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. equal rights of women, but it helped turn the tide against working women by

eliminating the day care services it had created and supporting "the 'right' of veterans”

to usurp females in the workplace (Faludi,Backlash 51). Meanwhile, American

industry did its part as well. In the same year that the United States declared victory in

Europe and the Pacific, heavy industry relieved 2 million women of their jobs, and soon

thereafter established limits for salaries earned by female workers and reinstated rules

against hiring married women (Faludi, Backlash 51). At the same time, psychologists

and other medical experts began to warn women of the supposed hazards to their

femininity and general mental health wrought by too much education and independence,

especially in the form of a career, in best-selling publications such as a 1947 advice

book entitled The Modem Woman: The Lost andSex Life magazine.31 Parlayed into

other sites of cultural production, these messages about proper gender roles and the

place of the family compelled even the Actors' Guild to showcase its embrace of the

American family's suburban resurrection, recruiting its top Hollywood stars to speak to

civic groups throughout the country.32 Joan Crawford, for example, donned a mop to

display her homemaking skills and then professed her parenting philosophy for

interviewers and photographers; representative of the male stars is Ronald Reagan,

whose defense of family values was reported to be "stirring" by at least one

correspondent (Coontz 27-28).

As already suggested, one particularly important mark of American manhood in

the postwar United States increasingly became fatherhood, which was attributed with all

the right developmental characteristics and achievements signifying normalcy and full

citizenship. Nor did psychologists, sociologists, and lay advice columnists alike

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hesitate to decree exactly what the right developmental characteristics and achievements

of a successful adult might be. Most famous is probably Erik Erikson, who by 1950

established his "Eight Stages of Man" theory, which in essence extended Freud's set of

psychological dilemmas and resolutions into adulthood.33 In this theory, individuals are

said to encounter a series of stage-appropriate tasks that when successfully negotiated

will culminate in full maturity. Even though Erikson's tasks are abstract and largely

benign in themselves—e.g., one task is presented simply as "Trust versus Basic

Mistrust”—as cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich has noted, "'maturity' and the 'tasks'

which led to it quickly entered the psychologists' vocabulary as professional code words

for conformity" (17). Perhaps more influential in concrete terms, then, has been Robert

J. Havighurst's pamphletDevelopmental Tasks and Education. Circulated in

psychology textbooks since the early 50s, these tasks outline quite specific life choices

for adults, as in Havighurst's "developmental tasks of early adulthood": 1) selecting a

mate, 2) learning to live with a marriage partner, 3) starting a family, 4) rearing

children, 5) managing a home, 6) getting started in an occupation, 7) taking on civic

responsibilities, and 8) finding a congenial social group (72-82). With "mature

adulthood" as the goal and the onus placed on individual responsibility and choice, this

set of seemingly innocent developmental tasks takes it place among the most effective

of interpellative constructs, perfectly reiterating societal gender roles without even

having to articulate them. As postwar attitudes towards women in the workplace make

clear, for example, Havighurst's sixth task for early adulthood is intended exclusively

for men.34

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Furthermore, as was the case for women and their femininity, were a man not to

take it upon himself to prove his mature adult status through marriage, fatherhood,

breadwinning, and general conformity to the status quo, he could expect his masculinity

to be brought into question. As sociologist Talcott Parsons states so bluntly in 1959:

"Virtually the only way to be a real man in our society is to have an adequate job and

earn a living. It is perhaps not too much to say that only in very exceptional cases can

an adult man be genuinely self-respecting and enjoy a respected status in the eyes of

others if he does not 'earn a living' in an approved occupational role" (271). The link

between manhood, occupation, and the generation of income was also a common theme

in popular novels of the 1950s, such as Sloan Wilson'sThe Man in the Gray Flannel

Suit (1955) and Herman Wouk's Marjorie Momingstar (1955). Affirmation of Parsons'

sentiments can even be found as early as 1950 in H. A. Overstreet'sThe Mature Mind,

one of the best-selling non-fictional works that year. According to Overstreet's thesis,

humanity has witnessed an historical striving toward "the maturity concept" that has

been thwarted time and again by immaturity, the central cause of all social ills. The

collective effect of this ideology of maturity was that men unable or unwilling to aspire

to the approved measures of maturity could expect to be considered "ill" indeed.

In particular, whether treated in popular culture or the annals of a psychiatric

journal, the immature man and the homosexual were virtually synonymous. In the 1963

text The Problem o f Homosexuality in Modem America, psychiatrist Abram Kardiner

offers his humble diagnosis, arguing that male homosexuals "cannot compete. They

always surrender in the face of impending combat. This has nothing to do with their

actual ability,. . . These are men who are overwhelmed by the increasing demands to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fulfill the specifications of masculinity" (27). The specifications do not even need to be

listed since it is quite evident that normative masculinity is about fully assuming one's

mandate as heterosexual family head and, maybe more importantly, about being a loyal

capitalist competitor. These are several of the key, intertwining tasks of a "good”

American. Indeed, while the one decidedly less benign task dictated by Erik Erikson,

his sixth stage of Intimacy vs. Isolation, begins with an innocuous and even appealing

call for love as the "prescription for human dignity [...] and for democratic living," the

description of this task soon segues into the insistence it can be achieved only by

finding a partner of "the other sex" with which to consummate "heterosexual mutuality"

(230). The suggestive bleeding together of all these terms also becomes glaringly

apparent with a turn to Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against anti-American

activity. Thus McCarthyite Senator Kenneth Wherry would assert that "You can’t

hardly separate homosexuals from subversives," while an aide would claim that their

cause had exposed a State Department writhing with "a veritable nest of Communists,

fellow travelers, homosexuals, effete Ivy League intellectuals and traitors” (qtd. in

Kimmel 237).

Furthermore, as in other ideological constructs of the period, "adulthood" and its

full accomplishment in "maturity” are found to be terms additionally deployed in the

delineation and promulgation of whiteness. Returning to H. A. Overstreet's 19S0

bestseller The Mature Mind, for example, we find that the historical striving toward "the

maturity concept" he describes is, in fact, an almost exclusively Western and white one.

So although Overstreet's overt goal in writing his treatise on maturity is quite

laudable—the elimination of social injustice of all magnitudes—and although he

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. laments the fact that "[a] number of saving insights have been brought into the world

without any of them saving the world" (90), his historical narrative undercuts that effort.

The chapter "Mature Insights Lost," for example, commences by acclaiming "the novel

idea of One God" and then makes its way through the supposedly key founding (and

entirely Eurocentric) moments in the evolution of this idea, such as Moses' founding of

moral law, the Greek recognition that "man is a rational animal," the gains by Western

scientific inquiry, and democracy's natural righteousness. In effect, then, Overstreet's

discourse on "mature adulthood" erects an inherently racialized developmental schema

wherein white Western cultures model the pinnacles o f human achievement. Similarly,

influential studies of human behavior to come out of the postwar era—such as the best

selling Kinsey Reports onSexual Behavior in the Human Maleand Sexual Behavior in

the Human Female—almost invariably confine themselves to white subjects although

they are circulated rhetorically as if representative of human behavior in general.35 This

is not to say that the Kinsey Reports fail to be clear about their statistical samples; in the

methods section of the report on males, for example, the researchers are forthright about

the fact that "[t]he present volume is confined to a record on American and Canadian

whites" (76). But the effect of describing the report as a study of the human male is to

equate whiteness with archetypal humanness.

There were, however, white men who spoke out against the status quo in the late

1940s and 1950s, which is to reiterate that dominant social constructions of whiteness

and masculinity are not inevitably synonymous with "white men" as such. C. Wright

Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, and others responded directly to

the overdetermined scientific postwar climate of consensus, rationality, and normativity,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and defied core ideals of American manhood in doing so. Mills critiques the power

elite and their intellectual pawns, Marcuse laments one-dimensional men, Fromm calls

for a society that is sane, and Goodman describes the Organized System that makes

growing up in America absurd. Nor was the population at large averse to critiques of

the status quo, the demands of which became increasingly stringent as the 1950s wore

on. Hard cover sales of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society numbered

around fifty thousand by 1960, while paperback sales of David Riesman'sThe Lonely

Crowd and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man numbered in the hundreds of

thousands (Schlesinger 45). Yet even the conversation intent on reimagining the

individual and society is almost without exception between and about men, and even

more pointedly, white men. While white men, then, are not inevitably synonymous

with whiteness and masculinity, the extent to which these identificatory terms were

naturalized in the United States at mid-twentieth century is betrayed by the fact that

even some of those social critics from the period dedicated to unveiling the "natural" are

found to work from the presumption of these very terms.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills, for example, staged a direct challenge to the

scientific norms embraced during this era by his discipline and others. Enacting a

pragmatic, populist form of sociological investigation and critique, Mills flew in the

face of disciplinary adherence to scientific objectivity, skepticism, and universalism; at

the same time, Mills challenged those intellectuals singing the praises of the 1950s and

the "end of ideology" those years had supposedly wrought. While Mills appears

implicitly to be critiquing a certain kind of white, male-defined universality, however,

he ignores the gender and racial implications of his own arguments. Take, for example,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Mills' 1951 work White Collar, an extended critique of the passive new mass society

represented by a growing middle class. Though Mills begins by suggesting that the

issues psychologically oppressing this population are "the troubles of all men and

women" ( White Collar xv) and even specifically mentions salesgirls, schoolteachers,

and housewives, it does not take long to surmise that Mills is spending little time

imagining the lives of white women, let alone the lives of people of color:

The nineteenth century farmer and businessman were generally thought to be stalwart individuals—their own men, men who could quickly grow to be almost as big as anyone else. The twentieth-century white-collar man has never been independent as the fanner used to be, nor as hopeful of the main chance as the businessman. He is always somebody’s man, the corporation's, the government's, the army's; and he is seen as the man who does not rise. ( White xi-xii)

In essence, what begins to creep into Mills' argument here is a marked nostalgia for an

era in which the person who is now the white-collar worker purportedly once controlled

his work and his world. Beyond the obvious shortsightedness of these broader

sentiments and their romantic notion of mastery, the version of the past invoked by

Mills in the form of the nineteenth-century farmer and businessman is almost without

exception also an invocation of the white man. And if there is any question as to

whether Mills really does intend to include non-whites in his will to power for the

white-collar worker, this quote speaks for itself: "If only because of its growing

numbers, the new middle class represents a considerable social and political potential,

yet there is more systematic information available on the farmer, the wage-worker, the

Negro, even on the criminal, than on the men and women of the variegated white-collar

worlds" (White xix). The "Negro" excluded from discussion and women a seeming

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. afterthought, Mills impassioned concern for the white-collar worker must be considered

in a different light.

On the one hand, then, it is hard not to find many of Mills' critiques of 1950s

society accurate and provoking: "What must be grasped is the picture o f society as a

great salesroom, an enormous file, an incorporated brain, a new universe of

management and manipulation” ( White xv). On the other hand, it is also hard not to call

Mills' larger vision into question when he states on the very next page that "The

uneasiness, the malaise of our time, is due to this root fact in our politics and economy,

in family life and religion—in practically every sphere of our existence—the certainties

of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have disintegrated or been destroyed" ( White

xvi). The language Mills finally settles upon to describe the white-collar worker is even

more revealing:

The new Little Man seems to have no firm roots, no sure loyalties to sustain his life and give it a center. He is not aware of having any history, his past being as brief as it is unheroic; he has lived through no golden age he can recall in time of trouble. Perhaps because he does not know where he is going, he is in a frantic hurry; perhaps because he does not know what frightens him, he is paralyzed with fear. (White xvi)

What Mills keenly saw moving into place was a more pervasive power structure quietly

headed by "the power elite"—a corporate hierarchy of state, military, and technological

organizations replacing the old institutions of church, school, and family. But Mills'

nostalgia for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "certainties" is unsettling. After all,

what were those certainties, what exactly was that golden age for which he longs?

Undeniably, it appears (nostalgically) to be one in which white, male dominance was

virtually the absolute rule.36

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Yet Mills' conception of the white-collar worker is one in turn also informed by

a compelling, if problematic, notion of the very oppressiveness of privilege itself. Thus

Mills approvingly quotes salesman Mr. Bowling, a character in George Orwell's

Coming Up fo r Air.

There's a lot of rot talked about the sufferings of the working class. I'm not so sorry for the proles myself.[...] The prole suffers physically, but he's a free man when he isn't working. But in every one of those stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him. O f course the basic trouble with people like us is that we all imagine we've got something to lose.' (White xi)

Mills' hierarchization of the oppression experienced by workers of course needs to be

critiqued. But his sense of bourgeois (definitively white) masculinityimagining as it

must constantly labor to retain its sense of self is prescient. So too is Mills' discussion

of this psychic suffering and his differentiation between psychic and social sites of

power: "Internally, they are split, fragmented; externally, they are dependent on larger

forces" ( White ix). And, ultimately, Mills ties these observations together: "[T]he

white-collar people are the interchangeable parts of the big chains of authority that bind

the society together" ( White xvii).

In fact, Mills had attempted to describe these "big chains of authority," what he

termed the power elite, as early as 1948 in his bookThe New Men o f Power. Yet as late

as 1959, in Mills' The Sociological Imagination, we see that his societal critique is

perhaps hindered from achieving its ends as a result of its own universalized terms:

Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday world, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often correct: What ordinary men are aware o f and what they do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they 34

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. (3)

Not only does Mills begin by addressing "men" universally as a group, but it soon

becomes obvious that what he imagines this group missing are "visions and powers"

outside the private (feminine) sphere and opportunities to "move" openly and actively

not as passive (feminine) lookers-on. These men are trapped, and the world they once

enjoyed, or might have enjoyed, has been lost to them, a world never available to white

women and people of color.

Most troubling, or maybe telling, about Mills' work is that there is evidence to

suggest he did see at least see the plight of women as being interconnected with the

plight of men and that he was not unwilling to critique masculinity as such. In an

unpublished review of Simone de Beauvoir'sThe Second Sex, entitled "Women: The

Darling Little Slaves," Mills concludes that "put in its briefest form,” Beauvoir's answer

"to the man-woman problem" is:

the elimination of woman as we know her—with which one might agree, but to which one must add: and the elimination of man as we know him [...]. No one can know what new types of human beings would be developed in this historically unique situation, but perhaps in sharing Mile, de Beauvoir's passion for liberty we would all gladly forego femininity and masculinity to achieve it; and perhaps the best types would follow Coleridge's adage and become androgynous characters in an androgynous world. {Power, Politics and People 346)

The question is why Mills would not make such a proclamation about gender publicly,

or at least inform his other work with such sensibilities as expressed above.

Additionally, even in his unpublished work whiteness remains a largely silent and

unproblematized term of his discussion.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In sum, then, the work of C. Wright Mills encapsulates the major presumptions

and internal contradictions of white masculinity in his day. His work, the work of a

self-proclaimed cultural critic, nevertheless fails to address publicly the very issues of

gender and race begged by his own observations. Indeed, even as he calls for

progressive change, he displays a nostalgic inclination that finds model social relations

in an imaginary past marked by traditional divisions of labor and traditional meanings

of gender. It is this same desire to challenge the terms of the subject's subjection to

power while neglecting, whether consciously or unconsciously, to fully articulate

several of its key terms—i.e., whiteness and masculinity—that also characterizes much

of the literature of the 1960s. Yet like Mills' work, too, this literature vitally captures

the manner in which power manifests itself both psychically and socially, presenting us

with subjects who attempt to come to grips with these intertwining, everchanging

forces.

And perhaps no group more frequently figures as prefatory to the literary 1960s

than the Beats. Critical works addressing the period regularly dedicate entire chapters

to the Beats and their most iconic representatives. Morris Dickstein's Gates o fEden:

American Culture in the Sixties is one such work. Focusing in large part on Ginsberg's

1959 reading at Columbia University and the response it generated, Dickstein's first

chapter goes on to describe the event in prophetic terms, as "emblematic of a whole era”

(3). A strong statement, it is nonetheless one difficult to refute completely. Though

initially lambasted by the high culture rightguard in journals likePartisan Review as

well as in middlebrow magazines like Time, which described the Beats as a "pack of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. oddballs who celebrate booze, dope, sex, and despair," their work ultimately became an

influential force of the day.

By now, of course, the Beat sensibility of rejecting convention, seeking

freedom, and encouraging experimentation has an altogether familiar ring to it. What

has a less familiar ring is the suggestion that the Beat sensibility might be best described

as a project intent on challenging the conventions of masculinity and whiteness.

William Carlos Williams' introductory remarks toHOWL certainly suggest this when he

announces the following to his readers: "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we

are going through hell" (preface). Significantly, though, it is only in retrospect that we

find the poet Allen Ginsberg addressing masculinity as such. Interviewed in 1969 for

Playboy magazine, he there expresses his pleasure in witnessing "the reappearance in

the form of long hair and joyful dress of the affectionate feminine in the natural Adamic

man, the whole man, the man of many parts" (qtd. in Dickstein 20). In discussing his

homosexuality and how he felt it somehow set him apart from early on in his life,

Ginsberg further describes how this recognition "served as a catalyst for self-

examination" and made him aware of a hyper-masculinity and aggressiveness in

American culture (qtd. in Dickstein 20). Ginsberg's gesture here is characteristic of a

dynamic that has attended the reading o f literary texts of the 1960s more generally—

wherein seemingly abstract struggles become fully visible as struggles against certain

"invisible" signifiers of identity (e.g., whiteness, masculinity) only in the context of or

collision with social resistance. Only in 1969 could Ginsberg name more precisely the

terms of his rebellion in 1959. In order to make visible as many of the resistances

staged by the literature of the 1960s as we can—the ones internal to whiteness and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. masculinity as well as the ones externalized as social struggle over, say, race and

gender—we might have to follow Ginsberg's lead and read the decade backwards.37

For the fruit to be reaped from such a strategy, I here turn to the first novel in

John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy,Rabbit Run (1960)—a novel that has yet to be

considered in terms of white masculinity. Showing how Rabbit's initial flight from the

middle American life he has known is catalyzed by his recognition that normative

masculinity is somehow fraudulent, I find that his resistant actions are ultimately

undermined by his need to keep the privileged fantasy of coherent and immutable white

manhood alive. At the same time, Updike's first Rabbit novel serves as a useful

example of resistant white masculinity's important foundations in a melancholia, and

subsequent hysteria, that animates but potentially compromises its efficacy as political

protest. Next examining Ken Kesey’sOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), I

display how the pursuit of an alternative to normative identity by his almost exclusively

white male characters is similarly enmeshed in a fantasy of American manhood in this

novel that transformed Kesey into a countercultural icon. Read as instantiating the

countercultural imaginary and its key 60s renegotiation of American manhood,

Cuckoo's Nest, I argue, ultimately invokes the figure of the "Indian" through the

narration of Chief Bromden in order to align its resistant characters with an originary

primitiveness that appears to free them of the modem demands of white masculinity

while at the same time bearing the truth of an entitled, identity-affirming connection to

the geographical United States.

Then turning to Michael Herr's writings on Vietnam, from his earliest and as-yet

unexamined late-60s magazine pieces to his book-length treatment in Dispatches

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (1977), I trace the way one writer comes to actively upset the fantasy of American

manhood so profoundly unveiled by the Vietnam conflict. This is an achievement I

contend Herr secures by confessing to and dramatizing the seductiveness of the

fantasy—especially its notion of a privileged relationship to knowledge—while at the

same time consistently returning to the real and discursive violence it does to all

subjects. In this way, Herr also suggests one model for intervening in the powerful

psychic needs that might constitute a subject against his own best interests as well as the

interests of others. I then conclude my dissertation with a reading of Mario Puzo's The

Godfather (1969) in the context of the early 1970's burgeoning neoconservativism,

whose aim was to restore white male enfranchisement, and growing cultural pluralism,

whose effect was to blur important distinctions between the experiences of ethnic and

racial subjects. Far from the final word on American manhood, the reactionary allure I

find lurking in Puzo's narrative of a powerful and traditional ethnic family that

undergoes the patriarchal transfer of authority from father to son points to the crisis of

white masculinity that most related commentary has taken as its starting point at the

same time the narrative reveals that identity's long-entrenched pathologies springing

from individualism and capitalism. My dissertation thus ultimately intends to widen

and deepen the scope of any such examination of latter twentieth-century white male

crisis and its manifestations in a variety of cultural texts, insisting on both the specific

historical transformations of the fantasy of American manhood and that fantasy's

grounding in the structure of subjectivity. At the same time, this study asserts that

unmasking white masculinity as an impossibility marked by its failed, often violent,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. performances is a vital project for an American literary discipline infused by critical

race and gender studies and seeking to unearth the national imaginary ever more fully.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Notes

1 See, for example, Wiegman,American Anatomies (1995); Savran,Taking It Like a Man (1998); and Robinson,Marked Men (2000). 2 See, for example, Omi and Winant,Racial Formation in the United States (1984); Edsall and Edsall,Chain Reaction (1992); and Lipsitz,The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998). 3 For instance, 60 percent of African and Latino Americans live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites, and black and Latino mortgage applicants are more than twice as likely as equivalent whites to be denied (Lipsitz 9,14). 4 Which is not to say I believe there is a commensurate proportion of children or people of any category who should be living in poverty. Nevertheless, as of the early 90s, almost half of black children could expect to spend at least several years of their childhood living in poverty (Coontz 234). At the same time, an entire one-third of Native Americans living on or adjacent to reservations reported being unemployed in a Bureau of Indian Affairs study, while of the two-thirds who reported being employed, half listed incomes of less than $7,000 (Jaimes and Halsey 324). 5 For example, a 1990 study found that blacks were four times more likely to be arrested on drug charges nationwide, even though of the 13 million habitual U.S. drug users 15 percent were African American and 77 percent were Caucasian; meanwhile, federal prison sentences are 20 percent longer for blacks than for whites committing the same crime (Lipsitz 10-11). 6 See, for example, Faludi,Backlash (1991) and Coontz, The Way We Never Were (1992). 7 The former includes federal and state judges, law partners, corporate managers, state governors, U.S. senators, and Fortune 500 executives and board members (Faludi xiii, 365-66). The disproportionate number of women in low-paying, benefitless service and clerical jobs is one salient feature of Barbara Ehrenreich's recent book Nickel and Dimed (2001), which documents her own one-year stint as a member of the working poor. 8 For in-depth discussion of such cases see, for instance, Harris, "Whiteness as Property" (1993); Ezorsky,Racism and Justice (1991); Faludi,Backlash 363-399; and Kairys, With Liberty and Justice fo r Some (1993). 9 My project takes gender as its primary term with respect to issues of gender/sexuality and is intended to reflect the cultural circulation of gender, which once "determined" is understood to verify one's sexuality. Thus all of my references to dominant gender foimations are intended to gesture toward, and sometimes expressly where I move into a specific discussion of sexuality, dominant sexual discourse (i.e., heterosexuality). 10 Thus, I intend my work to participate in the by now well-established genre of cultural criticism first articulated at length in texts such as Frederic Jameson'sPolitical Unconscious and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities—that is, sociopolitical criticism that uses (explicitly or implicitly) the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary and that takes fantasy to be an integral component.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 11 My thanks to the recent work of Dana Nelson, namelyNational Manhood (1998), for suggesting the catchphrase "American manhood” to me. Nelson uses "national manhood" to encompass the constructions of white masculinity that characterize the early republic through the mid-nineteenth century. I find this to be an extremely useful condensation of the multiple ideologies informing masculinity in the United States but one that by the post-WWII period is better epitomized by a (seemingly) determinate sense of American-ness rather than the dynamics of nation building. Indeed, this is a good example of how the attributes and meanings of American manhood are open to historical transformation, though more so in emphasis than in content. For example, the Anglo-Saxon has given way to the white and the Protestant has given way to the Christian, while religious identification in general now pales against sexual identification and the capitalist individual experiences competition that is more global than local. 12 For a concise summary of the theoretical problems that have sprung from fixing categories of identity within related scholarship, see Somerville, Queering the Color Line (2000) 3-9. 13 Allen's exact quote is as follows: "[I]f racism was a flaw, then the 'rise of liberty* would have been better off without it—a line of reasoning that negates the paradox. On the other hand, if racism made the 'rise of liberty' possible, as the paradox would have it, then racism was not a flaw of American bourgeois democracy, but its very special essence." 14 Versions of this narrative inform the texts that follow in varying degree. For examples of television documentaries and dramas, seeMaking Sense o f the Sixties (1991) and The '60s (1998). For examples of general anthologies, see Albert and Albert, The Sixties Papers (1984) and Bloom and Breines, "Takin’It To the Streets" (1995). For examples of works of history and sociology, see Gibson,Warrior Dreams (1994); Jamison and Eyerman,Seeds o f the Sixties (1994); and Rossinow, The Politics o f Authenticity (1998). Many of the works that assume or rely on a narrative of pre- liberationist white male stasis are in fact excellent in their own right—the question is what remains to be discovered by making the construction of whiteness and masculinity terms of our investigations. 15 Marginalized groups, on the other hand, have been visible in that they have been made to stand for die non-normative through the overdetermination of their (dictated) identificatory particulars and invisible in that they have had their own self representations silenced or repressed. 16 Work on both whiteness and masculinity by now comprise distinct categories of study typically housed under race and gender studies respectively, though as subfields they are developed enough by now to contain much internal variation. In addition to the works on whiteness listed in endnote 2, significant works on whiteness include Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (1981); Dyer, "White" (1988); Alba, Ethnic Identity (1990); Morrison,Playing In the Dark (1990); Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters (1993); Allen, The Invention o f the White, Vols.Race 1 and 2 (1993/97); Lott,Love and Theft (1993); Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994); Delgado and Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies (1997); and Hill, ed.,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Whiteness (1997). Significant works on masculinity include Ehrenreich,The Hearts o f Men (1983); Sedgwick,Between Men (1985); Brod, ed., The Making o f Masculinities (1987); Chapman and Rutherford, eds.,Male Order (1988); Silverman,Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992); Berger, Wallis, and Watson, eds., Constructing Masculinity (1995); Kimmel, Manhood in America (1996); and Faludi,Stiffed (1999). For works specifically addressing white masculinity in addition to those mentioned in endnote 1, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (1995) and Pfiel, White Guys (1995). 17 A similar critical move has also been made with specific attention given to post-Vietnam sensibilities by Jeffords,The Remasculinization o fAmerica (1989) and Gibson, Warrior Dreams (1994), though only Gibson comprehensively discusses gender and race. 18 This observation is based on my sum experience of reading book jackets, anthology introductions, literary histories, teaching guides, and critical essays that span from the publications of these works to the present. Naturally, then, this is a sum of a dominant representation to which there are exceptions. 19 Aside from a handful of critical essays on specific works, the only book length study of whiteness, masculinity, and 60s literature spanning the decade that I have encountered is Savran,Taking It Like a Man (1998). While Savran's interests are similar to mine, Savran gives more weight to the historical shifts of the era than I do. As such, he claims that "no longer having others on whom to inflict his power and his point with impunity, the male subject [of the 1960s] began to turn against himself and to prove his mettle by gritting his teeth and taking his punishment like a man" (176). Moreover, whereas Savran finds a masochism specific to 60s masculinity, I understand the male subject's turn against himself as a fundamental component of the subject's very coming into subjectivity. Also certainly worthy of note is Leslie A. Fiedler'sLove and Death in the American Novel (1960/1997), though it was initially published just on the cusp of the 1960s and thus even in revised form primarily analyzes works from earlier periods in American literature. 201 would include much of the so-called experimental fiction of the 1960s on the postmodern spectrum, such as works described as falling into the absurdist tradition. It is also worth remembering that part of the multicultural project has been the recovery of literature, thus the "multicultural" canon also includes works published well before the 1960s. 21 Although not in agreement about the particular kind of change wrought, see, for example, Howard Zinn,Postwar America (1973); Christopher Lasch, The Culture o f Narcissism (1978); and James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations (1996). 22 For a concise and useful overview of 1960s popular culture, see PopLoss, Dreams (1999). 23 See Omi and Winant, Racial Formation 77-112. 24 Not that a critique of the American psychic structure had not been made before—books such as W.E.B. DuBois'The Souls o fBlack Folk (1903) and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1967), to name just two examples, had made the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. point quite well. The key difference is the attention the black power movement succeeded in drawing to the critique. 25 While Morrison focuses specifically on racial oppression, her basic assumption deeply resonates with all forms of oppression. 26 It is worth noting that while the GI Bill has become inevitably associated with servicemen, the predominant recipients of the Bill's benefits, almost 65,000 of the 2.2 million to attend college under the bill were women (Olson 24). The majority, if not all of them, were the wives of veterans however. See the following note and discussion to which it refers for explanation. 27 No full length study of the GI Bill and female veterans exists, which is significant in itself. My thanks to Christopher Loss and his unpublished Master's Thesis '"The best-informed soldier in the world': Adjustment, Education, and the 1944 GI Bill of Rights" for this point. 28 These percentages represent the dishonorable discharges administered between August and November of 1946 (Sacks 312). 29 For more extensive analysis of how the GI Bill was ade facto affirmative action plan for white men, see Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks" (1994), and Herbold, "Never a Level Playing Field" (1994). 30 For an excellent history of WWII from a multicultural perspective addressing the experiences of wide-ranging groups of marginalized racial and ethnic groups, see Takaki,Double Victory (2000). 31 See, in particular, the December 1956 special issue on women byLife magazine. Betty Friedan's 1963 classic The Feminine Mystique is, of course, the most famous refutation of these sentiments. Even so, the sort of warnings made in the 1950s continue to demonstrate a lamentable resiliency. See (or don't!) Sylvia Ann Hewlett's recent Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest fo r Children (2002), which purports to claim widespread dissatisfaction among women who have pursued careers at the expense of having children. Hewlett's book earned her a spot on the cover of a recent issue ofTime magazine (headline: "Babies vs. Careers: Which Should Come First for Women Who Want Both?"). For a concise critique of Hewlett's book—and the genre to which it belongs—see Katha Pollitt's "Backlash Babies" (2002). 32 We might see these speaking engagements as a kind of extension of the way the most popular post-war Hollywood genre—film noir—was itself dramatizing and staging solutions to the problems wrought by the wartime destabilization of traditional gender roles and burgeoning notions of female power. Virtually every critic writing on the thematic, as opposed to purely stylistic, features of film noir point out its recurrent motif—the encounter between the femme fatale (a woman whose unbridled desire threatens everything) and the noir hero (whose very manhood, and the patriarchal order he represents, depends on his defeat or domestication of the femme fatale's desire). In the classical noir films of the 1940s, the femme fatale is thus usually killed, sent to jail, or reformed. Such films end up staging a world "re-adjusted," even if only temporarily, in which improper gender roles have been duly punished and proper gender roles rewarded. To cite just a few famous examples: at the end of John Huston'sThe Maltese Falcon (1941), Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) refuses to "play the sap" for the femme

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fatale (Brigid O'Shaugnessy, played by Mary Astor) who murdered his partner, instead turning her over to the police and to the prospect of capital punishment. At the end of Billy Wilder'sDouble Indemnity (1944), Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) shoots and kills Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the femme fatale whose desire he cannot reign in. Robert Montgomery’s The Lady in the Lake (1946) and Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946) pursue an alternate path. In Montgomery’s film, the femme fatale (Adrienne Fromsett, played by Audrey Totter) realizes midway through the film that her true desire is to take care of Marlowe (Robert Montgomery), and the vacant position of the femme fatale position is quickly taken by another dangerous woman who is duly murdered at the end of the film. In Vidor's film, the perception of Gilda (Rita Hayworth) as dangerous turns out to be one giant mistake. For two key works treating the femme fatale as a symptom of the post-war crisis of patriarchy, see Doane,Femmes Fatales (1991) and Place, "Women in Film Noir" (1998). 3 See Erikson, Childhood and Society (1950). 34 Carol Gilligan would later make the most exhaustive and well-known critique of male bias in psychological research. See Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982). 35 For other versions of this elision, see Erikson, Childhood and Society (1950); Wertham, The Seduction o f the Innocent (1954); and Flesch, Why Johnny Can't Read (1955). 36 Like all nostalgic fantasies, the scenario at the heart of Mills' is no less false. This is not to discount the significant material power (and brutality) wielded by white men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is, instead, merely to point out that in every historical epoch, discontinuities in the master-slave relationship always exist. 37 Suffice it to point out here that, say, in a book like Kerouac'sOn the Road, race is sometimes not so "invisible." Indeed, one could argue that blackness and brown ness are central presences in Kerouac's novel. Their function, however, seems primarily to be the maintenance of the invisibility of whiteness. Because Kerouac's protagonists experience whiteness (unconsciously) not as a "color" at all, they seek out encounters with African Americans and Mexicans upon which to ground racial identity. Moreover, Kerouac's representations of racial otherness are without question romanticized caricatures—a method that furthers invisibility in its own way.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 2

MELANCHOLIA, HYSTERIA, AND THE RESISTANT WHITE MALE SUBJECT: THE CASE OF JOHN UPDIKE'S RABBIT, RUN

Random Onlooker: Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against? Johnny Straber: What've ya got? ~ dialogue from The Wild One (1954)

In discussing what motivated his creation of the character Harry "Rabbit"

Angstrom and of Rabbit, Run (1960), John Updike has reflected that "Kerouac's On the

Road was in the air, and a decade of dropping-out about to arrive, and the price society

pays for unrestrained motion was on my mind”(Hugging the Shore 850-51). Beyond

the Beat movement, contemporaneous films such as Laslo Benedek'sThe Wild One

(1954) and Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) only validate Updike's

perception of the era he was witnessing. Yet the fact that Marlon Brando's character in

The Wild One is the leader of a delinquent group of young white men who call

themselves "The Black Rebel Motor Club" is a pointed reminder that when not

otherwise qualified, 1950s "rebellion" signifies a universalized resistance to the status

quo that is really male and white. Moreover, if trauma can be defined in certain

instances as that which produces symptoms and behaviors whose origins are somehow

ineffable, then Johnny Straber's deflection of the question "What are you rebelling

against?"—by replying, "What've ya got?"— is a classic display of it. A year later in 46

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Rebel Without a Cause, a teary dialogue between the tormented teenager played by

James Dean and his onscreen father displays more explicitly what those ineffable

origins might be:

Jim Stark: What can you do when you have to be a man? Mr. Stark: Well, now___ Jim Stark: No, you give me a direct answer. I want an answer now... I need one___

In this same historical moment, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom runs for the first time, his

motives and desires in some ways as elusive to him as any answers, even while he

assures himself he is running towards something.

My purpose in discussing the potentially traumatic experience of white male

subjectivity in post-World War II America through the 1960s is not, of course, to ignore

trauma produced in the name of masculinity and whiteness; rather, it is to suggest their

interrelatedness. The 1960 novel Rabbit, Run suggestively captures these conjoined

traumas in its depiction of Rabbit's angst-ridden compulsion to find some alternative to

the normative American manhood he feels he must embody. While Rabbit's struggle

for the most part remains an internalized psychic conflict worked out against his family

that he does not effectively connect to larger social and cultural forces, a careful reading

of Rabbit, Run reveals that Rabbit's crisis is a direct response to those larger social and

cultural forces regulating white masculinity in the postwar era and his inability to

mourn, or give up, the ideals demanded by that identity. That is, Updike's novel

presents us with a character grappling with the melancholia at the heart of his white

male American identifications and displays how that melancholia is inevitably played

out against the historical moment in which it is situated. Manifested in his persistent

and anxious searching, Rabbit's melancholia is thus the function of his tenuous 47

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. identification with the ungrieved lost "objects" of masculinity and whiteness, but it is

also an expression of the limits and possibilities specific to these identifications in the

postwar United States.1

Studying the 1960 novelRabbit, Run in this historical context makes it almost

impossible, of course, not to consider the rest of Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, each

subsequent book of which has appeared with a new decade.2 This is particularly true of

Rabbit Redux, the sequel toRabbit, Run first published in 1970, since it is set at the end

of the decade Updike anticipates with the first work. Indeed, turning to the author's

"special message" to purchasers of the Franklin Library limited 1981 edition Rabbitof

Redux, we find that Updike himself offers a strikingly melancholic explanation for why

he chose to return to Rabbit's story in the first place:

I did not intend a sequel. But a little over ten years later, as the interminable Sixties were drawing to their end, the idea that Harry Angstrom was still out there and running suddenly excited me. [...] A number of people had asked me what had happened to Rabbit, who was last seen running along a street of Brewer, Pennsylvania, in no special direction; now I would show them, and throw in all the oppressive, distressing, overstimulating developments of the most dissentious American decade since the Civil War—anti-war protest, black power and rhetoric, teach-ins, middle-class runaways, drugs, and (proceeding eerily to its brilliant technological rendezvous through a turmoil of violence at home and abroad) the moon shot. (Hugging 858)

Besides the placement of the adjective "interminable" before the noun "Sixties," what

especially interests me here is Updike's description of certain developments from the

decade as "oppressive, distressing, overstimulating." Who, exactly, was oppressed,

distressed, and overstimulated by "anti-war protest, black power and rhetoric, teach-ins,

middle-class runaways, drugs, and [...] the moon shot"? Apparently, Harry "Rabbit"

Angstrom has something to do with Updike's answer to this question. For in returning

to Rabbit at the end of the 1960s, Updike is unable to pick up the story of his flight- 48

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. happy character without invoking those cultural events most threatening to the white

male establishment during that decade.

If Rabbit Redux is Updike's tale of an historical moment in which the postwar

establishment is, or believes itself to be, under siege, then, I believe that Rabbit, Run

can be described as his tale of the historical moment in which the postwar establishment

is at an apex. And at the heart of both narratives, of course, is that middle American

fixture of the establishment, the average white male. Significantly, though, the majority

of critical work analyzing race and gender in Updike's Rabbit tetralogy seesRabbit

Redux as the novel most embroiled in those issues; in fact, there has been no substantive

discussion of the question of race inRabbit, Run at all. Furthermore, the implication of

nearly all of this critical work, only sometimes made explicit, is thatRabbit Redux is the

novel that most represents white masculinity in crisis.3 While I agree that Rabbit Redux

does represent white masculinity in crisis, it is only one of the predicaments that might

attend the maintenance of American manhood—a crisis catalyzed by the national

fracturing of the country’s formative signifiers that has the potential to leave privileged

subjects feeling oppressed, distressed, and overstimulated, to paraphrase Updike. The

crisis in Rabbit, Run, however, arises from the fact that those master signifiers,

whiteness and masculinity in particular, arenot yet fractured in the public domain.

Indeed, their apparent immutability at that historical moment is precisely what leaves

Rabbit running in his melancholic circles, tom between fleeing the oppressive demands

of American manhood and seeking to retain its promised privileges. Embodied by the

regulating performances of public figures such as Ozzie Nelson and John F. Kennedy,

imaginary ideals such as the nuclear family and developmental maturity instructed

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. white male subjects about how to properly identify. In capturing the dissonance internal

to the post-WWH white masculine dominant, Rabbit, Run thus also betrays the

inevitable site of ideology's failure when it seems most hegemonic.

What Updike finally dramatizes through the character of Rabbit, then, is a

fascinating account of power in its twin psychic and social registers as applied to a

largely privileged, yet resistant, subject—a subject who can aspire to those privileged

signifiers but who at the same time apprehends he is subjected by them.4 As such, it

becomes clear that the seemingly contrary "moon shot" included on Updike's list of

"oppressive" 1960s developments is in fact a trace of the extreme, ultimately impossible

demands of American manhood. At the heart of this examination is the question of

whether Rabbit ever does succeed in grieving masculinity and whiteness, in recognizing

the lost objects he believes would secure his identity for the fantastical entities they are.

For where Rabbit fails to transcend the fantasy of American manhood, he is locked into

a quest damaging both to himself and to those around him, one that prevents him from

replacing the artificial demands of mature adulthood during the postwar era with ethical

responsibility. At the same time, this reading of Updike's first novel also serves as a

kind of case example for the psychic complexities that seem to characterize resistant

white male subjectivity more generally across historical moments and that we will see

repeated in the subsequent texts I treat in my dissertation. While this resistance, as I

have already begun to indicate, is grounded in a melancholic relationship to identity, I

will also show how such melancholia nonetheless finds key expression in the seemingly

contrary state of hysteria.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Against Some Enemy Behind": Fleeing American Manhood

His stated goal being to contrast an obedient and self-sacrificing life with one of

"instinctual gratification," Updike originally conceived of his Rabbit story as a novella

to be coupled withThe Centaur. In crafting a response to what he perceived to be the

Beat ethos of hedonistic impulsiveness, however, Updike discovered a character both so

intriguing that it demanded the treatment of a novel-length work and so caught up in the

moment that he would have to go against narrative practice of the time and write the

novel in present tense. Yet Updike sees something more than a perfunctory Bohemian

embrace of pleasure, rejection of convention, or quest for place underlying the

"instinctual" life he strives to capture inRabbit, Run. As Updike describes Harry

"Rabbit" Angstrom, borrowing his words from author Joyce Cary, Rabbit is '"a traveller

who is bushed in unmapped country, when he feels all at once that not only has he

utterly lost his way, but also his own identity"' (qtd.Hugging in 850). This description

of Rabbit is most apt, for as Rabbit's story unfolds one cannot help but sense that his

dilemma is not so much where to be in late 1950s America as whom to be. From that

most memorable of opening sequences—in which Rabbit spontaneously drives off with

every intention of leaving his wife and son behind for good only to return the next

morning and seek out the advice of his former high school basketball coach—Rabbit's

predicament becomes gradually clear. Grounding this series of events is the historical

context of the 1950s in which Rabbit acts, a context carefully if subtly suggested by the

details of Updike's narrative, especially within the opening flight scene. As filtered

through the consciousness of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, however, these details

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. underscore the peculiar intersections of masculinity and whiteness with things

characteristically "American" of the period that animate Rabbit's quest.

Returning to the opening sequence, then, it is within the first few pages that we

quickly leam Rabbit is a former high school basketball star who has since married, due

in part to an unplanned pregnancy, and taken an entry level sales job peddling the

MagiPeel Peeler to housewives in Brewer, Pennsylvania, the only real home he has ever

known. As the novel begins, Rabbit is on his way home from work when he happens

upon a group of high school boys playing basketball. Edging his way into the game,

Rabbit is made conscious of his age and finds himself reflecting on his past as a star

athlete: "You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody

cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can't see very well and the noise swirls

around you and lifts you up, and then you're out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it

feels good and cool and free" (Updike,Rabbit, Run 11). Less warm are Rabbit's

thoughts on adulthood:

You're out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them. They've not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him. Yet in his time Rabbit was famous through the county; in basketball in his junior year he set a B-league scoring record that in his senior year he broke with a record that was not broken until four years later, that is, four years ago. (Updike,Run 11)

In addition to displaying Rabbit's nostalgia for his adolescence, these passages also

begins to make evident the extent to which Rabbit's years as a basketball star serve as a

major reference point for him. After all, in recalling when his second record was

broken, Rabbit first remembers the event as happening in the present time of "four years

later" and only then corrects himself by saying "four years ago." Similarly, at the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. moment he joins the game, we leam that "He goes into the scrimmaging thick of them

for the ball, flips it from two weak grubby-knuckled child's hands, has it in his own.

That old stretched-leather feeling makes his whole body go taut, gives his arms wings.

It feels like he's reaching down through years to touch this tautness" (Updike, Run 10).

Establishing Rabbit's negative feelings about adulthood and nostalgia for the past,

Updike's description of Rabbit's encounter with the boys significantly commences the

movement toward his attempted escape from Brewer.

Appropriately, then, the small sense of optimism revived by the game for Rabbit

turns sour as he arrives home and faces the domestic scene that is his reality—his wife,

Janice, sitting glued to the television set and large with their second child while she sips

an Old-Fashioned. Perturbed that Janice remained in her seat while he fumbled to

unlock the door, Rabbit nevertheless carries out a patently scripted greeting of his wife

even as it is contradicted by his thoughts: "Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped

being pretty. With the addition of two short wrinkles at the comers, her mouth has

become greedy; and her hair has thinned, so he keeps thinking of her skull under it”

(Updike,Run 13). Here and elsewhere, Janice signifies a failing 1950s domesticity, one

fated to die a slow death as it sucks the life out of everyone it touches. As depicted by

Updike, Janice is almost purposely defiant of the "timesaving conveniences" of the

modem housewife, such as the MagiPeel vegetable peeler, regularly overcooking the

ready-prepared meals she makes and leaving the household dirt for another time in her

otherwise free day. As a result, while Rabbit and Janice quarrel about his late arrival

and her unnecessary purchases, the feminine presence that appears to be working

outside his control in the domestic sphere begins to stand in static contrast to the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. feminized and sexualized imagery that he associates with playing basketball, wherein

the hoop has a "crotch" and the ball drops while "whipping the net with a ladylike

whisper" (Updike,Run 9-10). Or, as Rabbit later recalls in thinking about one of his

postgame sexual encounters: "He came to [the girl] a winner and that's the feeling he's

missed since. [...] So that the two kinds of triumphs were united in his mind” (Updike,

Run 184). In the undomesticated space basketball designates, Rabbit very much

imagines himself to be in control, or, rather, to have been in control since he relies on

his memories of performing as a star player. In this way, Updike allows Rabbit's

recollections to serve both as affirmation of masculine identification and as resistance

against the demands of dominant masculinity, a paradox that soon envelops the entire

narrative.

Indeed, if Rabbit's thoughts are resistant, his scripted greeting of his wife

exhibits an obedience to his corresponding role in the domestic scene: developmentally

on-task husband. These expectations perhaps appear in clearest relief when we consider

the cultural activity that began to appear in opposition to them. The films mentioned in

the introduction to this chapter and the "delinquent" behavior they depict are one

example. The rise ofPlayboy magazine and its construction of the 1950s playboy

figure is another, representing a direct response to societal demands that proper adult

masculinity be measured by matrimonial and occupational duty. Rabbit will in fact rely

quite directly upon the alternative masculinity posed by the playboy figure in his return

to Brewer when he seeks out Marty Tothero, his former basketball coach, and takes up

residency with Ruth, a sometime call girl. As Barbara Ehrenreich has observed,

[TJhrough its articles, its graphics and its advertisements Playboy presented, by the beginning of the sixties, something approaching a coherent program for the 54

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I

male rebellion: a critique of marriage, a strategy for liberation (reclaiming the indoors as a realm for masculine pleasure) and a utopian vision (defined by its unique commodity ensemble). (SO)

Offering the female body, compulsory heterosexuality, and hedonistic consumerism as

the vehicles for his program of rebellion, Hugh Hefner's magazine more consequentially

succeeded in shielding aspiring playboys from the major charges of male delinquency

and deviance leveled at the time: developmental immaturity, latent homosexuality, and

communist affiliation. If these charges seem banal or trifling now, they were hardly so

within the context of the Cold War era, when any single accusation was always

suggestive of the others and often considered worthy of prosecution—sentiments

effectively preyed upon by the likes of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. Worthy

of note, then, is the fact that one of the things catalyzing the argument between Rabbit

and Janice is her reproach of his lack of maturity for "playing like a twelve-year-old” by

joining the game of basketball on his way home (Updike, Run 17). Consequently,

Updike begins to weave a vital narrative thread of 1950s male gender politics into his

novel when he represents a domestic sphere to which Rabbit feels little positive

connection but that commands his acquiescence and participation anyway.5

Further contributing to this narrative thread is Updike's ironic presentation of the

postwar work ethic within the context of the latest episode ofThe Mickey Mouse Club.

The encounter between Janice and Rabbit reaching a stalemate, Rabbit turns his

attention to the television in an attempt to quell his feelings of aversion and antipathy.

At the same time, Jimmy, the adult Mouseketeer, steps forward to play his Mouseguitar

and deliver the episode's daily proverb:

"Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. [...] God wants some of 55

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. us to become scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists. And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. That's die way to be happy." He pinches his mouth together and winks. (Updike,Run 15)

With his presentation of this psuedo-philosophic variation on the postwar work ethic,

Updike succeeds in communicating the dominant 1950s social imperative to become a

mature, productive adult. In the age of late capitalism, this imperative amounts to a

fitting equation, one well represented by Jimmy's maxim: the goal of self-knowledge

being dependent upon how hard one works, on one's productivity, the self is made

synonymous with the work one does. And as Updike’s ironic presentation further

suggests, this imperative has perhaps failed in cultivating substantive self-knowledge

when grown adults turn to the Mickey Mouse Club for entertainment and philosophical

insight; at the very least, the automaton-like role-playing of Rabbit and Janice seems

somehow implicated in a deficient model for adulthood. These are points that do not

completely escape Rabbit.

Indeed, through Rabbit's response to the Mouseketeer proverb, Updike situates

his main character as a decidedly resistant one. For having taken in the proverb,

Rabbit's attention is instead drawn to Jimmy's final rhetorical gesture of pinching his

mouth together and winking:

That was good. Rabbit tries it, pinching the mouth together and then the wink, getting the audience out front with you against some enemy behind, Walt Disney or the MagiPeel Peeler Company, admitting it's all a fraud but, what the hell, making it likable. We're all in it together. Fraud makes the world go round. The base of our economy. Vitaconomy, the modem housewife's password, the one-word expression for economizing vitamins by the MagiPeel Method. (Updike,Run 15)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In separating the rhetoric from the content—or, more accurately, interpreting the

rhetoric as the content—Rabbit perceives individual power as being held in check by

the consolidated discursive and socioeconomic power of "some enemy behind," which

he specifically defines as corporate culture producers like "Walt Disney or the MagiPeel

Peeler Company.” This designation of the "enemy behind" as corporate is key, marking

Rabbit's relationship to that power in specificallywhite masculine terms since, to be

sure, there is no "Organization Person" in the 1950s—one is a (white) "Organization

Man ."6 Given the limited professional opportunities for white women and all people of

color at the time, the gendered and racialized assumptions that inflect the work ethic

Jimmy distills cannot be denied.7 Few people who were not white and male were being

encouraged to become scientists, artists, firemen, or doctors, even trapeze artists, nor

were they likely to be told they had "the special talents to become these things.” In

sum, the postwar work ethic favored an increasingly professionalized version of the

protestant work ethic that called on those with the right special talents and bodily

attributes to mark their American manhood with a white-collar.

Rabbit's final, sardonic reiteration of the MagiPeeler spiel serves to highlight his

sense of the gendered, implicitly racialized nature of what he calls the "fraud" but that

could just as easily be called ideology. For, through the example he lands on, Rabbit

implies that the average woman in 1950s America, here represented by the modem

housewife, is the recipient of a kind of fraud. Additionally, Rabbit quite clearly

insinuates that the average male counterpart to this woman, like himself and other

potential organization men, both perpetuates and receives the fraud—that is, the

ideologies of domesticity, white-collar labor, and corporatism.8 Thus, while the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. MagiPeel Peeler Company should represent an icon of white male privilege for Rabbit

and the possibility of his access to that privilege, he apprehends them, and even the

ostensibly benign Walt Disney Company, as "the enemy." In other words, Rabbit is not

so incapable as we might think of the recognition that the external powers he finds so

oppressive are socially constructed and that he, in fact, contributes to their construction.

Ultimately, then, this scene works to establish that Rabbit's subjectivity, though situated

squarely within what seems to be one of white masculinity's most hegemonic moments,

is hardly characterized by a seamless relationship to the identificatory terms that mark

that moment.

Certainly, as the opening sequence ofRabbit, Run moves toward Rabbit's retreat

from Brewer, we find that if Rabbit cannot have things "start anew,” which he had

vaguely hoped on his way home from work, then he is most comfortable when the

"fraud" is palpable. As such, the moment that appears to jolt Rabbit into fleeing his

home and the life he has known is precisely the moment when the tension is about to

smooth over. Through with his angry exchange with Janice, Rabbit is readying to pick

up their car and their son Nelson in town when "Janice calls from the kitchen. 'And

honey pick up a pack of cigarettes, could you?' in a normal voice that says everything is

forgiven, everything is the same. Rabbit freezes, standing looking at his faint yellow

shadow on the white door that leads to the hall, and senses he is in a trap. It seems

certain. He goes out" (Updike,Run 19-20). It is in this instant that Rabbit runs.

So far, then, we have seen Rabbit poking at key features of his adult identity and

finding holes in them. Variously located for Rabbit in Updike's portrayals of the

postwar domestic sphere, work ethic, and corporate cultural complex, the demands of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. American adulthood are precisely the "everything" he fears will remain unchanged and

flees. The appeals to whiteness and masculinity made by these demands, however,

figure Rabbit's quest for some alternative to the prevailing mode of adulthood as one not

just for identity in general but one for an alternative to dominant American manhood.

In effect now consciously motivated by the questions "Who am I?" and "What do I

want?," Rabbit imagines that at one time he did know who he was and what he wanted.

That is, Rabbit believes there is an other, some person or experience, capable of

answering his questions in the way the adulation of the cheering crowd once seemingly

served to guarantee his identity. As underscored by Lacan's famous dictum—desire is

the desire of the Other—these questions are mutually constituting: "Who am I for the

other?" Lacan's point, of course, is that this other does not have an answer, does not

even exist; rather, the other and answers believed to come from it are the subject's own

fantasmatic constructions. In other words, yes, there was a crowd that did cheer and

adore Rabbit, but the larger meaning he assigns to this adulation is a product of his own

fantasy. That this fantasy resurfaces in the face of the encroaching demands of

normative white masculinity thus marks it precisely as a fantasy of American manhood,

one Rabbit is on the brink of either traversing or reifying. For unlike the fully

interpellated subject for whom identity and desire is transparent, the fleeing Rabbit we

come to know has at least begun to articulate identity and desire as a question.

However, having not yet given up the question and the belief in an answer,

which would be to traverse the fantasy, Rabbit’s aim is now the hysteric's, to fill in the

gap between identity and desire by seeking to answer who he is and what he wants.9

That is, as an hysteric—here invoked to name the symptomatic way a subject comports

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. himself toward the Other as locus of plenitude and knowledge—Rabbit refuses to

disinvest himself completely of the belief that desire as full satisfaction exists and that

stable, whole subjectivity can be achieved by securing that desire. Thus, to keep his

desire alive, the hysteric must paradoxically reject the "answer" that really would

complete his search—that there is no other capable of providing an answer—and

instead finds ways to make the other reappear. Nevertheless, the hysteric is also a

decidedly resistant figure in that he has at least acceded to the fact that the ideals

advanced by culture are inadequate; that is, in that he has at least rejected the dominant

(and conformist) answers proffered by society to the inseparable questions of desire and

subjectivity. This rejection is what prompts the hysteric's symptomatic and serial search

for answers believed to lie elsewhere. Such a picture of Rabbit is perfectly illustrated

early in his trip as he stops for gas just outside Brewer and converses with the white,

middle-aged man attending the gas station:

"Do you have any maps?" "Son, where do you want to go?" "Huh? I don't know exactly." "Where are you headed?" The man is patient. His face at the same time seems fatherly and crafty and stupid. For the first time, Harry realizes he is a criminal. [...] Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. Senseless fear cakes over Rabbit's body. (Updike,Run 30)

Briefly convinced that the attendant may even be calling the state police as he makes

change for Rabbit, Rabbit eventually succeeds in persuading himself that the attendant

has no reason to suspect him of anything. Then returning with Rabbit's money, the

attendant informs him that there are no maps left, instead offering the advice that ”[t]he

only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you

go there" (Updike, Run 32). When Rabbit retorts, "I don't think so" (Updike, Run 32), 60

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. he resists the hysteric's desire to reinvoke the other and to be assured of his actions and

identity by giving in to prescribed notions of truth. In other words, he maintains his

social protest, not insignificantly here against the white, "fatherly" other. While

hysteria at first may seem a state at odds with melancholia, then, we can see how this is

not necessarily the case when the lost objects of identity for which a subject is locked in

grieving form the substance of that subject's hysterical seeking. As will become

increasingly evident, Rabbit's hysterical seeking is a definitive manifestation of his

melancholia, his ungrieved identification with the ideals of masculinity and whiteness

informing the fantasy of American manhood.

Surely, it is key that the deep intersections of masculinity and whiteness are

made all the more palpable as Rabbit flees and renders his more conscious conflict with

the masculine increasingly tenuous and unstable. In fact, the very second that Rabbit

concretizes his resistance against American manhood and pulls on to the highway

outside of Brewer, blackness enters the narrative:

Rabbit turns on the radio. After a hum a beautiful Negress sings, "Without a song, the dahay would nehever end, without a song.” Rabbit wishes for a cigarette to go with the washed feeling inside and remembers he gave up smoking and feels cleaner still. He slumps down and puts one arm up on the back of the seat and glides down the twilight pike left-handed. "A field of com” the Negress's voice bending dark and warm like the inside of a cello "the grasses grow" the countryside dipping around the road like a continuous dark bird "it makes no mind no how" his scalp contracts ecstatically. (Updike,Run 27-28)

Filling Rabbit with feelings of cleanliness, calm, and even ecstasy, the voice of "the

Negress" functions as much more than entertainment or artistic expression for him. The

voice appears, in fact, to deliver Rabbit into the experience of whole, satisfied

subjectivity. The voice even takes on an immediate physical presence when Rabbit

imagines that "a beautiful Negress" is singing, suggesting quite concretely that what the 61

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. voice delivers to Rabbit is the fantasy of complete white male subjectivity. As such,

while a multitude of other songs pass through Rabbit's consciousness, most of which he

knows by name, none of them registers with near the depth or feeling this one does.

Indeed, the affective weight of Rabbit's entire plan of driving south toward the

Gulf of Mexico—of "going right down the middle, right into the broad soft belly of the

land, surprising the dawn cottonfields with his northern plates”—is loaded with

sociohistorically determined signifiers of racialized American identity (Updike,Run

35). Looking over a map while parked at a gas station, Rabbit thus reflects that "Over

on the left three red roads stream parallel northeast to southwest [...]. Get on one of

them it would be a chute dumping you into sweet low cottonland in the morning. Yes.

Once he gets on that he can shake all thoughts of the mess behind him” (Updike, Run

35). That Rabbit's dreams of freedom, of a fully realized individualism, seem concrete

to him only against the backdrop of the "sweet low cottonland" is no arbitrary

association when the South is the locale typically associated with the American

institution of slavery and the site of the civil rights movement’s most pitched battles at

that instant.10

This association is only heightened and further solidified by the sudden

appearance of the second of the three lone African-American figures present in the

entire novel: "He gives two dollars for gas to the attendant, a young but tall colored boy

whose limber lazy body slumping inside his baggy Amoco coveralls Rabbit has a weird

impulse to hug. This far south the air already feels warmed. Warmth vibrates in brown

and purple arcs between the lights of the service station and the moon" (Updike,Run

35).11 Imagining himself to be deeply alienated from and even suspicious to the other

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. characters he encounters on his drive, Rabbit's perception of the attendant is replete with

the rearticulation of burdened American manhood through its racial ideology. With

Rabbit's masculinity more obviously under siege to him by his act of rebellion,

racialized identity presents a means of affirming an apparent stability and wholeness of

identity while the particular invocation of whiteness suspiciously works to recoup the

universality associated with normative masculinity.12 Thus, returning to "the Negress,"

we find that when the song ends and Rabbit is no longer accompanied by the specter of

feminine blackness embodied for him in the singing woman, his mood is vastly

different. Here we find his mind "nervously" shifting from Janice to his parents and his

son, Nelson, to the fear that he is heading the wrong way on the highway. Not even

fantasmatic thoughts about his basketball playing are capable of relaxing him: "He

imagines himself about to shoot a long one-hander, but he feels he's on a cliff, there is

an abyss he will fall into when the ball leaves his hands" (Updike, Run 28).

Rather than realizing what the preceding moment begs—the recognition of

fantasy as fantasy—Rabbit proceeds in true hysterical fashion and works instead to

construct a new scene of mastery that will fill in the gap between identity and desire

magnified by his rebellion. Consequently, what does calm Rabbit down is a variation

on his adolescent fantasy of American manhood that emphasizes racialized sexual

power over his now former athletic prowess. Driving by a sign to Wilmington that

makes him think of the Du Ponts and how they "own" the city, Rabbit dwells on what it

would be like to be physically intimate with a Du Pont heiress:

A barefoot Du Pont. Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breast. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in softly still lots left. Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all, 63

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. descended from some old Indian-cheater luckier than the rest, inherit the same stuff if they lived in a slum. Glow all the whiter there, on drab mattresses. (Updike,Run 29)

Certainly, this revised fantasy reveals a more overt cognizance of gender and racial

difference by Rabbit, a cognizance that will only intensify as his quest continues and

that speaks to the profound ways in which race and gender constitute adult American

manhood. In Rabbit's reflection that one thinks "of millions as being white," for

example, he finally articulates the privileged subject as a racial subject too. The

appearance of race exactly as Rabbit rebels thus serves as an important reminder of how

whiteness is always contained in the demands of dominant American manhood. At the

same time, the Du Pont name also recalls the oppressive corporate complex Rabbit has

affirmed as somehow delimiting his possibilities as a white male subject. Here, again,

he defies dominant notions of power and privilege in attributing that power and

privilege to luck, to tricks of trade evocative of the rhetorical tricks he mused on before.

Yet in feminizing that corporate oppressor and imagining it as white and then deriving

psychic satisfaction from this scene, Rabbit shows himself still to be dependent upon

some kind of fantastical rendering of white masculinity; more pointedly, the scene

leaves open the possibility that he can participate in that fantasy.

In addition to deepening the racial implications of Rabbit’s quest, the narrative

of his initial flight from Brewer also importantly reiterates the larger cultural context for

adult American manhood and the demands that structure that manhood. Among the

most key details in this vein are the bits of a news that Rabbit overhears on the radio as

he drives through the night. Having departed on the evening of March 20, 1959, Rabbit

tunes in to the following radio broadcast:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. news (President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan begin a series of talks in Gettysburg, Tibetans battle Chinese Communists in Lhasa, the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama, spiritual ruler of this remote and backward land, are unknown, a $250,000 trust fund has been left to a Park Avenue maid, Spring scheduled to arrive tomorrow), sports news (Yanks over Braves in Miami, somebody tied with somebody in St. Petersburg Open, scores in a local basketball tournament), weather (fair and seasonably warm). (Updike,Run 34)13

Leading the official "news," then, are two headlines that succinctly capture the Cold

War context of Updike's novel. The first is the meeting of British Prime Minister

Macmillan with President Eisenhower, which was organized in preparation for an

upcoming summit between Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet

Union—the major world powers at the time. West Berlin increasingly threatened by the

Soviets, Eisenhower and Macmillan were to meet to strategize against the Soviets, a

decision motivated by what was more generally known as "the communist threat”

(Ristoff 46-7).14 Indeed, the news report itself replicates the veiling of, in the words of

critic Dilvo Ristoff, "a whole socio-political universe typical of the 1950s, most of

which—especially the nuclear threat and the world power conflict—is only present

through its conspicuous absence" (47). The second piece of news headlining the radio

broadcast is the Dalai Lama's flight from the Communist Chinese, an otherwise obscure

bit of news to the average American except for the omnipresent political concern with

communism. This event, in fact, even more directly evokes the discourse on communist

expansion forwarded by anti-communist propaganda, particularly the oft-discussed

"domino theory" (Ristoff 48). Standing as a testament to the ongoing anxiety about

communism throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s is the Taft-Hartley act of 1947,

which made anti-communist oaths a requirement for all union leaders, and the act's

extension to all employers in the United States on the very day that Rabbit's story 65

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. begins (Ristoff 50). At the same time, the Taft-Hartley act speaks to the increasing

influence of corporatism throughout the 1950s, an influence perceived as so far-

reaching that it requires special anti-communist measures yet so fundamentally

American that Eisenhower can make the former president of General Motors his

Defense Secretary and insist there is no conflict of interest (Ristoff 49). And finally,

embedded within a deluge of popular songs and commercials, the news broadcast's

coupling of "the" news with sports news suggests an era in which the world of sports is

of importance almost equal to the world of political and social events, that individuals'

leisure time identifications are merely an extension of their larger American self—a

connection frequently reiterated by those seemingly superfluous popular songs and

commercials. In sum, the salient effect of the radio broadcast is to establish a general

sense of 1950s America. Read from the perspective of Rabbit’s resistant posturing

against white masculinity, however, the broadcast stresses how universalized American

citizenship and its banal day-to-day concerns always gesture back to the white manhood

it assumes.

Most striking, then, is the event that appears to motivate Rabbit's return to

Brewer the very morning after his escape. Appropriately, this event occurs when

Rabbit stops at that bastion of 1950s normalcy, the roadside diner:

Somehow, though he can't put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes [...]. In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside, or is it all America? (Updike,Run 36)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Made to feel self-reproach, here the internalized accusation of "strangeness" or

difference, Rabbit becomes overwhelmed with the anxiety that he is in fact utterly

different from, alien to, "all America.” Being American and on the inside means being

normatively male and white; that Rabbit feels the people in the diner "sense" him to be

"different" is tantamount to a recognition that he has lost something, equivalent to the

very epistemologies that gender and race one non-normatively. In this way, Rabbit's

felt "strangeness" is in fact the melancholic apprehension that something is missing

from subjectivity, from identity. One of the things that Rabbit has landed on is gender,

namely a seamless, stable embodiment of masculinity. At the same time, race is

revealed to function as a structuring term of identity in symbiosis with gender. As a

melancholic, Rabbit is locked in the unfinished process of grieving the recognition that

subjectivity is in fact grounded in lack and loss. It is thus fitting that Rabbit's

discomfort and alienation cause him consequently to become lost on a dark, unmarked

backroad. Almost brought to a state of panic but finally making his way back to the

highway, Rabbit, we leam, "turns instinctively right, north. The trip home is easier. [..

.] He has broken through the barrier of fatigue and come into a calm where nothing

matters much” (Updike,Run 40).

While Rabbit's motivations for turning home are perhaps an early indication of

the limits of his capacity for rebellion, Updike nevertheless intends for us to understand

Rabbit's return to Brewer as a definitive continuation of his hysterical search. As

Rabbit will assert to himself later the next day, "He is the Dalai Lama" (Updike,Run

52), an identification that likens him to a spiritual guru who is fleeing communists and

that in turn equates Rabbit with the pursuit of freedom and the United States with an

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. oppressive regime. Rather than return to his family, one of the felt expressions of that

oppressive regime, Rabbit thus seeks out his former basketball coach.

That Rabbit's thoughts immediately shift from the weariness and resignation he

feels upon giving up his journey southward to his memories of basketball is not

surprising, of course, since those memories regularly function as a confirmation of

stable American manhood for him. First likening his current state o f exhaustion to that

he often felt by the last quarter of a basketball game, Rabbit ultimately focuses on the

satisfaction those games provided:

[A]t the start of the night when you came out for warm-up and could see all the town clunkers sitting in the back of bleachers elbowing each other and the cheerleaders wisecracking with the racier male teachers, the crowd then seemed right inside you, your liver and lungs and stomach. There was one fat guy used to come who'd get on the floor of Rabbit's stomach and really make it shake. Hey, Gunner! Hey, Showboat, shoot! Shoot! Rabbit remembers him fondly now; to that guy he had been a hero of sorts. (Updike, Run 40)

As Rabbit's searching continues, then, it is with this dual, contradictory, and potentially

disruptive urge: to continue asking the hysteric's question, "Who am I for the Other?,"

but at the same time to invoke past and future scenarios of fully satisfied desire and

identity so as to retain the illusion of American manhood.

Arriving in Brewer early, Rabbit anxiously waits in his car outside Marty

Tothero's apartment at the Sunshine Athletic Association. Rabbit is at first afraid he has

made a mistake in coming to Tothero when he sees how much his ex-coach has

changed, but "Tothero says the perfect thing. 'Harry,' he says, 'wonderful Harry

Angstrom'" (Updike,Run 44). Moreover, Tothero is more than eager to play the role of

adjudicator when Rabbit states that he is there for Tothero's advice and a place to sleep:

"Tothero is silent before replying. His great strength is in these silences; he has the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. disciplinarian's trick of waiting a long moment while his words gather weight" (Updike,

Run 44). Rabbit in fact reveals earlier in the extended opening scene of the novel, just

before he flees, that it is precisely a kind of paternal authority that Tothero represents

for him: "Next to his mother Tothero had had the most force. The thought of his old

coach [...] frightens him" (Updike, Run 21). Notably, though, Tothero represents both

the possibility of an alternative (white) masculinity—he too has defied society's norms

by leaving his wife and taking up the suspect lifestyle of a licentious bachelor—and the

possibility of a return to the dominant fantasy of American manhood crystallized by

Rabbit's star basketball career.

Ultimately, Tothero is also an appropriate choice for Rabbit given the increasing

amount of psychic energy Rabbit spends on fortifying gender difference as the novel

progresses, even as he continues to reject normative masculinity. As a result, I want to

turn more exclusively for a moment to the issue of gender and what appears to be its

crucial and disquieting remainder for Rabbit: sexuality. Explaining the ego's

assumption of a gendered character, Judith Butler has persuasively argued that the

assumption of gender depends upon a primary disavowal of homosexual attachments

and that this prohibition is precisely what would provoke a melancholic gender

identification by forcing one to incorporate the forbidden object into the ego.15

Fundamentally, "the identification contains within it both the prohibition and the desire,

and so embodies the ungrieved loss of the homosexual cathexis" (Butler,The Psychic

Life o f Power 136).

I find this understanding of gender melancholia particularly useful in clarifying

Rabbit's relationship to his immediate family in Rabbit, Run, especially his distant

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. connection to his father and his perception that his mother is "too powerful." For these

relationships appear to underwrite so many of Rabbit's decisions and actions. Rabbit in

fact clearly comprehends his parents as themselves successfully embodying the

normative ideals of gender, when in the very last instant before he departs Brewer,

Rabbit peeks in the window of his parents' home to get a glimpse of his son, Nelson:

"Pop and [his sister] Mim smile and make remarks but Mom, mouth set, comes in

grimly with her spoon. Harry's boy is being fed, this home is happier than his [...].

His acts take on decisive haste" (Updike,Run 26). Most aligning himself with

dominant gender constructions is Rabbit's father, who offers criticisms of his son's

inability to adjust to "normal" family life, that he "didn't want to get dirty" but instead

just "chase ass" (Updike,Run 152). The substitution of Tothero as a paternal authority

thus not only provides Rabbit with an alternative, it signifies an hysteric's observation

that American manhood as "successfully" embodied by his father is nevertheless

inadequate. In this way, his mother is somehow "too powerful," too adequate. This,

makes even more sense when we allow that as the initial site of feminine identification,

the figure of his mother must be refused if Rabbit is to succeed in heterosexualizing his

desire within the parameters of the incest prohibition. Yet, this heterosexualization also

demands that in his masculine identification Rabbit must embrace the feminine as the

object of his desire.16 Given this dynamic, it should be no surprise that the desire

Rabbit most repeatedly insists on knowing is the desire of women for himself.

"Knowing" a given woman's desire subverts his identification with that woman to a

mastery over her and the difference he must prove.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. While Butler gives emphasis to the way in which the incorporation of both

prohibition and desire in melancholic gender identification causes homosexual desire to

"panic" gender, I think we can also speak about how the subject's perception that he or

she has failed to achieve a culturally prescribed gender ideal might panic sexuality.

Indeed, it would be more accurate to describe the homosexual desire Butler means as

the subject's perception that he or she has failed to achieve a culturally prescribed ideal

of sexuality. The two dynamics, in fact, are so closely intertwined as to make it almost

impossible to differentiate them. Thus, although the trajectory outlined above would

seem to insist that gender is made possible by desire and society's demands upon it, we

must remember that those demands upon desire are always already overwritten by

gender in an attempt to make desire, which is radically unknowable, determinable.

Butler herself makes a similar point when she concludes that "Perhaps only by risking

the incoherence of identity is connection possible"(Psychic 149).

As a result, the moments where Rabbit is made anxious about his

heterosexuality are also laden with his gender anxiety, and conversely, Rabbit's gender

anxiety is marked by repeated ruptures in his heterosexual veneer. My intention is to

open up the possibility that Rabbit's anxiety is not abouteither sexualityor gender, but

about a vague intimation of the performative nature of these identificatory categories

and the mourning this recognition would necessitate. For example, after agreeing to let

Rabbit sleep at his apartment, Tothero lingers to watch him undress and makes Rabbit

uncomfortable in doing so. Yet even after Tothero has left, Rabbit remains troubled:

The old man's standing there was disturbing but Rabbit is sure that's not his problem. Tothero was always known as a lech but never a queer. Why watch? Suddenly Rabbit knows. It takes Tothero back in time. Because of all the times he had stood in locker rooms watching his boys change clothes. Solving this 71

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. problem relaxes Rabbit's muscles. He remembers the couple with linked hands running on the parking lot outside the diner in West Virginia and it seems a great loss that it hadnt been him about to nail her. (Updike, Run 47)

Here and elsewhere in Rabbit, Run, Rabbit's attempt to retain mastery is bound by his

ability to "know" desire, his own and others. As we have seen, the subject's

incorporation of gender and sexuality relies precisely on the belief that he or shecan

know. In the above passage, Rabbit sustains his mastery in the face of this potentially

homosexual and disruptive scene by "knowing" Tothero's desire and then imagining his

own gender-affirming sexual conquest of the girl from West Virginia.17 This imaginary

act—on the surface meaningless in the sense that it confirms nothing for an "actual"

other—reveals yet again the force of psyche in subjection and the necessity of

theorizing the ways in which it collaborates with power. At the heart of performativity,

furthermore, are the loss and indeterminacy that Rabbit cannot bring himself to face and

that appear to be the very grounds from which the performative spring.

Bringing the more developed understanding of melancholic gender identification

discussed above to bear upon it, the final moment o f the extended opening scene of

Rabbit, Run vitally crystallizes the psychic investments from which Rabbit is struggling

to disentangle himself. In this moment, which occurs just as Rabbit drifts off to sleep in

Tothero's bed, Rabbit has just assured himself of Tothero's heterosexual desire (and his

own) when his thoughts about the West Virginia girl shift to his first experience with a

prostitute, a recollection that is meaningful on several levels. First, it accounts for the

sole memory of any length that Rabbit recalls from his stint in the Army after high

school. If not informed otherwise by the few appearances of this one memory and

several passing references to Rabbit's age, one would think that Rabbit's high school

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. years merged seamlessly with his courtship of Janice and their ensuing married life.

Against the repetition of Rabbit's high school recollections, the absence of reflection

about the intervening years speaks to something distinctly unsatisfying, even traumatic.

In fact, while many argued that participation in the armed services was necessary for the

realization of one's manhood, as displayed in my discussion of WWEI and postwar

adjustment in chapter one, Updike's novel refuses to validate any such easy equation.

Perhaps most significantly, however, Rabbit's memory comes as the psychic

culmination of events in his life over the preceding day and a half:

As Rabbit thinks back, he recalls his experience in immediate and vivid detail: [H]e was nineteen. Coming down the street with Hanley and Jarzylo and Shamberger the tight khaki making him feel nervous. [...] Rabbit couldn't believe the house was right. It had flowers in the window, actual living flowers innocent in the window and he was tempted to turn and run. Sure enough the woman who came to the door could have been on television selling cake mix. (Updike,Run 47-48).

From the start, then, the memory focuses on the expectation of a sanctioned,

recognizable performance versus the actuality of an unstable, ambivalent one. In short,

here, seemingly for the first time, is Rabbit's encounter with the "fraud" of gendered

identity and the performativity that sustains it, with the fact that appearances can

sometimes be mere facades: behind the ordinary house, with its "innocent" flowers in

the window, is really a brothel, and Rabbit's discomfort is indexed by his desire to run.

Rabbit's recollection of his actual sexual encounter at the whorehouse further

elucidates these tensions:

[She] smiled under him, working around to get him right, and even speaking kindly: "You're all right, honey. You're gone along all right. Oh yeaas. You've had lessons." So that when it was over he was hurt to learn, from the creases of completion at the sides of her lips and the hard way she wouldn't keep lying beside him but got up and sat on the edge of the metal-frame bed looking out the dark window at the green night sky of Texas, that she had faked her half. Her 73

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. mute back showing in yellow-white the bar of a swimming-suit bra angered him; he took the ball of her shoulder in his hand and turned her roughly. The weighted shadows of her front hung so careless and undefended he looked away. (Updike,Run 48)

Most obviously, Rabbit's experience with the prostitute stands as a pointed departure

from the masterful American manhood with which Rabbit's memories of high school

are laden. Based upon the content of this memory and its context within Updike's

novel, I believe that it must finally be read as one of the fundamentally formative,

traumatic events defining Rabbit's relationship to subjecthood and thus American

manhood. Here, in miniature, is an almost perfect distillation of the way trauma

constitutes the desiring subject and catalyzes symptoms that cover over this fact. Prior

to Rabbit's experience at the brothel, it is—or so he imagines—as if all desire is

transparent, is simply known directly: thingsare what they are. What marks an

experience as traumatic, of course, is the first time a subject comes face to face with that

which is not what it appears to be. This encounter then catapults the subject into a

world of meaning in which desire first appears as such, which is to say, in which desire

appears as elusive. In this world, what a subject encounters seems always to be a mask

for something more essential beneath it. This is what Rabbit encounters both in the

facade of the brothel and the recognition that the prostitute has "faked her half': the

prostitute's desire is not his. In claiming the centrality of this traumatic experience, I am

really simply asserting here that Rabbit meets the desire of the other for the first time—

as something unknowable and thus terribly unsettling. This, then, triggers both the

nostalgic coloring given to his memories of the past and the hysterical search to

reproduce the experience of being on the basketball court, basking in the clear and

unadulterated desire of the other. It is, as I have suggested, a serial search doomed to 74

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fail, since it cannot completely shake the trauma that catalyzes it—i.e., the sense that the

other’s desire is a fake concealing not something more essential but rather the

groundlessness of desire as such.

This inability to shake the trauma is indexed not just by the placement of this

recollection in the novel at the end of its key opening scene, but in the description of the

aftermath of the sexual encounter with the prostitute. Indeed, the "meaning" the

prostitute confers on that encounter does not only delineate a Rabbit who is a long way

from the days when his activity brought about the satisfaction of the crowd and the

crowd then confirmed his fantasmatic identity. On the contrary, the prostitute's

behavior reveals his activity to have been mechanical and meaningless to her; in this

way, the illusion of full satisfaction upon which fantasy depends has been disrupted,

thus destabilizing Rabbit's sense of complete identity. More specifically, Rabbit's

encounter with the prostitute signifies a failure on his part to secure proof of his sexual

difference from her, a memory that rightly haunts him as he acts to resist the demands

of normative white masculinity. For, in effect, the prostitute has acted upon Rabbit,

rendering herself unknowable and active, him known and passive. Made to occupy this

position, Rabbit is thus shown to be the empty "receptacle" he feared he was and the

matrix of desire, refused identification, and incoherent subjectivity veiled by his former

sense of identity are undone. As the passage finally closes, then, Rabbit drifts off to

sleep, noticing that "The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. Its noise comforts

him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world

down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of

love" (Updike,Run 48). His last seconds of consciousness upon him, Rabbit releases

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. himself from the burden of reconcretizing his masculinity and moves toward the

possibility of something much less determinable. Now "hidden and safe," Rabbit

reveals that what has appeared to be ungrievable may simply be an incoherent,

"disembodied [...] motion of love."

Motions ofLove, Notions o fSelf

Through my close reading of the extended opening scene o f Rabbit, Run, I have

attempted to read Rabbit's actions as social protest that works against its own animating

recognitions by seeking to evade an acceptance of the dissatisfaction and loss that

constitutes desire and identity. I have tried to show how the unsignified (i.e.,

ungendered, unracialized, etc.) ambivalence at the heart of subject formation is made

coherent for white male subjects in distinctly gendered and racialized ways and how

attempts at this coherence are inextricably tied to the historical moment in which

society and the individual struggle to secure it. I hope I have also begun to suggest that

Rabbit's adult responsibility is not to fulfill the cultural ideals of American manhood—

familial, professional, sexual, or other—with which society and the individual have

come to shroud incoherence. Indeed, I read Rabbit's actions as social protest precisely

because he is willing to challenge these ideals. Rabbit's responsibility does lie,

however, in how he chooses to cope with the fact that subjectivity is marked by

dissatisfaction and loss and by a coherence that is only apparent.

In fact, these are precisely the recognitions that the hysteric is on the verge of

making and why Freud is perhaps correct in his hypothesis that the most authentic

subject is the hysteric who comes ultimately to recognize his or her hysteria—who

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. comes, that is, to structure a new relation to constitutive loss. As such, Updike depicts

Rabbit as a "failed" hysteric of sorts, one who thus far has continued to make the

mistake of trying to remedy his hysteria, and among the remedies that society and the

individual have collaborated in constructing are gender and race. In essence, then, the

embrace, or attempted embrace, of gender and race as coherent markers o f identity

could be said to be the exhibition of an hysterical symptom—society’s as well as the

individual's. Through Rabbit's two most intimate relationships with men and women in

the novel, Tothero and Ruth, Updike shows his character exploring the options open to

him, tom between defying the ideals of American manhood and needing to fulfill them

at the same time.

That Rabbit almost immediately enters into a new heterosexual relationship

upon returning to Brewer, then, is apt. That this relationship is with a smalltown call

girl is even more appropriate. Ruth, to whom Rabbit is introduced by Tothero, is a

challenge to the white masculine dominant at the same time she saves Rabbit from one

of that dominant's most volatile disciplinary tactics—the charge that men unable to

embrace and maintain monogamous conjugal relations are developmentally delayed

members of society and probably homosexual. While the terms "mature" and

"immature" may strike us now as banal in suggestion, the case was quite otherwise in

the 1950s when immaturity was almost synonymous with homosexuality, then defined

as a regressive pathological affliction characterized by "adaptive failure," "perpetual

adolescence," and the like.18 In living with Ruth, Rabbit is able to replicate the surface

features of normative masculinity without being bound to it at the same time that Ruth

herself provides Rabbit with a constant female presence whose desire he can "know":

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature. The pavement kicks under his feet as he runs to the grocery store in his dirty shirt. What do you like? He has her. He knows he has her. (Updike, Run 89).

The result is that Rabbit is able to continue subverting any feminine identification in his

mastery over Ruth and thus establish the difference he must prove to secure masculine

subjectivity. Meanwhile, this passage also displays how small the distance really is

between the gendering of the other and the racializing of the other, how they are in fact

structured from the same epistemologies. Thus Rabbit here confirms his masculine

subjectivity by conceiving of gender within the terms of a racialized rhetoric that

imagines women as natural objects occurring only in relation to an unnamed male

subject. At the same time, Rabbit also derives important gratification from that fact that

Ruth and the lifestyle she embraces do represent a direct challenge to the normative

expectations society has about gender. Ruth, for example, gets Rabbit's sarcastic jokes

about the modem housewife and his MagiPeel spiel, jokes that Janice is unable to

comprehend as humorous.

Given how Ruth functions for Rabbit, then, it begins to be clear that if he is ever

to transcend the demands of American manhood he appears so interested in challenging,

among other things, he must recognize his need to establish gender difference as one of

those demands. Tothero is hardly a model for such a recognition in his own assertions

about women to Rabbit: '"Do you realize, Harry, that a young woman has hair on every

part of her body?' 'I hadn't thought about it.' Distaste stains his throat. Do,'Tothero

says. Do think about it. They are monkeys, Harry. Women are monkeys'" (Updike,

Run 54). Yet Tothero's revelations to Rabbit are useful in further illuminating the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dissatisfaction and loss that society and the individual strive so hard to veil with the

supposed determinacies of gender and race. One such point occurs when, in attempting

to persuade Rabbit not to be concerned about Janice, Tothero offers the following

explanation of what moved him to flee from his own wife:

"But do you know when it began? It began with her skin. One day in the spring, in nineteen forty-three or four, it was during the war, without warning it was hideous. It was like the hides of a thousand lizards stitched together. Stitched together clumsily. Can you picture that? That sense of it beingin pieces horrified me, Harry. [...] Let's not talk about little mutts like Janice Springer, Harry boy. This is the night. This is no time for pity. The real women are dropping down out of the trees." (Updike,Run 54-55)

On the surface, of course, this description of women as a separate species whose

difference is biologically determinable is just one more instance of a male subject

seeking proof of the difference he must instill to "be" that subject. But when we push

on what Tothero implies by "real women,” we find that this passage uncovers much

more than that. In essence, for Tothero, a "real" woman not only releases one from the

psychic and social obligations of marriage and family, she also does not remind one of

the body’s mutability, only its vitality. We might recall here, for example, Rabbit's

experience in the brothel, where, in addition to the notion that the prostitute "faked her

half," Rabbit is in part unsettled by the clear signs of bodily aging that he notices, like

the "creases" at the sides of the prostitute's lips and her weighted breasts. These are the

characteristics it is suggested Tothero's "real" women are able to defy. Yet Tothero's

words should also remind us that what opposes any fantasy of mastery is both the

multiple social markers of powerlessness and the fear of impotence that more generally

attends the experience of subjecthood. As such, his words expose how dissatisfaction

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and loss are not abstract phenomena but, ultimately, real traces of the fundamental

vulnerability that marks being—mortality.19

While Updike finally portrays the inadequacy of the kind of solution presented

by Tothero—Tothero's own mortality soon catches up to him quite resolutely in a

debilitating stroke near the end of the novel—Updike importantly allows for the

suggestion of a solution in the musings of Ruth. Indeed, Rabbit appears as if in relief

against Ruth's decidedly unmelancholic psyche, completing a spectrum that would

locate Tothero at its other end. As clarified in the following interior monologue, Ruth

has already achieved many of the insights about gender that Rabbit and Tothero are in

such dire need of making:

The thing was, they wanted to be admired there. They really did want that. They weren't that ugly but they thought they were. That was the thing that surprised her in high school how ashamed they were really, how grateful they were if you just touched them there and how quick word got out if you would. What did they think, they were monsters? If they'd just thought, they might have known you were curious too, that you could like that strangeness there like they liked yours, no worse than women in their way, all red wrinkles, my God, what was it in the end? No mystery. That was the great thing she discovered, that it was no mystery, just a stuck-on-looking bit that made them king and if you went along with it could be good or not so good. (Updike,Run 137)

Ruth's recognition of the penis as "just a stuck-on-looking bit that made them king" is a

distillation of the feminist recognition that the penis is a sign that merely—but all too

forcefully—circulates in the dominant patriarchal imaginary as a signifier of presence,

activity, and power. Ruth sees through the sexual encoding of the ontological that not

only contributes to the creation of fantasies of mastery like that attending American

manhood but also places those fantasies in a hierarchy by privileging certain elements

of them—for example, the visible, the male, and by extension, the white. Similarly, she

attributes neither sex with capacities or attributes beyond the simply human; men and 80

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. women have bodies that are strange and beautiful, capable of pleasure and

disappointment, neither one more mysterious or powerful than the other in actuality.

The result is that Ruth also sees that it is in the domain of the imaginary that difference

is wrought: "[T]hrough all the cloth, everything, off they’d go. They couldn't have felt

much it must have been just theidea of you. All their ideas" (Updike,Run 137-138).

In the end, however, Ruth refuses to fully bear the existential burden that Rabbit

wants to impose upon her, withdrawing from him emotionally and physically. When

this refusal coincides with the birth of Rabbit's daughter, Rebecca, Rabbit returns to

Janice and his family. Rabbit's initial return, however, is a forced one brought on by the

birth itself and his sense that he has a fatherly obligation to be there. Yet the thought of

the birth itself raises all the deepest anxieties that Rabbit is desperate to quell:

He does not expect the fruit of Janice's pain to make a very human noise. His idea grows, that it will be a monster, a monster of his malting. [...] His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die:the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. (Updike, Run 183-184)

All too clear, then, is the fact that Rabbit continues to have moments in which his white

masculinity appears to him as radically unknowable—here contained in the female-

centered scene of birth and the product of his unintelligible sperm—and that the

anxieties springing from this confusion have forced him to face the question of

mortality. In moments such as these, Updike underscores the complexity of Rabbit's

situation in his evocative presentation of the existential truths that lie beneath and

animate the hysteric's melancholic theatre: the death of God and the certainty of

mortality. Significantly, then, what allows Rabbit to retreat from these recognitions and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pushes him back into his former domestic fold is the apparently unmonstrous fact of

Rebecca, upon whom seeing for the first time he thinks, "What he never expected, he

can feel she's feminine, feels something both delicate and enduring in the arc of the long

pink cranium" (Updike,Run 202). That is, both Rabbit's "knowledge" that Rebecca is

female and white and his sense that she is the enduring refutation of his bodily

mutability work to deliver apparently stable identity back to him.

As Rabbit confides to Ruth earlier in the narrative, '"When I ran from Janice I

made an interesting discovery. [...] If you have the guts to be yourself,' he says, 'other

people'll pay your price'" (Updike,Run 140). Although Rabbit has struggled to define

the "self' to whom he refers, his statement plainly speaks—literally and figuratively—

to the power of the very notion of selfhood and the sacrificial economy on which it is

based. After all, his statement admits that achieving stable, whole identity requires an

"other" who will "pay your price," who will necessarily be the sacrifice through whom

full presence is secured. For the white male subject, this sacrificial lamb has

historically taken the form of subjects who are supposedly lacking, wanting, instinctual,

fragmented. But perhaps Rabbit's statement admits more than it intends, for the other is

here described as carrying the burden of what is really the dominant subject's "price."

That is, I think we must read the lack, want, instinct, and fragmentation imposed upon

femininized and racialized subjects as a transference and denial of what in fact also

belongs to the subject claiming the "masculine" and the "white” and as an attempt to

screen a recognition of his own mortality and the necessity o f mourning. Returning to

the larger historical context for Rabbit's hysterical seeking, then, it seems no mistake

that Rabbit himself has earlier articulated what is perhaps the predominant demand of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. postwar American manhood—maturity—as itself signifying a kind of death. As Rabbit

sharply replies to Reverend Eccles' council that God would want Rabbit to accept his

adult responsibilities: "If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I dont cry

over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead” (Updike,Run 102).

On the one hand, Rabbit's critique is apt given the very small set of (im)possibilities for

subjecthood should he take dominant white masculinity as his model. On the other

hand, mutability itself appears to be the primary obstacle preventing Rabbit from

imagining alternatives to American manhood and encouraging him to act in ways that

violate the integrity of those around him. As such, while Rabbit is correct to attack the

ideology of mature adulthood as a kind of metaphorical death, he nevertheless persists

in deflecting the psychic anxieties surrounding real bodily mutability which that

ideology works to veil.

Rabbit's return to Janice and his children, then, is dependent upon the erection of

yet another screen behind which he can conceal mortality—the ''feminine,'' "enduring,"

and "pink" Rebecca. The significance of Rabbit's perceptions of Rebecca here cannot, I

believe, be underestimated; they too intensely replicate Rabbit's usual means of gaining

control. Rabbit, however, is again not without contradictory feelings about himself and

his actions. Playing with his son, Nelson, at a local playground, Rabbit thus muses:

He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks. (Updike,Run 208).

Here we again see Rabbit's melancholia at work, as he on the one hand recognizes that

dissatisfaction and loss are a fact of life and on the other hand clings to the idea that 83

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. there was a time when he was without them. Also not insignificantly, it is in the

presence of his son, Nelson, that Rabbit is confronted with this insight. His daughter,

the preternatural Rebecca, still holds out the promise of"fullness." This dream of

omnipotence, that there was a time when Rabbit was without loss, is, of course, the very

thing that has driven his hysteria. Without giving it up, Rabbit will forever seek out the

fullness he believes he once had, using the cultural ideals of American manhood to fill

the void.

As we've seen above, then, Rabbit's recollections of his star basketball days are

but one facet of his serial, hysterical search for a bearer of manhood's "truth" who might

arrest the process commenced and fueled by his encounters with fraud. An outgrowth

of those recollections, his relationship to women is what proves to leave the most

lasting damage. Rabbit even has obscurely admitted to himself that the two "triumphs"

are "united in his mind," and his thoughts and actions only confirm this association. It

is not long after returning home, then, that Rabbit attempts to initiate a sexual encounter

between himself and Janice, though she is not recovered from giving birth. When

Janice refuses, saying with more significance than she surely intends, "'I'm not your

whore, Harry,'" Rabbit picks up and runs yet again (Updike,Run 229). Gone for the

entire night and the better part of the next day, Rabbit returns to his various haunts

around Brewer, such as Reverend Eccles' home and Ruth's apartment. Though it is not

clear that Rabbit really intends to stay away, Janice fears the worst and begins drinking

again only to drown Rebecca accidentally as she attempts, in a drunken stupor, to bathe

her.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Between Rebecca's death and the funeral, then, we are presented with a Rabbit

who is forced to confront mortality face to face and who at first appears to accept

responsibility for his role in his daughter's death. Here he dreams of the moon eclipsing

the sun, drowsily believing "that what he has witnessed is the explanation of death:

lovely life eclipsed by lovely death. Intensely relieved and excited, he realizes he must

go forth from this field and found a new religion" (Updike, Run 260). On the brink of

accepting the certainty of death, a realization that might allow him to transcend his

hysteria and its underlying melancholia, Rabbit yet again retreats when, waking, he sees

that "Janice stands by the bed [...]. There is a drab thickness of fat under her chin he

has never noticed before. He is surprised to be on his back; he almost always sleeps on

his stomach. He realizes it was a dream, that he has nothing to tell the world, and the

knot regathers in his chest" (Updike, Run 260). Signified by the physical change in

Janice's face and the corpse-like sleeping position Rabbit has uncharacteristically

assumed, bodily mutability and the imminence of death concretely mark Rabbit's

anguished stasis.

Appropriately, then, at the moment supposedly sanctioned by society for

mourning, one of American society’s most powerful institutions, religion, is responsible

for providing the final vehicle for Rabbit's return to hysteria:

"The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing." Eccles' voice is fragile outdoors. The distant buzz of the power mower halts respectfully. Rabbit's chest vibrates with excitement and strength; he is sure his girl has ascended to Heaven. [...] A strange strength sinks down into him. It is as if he has been crawling in a cave and now at last beyond the dark recession of crowding rocks he has seen a patch of light; he turns, and Janice's face, dumb with grief, blocks the light. "Don't look at me," he says. "I didn't kill her." (Updike,Run 270-271)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Without a fundamental recognition of his hysteria and what has driven it, Rabbit is

unable to give up his manic seeking and remains locked in a psychic struggle that

cannot or will not reveal its relationship to the social. There is, in fact, an ethical reason

for Rabbit to return to his former life, even if only temporarily, and to accept

responsibility for his behavior and its effects that is not grounded in the ideology of

mature adulthood and American manhood's unrealizable demands. Rather, the reason

lies in Rabbit's obligation to the recognition that loss and dissatisfaction ground

subjectivity and that he has not only struggled under but himself participated in a range

of cultural violences in avoiding this recognition—an insight Rabbit flees yet again at

Rebecca's funeral. Updike's novel thus ends in the angst-ridden place where it first

began, with the isolated white male body of Rabbit panicked and running, this time

from the scene of mourning at his infant daughter's graveside and back into the streets

of Brewer: "His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his

heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a

kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs"

(Updike,Run 284).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Notes

11 here intend to establish the distinction between mourning and melancholia first suggested by Sigmund Freud. See Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia,"The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (1989), 584-89. For a discussion of gender and sexuality in relation to melancholia, see Butler, Gender Trouble (1990) and The Psychic Life o f Power (1997). The exact publication dates are as follows:Rabbit Redux (1970); Rabbit is Rich (1981); andRabbit at Rest (1990). 3 The following lists criticism about race and gender in the Rabbit tetralogy, though whiteness and masculinity are rarely treated in specificity. For the only critical work specifically addressing whitenessand masculinity in depth, but only fromRabbit Redux on, see Robinson, Marked Men (2000). For work on race, though almost exclusively onRedux and ignoring Run completely, see Alter, "Updike, Malamud, and the Fire This Time" (1972); Russell, "White Man's Black Man: Three Views" (1973); Campbell, "Updike's Honky Apocalypse:Rabbit Redux” (1978); Jackson, "Rabbit is Racist" (1984-85); Clausen, "Native Fathers" (1992); Boswell, "The Black Jesus: Racism and Redemption in John Updike'sRabbit Redux” (1998); and Prosser, "Under the Skin of John Updike: Self-Consciousness and the Racial Unconscious" (2001). For work emphasizing gender, see Allen, The Necessary Blankness (1976); Olster, ’"Unadorned Woman, Beauty's Home Image"’ (1993); and O'Connell,Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma (1996). Note also that there is a vast body of Updike criticism that gives priority to neither race nor gender; the primary categories of investigation therein analyze the Rabbit novels within a theological framework or as representative of a kind of American "Everyman." For an example of the former, which is by far the dominant category, see Hamilton and Hamilton, The Elements o fJohn Updike (1970); for an example of the latter, see Greiner,John Updike's Novels (1984). 4 For a provocative reading of subject formation that meditates upon the important implications of power's inability to interpellate subjects seamlessly—how the inadequacies of power are writ large in its own incessant rearticulations—see Butler's The Psychic Life o f Power. 5 Although not my focus, I would argue that Updike also captures the potentially oppressive and stupefying effects of matrimonial and familial expectations for women. 6 "The Organization Man" is a term borrowed, of course, from William H. Whyte, Jr., who first coined it in and then used it as the title for his popular 1956 critique of the movement toward corporatizing the American individual. While he does not leave women out of his discussion altogether, his overwhelming emphasis is on men and professional jobs from which women would have been excluded. In fact, there is an important critique to be made of Whyte's work for its nostalgia about a golden age of "the Protestant work ethic," "self-reliance," and "rugged individualism"—an age in which white women as well as all people of color had even less to do with the professional work world and in which the representative individual was always white and male.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7 Importantly, critiques of these assumptions were just being (re)articulated at the time by early secondwave feminist works like Simone de Beauvoir'sThe Second Sex and by the civil rights movement generally. 8 This is not to say that I think women themselves never perpetuated these ideologies—I intend merely to summarize what Rabbit observes here. 9 For this notion of "traversing the fantasy" as the endpoint of psychoanalytic inquiry, see Lacan,The Four Fundamental Concepts o f Psycho-Analysis (1981). 10 Toni Morrison has been inspirational on the count of how race informs our supposedly universal notions of American individualism. See Morrison,Playing In the D ark{1990). 111 purposely use the word "figure” as opposed to "character" to emphasize the comparatively minor roles assigned to African Americans within the novel as a whole. 12 Thus, whiteness is shown to depend upon visibility and particularity to circulate as normative. As a result, the power of whiteness is not so much in failing to acknowledge one's whiteness; it is in failing to acknowledge the privilege and entitlement that whiteness signify—as white identity politics of the latter twentieth- century have shown. 13 My thanks to Dilvo I. Ristoff s extensive historical contextualization of Rabbit, Run in his Updike's America (1988) for the general historical situatedness of the novel suggested by die political news in the radio broadcast. As indicated by the tide of Dilvo's work, however, his reading retains its emphasis on history in general while my reading turns to the unique experience of the white male American subject. 14 As Ristoff points out, the meeting actually took place at Camp David, though Eisenhower had just been to Gettysburg (47). 151 believe "homosexual" can be read as applying to the broadest possible range of same-sex love attachments here. 16 The result, as Butler points out, is troubling: "One of the most anxious aims of his [the male's] desire will be to elaborate the difference between him and her, and he will seek to discover and install the proof of that difference. His wanting will be haunted by a dread of being what he wants, so that his wanting will also always be a kind of dread. Precisely because what is repudiated and hence lost is preserved as a repudiated identification, this desire will attempt to overcome an identification which can never be complete" Psychic( 137-138). 17 The girl, of course, is not without her own importance in this psychic performance and should remind us of the erotic triangle frequently depended upon between men so as to verify their heterosexuality and masculinity. See Sedgwick, Between Men (1992). 18 See Ehrenreich, The Hearts o fMen (1983), and Kimmel,Manhood in America (1996). 19 For an incisive and comprehensive reading of how hysteria and bodily mutability are linked, a reading that also undoes the traditional link between desire and the phallus, see Bronfen, The Knotted Subject (1998). For Bronfren, the hysteric's protean performances are an attempt to cope with the primordial "knotted scar" marking subjectivity that she contends has been manifested in western imagery of the navel. As

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. she puts it, "notions of want or implenitude, flaw, and vulnerability are inscribed into human existence [ ...] . The individual is constructed out of and over an originary traumatic wounding” (9-10). In arguing for the significance of this originary bodily wound, Bronfen attempts to vex "the sense or security that what fundamentally splits the subject is its alienation within language" (9). Rather, what returns to haunt the subject's claim to plenitude is the traumatic knowledge signified by the navel—what Bronfren calls the "somatic sign of naught" (7). In her re-reading of Oedipus, Bronfen maintains that incestual desire itself might in fact be a way to disavow bodily mutability: Over and above incest and parricide we share another fate, perhaps common to men and women alike in a way the gendered Oedipus complex is not, another curse that the oracle laid upon us with the cutting of the umbilical cord, whose nonarbitrary, indexical sign is the navel, not the phallus. This curse, or prophecy, is about the mutability of our bodies [...]. Any fundamental realization of what Freud calls impotence, I would argue, involves a recognition of the traumatic knowledge of vulnerability that grounds our existence [...]. At the center of all traumatic knowledge, including what Freud calls the recognition of human impotence, lies a recognition of mortality. (15) We might thus extend Bronfen's claim to Rabbit's hysterical attempts to re-secure sexual and gender difference and read them a means of keeping himself at one remove from a recognition pertaining to the fate "common to men and women alike"—i.e., our fundamental vulnerability/mortality.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 3

REJECTING THE ESTABLISHMENT, RESURRECTING (PRIMITIVE) AMERICAN MANHOOD: KEN KESEY’S ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST AS COUNTERCULTURAL FANTASY

A considerable new message. . . The current fantasy. . . Fantasy is a word Kesey has taken to using more and more, for all sorts of plans, ventures, world views, ambitions. It is a good word. It is ironic and it isn't. It refers to everything from getting hold of a pickup truck—"that's our fantasy for this weekend"—to some scary stuff out on the raggedy raggedy edge But how to tell it? . . . It has never been possible, has it, truly, just to come out and announce the current fantasy, not even in days gone by, when it seemed so simple___ ~ from Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)1

If John Updike'sRabbit, Run (1960) elucidates the sort of contained insurgency

that characterizes the resistant white middle-American male of the 1950s, then Ken

Kesey*s One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) stages the kind of encounter between

that male and his societal nemeses for which the 1960s would become famous. As in

the former text, the latter must grapple with the very structure of subjectivity in addition

to all the inflections of race and gender that infuse the white masculinity it seeks to defy

and redefine. Published during one of the civil rights movement's moments of greatest

visibility,Cuckoo's Nest must be read, I argue, as responding to historically specific

challenges to white masculine identity, an identity that was still taking its formative

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cues from postwar sex roles. Yet the novel does more than respond to the moment in

which it is situated. As a text hailed for its countercultural sentiments and largely

responsible for securing Kesey's place at the vanguard of the countercultural movement,

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest anticipates and ultimately participates in one of the

significant renegotiations of white masculinity during the 1960s—countercultural

manhood.2

The appealCuckoo's Nest to readers from that decade who at all identified with

anti-establishment sentiment indeed seems obvious: the Combine, Nurse Ratched, and

her orderlies [read: the establishment] are pitted against Chief Bromden, Randle P.

McMurphy, and the other hospitalized men [read: an incipient counterculture] in a

dramatic and often humorous narrative about a mental ward of societal misfits who

rebel against the system. Similarly, if there is one point of critical agreement about

Cuckoo's Nest, it is that Kesey is writing in the spirit of the countercultural trend re

energized by the Beats and consciously working to imagine those forces in American

society that appear to strip one of his agency. While these broadest assessments of

Kesey's novel are certainly fair, I want to insist on reading "his" quite literally. For at

the very least, Kesey implicitly concentrates his energy on those forces that oppress

white middle-class men—a point underscored by the demographics of the ward Kesey

depicts. All of the patients are male, and with the single exception of the mixed-blood

character Chief, they are also all white.

My goal here, however, is not to participate in the deadlocked critical

conversation about whether One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is sexist or, more

recently, racist. Surely, it is a problem that criticism centering on the relationship

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between the inhabitants of the ward and their overseers has tended to discuss, or simply

to work from the assumption of, the narrative as one that champions universal

individualism and self-reliance for all, often hailing the renegade McMurphy for

selflessly sacrificing himself to save Chief Bromden and the other men.3 But even

where the role of gender, sexuality, or race in the novel has been treated in any depth,

the trend has been to examine one of these terms in isolation and at times to dismiss the

work completely on the grounds that R.P. McMurphy as the central character or Kesey

himself are irreparably sexist and racist.4 I would argue that the more productive

approach is to question how Kesey's work engages and negotiates cultural fantasies of

gender and race, particularly emphasizing the intersections of masculinity and

whiteness, an approach to the novel which has as yet to be taken.5 At the heart of this

investigation, then, is the role of Chief Bromden as narrator of a story that locks its gaze

on the white male subject. Far from a text-bound concern, this question ultimately

strives to take into account the cult-like popularityCuckoo's of Nest as well, a

popularity that in fact helped secure Kesey's place among the countercultural avant-

garde. Already famous for his novel, which grew out of his night job at a mental

hospital where he also first experimented with LSD, Kesey soon became a

countercultural guru on par with the likes of Timothy Leary.6 Kesey's activities, and the

counterculture in general, were then taken mainstream with the publication of Tom

Wolfe's best-selling 1968 book,The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which popularized the

freewheeling Merry Pranksters over which Kesey presided, especially their cross

country Day-Glo bus journeys and the acid tests they christened as a group. I believe,

in other words, that as a text profoundly entwined with the 60s counterculture,One

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest might have something useful to tell us about how

countercultural manhood imagined itself and thus shed light on one of the most

significant renegotiations of American manhood to occur during the decade.

Red Man’s Burden: The Narrative Role o f ChiefBromden

As I have already indicated, there is a seemingly self-obvious relation between

the narrative of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its appeal during the 1960s when

the tone of the book can so easily be described as anti-establishment. Kesey begins by

framing his story within the first-person narrative of Chief Bromden, who is described

as being a mixed blood of half white and half Columbia Gorge Indian descent and

referred to simply as Chief by the other characters. Recounting his former life as a

diagnosed mute schizophrenic and as one of the patients from an oppressive state

psychiatric ward in Oregon who succeeds in liberating himself, Chief tells his story first

in present tense, during the height of his schizophrenia, and then shifts into past tense as

he proceeds to that part of the story where he overcomes his illness.

At the center of Chiefs narrative is Randle P. McMurphy, a transfer to the

hospital from a work farm who has been committed after being diagnosed as a

psychopath. McMurphy figures so centrally for Chief that the overwhelming critical

tendency has been to treat Cuckoo's Nest as McMurphy's story. There is, of course,

some grounds for this interpretive move as McMurphy plays such a vital role in

motivating the action. A dynamic maverick type, McMurphy is able to apprehend how

the hospital's program for psychic health is one resting on strict conformity, and he soon

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. takes it upon himself to revolt against the hospital authority and to enlist the

participation of Chief and the other men along the way.

One way to summarize Kesey's story, consequently, would be to describe it as

the tale of a rebel and his disciple that examines how society interpellates subjects and

how the failure of interpellation is a foundation for social resistance. Indeed, the

narrative thread I've begun to describe is unquestionably resistant, even progressive by

post-World War II standards. At a time when Native people were still being forcibly

anglicized, the story links Chiefs schizophrenic break to the mistreatment of the

Columbia Gorge tribe and the swindling of his father's land by government officials, as

well as to his combat experience as a soldier during the Second World War.

McMurphy, meanwhile, serves as a kind of proto-agitator for personal liberation, one

who particularly anticipates the sexual revolution in his exhibitions of and calls for

uninhibited bodily pleasure. Finally, Kesey's story rejects the normativeness of

heterosexuality when three of the characters who triumphantly emerge from the hospital

at the end do so because they have renounced societal prohibitions and embraced their

same-sex desire. One of these three characters, Dale Harding, in fact plays a major role

in the novel as the erudite spokesman for the other longtime patients on the ward.7

Accordingly, Chief, McMurphy, and Harding appear on the surface to be the

appropriate, even laudable, representatives of an incipient anti-establishment

sensibility.8 Yet when we study more closely how Kesey's metaphorical establishment

is represented in relation these resistant figures, it becomes apparent that reading

Kesey's novel as pure social commentary misses the mark. Such a reading elides the

fact that it is exclusively through Chief that we leam about the psychiatric hospital, the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hospital authorities, and the other patients, most especially, McMurphy and his deeds.

As Kesey himself would later compellingly insist in his rejection of the McMurphy-

centered film version of his novel directed by Milos Forman: "It's the Indian's story."

At the same time, as already noted, Chief ultimately narrates a story whose primary

concern is the lives of white men. Should we take these other issues seriously, a

narrative with coordinates in fantasy begins to emerge.

Turning to Kesey’s metaphorical establishment, then, we find it is most of all

represented by what Chief calls "the Combine." The Combine is Chiefs collective

name for the omnipotent and repressive force he believes controls him and anyone else

it chooses, both inside and outside of the hospital. As Chief explains it, the ward is one

of the Combine's factories "for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the

schools and in the churches" and the primary product the Combine is interested in

generating is the right kind of man (Kesey, Cuckoo 38). Imagining one of these "fixed-

up" men on the Outside, Chief describes how "the Delayed Reaction Elements the

technicians installed lend nimble skills to his fingers as he bends over the doped figure

of his wife, his two little girls just four and six, the neighbor he goes bowling with on

Mondays; he adjusts them like he was adjusted. This is the way they spread it" (Kesey,

Cuckoo 38). While Chiefs perspective is that of a paranoid schizophrenic, one who

pretends he is deaf and dumb as a means of self-protection against the Nurse and her

"bag full of a thousand parts," Nurse Ratched herself nevertheless validates Chiefs

perceptions in her own characteristic declaration that "A good many of you are in here

because you could not adjust to the rules of society in the Outside world" (Kesey,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Cuckoo 3,171). As a former Army nurse, Nurse Ratched has a special military

penchant for rules and order that makes her a perfect countercultural nemesis.

That the kind of rule-bound society invoked by the Nurse is exactly what Kesey

has in mind when he depicts the Chiefs paranoid observations becomes clear during a

key scene later in the novel when the patients make their sole excursion outside of the

hospital. On their way to take a fishing day trip along the Oregon coast, the other men

engage in banter while Chief reflects on "the signs of what the Combine had

accomplished" since he was committed:

—a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car, then hooting its electric whistle [..

Or things like five thousand houses punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, [...] a sign saying " n e s t in t h e w e s t HOMES— NO d w n . p a y m e n t f o r v e ts ,"a playground down the hill from the houses, behind a checker-wire fence and another sign that read "ST. LUKE'S SCHOOL FOR BOYS" [ .. .]. All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by those guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. (Kesey,Cuckoo 227-28)

What Chief sees on the "the Outside" is an oppressed, automaton-like population of

white middle-class men and boys, all the Combine's "accomplishment." Although most

of the action takes place within the hospital, then, this setting serves as a magnification

of the larger society "Outside"—precisely the kind of conformist society that the

counterculture defined itself against. Even more significantly, Chief describes a white

male population who serve as cogs in the normative social machinery, echoing the

major cultural criticism of the 1950s and early 1960s by the likes of William H. Whyte,

C. Wright Mills, Allen Ginsberg, David Riesman, and Paul Goodman. As in the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. commentary of those critics, what Chief observes about the men and boys springs from

the benefits of post-WWH normativity—white-collar employment, home ownership,

suburban exclusivity, affluence, educational opportunity, patrilineal inheritance—at the

same time his observations lament that nonnativity's demands—corporate bureaucracy,

class hierarchy, consumerism, homogeneity, compulsory heterosexuality. And this

tension appears to be what underwrites Kesey's novel as a whole, for the men on the

ward are caught directly between society's insistence on the normative ideals of

American manhood and the costs of those ideals.

Not that the Chiefs description of the Combine is always so abstract and

sweeping. His initial descriptions of the Combine directly align it with Nurse Ratched

and her orderlies. According to Chief, the Combine works through those with authority

over the men in the hospital, and, as he sees it, they are ready at every turn to

psychologically and physically violate the men as part of the Combine's program of

conformity. It is in this vein that Chief characterizes the work Nurse Ratched does:

Under her rule the ward Inside is almost completely adjusted to surroundings. But the thing is she can't be on the ward all the time. She's got to spend some time Outside. So she works with an eye to adjusting the Outside world too. [She works] alongside others like her who I call the "Combine," which is a huge organization that aims to adjust the Outside as well as she has the Inside. (Kesey, Cuckoo 26)

Equally tyrannical in Chiefs assessment are the Nurse's orderlies. Indeed, as the first

line of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "They're out there," is a menacing

introduction to the characters Chief simply refers to as the "black boys”:

Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them. They're mopping when I come out the dorm, all three of them sulky and hating everything, the time of day, the place they're at here, the people they got

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don't see me [...], but they got special sensitive equipment detects my fear [...]. They laugh and then I hear them mumbling behind me, heads close together. Hum of black machinery, humming hate and death and other hospital secrets. (Kesey, Cuckoo 3)

In sum, at his most paranoid, Chief figures the Combine as a sinister, controlling power

that works directly through certain white women and African-American men. By the

end of the novel, however, Chief will accede to the notion that, as cruel as the Nurse,

her orderlies, and society at large can be in their demands for normativity, there is also a

responsibility to be bom by himself and the other men—a responsibility he will suggest

can be traced to the psychic demands they place upon one another as well as

themselves, though he will retreat from that intuition in the last instance.

This is not to say that Chief is wrong to perceive himself and the other

characters who inhabit the mental ward as oppressed. Where Chief and the other

characters "fail" is in their misrecognition of the terms of their oppression, locating the

source of their problems completely outside themselves, in female masculinity and

blackness for example. The result is a resistance that can never be genuine, let alone

efficacious. They are, as we will see, implicated in their own oppression by their

unmitigated desire for the power and complete identity promised by alternativean

fantasy of white masculinity. That is, if at the outset Kesey's story figures the

oppressive forces that work against the men as black, female, and societal, by the end,

this representation necessarily gives way to one that reveals those oppressive forces to

be as much white, male, and psychic.

The question remains, though, of the relationship between this story and the

narrative role of Chief, who we are told is visibly mixed-blood and self-identifies as

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Indian. To rephrase this issue more broadly, if Kesey's novel is about the search for an

alternative fantasy of white masculinity, in what way is this search emboldened or

informed by the fact that it is told from the perspective of a mixed-blood Native

American? My own sense here is that the answer to this question rests on the

romanticized notion of a primitive manhood—that is to say, a rediscovered way of

being a whole man with indigenous claim to the national imaginary that gains its

legitimacy (and countercultural credentials) by recourse to the figure of the American

Indian. This figure of the Indian is, in fact, a governing motif in countercultural

discourse. From the connection between psychedelic drugs and ancient wisdoms that

would lead Timothy Leary to claim he founded America's "first indigenous religion" to

the posters for the first Be-In in January of 1967 that describe the event as "Pow-Wow,

A Gathering of the Tribes" and feature a Native man in traditional dress clutching an

electric guitar, the counterculture defines itself around the primitive.9 As Keith Lampe

would claim in his anti-establishment article "On Making a Perfect Mess," originally

published in September 1967 inThe Mobilizer, the official publication of the antiwar

National Mobilization Coalition: "[W]e emancipated primitives of the coming culture

are free to do what we feel now because we understand that logic and proportion and

consistency and often even perspective are part of the old control system and we're done

with old control systems" (3). Even those in opposition to anything countercultural

found themselves tapping into primitive imagery, as in Ronald Reagan's description of a

hippie: "His hair was cut like Tarzan, and he acted like Jane, and he smelled like

Cheetah” (qtd. in Dudley 143). Reagan's statement is doubly significant in the way it

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. gestures back to the other major entity that had long constituted the American primitive

imaginary—the African.

Indeed, as recently as 1957, Norman Mailer's infamous essay "The White

Negro" had called upon resistant white men to defy Cold War fear and conformity once

and for all by becoming a "hipster,” one of "a new breed o f adventurers, urban

adventurers who drifted out at night looking for actions with a black man's code to fit

their facts," who "had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for

practical purposes could be considered a white Negro"(Advertisements for Myself339).

Yet, for all o Mailer's f purported sympathies for the oppressed African American, his

primary concern is white male liberation that depends directly upon the still-oppressed

figure of the black man to imagine itself: "Knowing in the cells of his existence that life

was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the

sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the

primitive, he lived in the enormous present, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for

the more obligatory pleasures of the body"{Advertisements 341). Mailer invocation of

the primitive should thus remind us of the ongoing dominant demand for an emotionally

contained and domestically bound "mature" white manhood since the primitivized

African-American man has so long been reduced to childlike qualities, qualities that

Mailer here has the privilege of choosing to adopt as he sees fit. Increasingly denied

this still-oppressed figure of the black man by the fast-growing visibility and gains of

the civil rights movements during the early 1960s, however, those inclined to look for

models for resistant white manhood in that figure had motivation to look elsewhere.

100

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. At the same time, Kesey and the incipient counterculture could no longer hope

to reconstitute a seemingly pure and whole white manhood because the historical

moment out of which the novel emerges is one wherein such notions of white manhood

have also been destabilized by the civil rights movement and various state actions

supporting the movement's claims. An initial destabilization having taken place as a

result of the 1954 Brown v. Board o f Education Supreme Court ruling and the ensuing

clashes over school integration, this destabilization was greatly intensified in the early

1960s when the lunch counter sit-ins began, when black and white college students

joined together against racial oppression in forming the instrumental Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), when the non-violent 1961 Freedom

Ride campaign attempted to force the integration of interstate bus facilities, and when,

perhaps most of all, the media gave more and more attention to these events and the

often brutal attacks against the protesters that resulted. Arguably culminating in the

Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the radical destabilization

of former notions of black and white identity—those publicly sanctioned by the state

most of all—left aftershocks that reverberated across the spectrum of American

identifications. This is why the narrator of Cuckoo's Nest can spring from neither the

black primitive nor a fully white body.10

Kesey's claim that his narrative is "the Indian's story" is apposite here. We

might even say that the force of all of McMurphy’s resistant posturing depends on the

Chiefs authentication of it. For against these newly destabilized and publicly

recognized notions of blackness and whiteness—especially the black and white

manhood that figure so centrally in the American democratic imaginary and the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. subsequent male-dominated civil rights movement—the indigenous manhood imagined

to be embodied by the American Indian emerges as a solution uniquely capable of

solving the contradictions inherent to the alternative fantasy of American manhood

Kesey seeks. After all, in the text's overarching investment in a fantasy of

countercultural identity, it must imagine itself against the dominant national imaginary

but also retain some kind of national imaginary to position itself within the culture it is

said to resist. Ultimately, then, the countercultural manhood engendered by Kesey

through the narration of Chief Bromden is precariously located between the potential

triumphs and abuses of fantasy, situated both on the margins of "proper" national

subjectivity and implicitly at the center, as "true" inheritor of the earth. Bringing these

issues full circle in Kesey's text is the vividly imagined figure of Randle P. McMurphy,

exemplar of resistant American manhood.

Meeting Man to Man, or The Fraternal Con

While my argument begins with Chief Bromden and his perceptions of the

Combine, as I have already indicated, it would be impossible to continue any

comprehensive discussion of Chief without also including a discussion of R.P.

McMurphy and the relationship that Kesey develops between the two. Directly

associated with the renegade spirit of an American cowboy from his very first

introduction, McMurphy serves as an evocative alter ego for the "deaf and dumb"

Chief: "I hear him coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks, and he

sure don't slide; he's got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes.

He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. apart, and stands there with the guys looking at him" (Kesey, Cuckoo 10). A self

described gambler, fighter, and lover of women, McMurphy often seems to have

stepped right out of a Western storyline, updating his horse with a motorcycle along the

way. After learning, for example, that Dale Harding is considered the patient in charge

of the other men, McMurphy announces, '"Then you tell Bull Goose Looney Harding

that R.P. McMurphy is waiting to see him and that this hospital ain't big enough for the

two of us. [...] Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man or he's a yaller

skunk and better be outta town by sunset" (Kesey,Cuckoo 19). In the ensuing, partly

mock exchange between Harding and McMurphy, they engage in a verbal high noon

that is settled when Harding declares, '"I take off my hat'" and then "bows his head, and

shakes hands with McMurphy" (Kesey,Cuckoo 20). As Chief concludes, "There's no

doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I'm not sure just what" (Kesey,Cuckoo

20). In the world of the mental ward that Chief describes, it is all too clear what

McMurphy has won, or more accurately, taken possession of. Chief and the other men,

believing themselves pitted against a system intent on robbing them of their manhood,

find that McMurphy promises to be the very realization of one of the white masculine

imaginary’s most mythic American forms—a form that Kesey first presents as an

alternative, even resistant possibility in the face of that imaginary’s dominant postwar

ideals.

Even before Chief can see McMurphy, overhearing him going through the

admitting process, Chief claims that he knows that McMurphy is "no ordinary

Admission" (Kesey, Cuckoo 10). Indeed, the phallic, hypermasculine manner in which

McMurphy presents himself as a rowdy Irishman does set him apart from the other

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. men, foregrounding the felt ambiguity in their relationships to whiteness and

masculinity. An ordinary Admission, according to Chief, would "slide along the wall

and stand scared till the black boys come sign for him and take him to the shower

room," where Chief claims he has seen several of the orderlies "running that

thermometer around in the grease till it's coated the size of your finger, crooning, Tha's

right, mothah, tha's right,' and then shut the door and turn all the showers up to where

you can't hear anything but the vicious hiss of water on the green tile" (Kesey,Cuckoo

10). In other words, an ordinary Admission would submit to the penetration of his body

by the "black boys," thus surrendering the authority whiteness supposedly grants him.

An ordinary Admission would likewise obey Nurse Ratched and hospital regulations,

since "Practice has steadied and strengthened her until now she wields a sure power that

extends in all directions on hairlike wires too small for anybody's eye" (Kesey,Cuckoo

26). In other words, an ordinary Admission would submit to psychological penetration

by a woman, thus surrendering the authority masculinity supposedly grants him. In

both instances, the surrendering of authority results in a subject rendered feminine by its

passivity, violation, and impotence—a subject already doubly disempowered as the

result of his failure to accede to the ideals of American manhood, ideals which

themselves no longer adequately deliver foil subjecthood him. This is the typical

patient on the mental ward as depicted by Kesey and typified in Chief.

At the other extreme is McMurphy, whom Kesey portrays as a man with no

intention of surrendering any of his authority, as a subject who appears to experience no

gap between identity and desire. Vital to this portrayal is McMurph/s presentation of

himself to the other men:

104

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. His face and neck and arms are the color of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. He's got a primer-black motorcycle cap stuck in his hair and a leather jacket over one arm, and he's got on boots gray and dusty and heavy enough to kick a man half in two. [...] One of the black boys circles him with the thermometer, but he's too quick for them [...]. "What happened, you see, was I got in a couple of hassles at the work farm, to tell the pure truth, and the court ruled that I'm a psychopath. And do you think I'm gonna argue with the court? Shoo, you can bet your bottom dollar I don't. [...] Now they tell me a psychopath’s a guy fights too much and fucks too much, but they ain't wholly right, do you think? I mean, whoever heard tell of a man gettin' too much poozle? Hello, buddy, what do they call you? My name's McMurphy and I'll bet you two dollars here and now that you can't tell me how many spots are in that pinochle hand. [...] God damn, Sam! cant you wait half a minute to prod me with that damn thermometer of yours?" (Kesey, Cuckoo 13)

Presenting himself to the men in a way that allows them to read him as embodying

white masculinity in the most unambiguous terms and reducing white masculinity to

that which can be tangibly enacted, McMurphy’s self-presentation is without a doubt

intended to coincide directly with full white male subjecthood. Dressed in biker garb,

however, McMurphy embodies social deviance as well. Like the other men in the

hospital, then, he has chosen to depart from socially prescribed conventions of postwar

American manhood. Yet, by condensing sexual difference into its most basic terms—as

McMurphy puts it, "fighting and fucking"—he retains the core features of a

(hetero)masculine imaginary bound to the corporeal and visually encoded with activity

and presence. McMurphy's "excess,” matched with the men's diminished masculinity,

makes him the perfect incarnation of an alternative fantasy of American manhood.

That this alternative is still marked by race, by whiteness, is apparent as well.

Added to the juxtaposition of the menacing black orderlies and McMurphy and his

refusal of their authority, the freedom that McMurphy enjoys in expressing his

masculinity is alone evidence that there is a distinctlywhite masculinity at work here. If

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. it need be said, African-American men during this era were not likely to be found

roaming the country on motorcycles and inviting confrontations with the law. The

cowboy-cum-biker fantasy is a white male one in the early 1960s.11 At the same time,

as the controlling perspective within the novel, Chief plays a vital role in validating

McMurphy's whiteness as well as his masculinity. Here, for example, is Chiefs

evocative description of the hand McMurphy extends in greeting when they first meet:

[B]ig as a dinner plate [ ...,] there was carbon under the fingernails where he'd worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; there was a dirty Band-Aid on the middle knuckle, peeling up at the edge. All the rest of the knuckles were covered with scars and cuts, old and new. [...] The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was worked in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West. That palm made a scuffing sound against my hand. I remember the fingers were thick and strong closing over mine, and my hand commenced to feel peculiar and went to swelling up out there on my stick of an arm, like he was transmitting his own blood into it. It rang with blood and power. (Kesey, Cuckoo 23-24)

In this description, McMurphy's hand becomes the physical, tangible marker of activity

and strength, even power, which Chief locates in the otherwise contingent entity of the

body for McMurphy. But this description is also loaded with the markers of

Native/white relations and mixed-blood identity. As a result, because Chief is someone

of Native lineage who has been discursively authorized with primitive intuition, he

sanctions McMurphy's whiteness and masculinity when he transposes them into "blood

and power" in a way that a white narrator could not.

McMurphy also validates the sensibility that whiteness and masculinity are

under siege in society at large as well as in the hospital, which later conflicts between

McMurphy and the hospital staff will show. As McMurphy explains, he is "a dedicated

man" who after wandering, logging, and a stint in the Army discovered that "his natural

bent was [...] to play poker. Since then he's settled down and devoted himself to 106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. gambling on all levels. Just play poker and stay single and live where and how he

wants to, if people would let him, he says, 'but you know how society persecutes a

dedicated man'" (Kesey, Cuckoo 20). Perhaps best displaying the men's feelings of

persecution and investments in an alternative fantasy of American manhood, though, is

the scene that occurs in the aftermath of McMurphy's inaugural Group Meeting with the

rest of the men.

Led by Nurse Ratched, all Group Meetings convene with the objective of

interrogating a predetermined patient's behavior, thoughts, and personal history. In the

Group Meeting first witnessed by McMurphy, Nurse Ratched's introduction of Harding

marks masculinity as a major site of anxiety and conflict from the start:

"Now. At the close of Friday’s meeting. . . we were discussing Mr. Harding's problem. . . concerning his young wife. He had stated that his wife was extremely well endowed in the bosom and that this made him uneasy because she drew stares from men in the street." [...] He has been heard to say, *My dear sweet but illiterate wife thinks any word or gesture that does not smack of brickyard brawn and brutality is a word or gesture of weak dandyism.' [...] "He has also stated that his wife's ample bosom at times gives him a feeling of inferiority. So. Does anyone care to touch upon this subject further?" (Kesey, Cuckoo 40-41)

By the end of the meeting and its inquisition, Harding has "got his thin shoulders folded

nearly together around himself, like green wings, and he's sitting very straight near the

edge of this chair, with his hands trapped between his knees. He's staring straight

ahead, humming to himself, trying to look calm" (Kesey, Cuckoo 54). Meanwhile, the

men who have participated avoid Harding, according to Chief, knowing "They’ve been

maneuvered again into grilling one of their friends like he was a criminal and [...]

chopping a man to pieces, almost as if they enjoyed it" (Kesey,Cuckoo 54). This scene,

of course, would confirm Foucault's worst fears regarding psychotherapy—the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. extraction of discourse from subjects regarding their desires, behaviors, and the like for

the purpose of disciplining them and producing conformity. It is worth insisting, then,

that this is Freud's and Lacan's worst fear too. After all, as a mode of political

intervention, psychoanalysis takes as one of its goals to undo that psychic component of

(self) subjection that "purely" epistemic critiques of power cannot undo alone,

represented in this scene by the enjoyment Chief perceives in the men as they

participate in the disciplining of Harding. These intersections of power, subjection, and

the psyche are exactly what get played out in the dynamics between McMurphy and the

men as McMurphy, having observed Harding's interrogation in watchful silence, tries to

articulate his discomfort with the meeting.

McMurphy begins by comparing the attack made on Harding with "a pecking

party," which he describes as occurring when a flock of chickens notice a speck of

blood on another chicken and peck it to death, then peck at one another until the whole

flock destroys itself. Although the analogy suggests that all of the participants in such

an attack are equally culpable, the men soon turn responsibility away from themselves

and instead come to let it rest on the hospital staff, namely Nurse Ratched as the one

"'who pecks that first peck"' (Kesey,Cuckoo 56). First resisting this critique of the

Group Meeting, Harding insists that it is all for his own good and that the Nurse has his

best interests in mind: '"What other reason would we have for submitting ourselves to it,

my friend? The staff desires our cure as much as we do. They aren't monsters. Miss

Ratched may be a strict middle-aged lady, but she's not some kind of monster of the

poultry clan, bent on sadistically pecking out our eyes" (Kesey,Cuckoo 57). Harding is

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. finally swayed, however, when McMurphy clarifies that he doesn't really mean that the

nurse is pecking at the men's eyes:

"At your balls, buddy, at your everlovin'balls. [...] No, that nurse ain't some kinda monster chicken, buddy, what she is a ball-cutter. I've seen a thousand of 'em, old and young, men and women. Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes—people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow the rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin' you where it hurts the worst. [...] It makes you sick, it saps every bit of strength you got. If you're up against a guy who wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger, then watch for his knee, he's gonna go for your vitals. And that's what that old buzzard is doing, going for your vitals.” (Kesey,Cuckoo 57- 58)

In response, Harding eventually "looks around, sees everybody's watching him, and he

does his best to laugh. [...] It gets higher and higher until finally, with a suck of

breath, he lets his face fall into his waiting hands. 'Oh, the bitch, the bitch the bitch,' he

whispers through his teeth” (Kesey, Cuckoo 60). And although McMurphy clearly

states that one need not be a woman to be a "ball-cutter"—indeed, one has to allow that

the social contract itself depends upon symbolic castration—the men on the ward

become enlivened to the possibility of resistance only when the struggle for power is

articulated in terms of gender.

While it is McMurphy who gets the men to admit their feelings of oppression, it

is Harding who further articulates the terms of that oppression. With his composure

now regained, Harding declares quite plainly to McMurphy that '"We are victims of a

matriarchy here, my friend, and the doctor is just as helpless against it as we are'"

(Kesey, Cuckoo 61). In Harding's further estimation, Nurse Ratched's power largely

derives from her ability to insinuate rather than accuse:

"Did you ever hear her, in the course of our discussion today, everonce accuse me of anything? Yet it seems I have been accused of a multitude of things, of 109

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. jealousy and paranoia, of not being man enough to satisfy my wife, of having relations with male friends of mine, of holding my cigarette in an affected manner, even—it seems to me—accused of having nothing between my legs but a patch of hair—and soft and downy and blond hair at that! Ball-cutter? Oh, youunderestimate her!" (Kesey, Cuckoo 61-62)

Yet what begins to be apparent is that what Harding describes as Nurse Ratched's

insinuation is, in fact, Harding's own projected self-accusation. As such, whether Nurse

Ratched believes that Harding is not man enough fails to be consequential in the last

instance when the men's own investments in a fantasy of white masculinity prevents

them from more broadly interpreting the nurse's mistreatment of them. For the purposes

of my argument, the consequential aspect of this passage is the revelation that Harding

does not believehim self to be "man enough." This belief and its implications become

even more evident when the conversation then turns to Harding's Darwinian-inspired

theory of the strong and the weak, the wolves and the rabbits in his analogy. According

to Harding, it is not because the men are "rabbits" that they have been hospitalized, but

because "'we can'tadjust to our rabbithood. We need a good strong wolf like the nurse

to teach us our place'" (Kesey,Cuckoo 62). Harding's error, of course, is in believing

that there are subjects who really do perfectly align with their subjecthood. Harding

thus would be more accurate in saying that he and the men can't adjust to, or accept, the

passivity, submission, and vulnerability—the lack—that are core features of

subjectivity, male or female.

This refusal leaves at least two alternatives: either overidentify with one's

subjection, as the men to this point have; or transfer one's experience of subjection

altogether, as the men are attempting to do by playing out the contingencies of power as

essentially gendered and racialized. Killing oneself is, of course, the most extreme form

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of this refusal, an option dramatically played out later in the novel. It becomes evident,

then, that Harding and the other men can be said to derive a certain amount of

satisfaction from their inability to be "man enough.” That is, remaining in an inverse

relationship to identity is better than not having any identity at all, at least to the

melancholic subject who cannot finally let go of the lost object he imagines his identity

to have been emptied of—here, white masculinity. In this way, Harding suggests an

answer to his own earlier question: '"What reason would we have for submitting

ourselves to [the Group Meeting], my friend?'" The answer is that the men enjoy the

meetings. That is, abasement and humiliation are forms of enjoyment when one derives

satisfaction from the maintenance of one's (self) subjection.

McMurphy, on the other hand, appears to derive great satisfaction from the

appearance that he is "man enough.” Thus when Harding suggests that underneath

McMurphy’s "cowboy bluster" perhaps he is a "rabbit" too, the discussion quickly

reveals how the refusal of dissatisfaction and loss become cloaked in gender: '"Yeah,

you bet. I'm a little cottontail. Just what is it makes me a rabbit, Harding? My

psychopathic tendencies? Is it my fightin' tendencies, or my fuckin' tendencies? Must

be the fuckin', mustn't it? All that whambam-thank-you-ma'am"' (Kesey,Cuckoo 64).

This passage betrays not only the desire to have that existential vulnerability embodied

so as to manifest it, confront it, and defy it, but it also shows how that very desire for

embodiment is read onto specific bodies. Replying to McMurphy, Harding appears to

summarize the sentiments o f the other men when he pronounces, without objection, that

'"There's not a man here that isn't afraid he is losing or has already lost his whambam.

We comical little creatures can't even achieve masculinity in the rabbit world, that's

111

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. how weak and inadequate we are. Hee. We are—therabbits, one might say, of the

rabbit world! [...] Friend. . . y o u. . . may be a wolf" (Kesey,Cuckoo 65). What

Harding recognizes in McMurphy is his potential to embody the white masculine

imaginary. If Nurse Ratched is understood to be in a position to teach the men about

their lack, then McMurphy offers the hope of a position that will redeliver satisfaction

and wholeness. As Harding has said, "We need a good strong wolf like the nurse to

teach us our place.'" In having overidentified with their subjection, Chief and the other

men needed, even wanted, an authority like Nurse Ratched who would reiterate their

lack for them.12 Conversely, any attempt by the men now to rid themselves of

subjection altogether will depend upon a subject who can reiterate complete identity for

them. Chief and the men want McMurphy to be a "wolf," and they want him to be a

decidedly white male one—a role McMurphy appears willing and ready to play.

Among the striking aspects of the preceding exchange between McMurphy and

Harding is its invocation of the original terms with which McMurphy presents himself

as a male subject to the men on the ward. Within that framework, masculinity is

something that can be actually accumulated, whether through certain mobilizations of

the male body (the literal performance of "fighting and fucking") or through certain

mobilizations of the male psyche (the rhetorical performance of those acts). That is,

there is the literal realization of "fighting" in bodily combat, and there is also its

rhetorical performance in psychic "combat," e.g., displaying wit, wielding insinuation

and demeaning language, and executing con games—all with the purpose of exercising

power over the other. Likewise, there is the literal realization of "fucking" in bodily

penetration, and there is also its rhetorical performance of in psychic "penetration," e.g.,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. displaying wit, wielding insinuation and demeaning language, and executing con

games—again, all with the purpose of exercising power over the other.13

The subsequent direction of the conversation between McMurphy and Harding

depends directly upon these multiple and intersecting modes for enacting masculinity as

they consider how to win the struggle for power in the hospital. Still protesting the

comparison of the men with rabbits, McMurphy tries to encourage the men, but Harding

interrupts, reducing the struggle for power to a most revealing degree:

"A man go around lettin' a woman whup him down till he can't laugh any more, and he loses one of the biggest edges he's got on his side. First thing you know he'll begin to think she’s tougher than he is and—" "Ah. I believe my friend is catching on, fellow rabbits. Tell me, Mr. McMurphy, how does one go about showing a woman who's boss, I mean other than laughing at her? How does he show her who's king of the mountain? [...] you see, my friend, it is somewhat as you stated: man has butone truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modem matriarchy, but it certainly is not laughter. One weapon, and with every passing year in the hip, motivationally researched society, more and more people are discovering how to render that weapon useless and conquer those who have hitherto been the conquerers—" "Lord, Harding, but you do come on," McMurphy says. "—and do you think, for all your acclaimed psychopathic powers, that you could effectively use your weapon against our champion?" (Kesey,Cuckoo 68)

When McMurphy admits that no, he "'couldn't get it up over'" Nurse Ratched, Harding

proclaims, '"There you are. She's won’" (Kesey,Cuckoo 69). As Chief morosely states,

"Harding’s won the argument, but nobody looks too happy" (Kesey,Cuckoo 69). This

includes McMurphy, who soon reconfigures the terms of the power struggle by

substituting the rhetorical versions of "fighting and fucking” for the literal suggested by

Harding. In fact, his interest in participating in the power struggle is itself presented as

a "con":

"Here's what I'm thinkin'. You birds seem to think you got quite the champ in there, don't you? Quite the—what did you call her?—sure, impregnable woman. 113

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. What I want to know is how many of you are deadsure enough to put a little money on her? [...] willing to take my five bucks that says that I can get the best of that woman—before the week's up—without her getting the best of me?" (Kesey, Cuckoo 71)

Yet, by now, it should be evident that what might appear to be a con, even a merely

capricious one, of the men by McMurphy is not so simple. While McMurphy thinks he

will engage in an amicable con of the men, not only are the men also conning

McMurphy, but everyone of them is, in essence, conning himself.14 As McMurphy

later explains to the men about being a gambler, "The secret to being a top-notch con

man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting

it. [...] So the both of you are getting what you want’" (Kesey,Cuckoo 78). They have

united themselves behind a screen of phallic potency, a fact that gets lost in criticism

that too completely identifies with McMurphy as champion of individualism and

emancipation.15

"'Who wawz that'er masked man?'": Pursuing the Big White Male

We have seen from the beginning of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, then,

that the Chiefs recounting of McMurphy's exploits in and out of the hospital is much

more than a simple account of McMurphy's actions. The narration is a chronicle of the

desires of Chief, McMurphy, and the other men on the ward—the desire of Chief and

the men to concretize an alternative fantasy of American manhood and so resist society

and their own constitutive lack and the desire of McMurphy to embody that fantasy.16

As such, what might otherwise appear to be only a humorous, offhanded moment

observed by Chief at the close of McMurphy's first day in the hospital assumes a deeper

resonance: 114

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. He goes to getting ready for bed, pulling off his clothes. The shorts under his work pants are coal black satin covered with big white whales with red eyes. He grins when he sees I'm looking at the shorts. "From a co-ed at Oregon State, Chief, a Literary major." He snaps the elastic with his thumb. "She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol." (Kesey,Cuckoo 81)

To be a symbol, of course, means to stand in for something that is absent; in fact, a

symbol is necessary only insofar as what it represents remains unrealizable, is always

already lost. But like Captain Ahab before them, the men on the ward continue to drive

themselves mad in the pursuit of that which cannot be fixed or wholly recovered—in

this case, white masculinity.17 As the details of Kesey1 s story reveal, Chief and the

other men are still invested in the idea that white male subjecthood is something that

can be tangibly realized, something that is more than the ridiculous performance of it,

and it is the arrival of McMurphy that revives the chase. McMurphy becomes the sign

made to bear the "meaning" of an alternative American manhood as he is encouraged by

those on the ward to play the role of rebellious newcomer and challenge the authority of

Nurse Ratched, her orderlies, and society at large. And McMurphy himself seems to

take the role seriously. As "symbol," however, McMurphy cannot escape the fate of all

symbols: to suffer the (structural) inability to coincide completely with the things the

symbol is said or believed to represent.

The desire of the men to see resistant white masculinity tangibly realized is

perhaps most evident in their longing to witness a power struggle pitting McMurphy

against Nurse Ratched and her orderlies. These moments perfectly dramatize white

masculinity according to the rubric within which Kesey initially frames McMurphy’s

white male identifications. Warned against the repercussions of bodily confrontations

and having eliminated bodily penetration as a possibility, McMurphy first engages in a

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. campaign of rhetorically performed white masculinity by making jokes that assert

sexual difference and his primacy within that difference, by using language that asserts

racial difference and his primacy within that difference, and by generally, as McMurphy

bet the men he would, getting "the goat" of those in authority at the hospital, especially

Nurse Ratched.

A temporary, but significant, respite in this struggle occurs when McMurphy

discovers that his release from the mental hospital, unlike the prison time with which he

is familiar, depends upon Nurse Ratched's approval. Challenging Harding and the other

men about why they withheld this information from him, McMurphy offers his own

analysis:

"I couldn't figure it out at first, why you guys were coming to me like I was some kind of savior. Then I just happened to find out about the way the nurses have the big say [...]. And I got wise awful damn fast. I said, 'Why those slippery bastards haveconned me, snowed me into holding their bag. If that don't beat all, conned ol’ R.P. McMurphy.'" (Kesey,Cuckoo 182-83)

Most importantly, when the men's behavior is interpreted in this manner, purely as a

con, as fleeting performance, McMurphy easily separates himself from the situation and

his role as fantastical icon. What appears to derail McMurphy’s resolve is Harding's

revelation that other than McMurphy, most of the men are not committed; rather, they

are voluntary admits. Deeply troubled by this knowledge, McMurphy explodes into

anger, interrogates the men about why they won't leave, and then, not receiving a

sufficient answer, finally utters, "I don't seem able to get it straight in my mind” (Kesey,

Cuckoo 185).

Yet, in the very next scene, during a Group Meeting, McMurphy aggressively

reinserts himself into the power struggle with Nurse Ratched when she proposes taking

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. away the privilege of the tub room in which the men play cards. According to Chief,

McMurphy quietly stands up, walks over to the Nurse's Station, and stating that "he

could use one of the smokes he bought this momin'," runs his hand through the glass,

then claiming it was so clean he forgot it was there (Kesey, Cuckoo 190). As this scene

illustrates, while McMurphy's struggle involves the attempt to contest the external

power exercised through the demands of normativity—here represented by Nurse

Ratched's efforts to discipline the men—he fails to see the extent to which he and the

other men have incorporated the fundamental premise on which those demands depend

by disavowing the performativity of all masculinities. That is to say, this scene forces

us to ask forwhom McMurphy is acting. The reply is captured in the moment before

McMurphy decides to approach the Nurse's Station, when he is hailed by the men:

"[OJne by one everybody else looked at him sitting there in his comer. Even the old

Chronics, wondering why everybody had turned to look in one direction, stretched out

their scrawny necks like birds and turned to look at McMurphy—faces turned to him,

full of a naked, scared hope" (Kesey,Cuckoo 189). This moment is decisive because it

presents McMurphy with the chance to relinquish the role in which the men have cast

him. More to the point, were McMurphy going to succeed in freeing these men, in

helping them to restructure their relationship to white masculinity, he would need to

refuse to occupy the position that guarantees their fantasy. By returning the gaze, and

acting for it, McMurphy validates the desire motivating the gaze. McMurphy likewise

betrays his own investment in the desire to reconcretize white masculinity, now shifting

his opposition into the realm of the material as he drives his fist through the glass at the

Nurse's Station. Appropriately, then, the remainder of Kesey1 s novel is an escalation of

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the men's confrontation of authority not in its rhetorical expression, at the level of

speech and discourse, but at the other site Western culture has historically located it—

the body.

Not that there is a sudden shift to the body in these last few sections of One

Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Chief has been busy reading the bodies of those around

him all along, McMurphy's most especially. And, in Chiefs initial alignment of Nurse

Ratched and her orderlies with the oppressive Combine, bodies figure centrally as well.

The following is a representative description of the "black boys":

All three wear starched snow-white pants and white shirts with metal snaps down one side and white shoes polished like ice, and the shoes have red rubber soles silent as mice up and down the hall. They never make any noise when they move. They materialize in different parts of the ward every time a patient figures to check himself in private or whisper some secret about another guy [.. .] when all of a sudden there's a squeek and frost forms along his cheek, and he turn in that direction and there's a cold stone mask floating above him against the wall. He just sees the black face. Nobody. The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and the black face and hands seem to float against it like a ghost. (Kesey, Cuckoo 29)

The orderlies, dressed in white, can be said to incarnate in their face and hands the

particularity that whiteness is at the same time that they invoke the fundamental void,

the hollow core, upon which all identity is grounded but that whiteness attempts to veil

by displacing its own particularity onto the racial other. As suggested earlier, one of the

contested terrains in Keseys novel is the falsely universalized and veiled white

masculine subject that grounds democratic citizenship; this move depends upon the

particularization of certain subjects so as to guarantee the dual privilege of denying

subjectivity’s empty center while achieving universal signification. Appropriately, then,

at their most menacing, the orderlies themselves appear as corporeal abstractions. It is

in this way, through the menacing representation of disembodied blackness, that Kesey 118

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. symbolically registers the threat posed by black appropriation of the corporeal

abstraction upon which the cultural privileges and civic entitlements of white

masculinity rest. That is to say, through the conflicts between the African-American

orderlies and the white patients, Kesey stages the struggle for the right to occupy the

masculine imaginary, a right denied African men upon their inception as American

subjects and reduction to property—often by the equation of blackness with the

primitive.18 The historic moment in which Kesey writes thus returns with force when

one recognizes that the civil rights movement itself might be described in this manner—

as the fight by and between men to redefine the masculine imaginary upon which

political and cultural enfranchisement in the United States has been traditionally

based.19 Recalling the usage of the slogan "I am a Man" by the civil rights movement,

we see how this slogan vividly displays the infrastructure of the system to which

African Americans hoped to gain access and within which their very subjectivities were

bound.20 That Cuckoo's Nest ultimately backs off from the idea that the orderlies are

responsible for the state of the men is thus hardly an absolution when Chief remains as a

rearticulation of the primitive.

Given that the crux of the struggle for power between the characters appears to

be about gendered significations, it should perhaps be no surprise that Nurse Ratched

becomes the primary object upon which the men's anxieties are played out. Here again,

the historic moment in which Kesey writes returns with force when one considers the

trenchant, and of course contradictory, accusations railed against dangerous female

influences in post-WWII American society by men's magazines likeEsquire and

Playboy, which routinely decried the modem American woman as a domesticating

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. menace, and women's magazines like Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping,

which routinely decried that same woman's failure to be domestic enough.21 As is also

the case with the orderlies, the Nurse's body seems to be of special interest to the men

from the beginning, her skin and breasts most especially:

Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils—everything worked together except the color on her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom. A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it. (Kesey, Cuckoo 6)

This initial reading of the Nurse's body almost perfectly captures the spectrum of

imposed meanings and played out anxieties with which the men color Nurse Ratched.

Chief "colors" Nurse Ratched in the most literal sense by emphasizing her whiteness, an

overdetermination repeated throughout the novel and that serves to displace the men's

own whiteness further.22 Similarly, in a displacement of the masculine imaginary to

which the men aspire, they perceive the Nurse's breasts within a phallic economy. As

someone with power over the men, the Nurse—though bearing the corporeal markers of

sexual difference—must paradoxically occupy a place within the phallic economy (lest

the phallic economy be utterly disrupted) at the same time that the Nurse's sexual

difference must be reiterated. Thus the very breasts that are "womanly" are the same

breasts that identify the Nurse as an "imperfect" woman, i.e., masculine. This

intersection of the feminine and the masculine exhibits how the phallic depends not

upon display but upon concealment. In this way we are reminded that what is at stake

in the struggle to repossess the white masculine imaginary is not "merely" the social,

political, and material but the psychic as well. Her (veiled) breasts represent the threat

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of co-opted phallic signification. Indeed, it appears to be precisely the fact that the

breasts are veiled that the men find so troubling in their incessant discussion of just

what exactly resides behind the bodice of her uniform. Displacing their own fears about

a masculine imaginary that they seem never able to possess, that they don't want to

admit does not exist (indeed, objects in the imaginary only have the allure that they do

when they are veiled, when they elude our possession), the men cling to the paranoid

notion that certain women have robbed them of their masculinity. Nowhere is this

internally conflicted feminine threat more starkly, or violently, evinced Onein Flew

Over the Cuckoo's Nest than in the climactic confrontation between McMurphy and

Nurse Ratched.

As stated earlier, McMurphy's re-entry into the struggle for power at the hospital

particularly serves to escalate confrontations with the body as site of meaning. It is

after McMurphy's "heroic" return, for example, that we witness Chief contemplating the

urge to touch McMurphy, not simply because "he's a man" but "because he's who he is"

(Kesey,Cuckoo 210). We also first witness actual physical encounters between

McMurphy and the orderlies, one of which is a brawl that Chief joins, resulting in

McMurphy and Chief being sent to the Disturbed Ward. The body as site of meaning is

there brought full circle when McMurphy and Chief are administered electroshock

therapy in a brutal attempt to discipline the body, to render it docile and therefore

incapable of posing problems to authority. As the narrative moves into its final scene,

then, Kesey has established an almost perfect balance between that power externally

subjecting the men and that power internally subjecting them. We easily perceive the

all-too-familiar outward loci of power Kesey depicts in the form of authority,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. therapeutic discourse, the institution, the law, the state.23 However, what makes Kese/s

novel so compelling and "controversial," I believe, is its depiction of that inward locus

of power, consciousness, and the psyche's dependence upon external power in its own

formation. Thus, even as McMurphy shares his doubts with the men that Nurse

Ratched is the immediate cause of their suffering, even as he leams that the men are

voluntary admits, even as Chief describes a McMurphy who paints and writes beautiful

letters, even as we are shown an increasingly exhausted, mechanical McMurphy with

the progression of the narrative—even in the face of all this, McMurphy accepts his role

as bearer of the white masculine imaginary. Surely, Harding thus implies more than he

intends when, in imagining McMurphy's escape from the hospital, he claims he will

"stand there at the window with a silver bullet in my hand and ask 'Who wawz that'er

masked man?"' (Kesey,Cuckoo 295). Harding's line here captures beautifully

McMurphy’s credentials as a figure around which to organize a fantasy of manhood:

like the Lone Ranger, McMurphy is positioned as one who is outside or above the Law

and thus is believed to be in full possession of a manhood that mere ordinary men

within the Law are without; likewise, he wears a mask that shrouds him in mystery and

thus keeps alive the allure of what is concealed beneath the mask.

As the final scene begins, the men are awaking from a raucous night of defiant

revelry. The major motivation for throwing their illicit party is the clandestine arrival

of several of McMurphy's "whore" women friends, one of whom has promised to aid

the stuttering, underconfident, and virginal Billy Bibbit by having intercourse with him.

Throughout the novel, McMurphy has joked with Billy about his supposed sexual

prowess: '"Billy 'Club' Bibbit, he was known as in them days. Those girls were about to

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. take off when one looked at him and says 'Are youthe renowned Billy Club Bibbit? Of

the famous fourteen inches?"' (Kesey, Cuckoo 98-99). As deliverer of (white

heterosexual) masculinity, McMurphy thus appears to fulfill his end of the deal when he

ultimately provides a woman with whom Billy can consummate his American

manhood. Harding affirms this sense that McMurphy has delivered the men into their

rightful masculinity when he asserts of the other men that "They're still sick men in lots

of ways. But at least there's that: they are sickmen now'" (Kesey, Cuckoo 294). Yet,

granted the illusion of masculinity, an imaginary in which to insert themselves, the men

fail to see how their sickness is implicated in the very manhood to which they lay claim.

Billy Bibbit most graphically displays this when, after Nurse Ratched discovers a newly

emboldened Billy savoring the aftermath of his sexual encounter and threatens to tell

his mother, he slits his own throat.

At first glance, it may be tempting to read this suicide as just one more sign of

the extent to which Nurse Ratched (and the oppressive societal mechanisms she

represents) interferes with the capacity o f men to enjoy masculinity-affirming

experiences. But why exactlydoes Billy kill himself? Why is the notion that his

mother will learn of his sexual performance so threatening? Although this question

takes us into the vast mythology surrounding the heteromasculine loss of virginity, it is

worth pointing out that in Billy's case, it appears that his sexual encounter signifies for

him a world in which his desires and his mother’s desires are not the same. As I have

been suggesting, this world is one in which white men face the impossible burdens of

manhood itself—a realization so traumatic for Billy that he takes his own life. This,

alas, is not the view taken up by the men on the ward. Regarding Billy as tragic victim,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. theirs is a view that locates the cause of their predicament squarely in the phallic power

that has been denied them, the phallic power co-opted by Nurse Ratched. Rather than

motivating any self-examination, Billy's suicide instead appears to demand a violent

attempt to take back power. How else to explain McMurphy's decisive response to

Billy's death—his dramatic physical attack of Nurse Ratched:

[H]e'd smashed through that glass door, her face swinging around, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had ever even imagined, warm and pink in the light. (Kesey, Cuckoo 305)

In his depiction of McMurphy ripping open the Nurse's uniform to expose her breasts

and trying to strangling her, Kesey takes the attempt to embody white masculinity to its

logical conclusion.

For, as we have seen, the attempt to embody the white masculine imaginary

necessarily returns to the body. Having situated the Nurse within a phallic economy, as

an extension of their own investment in the white masculine imaginary, this final

encounter with the Nurse's actual body contains the potential to undo the men's

investment in the imaginary, to insist that phallic authority depends upon the illusory

attribution of power. Yet, by clinging to the notion that the Nurse's breasts give proof to

some real sexual difference and potency, the men retain the phallic economy to which

they aspire. As Chief declares upon Nurse Ratched's return to the ward in a new

uniform:

Some of the guys grinned at the front of it; in spite of its being smaller and tighter and more starched than her old uniforms, it could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman. [...] She tried to get her ward back into shape, but it was difficult with McMurphy's presence still tramping up and down the halls

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and laughing out loud in the meetings and singing in the latrines. She couldn't rule with her old power any more. (Kesey,Cuckoo 306-7)

Rather than face the traumatic recognition that Billy's suicidal act and self-mutilated,

lifeless body demands—that bodily performances can produce an anxious manhood for

which there is no redress, that no body can incarnate a white masculinity that always

already exists only in the realm of the imaginary—the men insist on the "truth" of Nurse

Ratched's body.24

So great, in fact, is the desire of the men to deflect this traumatic recognition

that when it repeats itself in the form of McMurphy's lobotomized and inert body, they

refuse to believe that it really is McMurphy. While the clear suggestion of the narrative

is that McMurphy has been administered a lobotomy as a result of his attack on the

Nurse, Chief and the other men who inspect the gumey posting a chart that reads "MC

m u r p h y , r a n d l e P. po st -o pe r a t iv e [...] l o b o t o m y " hypothesize otherwise:

[RJeading the chart, [we] then looked up to the other end at the head dented into the pillow, a swirl of red hair over a face milk-white except for the heavy purple bruises around the eyes. After a minute of silence Scanlon turned and spat on the floor. " Aaah, what's the old bitch tryin' to put over on us anyhow, for crap sakes. That ain't him." (Kesey, Cuckoo 307)

From there the men proceed to examine the body in detail, scrutinizing its nose, scars,

tattoos, sideburns, arms, size, shape, and expression. The unanimous agreement is that

the body amounts to a "crummy sideshow fake" (Kesey,Cuckoo 308). Never referring

to the man on the gumey as McMurphy but only as "the body," Chief then contemplates

what McMurphy would have done. Concluding that McMurphy would not have left

"something like that" around for the Nurse to use as "an example," Chief resolves that

he must eliminate the problem:

125

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I sat up in bed, and my shadow fell across the body, seeming to cleave it in half between the hips and the shoulders, leaving only a black space. [...] The big, hard body had a tough grip on life. It fought a long time against having it taken away, flailing and thrashing around so much I finally had to lie full length on top of it [...]. I lay there on top of the body for what seemed days. Until the thrashing stopped. (Kesey, Cuckoo 309)

This last major act by Chief, before he throws the control panel through a window and

runs away from the hospital, is decidedly an act motivated by disavowal.25 As such,

readers miss a crucial dimension of the text here when they interpret Chiefs deed as a

purely compassionate "mercy" killing intended to put McMurphy out of his misery or

some unambiguous gesture of opposition against Nurse Ratched, the Combine, and its

"adjustment" aims. While these motivations may inform Chiefs act to a degree, they

are compromised by the fundamental disavowal at work. Unable to reconcile the white

masculine imaginary seemingly actualized by McMurphy before the attack with the

vacant, unmasked face and body before him, Chief must destroy McMurphy's body in

order to keep it alive at the level of fantasy—which is, after all, where the imaginary

always and only resides anyway.26 Indeed, as the men so graphically illustrate, what

McMurphy's body presents them with is thefactum brutum of white masculinity, of

corporeal existence, itself—the body as bearer of difference prior to its inscription into

the domain of meaning, power, politics.27

Chiefs murder of McMurphy is thus linked implicitly to Keseys choice to tell

his novel from the perspective of a man whose name announces indigenous patriarchal

power. Both this climactic act and the very form of the novel suggest that it is the

figure of the Indian (or Indianness) who will "save" white manhood. It is Chief, who to

the very end, clings most tenaciously to coping mechanisms that cover over

McMurphy's total diminishment.28 And it is Chief who has been intent all along to 126

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. preserve the higher truth of McMurphy's story—a truth that eclipses questions of factual

accuracy. Chief himself almost admits to as much when, at the very beginning of the

novel, he insists that his story is "the truth, even if it didn't happen" (Kesey,Cuckoo 8).

In Chiefs climactic act, Kesey*s novel substitutes the Indian for the resistant white

American man, a substitution that is built throughout the narration in the insistence that

Chiefs subjectivity is itself dependent upon an alternative fantasy of American

manhood that is white. Ultimately, a similar dynamic is replicated in the

counterculture's strategic appropriation of primitive manhood in the effort to find an

idealized manhood that both retains an affiliation with the United States and rejects its

dominant norms. We might recall here Keith Lampe's claim that the counterculture's

resistant white men are "the true primitives"—for Kesey and the counterculture, the

problems of white American manhood thus find their solution in the alternative fantasy

of American manhood modeled by an indigenous masculinity to which white men

themselves may lay claim.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Notes

1 Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test 29. 2 Of course "the counterculture," appropriately I think, confounds easy definition or quantification. I mean to suggest the broadest, most inclusive understanding of the term—from its most entrenched and earnest representatives to its most popularized and commodified regurgitations—since the 1960s youth rebellion seems still to resonate across the political, cultural, and moral spectrum. 3 While there is a small but significant body of criticism that challenges this view, finding the men ultimately to be less admirable than they might appear on the narrative's surface, this work too springs from an essentially universalized perspective. For criticism that generally challenges the notion that Cuckoo’s Nest represents the triumph of individualism and self-reliance, see Knapp, "Tangled in the Language of the Past: Ken Kesey and Cultural Revolution" (1978); Adams, "Sex as Metaphor, Fantasy as Reality: An Imaginal Re-encounter with Ken Kesey and the Counter-Culture" (1985); and Madden, "Sanity and Responsibility: Big Chief as Narrator and Executioner" (1986). 4 For work addressing gender and/or sexuality, see Boyers, "Attitudes Toward Sex in American High Culture'" (1968); Forrey, ''Ken Kese/s Psychopathic Savior: A Rejoinder" (1975); Allen, "Women o f the Fabulators: Barth, Pynchon, Purdy, Kesey" (1976); Horst, "Bitches, Twitches, and Eunuchs: Sex-Role Failure and Caricature” (1977); Heatherington, "Romance Without Women: The Sterile Fiction of the American West" (1979); and Vitkus, "Madness and Misogyny in Ken K ese/sOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1994). For work addressing race, see Beidler, "Ken Kesey's Indian Narrator: A Sweeping Stereotype?” (1977). Addressing gender and race, and ultimately sexuality, are Fiedler,The Return o f the Vanishing American (1968), and Waxier, "The Mixed Heritage of the Chief: Revisiting the Problem of Manhood in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1995). 5 Waxier, cited in the preceding note, come closest to giving due attention to the intersections of masculinity and whiteness except that he only discusses Chief within this framework, motivated by Chiefs "mixed blood" heritage. Unfortunately, the effect of this move is to pathologize what he describes as the "complex" effects of mixed blood identification and to suggest there is nothing complex or pathological about white identification (e.g., McMurphy). 6 See, for example, Warren Hinckle's 1967 expose "A Social History of the Hippies,” which was published in March of that year forRamparts magazine, a radical muckraking publication popular with the counterculture, and places Leary and Kesey at the heart of that movement. 7 The other two characters are Sefelt and Fredrickson, who according to Chief, "[sign] out together Against Medical Advice" (Kesey, Cuckoo's Nest 305). 8 This connection does not intend to elide the profoundly heterosexist nature of much of the counterculture and its discourse but rather to suggest the space in part made for gay liberation by the counterculture and other liberationist movements who challenged society's personal and political norms.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9 For more on Leary and the Be-Ins, see Hinckle or Gitlin,The Sixties (1993). For an incisive critical examination of the Native American vis-a-vis the counterculture, see Deloria, Playing Indian (1998), 154-191. 10 And, at the risk of stating the obvious, a narrator who wholly embodies racial otherness of any kind is of course undesirable in that such a turn would do away with whiteness altogether. 11 The delinquent rebel biker image of the 1950s and the rise of the notorious Hell's Angels throughout the 1960s also speak to this point, as does Melvin Van Peebles' counter-fantastical filmic encounter between this latter group and Sweet Sweetback in Sweet Sweetback's BadddAsssss Song (1972). 12 Here we are presented with the paradox that pertains to marginalized groups and the extent to which recognition by the State, etc. interferes with their capacity to disrupt altogether the terms of their subjection. Apropos Kesey, if the men on the ward are at all to have the chance to constitute a masculinity liberated from its normative imaginary, the last thing they need at this point is Nurse Ratched's recognition—a recognition that only reifies or supplements the hegemonic white masculine imaginary in which they cannot see their own reflection. 131 hardly mean to suggest here that "fighting and fucking" are somehow essentially male behaviors. Rather, I am pointing out what two meaningless physical attributes of the male body—strength and anatomy—have come to signify and how these significations are performed within the novel. As already noted, one need not in fact be male to perform these signs of masculinity; Nurse Ratched does so quite skillfully. For an excellent discussion of the responsibility of the men on the ward, particularly Chief, in McMurphy's demise, see Madden. Madden's article does not, however, push far enough what I believe are vital, complicating questions of gender and race in his discussion of individual responsibility, particularly the question of McMurphy's role in his own self-destruction. At the same time, the rejection of laughter as a mode of resistance by the men further displays their investment in this screen. Laughter, in fact, seems to offer the possibility of genuine resistance, as when McMurphy first arrives and enters the hospital day room: He stands there waiting, and when nobody makes a move to say anything to him he commences to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there's nothing funny going on. But it's not the way that Public Relation laughs, it's free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it's lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it's the first laugh that I've heard in years. (Kesey, Cuckoo 11) I would argue that what strikes the men most about McMurphy and his laughter, or more accurately, this laughing McMurphy, is that they are presented with a decentered subject, one who is willing to risk incoherence and embraces indeterminacy. Unlike the "fat Public Relation laugh" or Harding's tense "Hee," McMurphy's laughter here disrupts the operations of power, and thus subjectivity, in the hospital and society more

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. generally. In its display of pleasure in the face of incoherence and indeterminacy, McMurphy's laughter is a recognition of the extant gap, or slippage, between consciousness and subjectivity. Laughter, like sexual desire, is not, however, immune to the very operations of subjectivity, and thus power, that it might disrupt. Having eschewed their responsibility in the operations of power and succumbed to their various fantasies of white masculinity, the men thus come to think of laughter as a weapon rather than a tool. 16 Note that while there are some men on the ward whose sickness or insanity cannot be reduced to a pursuit of the masculine imaginary, the men who serve as the main characters from the ward can to a person almost be described in this way. 17 For a compelling argument that claims white masculinity is precisely what Melville's novel is about, see Babb,Whiteness Visible (1998). 18 Or, more accurately, as Robyn Wiegman has argued in examining the original formulation of a legitimate American citizen: [T]he ungendering that [Hortense] Spillers ascribes to the translation of human beings into property was thus predicated on the impossibility of such beings claiming not simply gender in the abstract, but the specificities and privileges of masculine gender itself. As such, we might consider the ungendering of the enslaved male body in the public sphere as a process of feminizing blackness, even as such a figuration—of a simultaneous ungendering and feminization— appears decidedly contradictory. But such contradictions haunt in various ways all black bodies in modernity, especially as subjectivity, humanity, and the privileges of patriarchal gender were repeatedly cast as unintelligible aspects of the slave's being. (.American Anatomies 67) 19 So too might the other early movements of the 1960s—the free speech movement, the student movement—be described. Thus the apparent necessity of a women's rights movement that would argue for the full political and cultural enfranchisement of women, as well as the attendant splintering o ff of women of color from the feminist movement so as to unmask the political and cultural enfranchisement that sprang from being an "un-colored" woman. 20 Whether participants in the civil rights movement themselves actually believed in masculinity as a stable entity, or whether their usage o f the masculine can be understood as strategic, is a whole other question, the "answer” to which surely lies in the gray area between both extremes. For an extended examination of this issue, see Carby,Race Men (1998). 21 See Tyler,Homeward Bound (1988), and Coontz,The Way We Never Were (1992). 22 McMurphy, for example, is never described as "white." Rather, his skin is "oxblood" or "sunburned.” 23 "Therapeutic discourse" should be understood to indict those psychoanalytic techniques aimed at strengthening the ego and getting the ego to adapt to a given social "reality."

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 Thus, even as both Harding and Chief articulate some sense of their, and the other men's, culpability in the attack and McMurphy's general subject positioning, they fail to push their recognitions to their inevitable extreme. 25 For Freud, disavowal always involvesboth recognition and denial of an external reality. 26 What Kesey has delivered in presenting McMurphy's lobotomized body is precisely therealization of a white manhood heretofore only imagined. That is to say, when the imaginary is actualized, it is no longer what it was. This is the logic of fantasy that Kese/s novel ends up tracing to its terrifying end in spite of the men's disavowal: the imagined scenario in which a man is in full possession of his desire is in fact shown to entail the dissolution of desire in toto. 27 As a novel often hailed for critiquing what has been described as the totalitarian technocracy of 1950s America and instead affirming a supposedly purer democracy based upon radical individualism, it is instructive to consider the contradiction o f democratic citizenship Cuckoo's Nest is caught up in. As Robyn Wiegman has argued in American Anatomies: [T]he movement toward human signification pivots [...] on the gendered assumptions that govern the relationship between the public and private spheres. In this relationship, it is the corporeal abstraction accorded white masculinity that underwrites a host of civic entitlements, serving as the veiled particular subject position on which the false universalism of democratic citizenship resides. (70) In an historical moment that threatens to out that "corporeal abstraction"—the moment of the civil rights and other social movements that reach ascendancy of a kind during the 1960s—the body as a hotly contested site of signification appears to be no coincidence. 28 In his flight from the hospital, Chief tries on McMurphy's biker cap, only to discover that the hat is "too small" and he is "suddenly ashamed of trying to wear it” (310). Even here, we see Chiefs difficulty in reconciling himself to facts that might muddy the image of McMurphy’s power. Chief is, and has always been, of coursemuch bigger than McMurphy.

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MAKING A SPECTACLE OF MAN AT WAR WITH HIMSELF: MICHAEL HERR'S WRITING ON VIETNAM FROM ESQUIRE TO DISPATCHES

Cover the war, what a gig to frame for yourself, going out after one kind of information and getting another, totally other. ~ Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977)1

In August of 1968,Esquire magazine ran a playfully entitled lead article called

"Military Personnel Will Not Participate in Any Activity Having to Do with Creating a

Union” about the plan to organize the United States Army hatched by a young, college-

educated draftee. With the flashy commercial photography style for which cover artist

George Lois made Esquire famous, the lead article is represented on the front of the

magazine by an affronted, stereotypically white Anglo-Saxon Protestant four-star

General being haughtily reprimanded by a young "ethnic" recruit.2 Repeatedly

returning to the issue ofVietnam, the article itself expresses great sympathy for soldiers

engaging in leftist and radical organizing, characterizing them as "soldiers whose asses

may belong to the Army but whose souls belong to them" (42). The travel section of

the August 1968 issue meanwhile presents the piece "Travel for the Man Who Has Had

Everywhere." Describing "the Pacific-Orient on, say, $500 a day" (70), this globe

trotting piece displays glossy color photographs of decadent travel vehicles and

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. destinations throughout the Asiatic Rim. Appearing in the same Esquire is a lengthy

correspondence about the impact of the Battle of Hue in Vietnam entitled "Hell Sucks”

by the then little-known, aspiring journalist Michael Heir.

As contradictory as these articles might seem, their competing interests are in

fact characteristic of Esquire during the 1960s, and these interests are ultimately related

to the project undertaken by Herr in writing his critically acclaimed book-length work

about Vietnam,Dispatches (1977). Illustrated in part above, a typicalEsquire issue

from that decade contains articles and editorials that critique the establishment and even

stray into radical politics. In addition to the lead article about organizing in the military,

an article about "The Politics of Pot” in the August 1968 issue also echoes such

sentiments with the caption "You remember, of course, how well Prohibition worked"

(58) and its skeptical discussion of marijuana's criminalization. Yet that same typical

Esquire quite clearly assumes a readership that in factis establishment, particularly in

its consumption-driven content such as its fashion and travel sections and its

advertisements.3 For example, just inside the cover of the issue I've been describing is

an ad for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Seminars in the Home, directed at the

"otherwise cultivated" person. Displaying two paintings in different styles but on the

same subject, Pierre Cot'sThe Storm and Oskar Kokoschka'sThe Tempest, the ad asks,

"Good Art? Bad Art? What would your judgment be? [...]. If you were unexpectedly

asked to judge these paintings, could you express a well-reasoned opinion about them?

Or would you be tongue-tied, unwilling to say anything because you're afraid you do

not know enough?" And in bold print on the seventh page is the following ad for a

series of books by professors from the Harvard School of Business: "Up on: Cost

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Effectiveness? Synectics? Cost of Capital? Real-Time Systems? Systems

Management? T-Groups? Successful executives keep moving fast with the fast-paced

world of modem business through t h e e x ec u tiv e p r o g r a m [...]. The man who

moves ahead—or stays on top—is paid for how much heknows and how well he keeps

on learning"

What finally compromisesEsquire's interrogation of the establishment, then, is

the extent to which the magazine seeks to resolve the very ontological crises occasioned

by the social changes of the 1960s that it at the same time acknowledges. If a reader is

discomfited by an uppity "ethnic" GI, then he can sign up for The Executive Program

and assure his own position "on top." If a reader feels the frontier is closing and forever

compromised by the tainted imperialistic ventures of his own country, he is reminded

that, even in the Pacific-Orient, there are still exotic destinations for purchase and his

benign pleasure. Rather than allowing its readers to struggle with the uncertainty that

necessarily precipitates political and personal change,Esquire capitalizes on the desire

of those readers to keep their authority secure and to maintain their knowledge and

power. Where a crisis of being and authority, of ontology, might occur—even in

something as benign as in an individual's encounter with a work of art at the Met—

Esquire promises to provide its readers with the information needed to stay in the know

and answer the next question. In fact, the full-page notice forEsquire 's 35th

Anniversary Special Issue, also appearing in the August 1968 issue, promises nothing

less than saving the world after wryly announcing that "AMERICA! THE END IS

NIGH! (Second Notice)." As the notice goes on to say:

The end of the twentieth century—and maybe the end of the world—is only thirty-two years away. On the other hand, [our Special Issue] is only three 134

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (3) months away and it's a lucky thing because what that issue does is show you h o w th e c e n t u r y c a n b e sa v ed . More specifically, it will be devoted to distinguishing between what can be saved, what ought to be saved, what ought not to be saved. How do we know? Because we have assembled an extraordinary collection of brilliant men and women to figure it out. (121)

If this issue ofEsquire is at all representative of the magazine's formal and

textual characteristics in the 1960s—and having closely examined numerous issues

from throughout that decade, I believe that it is—it becomes eminently clear that the

ontological crises of being and authority with which Esquire grapples take white

masculinity as their reference point. From its inception,Esquire has been all about

articulating coherent narratives around the apparent biological facts of sex and race.

This is a point perhaps made most baldly by the universal man hailed in the subtitle

"The Magazine for Men" and "Esky," the magazine's fair-skinned, "white-haired, pop-

eyed playboy mascot” (Lois 68).4 Originally conceived in 1937 as a magazine in the

tradition of The New Yorker, as a highbrow publication for American men that would

mix serious writing with some irreverence but that would also include fashion, "girlie"

covers, and be sold only in men's clothing stores, Esquire quickly became a regular

newsstand periodical as a result of its popularity. Its initial integrity was likewise

secured with the publication of writing by authors such as Ernest Hemingway and F.

Scott Fitzgerald. Then responding to the climate created by World War n, the editors

enlarged their cover pin-ups into double-page coverspreads in a simultaneous appeal to

servicemen and the War Production Board, which controlled the wartime paper supply.

Only with the accession of Harold Hayes to editor-in-chief in the late 19S0s did Esquire

return to its former seriousness, ceding the "girlie" market to Hugh Hefner's upstart

Playboy and instead reaching out to the "sophisticated" readership Hayes would

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. envision, serve, and shape throughout the 1960s, during which time the circulation rose

to near 2 million (Polsgrove 70).

Such is the history of Esquire that sets the stage for the conflicting notions of

American manhood at work in its issues during the 1960s, a tension marked by a clear

affiliation with dominant masculinity on the one hand, represented by the General and

the Man (who has "had" everywhere), and a fundamental fascination with resistant

masculinity on the other, represented by the disgruntled GI and the sundry hippie or

revolutionary. While the overriding subtext of the articles and ads inEsquire insists

that the privileges o f American manhood are under duress, then, in the last instance, the

magazine promises that its epistemological acumen will resolve that crisis. In this way,

Esquire ultimately offers fantasya of resecured American manhood—a script for living

as a white male citizen of the United States in which ideas and events that might call the

privilege of that identity into question are taken to be problems of knowledge, all of

which are decipherable. It is this same Esquire for which Hayes eventually employs

Michael Herr as a correspondent in Vietnam.

We might expect, then, that Herr’s work about Vietnam would embody the

contradictions contained in Esquire, and the history of his relationship with the

magazine certainly warrants this expectation.5 Herr's regard for Esquire dates back to

the early 1950s, when he began reading it in junior high school, and he is described as

recalling the magazine to be "incredibly urbane and sophisticated" (Polsgrove 56). The

acquaintance between Herr and Harold Hayes began in the editor's first year with

Esquire, when Herr interviewed for a junior editor position prior to his graduation from

Syracuse University, though he was not offered the job. Maintaining a professional

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. connection with Hayes over the next six years, Herr finally met with Hayes about

covering the Vietnam War for Esquire in May 1967, appealing to ideas of "the best kind

of journalism," "[the] dramatic value of the war," and "a chance to make it seem more

real" (qtd. in Polsgrove 171). In a follow-up letter on June 1,1967, Herr then detailed a

number of topics he envisioned addressing in his correspondence, most notably the

Green Berets, the media presence in Vietnam, Graham Greene's "quiet American," and

a sketch of General William Westmoreland or someone of like standing.

Herr was explicit with Hayes, however, that he would not send news per se, that

he felt conventional news had so far failed in telling the story ofVietnam. As a result,

the initial plan suggested by Herr was to submit a running journal to Hayes that would

then be published as a regularEsquire column and would include "extended vignettes,

set pieces, geographical sketches, personality portraits (it would be full of people), even

battle reportage” (qtd. in Polsgrove 171). In sum, Herr's description of how he would

approach the subject of Vietnam likens itself very much to the tone and style Esquireof

in the mid- to late 1960s. As Herr himself wrote to Hayes when first conceiving of his

project: "Esquire and any writing that I do in Vietnam are all tied together in my head,

and it would take some terrible desperation to separate them for me. This is one of

those weird, magic equations that writers make up for themselves, an illogical

arrangement of symbols that has been known to generate first-rate work" (qtd. in

Polsgrove 172).6 My reading of Herr's work on Vietnam within the context of its

original relationship with Esquire, the first such critical examination, will display that

the "magic equation" of which Herr speaks is crucial to a comprehensive understanding

ofDispatches and the previously published pieces that went into its making. More

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. specifically, I will argue that while Herr’s earliest essays about Vietnam importantly

originate in and respond to the fantasy of dominant white masculinity proffered by

Esquire magazine, where they were first published, his final book-length treatment of

Vietnam in Dispatches unequivocally rejects that fantasy. In contrast to texts examined

in the preceding chapters, then, Dispatches stands out as an actual intervention in the

fantasies of American manhood made manifest by events of the 1960s.

That Dispatches intervenes at the level of fantasy is in part authorized by the

critical consensus locating Herr's book squarely in the now-established tradition of New

Journalism. Though Herr himself quibbles with this designation, it is certainly fair to

say that Herr's work on Vietnam is heavily influenced by the distinct journalistic genre

that rose to prominence in the 1960s under the sway of writers like Gay Talese and

Terry Southern.7 As its name suggests, New Journalism is precisely about doing away

with orthodox methods of journalism, an ostensibly objective stance most of all.

Embracing the idea that the subjective experience of historical agents can and should be

rendered, not hidden from view under the guise of objectivity, such journalism attempts

to recreate the subjective experience of the story’s actors as it filters the people, settings,

and events through the felt mood and sensibility of the author. As a result, it is not

surprising to find that virtually the entire body of criticism aboutDispatches addresses

the book's emphasis on subjective experience, whether the critic stresses the subjective

experience of memory, the Vietnam War, writing, spectatorship, historiography, or

warfare in general.8 What is surprising is that almost no one has explored how

Dispatches deploys two of the most significant terms of American subjectivity in the

late twentieth century: gender and race.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In the one extended analysis of gender in Dispatches, Maria S. Bonn concludes

that "Herr's carefully constructed ironic representation of the Vietnam War finally caves

in under the weight of his enchantment with the war experience," leaving the reader

with "that traditionally masculine view of war," one which "reassures us that war has a

wild and violent beauty” (6-9). Similarly, an article by Maggie Gordon scrutinizing

Herr's discursive adaptation of cinematic structures, styles, and techniques contains a

subsection critical of the author's "[mjasculine voyeurism," which Gordon claims

"objectifies and aestheticizes war” (7). In the two examinations of Dispatches to

consider race in any way, the focus has been on the question of how Herr represents the

Vietnamese experience. Michael Spindler reproaches Herr for reducing "the

devastation of a small Asian country and the slaughter of approximately two and a half

million of its people [...] to the warm glow of personal reminiscence" and ultimately

for denying "the historically specific, political origin of the conflict" (27-29). David E.

James echoes these sentiments when he accuses Herr of "[Reducing the invasion to the

experience of the American GI" and "concealing] the historical events by which the

soldiers came to be in Vietnam" (86). I will argue, however, that Dispatches is a

conscious exploration of the "historical" (and the ahistorical), the "objective” (and the

subjective), an exploration finally insisting that the desires and fantasies o f Americans

have as much to tell us about the reasons for U.S. involvement in Vietnam as

"historically specific" ones do and must be the focus of intense examination—our

fantasies about masculinity and whiteness most especially.

For in eschewing journalism's tired methods, Herr is set free to explore the

subjective but inevitably finds himself face to face with the very question of subjectivity

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and thus of fantasy. Taking what was just another news item to some journalists and

working to imagine the consciousnesses that infuse it, Herr finds that his story about the

Vietnam War is steeped in the most entrenched and mythic terms o f white masculinity.

That white masculinity is a central concern of Herr's story does not suddenly appear in

the book to finally emerge from his experiences in Vietnam; rather, this concern is

importantly laid bare in the earliest pieces he wrote forEsquire magazine.

The General and Michael Herr

Departing for Saigon in late November of 1967, Herr embarked on his eighteen-

month stint with the Vietnam press corps. The book based on Herr's experiences in

Vietnam, Dispatches, was published almost ten years to the day that he left on that

assignment. Between those two dates, Herr published several pieces that would be

revised and eventually included in his book. The August 1968Esquire article "Hell

Sucks" was his first related publication, ultimately becoming the second section of

Dispatches and retaining its original title. In August 1969, the New American Review

published "Illumination Rounds," which later appeared under the same title as the fourth

section of Dispatches. Esquire then printed the next, and longest, of Herr's early essays

as a two-part installment—"Khesanh" and "Conclusion at Khesanh"—in its September

and October 1969 issues. Together, these were developed into the large third section of

Dispatches simply entitled "Khe Sanh." Finally, just prior to the publication of

Dispatches, as is typical in promoting a book,Rolling Stone ran an excerpt from the

completed text.9 Focusing on the early published articles, first "Hell Sucks" and then

"Illumination Rounds" and the two-part "Khesanh," I will continue to show how

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dispatches benefits from being read within the context of Herr's entire body of writing

on Vietnam, and within the context of an originary relationship to Esquire as well.

Once having arrived in Saigon, Herr worked to fulfill his agreement with Hayes

and remained in regular contact with the editor, sending off enough material to Esquire

for at least one column by the last week of January 1968. In addition to the plan for a

monthly column, Hayes and Herr had also discussed having Herr create a "power chart"

of "the American establishment in Saigon" in the tradition of the other power charts for

which Esquire had become famous, or in some instances infamous, by the late 1960s

(Polsgrove 173).10 Although Herr has since reflected that "I was there about a week

when I realized what a horrible idea [the plan with Hayes] was" (Schroeder 33), only

after the Tet Offensive began on the last day of January did Herr take any decisive

action to alter his assignment. Caught in the fighting at Cantho for five sleepless days,

Herr nevertheless managed to cable Hayes directing him not to run the work he had

sent, that it seemed "like it had been written from a different war" (qtd. in Polsgrove

174). Then encamped with troops just outside of Hue, following a brief stop in

occupied Saigon, Herr again pleaded in a letter to Hayes dated February 5,1968, that he

not use the material:

There is no similarity between the Saigon I left this morning and the Saigon I wrote about in January [...]. The last ten days have been incredible. Even the most experienced correspondents here have been shattered by the offensive and, even more, by the insane American reaction to it [...]. I think [the Vietcong] could, eventually, take Saigon. Right now, with about 1500 men, they have crippled the city, and no American with any power will admit it, will even give the Vietcong the respect they’ve earned by this offensive. Where we have not been smug, we have been hysterical, and we will pay for all of it. (qtd. in Polsgrove 174)

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Honoring the wishes expressed by Herr in his communications, Hayes withheld the

column. After Hue, Herr made his way to Khesanh and Danang and back to Saigon,

where he rested and then wrote his first piece on Vietnam—the Esquire article "Hell

Sucks" (Polsgrove 176).

Though Herr is often said to have made significant revisions to all of the pieces

from the late 1960s that later appeared in some form in Dispatches, a close examination

of those early articles reveals otherwise. Indeed, while Herr wrote a significant amount

of new material and moved other material around for his book, "Hell Sucks" is the only

early published text to undergo extensive reworking.11 These revisions provide a

compelling glimpse into the evolution of Herr's sensibilities regarding the war, his place

in it, and his relationship to Esquire magazine.

The first glimpse of these sensibilities is provided by the original opening

paragraph of "Hell Sucks" as it appearedEsquire. in For this is the very same moment

eventually used to begin "Breathing In," the first section ofDispatches:

There is a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon, and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'll lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. The map is a marvel, especially absorbing because it is not real. For one thing, it is very old. It was left here years ago by a previous tenant, probably a Frenchman since the map was made in Paris. The paper has buckled, and much of the color has gone out of it, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicts. Vietnam is divided into its older territories of Tonkin, Ann am and Cochin China, and to the west, past Laos and Cambodge, sits Siam, a kingdom. That's old, I told the General. That's a really old map. (Herr, "Hell Sucks” 66)

Present in Herr's published work on Vietnam from its inception, then, is the felt sense

that he is purposely locating himself in distinct opposition to the prevailing journalistic

mantra of "who, what, where, when, and why."12 Only a writer situated in that place

would open his work with an image, here an outdated map, and one that invokes 142

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. complicated evocations of the past rather than breaking news from the front. In fact, the

article as a whole defies readerly expectations of uniform chronology, clear setting, and

standard sources. Similarly, Herr sets the tone for his article by beginning with a

moment that requires us to observe him in the act of observation and that alludes to the

larger questions his subjective experience has begged—questions of past and present, of

the real and the illusory, of how certain histories have been represented and how they

should be represented, of what witnessing history is.

Nevertheless, while almost identical to the revision that begins Dispatches, the

original version of this scene does bear one quite notable difference. That is the

surprising reference to a General who apparently (along with us) has been audience to

Heir’s remarks regarding the map on his wall. I say surprising because this reference to

the General—and the whole of Herr's succeeding conversation with him, which frames

the entirety of "Hell Sucks" as it first appeared Esquirein —has been omitted from

Dispatches altogether. As Herr continues the original opening scene of "Hell Sucks":

The General is drawn to it [the map] too, and whenever he stops by for a drink he'll regard it silently, undoubtedly noting inaccuracies which the maps available to him have corrected. The waters that wash around my Indochine are a placid, Disney blue, unlike the intense, metallic blues of the General's maps. But all of that aside, we both agree to the obsolescence of my map, to the final unreality of it. We know that for years now, there has been no country here but the war. The landscape has been converted to terrain, the geography broken down into its more useful components; corps and zones, tactical areas of responsibility, vicinities of operation, outposts, positions, objectives, field of fire. The weather of Vietnam has been translated in to conditions, and it's gone very much the same way with the people, the population, many of whom cant realize that there is an alternative to war because war is all they have ever known. Bad luck for them, the General says. As well as he knows them (and he knows them well), he seldom talks about them except to praise "their complexity, their sophistication, their survivability." Endearing traits. (66)

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In this original opening passage, Herr thus begins by confronting the geographical and

metaphysical landscape of Vietnam in the company of the General. The effect of this is

to literally and figuratively embody in the General a central aspect of the American

presence Herr first set out to describe forEsquire —namely, "the American

establishment in Saigon" that he and Hayes originally thought they would fashion into a

savvy "power chart." The portrayal of the General as being attracted to the map

precisely because it reminds him of the accuracy of his own maps and information

underlines his association with the establishment. This association is further deepened

by Herr's use of passive voice in describing the reconfigured, rhetorically colonized

landscape, weather, and people ofVietnam. For the passive voice has the subtle effect

of attributing the rhetoric back to High Command when this description is followed by

the General's direct commentary about it: "Bad luck for them.” Such moments also

capture the ironic tone Hen* uses in presenting the General throughout his article, a tone

reiterated above in Herr's final sardonic reflection on what the General appears to

believe is praise for the Vietnamese character. In essence, Herr locates himself

somewhere outside the cultural dominant certainly represented by the General in the

article version of "Hell Sucks." As Herr reflects later in the article, "It has finally

become the kind of conventional war that the Command so longed for, and it is not

going well. [...] [A]fter all these years, we were caught in midwinter with the blunt

truth that our achievement in Vietnam had been less than epic, a fact that touched

everyone but the men who run the war" ("Hell" 66). Thus, while the General comes to

embody the highest ranks of the establishment's military institution, and dominant white

masculinity by extension, Herr places himself at one remove from that subject position.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Yet, as we have seen, Esquire is supremely concerned with scripting dominant

white masculinity, and Herr himself has professed that "Esquire and any writing that I

do in Vietnam are all tied together in my head." At the same time, Herr insists to

Harold Hayes that Vietnam has become "a different war" after the Tet Offensive and

that their initial plan for covering the conflict in Esquire is no longer valid. What soon

becomes apparent in comparing the two versions of "Hell Sucks," then, is how the first

version serves as a space wherein Herr has only just begun working through what he

means when he says that the war is now "different.” After all, Herr wrote the first

version almost immediately upon returning to Saigon in the wake of the Tet Offensive.

As a result, I believe the later-excised General especially stands out as a trace of Herr's

original conception of the war and how he would write about it, a conception deeply

informed byEsquire.

Because the General is a function of Herr's evolving sensibilities, his treatment

is consequently not without contradiction. On the one hand, the General seems to be

yet another commodity offered up to the readers ofEsquire wherein the General is

made an object of knowledge that serves to diffuse any ontological crisis the Vietnam

War might precipitate in the magazine’s readers. In this vein, Herr replicates the larger

posture assumed byEsquire as a whole. Should readers come to the article anxious that

Vietnam is the great crisis of their time—as many readers would have after Tet, when

even mainstream newscasters such as Walter Cronkite began publicly registering

dismay about the war—the General works to contain that anxiety. Confiding that the

war "is not going well," for example, Herr also remarks that "It has finally become that

kind of conventional war that the Command so longed for" ("Hell" 66, my italics).

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Statements such as these suggest that the war has been driven by the fantasies of a few

men who are in select, visible positions of political and military power—men like Herr's

General.

On the other hand, the General is more than an object of knowledge for the

reader’s consumption. In the General's role as purveyor of knowledge, he cannot help

but likewise act as a site of identification. This is evident in the original map scene

when Herr questions the General's assessment of the Vietnamese, but not his basic

authority about them, stating without any obvious irony that the General "knows them

well." Herr's identification is further revealed in his later comments on his "growing

friendship" with the General:

I have never really understood [it], since there is not a single point touching the war that we agree on. [...] My colleagues think that he drinks with me instead of them because I am accredited to a monthly, but of course there's more to it than that. For one thing, the General never condescends to me, while I take a lot of trouble trying not to understand him too quickly. I suppose that we are both, in our own way, aesthetes. The General is an aesthete in insurgency and counterinsurgency, a choreographer of guerilla activity, and he has been at it a long, long time. Some of the older hands here remember seeing him in Vietnam at the time of the Indochina War. ("Hell" 69)

Like the other sources of information, knowledge, and authority with which the reader

of Esquire would be accustomed, includingEsquire itself, the General is favorable

precisely because he is not condescending. That is, Herr is understood not only as a

capable recipient of the information the General has to share, but an entitled one too.

They are fellow "aesthetes," specialists and connoisseurs who consume information as

well as dictate its importance. Moreover, the information the General provides

circularly functions to absolve Herr and the article's readers of any responsibility for the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. events about which they are being informed not only because it comes from the General

but because it makes them knowing subjects.

This paradox of Herr's disassociadon from and identification with the General is

brought into useful and fascinating relief in the final moment of the extended scene

between Herr and the General that concludes the Esquire version of "Hell Sucks." The

scene begins with Herr's speculation about his friendship with the General quoted in

part above, moves into their conversation and its usual topics, and then lapses into a

lengthy meditation on the dead Herr has seen since being in Vietnam. According to

Herr, the General worries about the writer's sanity and his "unhealthy fascination" with

death:

He respects it intellectually (one of our other constant topics is suicide) but finally he finds it morbid and unprofitable. Worst of all, he finds that I have a tendency, when discussing the dead, to not only dwell on them, but to personalize them as well. "That way lies you-know-what," he says, tapping his temple; but he lets me get it out, lets me talk about the victims, about the dead and the disposition of the dead. ("Hell" 109)

Going on to describe the dead, Herr catalogs a Cambodian Mercenary, Vietcong, small

children, and American GIs. The last dead Herr describes is the one he considers "the

worst," a Vietnamese man whose "head had been shaved off by a piece of debris, so that

only the back of his scalp remained connected to the skull" and whose "grinning and

dripping, all rot and green-black bloat" ("Hell" 110) haunt Herr's vision. Expressing his

empathy, the General assents that the war is "terrible" but adds that its outcome would

have been different if "they'd listened to me" ("Hell" 110). Then asking the General to

whom he is referring, Herr is met only with a checked smile and an ambiguous

reflection:

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Sometimes,” the General says, "I think I'm the only man in the world who understands this thing.” "It must be very lonely for you." "Mike, it comes with the job. But you. If you hate this all so much, why do you stay?" He has me there. I wait a moment before answering. "Because, General, it’s the only war we’ve got." And he really smiles now. After all that talk, we're speaking the same language again. ("Hell" 110)

What I believe this scene displays is that, in the last instance, Herr must concede that a

desire for the experience of war connects him to the General. Although Herr attempts

to separate himself from the General in his final rejoinder, the implication that they

have not been "speaking the same language" breaks down under the weight of his tacit

identification with the General. Herr earlier insists on the distance between the General

and himself, going as far as to state that "there is not a single point touching the war that

we agree on," but he cannot get around their shared desire to be there ("Hell" 69).

That this desire is animated from the beginning by a fantasy of dominant

American manhood becomes evident gradually. First is Herr's own admission early in

the Esquire version of "Hell Sucks" that his encounters with the difficult and vicious

Tet Offensive battles have forced him to recognize the complexity of his motivations

for being there:

[BJefore Hue, you thought of yourself as a dove or a hawk, felt that our involvement was criminal or proper, obscene or clean. After Hue, all of your lines of reasoning turned into clumsy coils, and all of the talk got on your nerves. Hue finally gave you what you had expected, half yearned for, in the days of the war that ended with the Offensive. It got up memories, vicarious enough, stored from old copies ofLife magazine, old movie newsreels, Pathe sound tracks whose dirge-disaster music still echoed: the Italian Campaign, the fight for the Reservoir, gruesome camp, evocations o f'44 and '50. (66-67)

In other words, Herr has begun to acknowledge that his desire to participate in the war,

even as a witness, has been catalyzed by more than seemingly extrinsic and calculable 148

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. political or military factors or his loyalty to the journalistic profession. Rather, he finds

that his experience is bringing him face to face with the internal and undetermined

elements of his psyche and the larger American psyche that infuses it.

Nowhere are these elements more evident as dominant white masculinity than in

the figure of the General, who is a fictional character invented by Herr. As Herr tries to

explain in a letter to the disgruntledEsquire legal department after he fails to provide

them with a source for the unnamed general: "He's fiction—I hoped that would be

obvious—made up out of a dozen odd types I've run into around Vietnam" (qtd. in

Polsgrove 176). In this way, the figure of the General in fact manifests the very

fantasmatic investments that Herr first discovers in attempting to put his experience in

Vietnam to paper. Herr's language in describing his decision to later delete the General

echoes this interpretation:

I was not always bound by the facts. That was a choice, it wasn't an accident. The first piece I ever wrote from Vietnam had in it a fictional character who was so fantastic and so obviously fictional that the only people who ever believed for a moment that he was a real character were the people in the legal department at Esquire magazine. They were a little nervous. Everybody else completely understood that I was making this general up. He's not in the book because by the time I got around to putting all the stuff together, I realized that I didn't need that kind of fantastic creation anymore, that so-called real life was quite fantastic enough. (Schroeder45)

That is, Herr chooses to project his consciousness onto a body that is white and male—

and the presumed locus of authority. In this way, Herr's work deserves, even

necessitates, being read as exploration of fantasy because it so forthrightly inhabits that

gray area between fact and fiction occupied by the individual psyche.

To begin establishing more concretely how this original version evolves, it is

useful at this point to return to the continuation of the map scene in its revised form,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which Herr places at the beginning of Dispatches. Here, Herr now contemplates the

map alone, the narrator and his consciousness having taken center stage:

I f dead ground could come back and haunt you the way dead people do, they'd have been able to mark my mapCURRENT and bum the ones they'd been using since '64, but don't count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. It was late '67 now, and even the most detailed maps didn't reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces o f the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We knew that the uses o f most information were flexible, different pieces o f ground told different stories to different people. We also knew that for years now there had been no country here but the war. {Dispatches 1)

In contrast to the original version of this scene, while Herr again states that his map is

not "real," he also importantly qualifies this by contending that his map should be

marked "CURRENT" and not the maps "they'd been using since '64" {Dispatches 1).

What Herr suggests by insisting that his map is "not real” but "current" is that we should

look to the map not for the quantifiable information it might provide but for the trace it

contains of information that defies measurement. The innuendo is that there is some

longstanding presence haunting the immediate moment in war-torn Vietnam for Herr.

At the same time, the effect of the passage is to suggest there is something that cannot

be yielded by scrutinizing Vietnam and its people, that can be yielded only by looking

at the stories we tell ourselves. As Herr will also add to the later version of "Hell

Sucks":

[Y]ou couldn't use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the proto-Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils. {Dispatches 49)

Having projected his consciousness onto two bodies that are white and male in this

scene's first version—differentiating the bodies primarily by their investments in the 150

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. war—Herr now focuses on only the organizing consciousness of his work. Although

both versions of the map scene share the sentiment that "for years now, there has been

no country here but the war,” Herr's assumptions about what it means to be an observer

of that war clearly have undergone some revision when the General is nowhere to be

found but Herr and the stories he has accumulated are everywhere ("Hell”

66/Dispatches 1).

Indeed, this excerpt fromDispatches is among those most often cited in the

criticism, the dominant strain in particular, which has appropriately read Herr's book as

an exploration of consciousness, memory, and meaning-making after the trauma of

witnessing the Vietnam War.13 And this is a reading further validated by the fact that

one of Herr's revisions to the earlier version of "Hell Sucks” is to shift parts written in

the present tense to the past tense, the tense in which he wrote all of his succeeding

work on Vietnam. Within the predominant critical strain, however, the emphasis of the

discussion has continued to be on how the form of Herr's book is its real and most

significant content and what allows him to successfully render a war-traumatized

consciousness. While I agree that form is central to the achievement of Dispatches,

there is a vital second point of inquiry deriving from this important first critical

recognition that needs to be considered, and this has to do with that content which

cannot be described purely in terms of formal innovation. That is, if readers of Herr

have understood him to take up the question of how one should represent the war-

traumatized consciousness—and lauded him for his reply—then we must also read Herr

for his reply to a second question inseparable from the first: what constitutes this war-

traumatized consciousness?

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Herr for recognizing and contesting what they agree is an American mythos of sorts,

one understood as being particularly informed by the media in its incarnations as the

nightly news, rock-and-roll, and Hollywood. Few readers, however, have made the

narratives that inform this mythos—and, by extension, the subjects that bear it—the

explicit focus of their investigations. In one of the earliest critical essays about

Dispatches, John Hellmann opens the possibility of just such an investigation in

concluding that "Herr's point is that for both individuals and the nation the previously

formulated structures supplied by our culture prevented one from at first perceiving the

reality of the Vietnam War, often even after experiencing it firsthand" ("The New

Journalism" 150). But ensuing critical work that has echoed the notion of these

preformulated structures in its discussions of "cultural influences" or "media-induced

modes of perception" has tended to equivocate on their nature and content, instead

remaining focused on the form and language of Dispatches.14 Hellmann's subsequent

examination o f Dispatches as a text emerging from, and ultimately against, the context

of an American "frontier mythos" is an important exception(American Myth 38). Don

Ringnalda's work on Dispatches is likewise notable, not so much for his analysis of a

specific narrative informing the organizing consciousness o f the book but for his

analysis of its architectonics, which he perceives as undergoing "a radical

epistemological crisis" that forces Herr to replace "a language of'defoliation' that had

imperialistic control over the formless and the inconclusive, a language that insisted on

order when there was none" with a "counterepistemology" (79-81). Taken together,

these readings gesture toward the operative presence I have begun to outline in Herr's

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. work of a mythos of American manhood, the same fantasy of dominant white

masculinity engendered between the pages ofEsquire. While the first version of "Hells

Sucks" underscores this operative presence, and Herr's nascent awareness of it, the first

versions of "Illumination Rounds” and "Khesanh" reveal Herr coming to terms with this

mythos.

Illuminating the Fantasy o f American Manhood

Unlike "Hell Sucks," very little about Herr's secondEsquire article on Vietnam

was changed for later publication. While this piece was first published in two parts as

"Khesanh" and "Conclusion at Khesanh,” in September and October 1969 respectively,

Herr retains virtually all of the organization and content of the originals when they are

merged to become the third part of Dispatches, "Khe Sanh." This description of Herr's

revision also applies to his article "Illumination Rounds,” which was published in the

August 1969New American Review j ust before the second Esquire piece came out. As

a result, the remainder of the early published pieces on Vietnam by Herr are interesting

not for any revisions made to them but for what they reveal Herr had in fact determined

was significant about his experience as early as 1969. What I believe we begin to see in

the article versions of "Illumination Rounds," and later "Khe Sanh," is the Herr who has

started actively to write against the kind of fantasy of white American manhood

proffered byEsquire magazine.

Comprised of a series of short vignettes, "Illumination Rounds” certainly stands

out as a stylistic milestone for Herr. With this piece, only his second article about

Vietnam, Herr announces unequivocally that traditional chronology and narrative

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. structure cannot fully capture the experience he wants to convey. But the moments he

selects from that experience are as important as the way in which he communicates

them. This is clear from the opening moment Herr sets forth, which recounts the first

time he witnesses soldiers in battle. Strapped into a Chinook that comes under attack,

Herr recalls that "I had to laugh, it was so exciting, it was the thing I had wanted, almost

what I had wanted [...]" ("Illumination Rounds" 64). Herr begins, then, by

distinguishing fantasy from the experience of it. Indeed, what stands out most in Herr's

memory of watching men around him get caught in gunfire and killed is his sense that

the events invoke a script belying his lived experience of them: "I thought I could hear

the [blood] drops hitting the metal strip on the chopper floor. Hey!. . . oh, but this isn't

anything at all, it's not real. [...] It took me a month to lose that feeling of being a

spectator to something that was part game, part show" ("Illumination" 64-65).

That this is a script for masculinity is underscored by the vignette that follows,

in which Herr illustrates the utter gulf between a group of soldiers returning from battle

and the "Red Cross girls" who are sent in to hand out coffee and comfort them.

Describing these girls as having "no idea where they were" when the soldiers ignore

them and one even gets verbally abusive, Herr refers to an ideological location rather

than any actual geographical place ("Illumination" 66). That is, the experience of battle

has disengaged the soldiers from that ideological script in which war is but one more

site for the consummation of gender roles. In their attempts to carry out that script,

which depends upon men participating in war, the young women become a target for

the soldiers' own sense of violation.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Yet, as we saw in relation to the original version of "Hell Sucks,"Esquire had

formulated a much more seemingly benign means of securing masculinity in its appeal

to the notion that being "in the know" is the marie of a powerful man and that certain

bodies of knowledge constitute the natural domain and confirmation of manhood. We

also saw how Herr in part aligned with such a relationship to knowledge through the

figure of the General. What is striking about "Illumination Rounds," then, is its total

rejection of such a pat understanding of how knowledge can function, especially

knowledge of warfare. Rather, the sequence of disconnected, often brutal vignettes

narrated by Herr in "Illumination Rounds" displays the impossibility of reducing the

traumatic experience of war back into information that can be disseminated. The final

moment of the last vignette vividly distills this very sentiment:

"I've been having this dream,” the major said. [...] "I’m in a big examination room back at Quantico. They're handing out questionnaires for an aptitude test. I take one and look at it, and the first question says, How many kinds of animals can you kill your hands?'"----- [ ] "After the first tour, I'd have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying,me dying. . . I thought they were the worst," he said. "But I sort of miss them now." (Herr, "Illumination" 85)

Not only does this scene affirm that trauma somehow exceeds the routine frameworks

provided for processing it, this scene also keenly evokes the way in which warfare has

functioned as a body of knowledge promising to deliver being and identity. Thus,

worse even than dreaming that he himself is dying is the major's dream that he cannot

assimilate some parts of his experience back into the body of knowledge informing that

experience. Which is to say that worse for the major than the loss of actual physical

being is the loss of psychic consistency, of identity, precipitated by the ontological

crisis that follows epistemology's failure. And one of the key aspects of identity surely 155

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. brought into question in this scene is any secure sense that warfare is the natural domain

and confirmation of manhood.

But Herr's growing consciousness of Vietnam's far-reaching trauma in

"Illumination Rounds" does not limit itself to the notion that it is simply a fantasy of

manhood that informs that trauma. Rather, he has begun to document a fantasy of

American manhood reciprocally informed by the whiteness it signifies. His vignettes

underscore the malicious impunity with which American civilian construction engineers

ride their Harley-Davidsons up the pagoda steps of a monument to the Vietnamese war

dead and the deep indifference that drives the refusal of the Armed Forces Radio

Network to play the music of Jimi Hendrix so meaningful to African-American

enlistees he has met. As a result, reading Herr within the context of his originary

relationship to the fantasy of dominant white masculinity encapsulated inEsquire

continues to be useful. For against that magazine's recurrent presentation of "the

Pacific-Orient" as a place for male American consumption and pleasure—from the

plethora of ads urging that Esquire readers "Go west," as British Airways puts it, to the

multiple travel exposes describing adventures to be had there—Herr has started to

display the deep failings of such a construction.

The failings of American Orientalist constructions and their relationship to

equally problematic constructions of dominant masculinity are acutely foregrounded by

Herr in his sketch of a white Special Forces sergeant who keeps extending his tour

regardless of the fact that he has a wife and three children back in the states and that the

seriousness of the battle injuries he has sustained relieve him of any obligation to

further duty. Herr details how the sergeant loves to rough house with the Vietnamese in

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. his compound, "sometimes punching them a little hard in the stomach, smiling a stiff

small smile that was meant to tell them all that he was just being playful”

("Illumination” 68). "The Vietnamese would smile too,” Herr tells us, "until [the

sergeant] turned to walk away. He loved the Vietnamese, he said, he reallyknew them

after three years. As far as he was concerned, there was no place in the world as fine as

Vietnam" ("Illumination" 68). When the sergeant then divulges to Herr how he has a

display case full of medals, photographs, and souvenirs from his three tours back in the

states and how his family places the kitchen table in front of it every night before

eating, the scene resonates with the most profound implications of what was Herr's

assessment of the American response to the Tet Offensive: "[N]o American with power

[...] will even give the Vietcong the respect they’ve earned by this offensive. Where

we have not been smug, we have been hysterical, and we will pay for all of it." That is,

betraying the knowing, even smug, subject of privilege such as the sergeant is the very

hysteria animating his desire to be in the know. Lurking in the shadow of the gleaming

display case, consequently, is a man who is slave to his own image, who even in the

face of danger and death returns to play out the cultural ideals that validate his trophies.

More than a mere cultural ideal of manhood, what we see in the vignette about

the sergeant is a cultural ideal of American manhood that discloses its implicit

whiteness, one wherein the racialized, feminized bodies of the Vietnamese become the

means by which a white American man might achieve that ideal. Thus, the sergeant's

racialization of the Vietnamese men also presumes and depends upon those Orientalized

male bodies issuing a passive, feminine response to his physical, masculine overtures.

Far from a stoic response to the sergeant's aggressive overtures, which would be a

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. response openly indicating indifference and devoid of feeling, the smile issued by the

Vietnamese men accedes to the sergeant's supposed dominance. Importantly, then, in

Dispatches, Herr will also capture the anxiety about a specifically white American

masculinity vis-a-vis the Orientalized female body in a scene that describes the rumors

surrounding a sniper in Saigon who is thought to be a woman. Herr relates that she is

known as a "tiger lady" to most but that "The commander of one of the Saigon MP

battalions said he thought it was a man dressed in an ao dai because a .45 was 'an awful

lot of gun for a itty bitty Vietnamese woman”{Dispatches 41). In other words,

although having succeeded in murdering a number of American officers, the sniper

must be either an overly masculine "tiger lady" or a Vietnamese man who is naturally

feminine enough to pass as a woman, and thus in easy contrast to the assured features of

white American masculinity. My point here, of course, is hardly to minimize the

murder of American officers; rather, it is to draw attention to the minimization of the

murders by those who are more interested in locating the perverse gender identification

of the sniper than in locating the killer.

At the same time, Herr's "Illumination Rounds” begins to register how white

masculinity depends upon a certain relationship to black masculinity, a relationship also

advanced within the pages of Esquire. Because while African Americans—and almost

exclusively men—are sometimes featuredEsquire, in they are very infrequently, if ever,

invited to participate in the magazine's fraternity of men in the know. Instead, African

Americans appear as one of the objects of knowledge to be consumed by the white male

reader and thereby confirm privileged American manhood, a dynamic ingeniously

played out in a Legal Defense ad run by the National Association for the Advancement

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of Colored People (NAACP) featuring a photo of rioting black men that inquires "Does

he make you mad? Scared? Guilty?" and then appeals for donations.

In a lengthier example of the same dynamic as utilized byEsquire , the

November 1970 issue contains an entire spread entitled "Is It Too Late For You To Be

Pals with a Black Panther?" that features a full-page photo of a group of African

Americans dressed in revolutionary garb and quips in an accompanying blurb, "Maybe

not if you are able to know one when you see one" (141). Challenging the reader to

"cross out those who are not Panthers” from the photo, the article reveals on the next

page that "There are no Black Panthers on the previous page. The friendly and

respectable seven are [...]" and then goes on to name the actors. This next page is

dominated, however, by a photo of a "real Panther," whose dress is dissected for us.

Pointing out "The Official Shades," Esquire says that "Although Huey doesn't need

them, a Panther wears shades to scare you. They hide what he's thinking and make him

look cool and mean. A cool, mean, scary black can give even the best of liberals, even

you, sleepless nights" (141). And describing "The Official Roots," Esquire notes that

"African trappings—spear, shields, a zebra rug, and throne—underline the Panther’s

identification with The Great Worldwide Revolutionary Struggle Against Oppression

and Colonialism. So what if the throne looks like Hong Kong wicker?" (141). Here,

then, Esquire once again encounters alterity merely to preserve a relation of power and

privilege. Moreover,Esquire insists that what makes black masculinity perverse is not

simply an excess masculinity—if the Asian man is too feminine, the African is too

masculine—but an excess tied to particular, tribalist, nationalist ends. If the "Great

Worldwide Revolutionary Struggle Against Oppression and Colonialism" is reallyonly

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a means of returning to primitive social relations that primarily benefit the black man,

then such a movement (and any of its more benign manifestations) has no wider, even

international, sociopolitical coordinates or implications.Esquire thus spins an

ultimately self-referential understanding of Black Panther politics, one that continues

today to indict even the most banal brands of politics for American racial justice in the

form of "reverse racism."

Herr, however, moves away from such an understanding, even going as far as to

recognize how, despite seeming differences between the racial otherness circulated by

Esquire and that embraced by white masculinity more generally, these constructions

belong to a project of securing white masculinity that perhaps most of all does not want

to think the two together. The distinctions that inform Esquire's representations of both

the Orientalized and the Africanized other seem in this way to work not only to

naturalize the construction of each but to repress any actual political affinities as well.

While Esquire perpetuates constructions of the Orientalized other as benign site of

pleasurable consumption and the Africanized other as menacing tribalist, Herr finds that

his experience pushes him beyond such facile understandings of the racialized

categories upon which American manhood depends. Indeed, Herr finds that every one

of these categories is emptied of its presumed meaning.

We can first see this in Herr’s encounter with a soldier who claims that he is a

member of the Panther Party when they get into a conversation while waiting for

choppers out of Kontum:

"I been heah mo'n eight months now," he said. "I bet I [...] ain' hardly fired back once." "How come?" "Shee-it, I go firin' back, I might kill one a th' Brothers, you dig it?" 160

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I nodded, no Vietcong ever called me honky, and he told me that in his company alone there were more than a dozen Black Panthers, and that [...] he was an agent for [them]. ("Illumination" 75-76)

When the soldier later retracts his statements, claiming he was just kidding, Herr

matter-of-factly comments, "But the Panthers have guys over here. I've met some"

("Illumination" 76). The soldier's chopper then arrives, and "as it rose from the strip he

leaned out and laughed, bringing his arm up and bending it back towards him, palm out

and the fist clenched tightly in the Sign" ("Illumination" 76). What stands out most

immediately in this scene is Herr's treatment of the event, which he neither breaks down

into its constituent parts nor entertains in a smug, hysterical, or ironic manner. On the

contrary, the one note of irony—Herr's reflection that "no Vietcong ever called me

honky"—functions doubly as both confession and revelation. That is, Herr confesses to

the thought processes that work to fortify the fantasy of American manhood at the same

time he turns that irony back on itself by displaying how any solidarity between the

Vietcong and African Americans destabilizes the naturalized linkages between nation

and race.

This disruption is then extended to the very system of occlusive difference upon

which all racialized meaning depends in a sketch related several pages later:

A little boy of about ten came up to a bunch of Marines from Charlie Company. He was laughing and moving his head from side to side in a funny way. The fierceness in his eyes should have told everyone what it was, but it had never occurred to most of the Grunts that a Vietnamese child could be driven mad, too, and by the time they understood it the boy had begun to go for their eyes and tear at their fatigues, putting everyone really up-tight, until one of the spades grabbed him from behind and held his arms. "C'mon, poor 1'il baby, 'fore one a these Grunt mothers shoots you," he said, and carried the boy to where the corpsmen were. (Herr, "Illumination" 81)

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Whereas the preceding Panther scene represents a racial solidarity between

marginalized figures that potentially reinvokes the racial categories they are supposedly

resisting, this vignette works to disrupt dominant racial subjectivity as well. As in the

Panther scene, Herr quite explicitly entertains the notion that there may be dimensions

of solidarity beyond naturalized categories of race in showing a black soldier who can

empathize with the mental breakdown of a Vietnamese boy implicitly brought on by

nationalist military aggression. At first glance, this solidarity appears to imply that the

primary commonality between these racial others is still indelibly tied to their use value

for the white masculine dominant rather than some essential feature of marginalized

identity. Herr takes this one key step further, however, by suggesting that the

Vietnamese boy’s madness is of a piece with the madness of white American men like

the sergeant with the display case or the major who keeps dreaming of Quantico: they

all "could be driven mad." That is, this scene empties all racialized notions of identity

of their meaning when Herr points up the mutually destructive effects the imposition of

such categories has.

It is significant, then, that Herr also begins to register the way in which

dominant identifications are made available to certain people based on the absurd bodily

marker of physical coloring in the sketch that suggestively precedes the Panther scene:

"You guys ought do a story on me sumtahm,” the kid said. He was a helicopter gunner, [...] on his seventeenth consecutive month in-country. "Why should we do a story about you?" "'Cause I'm so fuckin' good,” he said, ”'n' that ain' no shit neither. Got me one hunnert 'n' fifty-se'en gooks kilt. ’N' fifty caribou." ("Illumination" 74- 75)

In stark contrast to the Panther who refuses to shoot at the Vietcong in an act of

solidarity, then, is this gunner who takes unabashed pride in the number of kills he has 162

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. made. Barely distinguishable by the language and dialect they use, the characters seem

almost interchangeable outside of what informs and motivates their actions. By

utilizing the GI vernacular in both scenes, but leaving the gunner racially unmarked

while the Panther is described as "a really big spade," Herr further disrupts the accepted

relationships between certain physicalities, their meaning, and their translation into

language.

This last scene should hardly be read, however, as Herr's unequivocal indictment

of all white male participants in the Vietnam War. His understanding of the war's

implications is much more nuanced than that. What we increasingly see in his articles,

in fact, is a growing recognition of the complicated interchange between the psyche,

subjectivity, and fantasy that is laid bare by a phenomenon as monumental—and

ultimately traumatic—as the Vietnam War. As such, Herr's next and final published

article before the publication ofDispatches , the September and October 1969 two-part

"Khesanh" article, opens with a scene that describes a young Marine whose tour is up

but who returns to camp every time he is taken to the landing strip to catch his ride

home. Caught in a vicious circle of departure and return that leaves him nowhere, the

Marine illustrates the kind of psychological damage wrought by the war, which Herr

sardonically notes the military calls "acute environmental reaction" ("Khesanh" 120).

Indeed, if he then segues into a discussion of the imperceptibility of the terrain and the

elusiveness of the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong, by the end of the piece, the

implication made by Herr is that many of those involved in battle are their own enemies

as much as any external forces. What Herr thus privileges in his report about the siege

of Khesanh is not the infamous battle literally fought during the Tet Offensive, but the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. psychic conflicts catalyzed by the war. And at the heart of Herr’s article is the pair of

characters known as Mayhew and Day Tripper.

Mayhew, an Appalachian-bom white Grunt, and Day Tripper, an African-

American Grunt from Detroit, are in fact among the most developed characters in all of

Herr’s work on Vietnam outside of his own narrative persona. In Herr's words as he

first encounters them:

There were two of them, one a big Negro with a full moustache that drooped over the comers of his mouth, a mean, signifying moustache that would have worked if only there had been the smallest trace of meanness anywhere on his face. He was at least six-three and quarterback thick. [...] The other Marine was white, and if I'd seen him first from the back I would have said that he was eleven years old. ("Khesanh" 1S2)

Evocative of a kind of Huck and Jim dynamic, Day Tripper is the maternal caretaker of

the naive Mayhew, who is singing the Oscar Mayer weiner jingle when they introduce

themselves to Herr. As they become acquainted, the conversation then turns to the fact

that as a reporter, Herr has elected to come to Vietnam and is not even paid a real salary

to do so. While Day Tripper reacts with shock to this idea—'"they ain'got the bread

that'd get me here if I didn' have t' be here'"—Mayhew insists otherwise: '"Horse crap,

[...] Day Tripper loves it. He's short now, but he's cornin' back, ain't you, Day

Tripper?'" (Herr, "Khesanh" 154). Similarly, as the three walk back to Herr’s bunker

and are faced with the bodies of recent casualties, Herr describes how Day Tripper

looks "at the bodies and then at me. It was the look which said, 'See? You see what it

does?' [...] Mayhew wasn't letting himself look at anything. It was as though he were

walking by himself now" ("Khesanh" 154).

It is in this way that, as the narrative progresses, Herr works to distinguish the

two friends: one uninvested in a fantasy of manhood delivered by violence, able to 164

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. admit his fears and confront the mutability of the body, and the other moved by an

external script, insistent on his bravery and a kind of desperate immortality. To borrow

from a subsequent exchange between Mayhew and Day Tripper:

"I ain't never gettm' hit in Vietnam." "Oh no? Okay, mothaf—er, why not? "Cause," Mayhew said, "it don't exist." It was an old joke, but this time he wasn't laughing. (Herr, "Khesanh" 156)

When Mayhew then signs up for an extended tour of duty without first telling Day

Tripper his intentions, the drama is brought full circle. Mysteriously absent for over an

hour, Mayhew suddenly reappears and confronts Day Tripper with the news:

"Hey, you hear it, motherf—er? [...] I just went over and extended." The smile vanished on Day Tripper's face. He looked like he didn't understand for a second, and then he looked angry, almost dangerous. "Say, again?" "Yeah," Mayhew said. "I just saw the Old Man about it." "Uh-huh. How long you extend for?" "Just four months.” "Jus' four months. Tha's real fine, Jim." (Herr, "Khesanh" 156)

In a scene literally at the core of his article and ultimately his book, Herr articulates the

substance of what can only be described as an imaginary scenario in which war is the

theatre in which men can be men. While Mayhew describes himself as having gone to

see "the Old Man" to formalize his extension, this phrase alludes to much more than a

high-ranking officer, also suggesting the dominant cultural ideals of manhood from

which Mayhew's fantasy takes its cues. At the same time, Herr's use of the "Man"

unequivocally exposes the whiteness that constitutes American manhood when Day

Tripper is able to see Mayhew's deferral to the "Man" as absurd and self-destructive,

quipping that Mayhew might as well just blow himself up with a grenade. Within a

context that likens the pair to America's best known black and white compatriots, this

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announcement, "Tha's real fine, Jim."' For this response works ironically to position

Mayhew as the slave—not so much as the result of any real material relationship to the

"Man" but as the result of a psychic relationship that takes that "Man" to be realizable.

As we have seen, this psychic relationship imagines the white male subject as

purveyor of knowledge in an attempt to master contingency and mutability. That Herr

has begun to recognize this feature of American manhood is vividly displayed in a

scene from the second part of Herr's article, "Conclusion at Khesanh," wherein the two-

month-old corpse of what is assumed to be an American soldier is taken to back to base:

We got out at graves registration with it, where one of the guys opened the bag and said, "S—, this is a Gookl What'd they bring him here for?" "Look, Jesus, he's got on our uniform." "I don't give a f—, that ain't no American, that’s a f— ing Gookl" "Wait a minute," the other one said. "Maybe it's a spade." ("Conclusion" 205)

Most immediately, this scene demonstrates a desire to "know" the corpse, to rid

themselves of the indeterminability of identity concretized by the body. Within the

context of the rest of Herr's piece on "Khesanh," however, the men's exercising of

knowledge to refuse the possibility that this extremely decomposed body could possibly

be American reads as a fascinating attempt to veil the mutability of the national

imaginary and the dominant subject with which it imagines itself. Herr then most

forcefully stresses the dangers of acceding to the ideals of American manhood when he

later relates that Mayhew is killed in action but Day Tripper makes it home. Herr's

point, of course, is not that one can avoid death by rejecting those ideals but that the

denial of mutability places one in violent proximity to all subjects, including oneself.

Nor is Herr's point that African-American men or other men of color cannot be seduced 166

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. by these ideals, his portrait of the Panther he meets in fact gestures in that direction;

Herr does, however, seem to comprehend American manhood as somehow perversely,

even incipiently, white.

It seems appropriate, then, that "Conclusion at Khesanh” would contain Herr’s

return to the original site of his own refusal, the "Man" represented by his fictional

General—and specifically, to a scene that replicates Herr's former exchanges with him.

In this instance, Herr joins a Time magazine reporter in interviewing General Tompkins

of the Third Marine Division. The difference in Herr's feeling about high command

now, though, is palpable. A huge relief map that covers the wall behind General

Tompkins receives little more than passing notice; more notably, Herr give little notice

to the general himself, instead finding his attention distracted by the Grunts he knows

are on the frontline as they sit comfortably in an office. When Herr finally turns his

attention back to the interview, the other reporter is concluding a lengthy tactical

question about the continued fighting at Khesanh, which is into its forty-fifth day, and

what the Marines would do if there was a simultaneous attack on Khesanh as well as all

of its supporting bases. The response that Herr desperately hopes the general will give,

to display horror at the thought and "Remember Mayhew," is not the one he makes:

"The general smiled, the crack trapper anticipating something good, past all doubting.

'T hat. . . is exactly... what w e. . . want him to do'" ("Conclusion" 122). What this

moment thus displays is Herr's own rejection of the white masculine dominant that

drives American foreign policy in Vietnam and drives white male subjects like Mayhew

to carry out that policy. Only a few pages later Herr also describes his encounter with

an extremely devout GI who makes Herr read a passage from Psalms that implores the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. reader not to be afraid, claiming, "A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at

thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee" ("Conclusion" 202). Herr’s response

hardly confirms this fantasy of immutability in his impulse to find the GI a different

passage from Psalms, "the one that talked about those who were defiled with their own

works and sent a'whoring with their own inventions" ("Conclusion" 202). The

combined effect of both of the preceding narrative moments, then, is not only to

implicate American manhood, but to suggest that there is a responsibility for the vast

sites of violence engendered by that fantasy that rests with the men themselves.

I believe the predominant effect of Herr's last article, then, is to forward the

notion that an event like Vietnam inevitably takes our most cherished cultural fantasies

into battle along with the real people who wage war. And Herr does not fail ultimately

to count himself among those doing battle with their cultural baggage in his increasing

willingness to admit to his own fantasmatic investments in American manhood. In one

of his few discussions of actual battle in his "Khesanh" piece, for example, while he

describes the anxiety and the fear that occur during firefight, Herr concludes the passage

with a much different emphasis:

It came back the same way every time, dreaded and welcome, balls and bowels turning over together, your senses working like strobes, [...] reaching in at the point of calm and springing all the joy and dread ever known,ever known by everyone who ever lived, unutterable in its speeding brilliance [...]. And every time, you were so weary afterwards, so empty of everything but being alive, that you couldn't recall any of it, except to know that it was like something else you had felt once before. It remained obscure for a long time, but after enough times the memory took shape and substance and finally revealed itself one afternoon during the breaking-off of a fire fight. It was the feeling you'd had when you were much younger and undressing a girl for the first time. ("Conclusion" 120)

Read in conjunction with the rest of Herr's article, my own sense is that this description

stands not as a romanticization of battle but rather as a confession theo fromantic 168

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fantasies that might work to propel one into battle in the first place. The result is that

Herr lands on a way to begin taking responsibility for the fantasy of American manhood

he has realized animates his identity—and this is the central concern of his final book-

length treatment of his experiences in Vietnam.

"Some terrible desperation": The Ethics o f Masculinity's Impossibility

Because Herr was employed in the capacity of a reporter, traveling and working

for eighteen months with the press corps in Vietnam, it at first seems unremarkable that

the title he would eventually choose for his book would beDispatches. A dispatch is,

after all, what journalists call a news item sent in to a newspaper or magazine. As we

have seen, when Esquire editor Harold Hayes first agreed to employ Herr as a

correspondent for his magazine, it was with the understanding that Herr would be

writing a monthly column from Vietnam. Yet if Herr finally realizes that he went with

the expectation of one kind of information only to get another—recall he never did

write that column—a title derived from the word "dispatch" necessarily takes on its

other nuances of meaning. These nuances spring from an etymology originating in the

Spanish meaning "to get rid of' and the Middle French meaning "to set free," as well as

from the word's other contemporary understanding: "to engage in the act of killing."

Yet, these potentially disparate significations are not so disparate at all when applied to

Herr's text and the "terrible desperation" that can be said to inform it.

As Herr himself has noted about his experience of writing Dispatches:

I came back from Vietnam having written only a very small part of the book while I was there. I wrote two-thirds of the book in eighteen months after I came back, and at that point there was some kind of massive collapse, a profound paralysis that I cantdirectly attribute to Vietnam, although Vietnam 169

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was certainly the catalyst. Vietnam was the last portion of a long journey. (Schroeder 35)

The "small part of the book” Herr describes is the original version of "Hell Sucks" while

the majority of what he wrote in his first eighteen months back would be his several

other published pieces "Illumination Rounds" and "Khesanh." At best, then, I think it is

more accurate to characterize Herr as refining his form in the years preceding the

publication of his book. Indeed, although numerous critics have suggested that Herr

needed the time preceding the publication of his book to develop his form, it seems

unlikely that this is what Herr describes when he refers to his "massive collapse" and

"profound paralysis" and when his early pieces had already laid the groundwork for his

unique narrative style. Rather, I believe that this pause in production is more related to

Herr’s discomfort with his relationship to his completed work and what he discovers

there.13 We have already seen, for instance, how Herr alters his original General-

centered version of "Hell Sucks" and how that first article contrasts with his subsequent

"Illumination Rounds" and the two-part "Khesanh" article, which go almost unchanged.

The achievement of Dispatches, as we will see, thus lies in Herr's decision to structure

his text around two dual intentions that indict himself as well as the men he encounters:

confessing to the seductive pleasures of the fantasy of American manhood while at the

same time insisting on the violence of that fantasy.

From early on inDispatches, then, Herr includes himself in his story, and not

just as a presence, but as yet another site of his investigation:

Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude

170

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. because I didn't know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you {Dispatchesdid. 20)

What Herr has learned is the ethical imperative of seeing—of knowing—certain events:

as an artist and human being, he is not absolved of an event merely because he did not

participate in it. Put another way, Herr recognizes that far from holding him at one

remove from the object of his attention and in a position of mastery over it, knowing

and the desire to know actually reveal him to be subject to that thing. To borrow Herr's

reflection near the end of "Breathing In," the opening section of Dispatches: "Years of

thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it

becomes experience, and then afterward [you] can't handle the experience”{Dispatches

68).

In the new Dispatches material, Herr is particularly insistent that the desire to

experience war and join in its supporting machinery is informed by the desire to more

fully embody masculinity, whether you participate directly or indirectly. One o f Herr’s

methods is to record his encounters with this desire and present them to the reader:

"First letter I got from my old man was all about how proud he was that I'm here and how we have this duty to, you know, / don't fucking know, whatever. . . and it really made me feel great. Shit, my father hardly said good morning to me before. Well, I been here eight months now, and when I get home I'm gonna have all I can do to keep from killing that cocksucker {Dispatches " 29)

As Herr also displays, the fantasy is one both fed by the culture and kept alive by the

subject himself. As he says in one of his earliest confessions of this dynamic:

"Somewhere all the mythic tracks intersected, from the lowest John Wayne wet dream

to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy, and where they did I believe that everyone

knew everything about everyone else, everyone of us there a true volunteer" (Herr,

Dispatches 20). 171

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. But what Herr perhaps most importantly displays is the vital relationship of

American manhood to the body as supposed bearer of identificatory meaning, hinted at

in the preceding passage. It is little surprise, then, that the scenes of war Herr describes

so often intersect with the imagery of satisfied sexual difference:

"Quakm' and Shakin'," they called it, great balls of fire, Contact. Then it was you and the ground: kiss it, eat it, fuck it, plow it with your whole body, get as close as you can without being in it yet or of it, guess who's flying around about an inch above your head? Pucker and submit, it's the ground. Under Fire would take you out of your head and your body too, the space you'd seen a second ago between subject and object wasn't there anymore [...]. Amazing, unbelievable, guys who'd played a lot of hard sports said they'd never felt anything like it, the sudden drop and rocket rush of the hit [...] almost open to clear orgasmic death-by-drowning in it. {Dispatches 63)

What this experience appears to promise is whole consciousness. What it really cedes,

though, is the finite body. The anxious relationship all subjects necessarily bear to their

bodies has reached a sick and feverish pitch in Dispatches, whether represented by total

destruction of the body or total escape into it. Even if seemingly delivered, the promise

of whole consciousness—the promise of the fantasy—can never be sustained. Yet Herr

succeeds in taking responsibility for this fantasy and the seductive promise of

satisfaction it makes at the same time he confesses to its pleasures:

Unless of course you'd shit your pants or were screaming or praying or giving anything at all to the hundred-channel panic that blew word salad all around you and sometimes clean through you. Maybe you couldn't love the war and hate it inside the same instant, but [...] they spun together in a strobic wheel rolling all the way up until you were literally High On War [...]. Coming off a jag like that could really make a mess out of you.{Dispatches 63)

In admitting to the violent impossibility of American manhood, and the fleetingness of

even its apparent satisfaction, Herr works toward emptying the fantasy of its lure.

Among the most key moments linking the pleasure and violence of American

manhood is thus the climactic final scene of the section entitled "Colleagues." While in 172

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. much of the rest of Dispatches Herr meditates on the intersections of the role of reporter

and the role of combatant, or focuses exclusively on the soldiers and officers, this

section of his book is a meditation on just the journalists—cultural purveyors of

knowledge. "Colleagues" begins with a dream-like scenario in which a reporter is

sitting at his desk typing while a "Colonel” and a "Kid" look on. The Kid asks, '"What

makes him do it?'” and the Colonel replies, "'I don't know, son [...]. Maybe he figures

he's got a job to do, too. Maybe it's because he's somebody who really cares "'

(Herr, Dispatches 187). Yet throughout this next-to-last section ofDispatches, Herr

foregrounds the felt power and glamour o f being a member of the press corps in

Vietnam and the kind of privilege it signifies. Inevitably springing from the tension

between these two contrary notions of the journalist's role is the question of ethical

responsibility.

Significantly, then, the culminating scene in this sequence of sketches and

reflections features British war photographer Tim Page, who is renowned for his rock-

star aura and manic daring. Already having had numerous and legendary close brushes

with death, Page is again nearly killed when he steps on a land mine and takes a two-

inch piece of shrapnel in the base of his brain. Unlike his other close calls, however,

this one leaves him paralyzed on his left side and permanently disfigures his face, so

much so that Herr does not recognize him in the hospital. Describing his encounters

with Page after the accident, Herr details how Page creates what is in essence an altar to

the Vietnam War, decorated with Buddhas, model airplanes, toy helicopters, prayer

candles arranged in an empty belt of .50-caliber cartridges, and Day-Glo posters

featuring monks, tanks, and soldiers. "He began talking more and more about the war,"

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Heir says, "often coming close to tears when he remembered how happy he and all of us

had been there” (Dispatches 248). It is then that Herr segues into the very last moment

of the scene and the section as a whole, where Page receives a letter asking him to write

a book "whose purpose would be to once and for all 'take the glamour out of war*":

Page couldn't get over it. "Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you dothat? [...]. Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is good for you, you can t take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." He was really speechless, working his hands up and down to emphasize the sheer insanity of it. [...] "Ohhh, what a laugh! Take the bloody glamour out of bloodywar!" {Dispatches 248-9)

That this scene is a self-referential one for Herr—not only because he too is a journalist

but because he will in fact write the book that Tim Page derides—becomes patently

clear when we recognize that Herr's tact is to lay bare the process by which war is

invested with glamour. Surely, the dangers of the imaginary are precisely what Herr

evocatively gestures at earlyDispatches in when he relates the war story told to him by

one of the Grunts:

But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it: "Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened." I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he'd waste time telling stories to anyone dumb as I was. (6)

What I believe Herr later understands about the story is that it rejects fantasy and its

perpetuation, that it is a critique of and intervention against those ideals that have left

man at war with himself as well as so many others. Herr, however, chooses to intervene

in the fantasy at the opposite extreme, by telling a "war story” that forces our gaze to

rest on the fantasy itself. As Herr's book makes clear, the glamorization of an event like

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avoid facing inevitable and destabilizing questions regarding their desire—and the

capacity to know fully what it means to have an certain anatomy and skin shading.16

Herr’s book refuses to be this place, and in this way it appears to make explicit—for him

and for us—the precariousness of identity that has been implicitly true all along: "We

came to fear something more complicated than death, an annihilation less final but more

complete [...]. We got out and became like everyone else who has been through a war:

changed, enlarged and (some things are expensive to say) incomplete"(Dispatches 243-

44).

It is in fact hard, after reading his account of the war, not to see Herr as

lamenting that perhaps we did not really need even the Vietnam conflict to teach us this

implicit truth. The nostalgia to which such a view commits Herr is thus a nostalgia of

the best kind, hearkening back not to a past age o f wholeness in which men knew how

to be men, of an America still innocent, but rather to an age in which men might have

recognized that there is no way to be the idealized man of American manhood. Herr

points toward this age of constitutive instability by invoking a metaphorical "Vietnam"

to name that more universal, deterritorialized experience of

dissatisfaction/loss/mutability that we all have experienced. At this metaphorical level,

"Vietnam” is America—that is to say, what we (and Herr) learn in and through the

literal transport of men in war to the physical territory designated as Vietnam might just

as easily have been glimpsed in America itself. This is, I take it, the ethical import of

Herr's memorable, haunting, and instructive final claim: "Vietnam—we've all been

there" (Dispatches 260).

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1 Heir, Dispatches 65. 2 As the renowned cover artist George Lois later described the article and controversial cover photograph he created in response: "The very thought that the U.S. Army, mid-war, could beunionized surely warranted anEsquire cover. And that's why this ethnic GI, recently drafted, chewing out a waspy four-star General, commanded a lot of attention" (22). Truly, the impact ofEsquire during the 1960s under editor Harold Hayes and advertiser George Lois cannot be emphasized enough. Providing the graphics to accompanyEsquire editor Harold Hayes' publication, Lois and his cover art are synonymous with the eventual cultural reign sealed Esquireby in the 1960s, whose circulation rose from 750,000 to near 2 million between 1962 and 1973. For a helpful and interesting history of Esquire, focusing mostly on the tenure of Harold Hayes, see Polsgrove,It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun (1995). ? For a useful collection ofEsquire covers by George Lois with his own accompanying commentary, see Lois, Covering the '60s (1996). 3 The very title ofEsquire appeals to this notion in its evocation of English gentry rankings, esquire being the ranking that precedes knighthood. 4 This is George Lois' apt description of Esky, who initially presided over the magazine covers as a puppet or cartoon figure. Lois was in large part brought on by Hayes to find an alternative to the "Esky dirty-old man covers" (Lois 68). While Lois' covers were a definitive departure from the original "girlie" covers Esquire,at Lois nevertheless retained Esk/s leering face to dot the "i" in the title. 51 will attempt to distinguish throughout this chapter between Herr’s book about Vietnam, Dispatches, and his writing or work on Vietnam—which is meant to include the earlier published pieces as well as the later book. 6 See Polsgrove and Schroeder, "Michael Herr: 'We’ve All Been There"' (1992), for further details about Herr's exchanges with Hayes. 7 While describing Dispatches as New Journalism accurately summarizes critical opinion about the work, and even the opinion of New Journalism "founding fathers" like Harold Hayes, this is not Herr's own opinion about his writing. Although Herr attributes other so-called New Journalists—such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson—with inspiring his work, Herr does not readily identify as a New Journalist. Rather, Herr prefers referring to himself as simply "a writer," rejecting the titles of novelist and historian as well. At the heart of Herr's discomfort with a title other than writer seems to be his sense that they presuppose or fail to articulate the writer's relationship to fact and fiction, what he has called "the anxious little secret of New Journalism" (Schroeder 44). Herr, on the other hand, has attempted to be consistently forthright about his use of fictional license in compiling an account of his experiences in Vietnam. For more on Herr, see Schroeder, "Michael Herr: We've All Been There'" (1992). For a comprehensive discussion of New Journalism, also see Hellmann, Fables o f Fact (1981). For representative examples of this journalistic style as well as some discussion, see Wolfe and Johnson, The New Journalism (1975), and Hayes,Smiling Through the Apocalypse (1987).

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8 The first critical essay to investigate this connection is John Hellmann's popularly cited article "The New Journalism and Vietnam: Memory as Structure in Michael Herr's Dispatches" (1980). 9 The November 3, 1977 issue ofRolling Stone excerpted the book's last section, "Breathing Out," and ran it as "LZ Loon." While several critical articles on Dispatches claim that Rolling Stone published early segments of Herr's work on Vietnam in the late 1960s, Herr himself has confirmed for me through personal correspondence that no such article or articles exist. One source of this scholarly errata may be the copyright page in Dispatches, which states that "Portions of this book were originally published in New American Review 7, Esquire, and Rolling Stone.” It seems that perhaps the earlier publication dates for Herr's articles in the first two of these periodicals have been mistakenly applied to the third. 10 This tradition of "power charts" dates by most accounts to the inflammatory July 1963 chart outlining "The Structure of the Literary Establishment in America" by Rust Hills. See Polsgrove. 11 By "extensive" I mean revision that involves significantly changing the content and organization of a piece of writing. In other words, even the most cursory comparison of "Hell Sucks” in the original and in its later form reveals that revision has taken place, whereas very close readings of the subsequent versions of "Illumination Rounds" and "Khesanh" are necessary to recognize that they have been at all revised for inclusion in Dispatches. 12 While I will use the phrases "speaking persona” or "organizing consciousness" where I can, those instances where I refer to "Herr" in relation to his writing on Vietnam should not be understood to invoke the real person Michael Herr. This differentiation derives from my assumptions about the constructed nature of the autobiographical and from Herr's own insistence that his work is in fact best described as a novel. Herr is quite explicit that his work is an intertwining of both "fact and fiction," that he thinks of Dispatches as more of a novel than journalism or any other genre. In Herr's own words, "Everything in Dispatches happenedfo r me, even if it didn't necessarily happento me" (Schroeder 44). Similarly, Herr himself describes the General as "a fictional character." 13 See Hellmann, "The New Journalism and Vietnam" (1980); Taylor, "American Personal Narrative of the War in Vietnam" (1980); Biedler, "1975 to the Present" (1982); Myers, "The Writer As Alchemist" (1988); Stewart, "Style in Dispatches” (1990); and Ringnalda, "Michael Herr's Spectral Journalism" (1994). 14 See, respectively, Myers and Stewart. 15 As we have seen, this discomfort is not totally absent in the beginning. Herr in fact admits to the ambiguous psychic territory in which he finds himself while writing "Hell Sucks" when, in the notes he includes for the Esquire section introducing its authors, he says that, "It has been frustrating, dangerous as hell and painful in more ways than I can tell you, and I want out for a bit. (It has been exciting too, but I won't go into that here)" (Aug. 1968, 32). 16 This inability to know would inevitably compromise the kind of authority to which white men have believed themselves entitled. We might recall here the General

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. invoked earlier who responds to every movement of the "Enemy" by positing his (and the U.S. Command's) own desire for that very movement asprior to it. hi such a desperate and ridiculous claim, it is difficult not to see a strategy determined to avoid desire as such—i.e., the desire of the other in its opaque dimension, which then has the effect of making one's own desire (and authority) far from transparent.

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RELEGITIMIZING AMERICAN MANHOOD: MARIO PUZO'S THE GODFATHER AND ITS REACTIONARY ALLURE

Behind every great fortune there is a crime ~ epigraph to The Godfather (1969) taken from Balzac

For all the challenges to the fantasy of American manhood that would occur

during the 1960s, one of the more lamentable, if unsurprising, legacies of that decade

has been the attempt to relegitimize it. Bearing up against his own white-collar angst,

countercultural revolt, and national military disillusionment, in addition to the multiple

challenges posed by groups from the political margins, the white male subject found at

least one new voice in the neoconservative movement that began to gain momentum at

the end of the 1960s. Recoding the racial and gender politics of American manhood as

a matter of the rights of "the individual," neoconservativism gradually succeeded in

delimiting the national democratic imaginary to its original common denominator: the

privileged white male.

Read against this neoconservative trend, one of the most popular narratives of

the late 1960s and 1970s—Mario Puzo's The Godfather (1969)—reveals itself to be

much more than racy pulp crime fiction or a disinterested historical representation of

the past. Rather, I will argue that the seemingly perennial appeal ofThe Godfather 179

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. story lies in the embattled relationship its characters bear to American manhood and in

the narrative's turn, against its own better inclinations, toward a solution deeply

compatible with the tenets of neoconservative ideology. In articulating this feature of

The Godfathers depiction of masculinity, my claim is not just that Puzo's narrative

reflects and is illuminated by neoconservative political discourse, although my detailed

examination neoconservative ideology of course shows this. Indeed, I likewise argue in

this chapter that The Godfather sheds just as much light on the "text" that is

neoconservative ideology as that ideology does on the form and content of the Corleone

saga.

Neoconservativism and the Political Recoding o f Race and Gender

In their groundbreaking work of critical race theory,Racial Formation in the

United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant have concisely illustrated how the

crux of the emergent new right and neoconservative projects of the late 1960s was to

train public attention on the American civic ideal of equality of opportunity while

simultaneously insisting that any collective or group rights, especially those demanding

an equality of result, were fundamentally anti-democratic and thus anti-American. Omi

and Winant distinguish the new right from neoconservativism in their discussion of

emergent groups participating in reactionary racial politics during the late 1960s by

reserving the latter term primarily to describe ethnicity theorists and cultural

commentators such as Nathan Glazer and Michael Novak. Because the actual

distinctions between the new right and neoconservatives are quite fine in practice and

because the new conservativism of the period in general does signal a distinct break

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from traditional conservativism, however, I have given preference to the term

"neoconservativism" to designate this unique rightward ideological trend. Omi and

Winant in fact discuss the convergence of the two groups beginning in the early 1970s.

My main reason for choosing "neoconservativism" as my working phrase, however, is

that it is the term "conservative" that has most often served, and continues to serve, as

the public self-designation for those on the right—far, new, or other.1

Having succeeded in forwarding equality of opportunity as the true democratic

norm, in part because civil rights arguments were initially founded on the same

principle, neoconservatives were then able to recode more blatant calls for "white

rights," characteristic of the emergent far right, as a simple invocation of the individual

rights attending traditional liberal democracy.2 In this way, fetishizing the individual

has allowed neoconservatives to disavow the fundamental contemporary and historical

functioning of racial oppression and discrimination in thesocial order of the state,

which refers not just to society's broad cultural context but to its institutions, policies,

conditions, and rules (Omi and Winant 83).3 The result has been that neoconservative

attention to an issue like "reverse discrimination" has devolved around heightening the

"race-thinking” and alienation said to attend any rejection of liberal democracy while

disregarding "the resentments and polarization which adherence to liberalism entails"

(Omi and Winant 130).

Bearing in mind the history of the liberal democratic subject in the United

States, which originated not only as a specifically white-raced individual but as a

specifically male-gendered and propertied individual as well, the potentially dangerous

reciprocal relationship between American manhood and the neoconservative project

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in Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign of 1964. Traditional conservativism had in

fact historically aligned itself with the African-American fight for equal rights at least

since the appearance of the abolitionist movement.4 Only after the early-60s

Republican insurrection that took Goldwater as its figurehead, in which pro-civil rights,

eastern establishment conservatives were ousted and effectively replaced with a new

brand of segregationist, formerly Democratic conservative, did conservatives in

general—and the Republican party in particular—become affiliated with anti-civil

rights doctrine.5 Goldwater was actually a conservative ideologue, who even against his

own private opposition to segregation, took it to be his mission to purge the Republican

party of any liberal inclinations that would lead to increased federal involvement of any

kind. As the first Republican since Reconstruction to take major states from the deep

South, then, Goldwater displayed through his electoral performance that the issue of

race could break the New Deal stronghold in that region since those voters remained

almost uniformly loyal to the federal agenda outside of civil rights.6 That is,

Goldwater's contradictory appeal ultimately revealed that a whole new constituency

could be won over under the guise of conservative ideology, a guise to which

segregationists and anti-civil rights advocates were more than willing to concede and

that shielded all involved, whatever their motivations, from accusations of racism

(Edsall 41).

Goldwater's experience may not have proven of much use, however, were it not

for a wider shift in public opinion away from support for civil rights measures and the

1968 presidential bid made by George Wallace. Indeed, events after 1964 such as the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ghetto riots, countercultural dissension, the northward shift of the civil rights

movement, and rising crime, illegitimacy, and welfare rates indisputably contributed to

a fracturing of the once broad support for civil rights. But it was Wallace who was able

to synthesize a conservative strategy out o f these disparate circumstances. A former

segregationist of the most virulent brand through the early 1960s, and a former

Democrat turned member of the American Independent Party, Wallace circa 1968

serves as an incarnation of the critical post-WWII transformation of white male

dominance in its ostensibly less sinister reactionary articulation. Avoiding openly racist

language, Wallace instead presented himself as the "law and order" candidate who

sanctioned the use of force in quelling protests and ghetto riots, who denounced

"welfare mothers" who were "breeding children as a cash crop," and who condemned

the evils of busing (Patterson 698, Weed 50). Wallace also fashioned himself as a

defender of "traditional values" in his regular attacks against feminists, anti-war

protestors, hippies, and sundry leftists (Patterson 698).7

Serving as a kind of synecdoche for what could be described as Wallace's white

male identity politics was his assault on "big government": "Liberals, intellectuals, and

long-hairs have run the country for too long [...] over-educated, ivory-tower folks with

pointed heads looking down their noses at us" (qtd. in Patterson 699). This delineation

of "us" versus "them" served Wallace particularly well in the face of growing blue-

collar and white ethnic backlash against what they believed was federal bureaucracy run

amok. Thus, what made Wallace's campaign worthy of attention was not the expected

support from southern segregationists and the far right, even when those groups openly

included organizations like the KKK and the John Birch Society. Rather, Wallace's

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. campaign was remarkable because he drew such a large following nationally, making it

onto the ballot in all fifty states, and especially in the North, from which he drew the

majority of his popular vote outside the south.8 A survey taken in the fall of 1968

revealed that over 20 percent of voters claimed they would cast with Wallace if he were

not a third-party candidate (Farber 302).

Before those election-day votes would be cast, however, a young political

analyst named Kevin Phillips would proffer the Nixon headquarters a detailed analysis

of voting trends in the U.S., contending that a more polished version of Wallace's

populist, racially inflected politics could be used to secure a Republican win and

significant conversion to their constituencies (Omi and Winant 124). While more

commonly affiliated with the emergent new right, Wallace thus served as the prototype

for what would become neoconservative rhetoric and political strategy. Christened "the

southern strategy" by political observers, Richard Nixon's platform offered a refined

version of the issues Wallace had made famous, calling for "law and order" while

criticizing Great Society programs, liberal Supreme Court decisions, and busing. Nixon

also appealed to the "silent majority," a term invented by his own strategists, here

deployed in one of Nixon's famous campaign pleas: "Working Americans have become

the forgotten Americans. In a time when the national rostrums and forums are given

over to shouters and protestors and demonstrators, they have become the silent

Americans. Yet they have a legitimate grievance that should be rectified and a just

cause that should prevail" (qtd. in Patterson 702).

In the end, Nixon's victory over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey hardly

gave him the mandate of the people. The vote itself was extremely close, with Nixon

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(Patterson 704). Moreover, at a new postwar low, only 60.6 percent of eligible voters

participated in the election, and there was a noteworthy decrease in participation among

historically Democratic poor, working-class, and lower middle-class populations

(Patterson 708). Most striking of all, however, is the fact that Humphrey's final share of

the total white vote was less than 35 percent (Patterson 708). Even if Nixon did not

have the mandate of the people, neoconservativism certainly did have a mandate from

white Americans. In fact, by the time mature neoconservativism would reach what was

perhaps its pinnacle of the last quarter of the twentieth century—Ronald Reagan's 1984

election landslide—the neoconservative victory would in large part be attributable

solely to the white male vote throughout the country. As reported in theSan Francisco

Chronicle: "Reagan won every category of white males except white Jewish males___

He won rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, young and old, North and South, Yuppie

and blue collar" (qtd. in Omi and Winant 133).9 In the move toward

neoconservativism's ascendancy, then, white men have played a fundamental role in

sanctioning its agenda of individualism, anti-statism, and traditional morality and family

values, which in turn revivifies their cultural authority and power. These are the same

ideological themes that animate one of the 1970s most popular novels— The Godfather.

Individualism, or the Crime o f Great Fortune

Published in March of 1969, Mario Puzo's The Godfather remained near or at

the top of the New York Times bestseller list for most of the sixty-seven weeks it was

ranked on the list (Puzo, The Godfather Papers 40). Puzo's Sicilian crime family epic

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[publishing], of all time," selling more than 21 million copies since its publication

(Zaleski 64-65). Undeniably, The Godfather is one of the best-selling novels in recent

publishing history. Add to its commercial success as a novel the critically acclaimed,

box-office blockbuster film version directed by Francis Ford CoppolaThe and

Godfather also becomes one of the 1970's best received and most familiar narratives of

any kind. Inspiring a multitude of sought-after merchandise, from a poster featuring

Eton Corleone to the popular movie soundtrack to bumper stickers and coffee mugs

featuring the Don's famous line, "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse,” the

1974 film sequel only secured the story’s place in post-60s popular culture.10

Indeed, the wild critical and financial success of The Godfather film has

generated a longstanding and continued interest in that version of Puzo's narrative and

its two sequels. Some have gone as far as to creditThe Godfather with single-handedly

reviving mass interest in Hollywood cinema. Whether or not this is true, Coppola's film

certainly generated the unprecedented revenue to warrant close attention, a regard only

underscored by the multiple Oscar nominations and awards given to both the first film

and The Godfather II. This is the legacy reflected in the critical treatment of Puzo's

narrative, which has come more often to be discussed as Francis Ford Coppola's. Given

that the success of the first film can be largely attributed to the success of the book,

there are important grounds for giving the novel careful attention as well.11 In fact,

little else than the book itself can explain the standing-line-only ticket sales for the

limited premiere of a film that was purposely kept low budget and given modest

promotion. Published a full three years prior to the release of the first film, the novel

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Godfather, must be treated as the cultural event it was. This is all the more the case

when it becomes clear that Puzo's story is inflected with the same tensions catalyzing

the rise of neoconservativism.

On its surface, The Godfather is a novel about an Italian immigrant family, the

Corleones, that has risen to power over the course of the first half of the twentieth

century through the system of organized crime in the United States. The plot of the

story in part recounts this rise to power, but primarily follows a series of challenges to

the established Corleone family business by internal family conflicts and by external

competitors. The main external threat against the Corleones comes from the Barzini

and Tattaglia crime families, who have joined together behind the entrepreneurial drug

racketeer Virgil Solozzo. Motivating this aggressive move is the felt sense of the

competing crime families that Don Corleone is past his prime, as indicated by his

refusal to sanction any Corleone participation in the budding drug market, and the

realization that there is no evident heir to him within the family business, leaving the

Corleone interests vulnerable to takeover. Indeed, the latter perception is accurate since

the greatest threat to the Corleone family business is the lack of a clear internal

successor to Vito Corleone, the current Don of the family. In line are Vito's sons

Santino (Sonny), Frederico (Fredo), and Michael, although the Don recognizes the

incompatibility of the job for Sonny, whom he knows is too impetuous, and Fredo,

whom he knows does not have the proper leadership skills. Opening with the wedding

of daughter Connie Corleone to Carlo Rizzi in August 194S, soon after the surrender of

the Japanese in WWII, the plot of the novel thus traces the return of Michael into the

family, who as the novel begins has effectively cut himself off from full relations with

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disdained for its criminal activity. The beginning of the novel also establishes a

secondary story line focused on the Las Vegas singer and Hollywood actor Johnny

Fontane, godson to Vito Corleone. But the principle focus is ultimately on the Don and

his relationship with Michael, newly returned from the Pacific as a decorated hero and

currently studying mathematics at Dartmouth. Michael is, in effect, on the cusp of full

American assimilation with his engagement to New Englander Kay Adams when an

attempt on his father's life by Solozzo pulls him back into the family fold.

Drawn, into the negotiations between his family and Solozzo as a novice whom

the other side can trust, Michael recognizes the position this puts him in and volunteers

to gun down Solozzo and the crooked police chief McCluskey to assure that additional

immediate attempts on his father's life will not be taken. Having committed the

murders, Michael must leave the country and seek refuge in Sicily, where he takes up

traditional village life and marries a village girl, not knowing when or if he will be able

to return to the United States. Exposed to the corrupt authority of Sicily's ruling power,

the Mafia, Michael gains an increasing appreciation for his father’s desire to secure his

own power, an appreciation fully solidified when Michael's Italian wife is killed in an

act of organizational vengeance aimed at Michael. Meanwhile, in the face of ongoing

gang violence resulting from the initial attempt on the Don's life, which has also

included the murder of Sonny Corleone, the Don comes to the realization that he must

broker the peace by consenting to support the other families who wish to enter the drug

market, but not before he secures Michael's safe return, free from retribution. However,

knowing that Michael now wishes to apprentice himself to his father and assume

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move that will allow Michael to reestablish the domination of the Corleone syndicate

through a surprise attack on the Barzini-Tattaglia faction and several traitors to the

family,caporegime Tessio and in-law Carlo Rizzi. At the same time, this plan shifts the

Corleone empire to Las Vegas with the purported goal of legitimizing all of their

business interests as soon as possible.

Since the debut of Puzo's novel in 1969, several significant strains of criticism

have emerged. The first situates The Godfather as being foremost an Italian-American

text, one in which—depending on the critic—Puzo either capitulates to ethnic

stereotypes or challenges them.12 Other scholars, however, have read The Godfather

more broadly as a social novel that offers a mixed critique of American capitalism and

family. John Cawelti has offered the most extensive reading in this vein, though Fredric

Jameson's later and more brief assessment is the best known.13 In general, this critical

strain reads Puzo's novel as capturing what Jameson has famously called a "Utopian

longing'' for the family in the face of the capitalist violence that conditions modem

subjectivity. The crux of the argument made by Cawelti and Jameson is that although

the Corleone business is ultimately an ideological substitution for the powerful interests

of big business and institutional bureaucracy, reflecting the mixture of fascination and

abhorrence most Americans have come to feel for corporate society, the Corleone

family offers us a fantasy of familial intimacy and safety—in one of its purest forms,

nonetheless, as an ethnic enclave. In the most recent strain of criticism to emerge,

however, Thomas J. Ferraro has challenged the neat binary of his critical predecessors

by arguing that family in Puzo's novel is hardly sanctuary from a capitalist world.

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ethnicity by celebrating the ethnic family, the Mafia achieves its romantic luster not

because Puzo portrays the Italian-American family as a separate sphere lying outside of

capitalism, but because the Italian-American family emerges as a potent structure within

it" (37). This reading thus insists that rather than standing in opposition to market-

based opportunity, the family in fact participates as a successful agent within the

market, which conversely structures their relationships as a family.14

I would here like to further complicate the third critical strain, which I believe

correctly situates the family inside the market system, by teasing out the implications of

the Corleone participation in that system. While Ferraro's interest in displaying what he

calls the simultaneity of family and business in the novel ultimately gives emphasis to

how family is complicit in the capitalist achievement of the Corleone business, I think it

is important to note that, in the last instance, the collectivity for which family—kinship,

ethnic, or other—has the potential to stand in the novel is always collapsed back into

one individual authority: the Godfather. At the same time, the collapse of authority

back into the figure of the Godfather is inseparable from the narrative's undeviating

division of sex roles, particularly its depiction of capitalist business as a sphere of

fundamentally male activity. What I finally want to suggest, then, is that this

fetishization of the powerful individual operates as a substitution for the pre-eminence

of the (white male) individual upon which neoconservativism grounds itself, returning

us to the thematic affinities between neoconservativism and The Godfather.

Such a narrative reduction to the powerful individual depends, of course, upon

the doctrine of individualism, that long-standing American cultural fantasy which

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. insists that lone citizens can succeed through rugged self-reliance and hard work and

that the history of successful men in the United States is the history of individualist

endeavor. Indeed, the affiliation of individualism and manhood is not something

neoconservatives themselves manufactured but a connection that has informed notions

of American manhood from its inception. As Dana Nelson has importantly observed

about the formation of national ideas surrounding manhood beginning with the early

Republic, ”[T]he process of identifying with national manhood blocks white men from

being able efficiently to identify socioeconomic inequality as structural rather than

individual failure, thereby conditioning them for market and professional competition"

(ix). That is, identifying as male citizenry has historically been a process of identifying

with the fantasies of both whiteness and individualism, which disciplines the male

citizenry for capitalist rivalry while simultaneously offering up the illusion of an

originary and unifying self-sameness. As the preceding chapters of this project have

sought to make clear, the 1960s mark over a decade of overt political action designed to

dislodge these same assumptions and beliefs, which continued to define American

manhood at mid-twentieth century. Neoconservative thought in essence sought to

reclaim the "original" democratic imaginary in order to solve that manhood's

legitimation crisis.

Turning back to The Godfather, then, we find that the Don and his associates

quite obviously both participate in and benefit from their embrace of one of the core

ideals of modem American manhood—capitalist individualism. Indeed, Vito's

immigrant story is an unabashed tale of American capitalist assimilation, at a time when

non-capitalist identification was a real, if risky, proposition in the United States.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Having made his home in the New York tenements of Hell's Kitchen, the young Vito is

brought into conflict with Fanucci, a Mafia extortionist and neighborhood "Black

Hand.” Vito's decision to return the extortionist's threat on his life in kind by murdering

Fanucci thereupon establishes Vito as a "man of respect” who will protect the interests

of other upstanding members of the community for their friendship and loyalty. Thus,

the principles of Vito's enterprise, to use his influence to better the lives of family and

friends and to rely upon the rhetoric of the reasonable business deal rather than openly

violent threats, distinguish him from his mafiosi predecessors and further align him with

capitalist individualism by invoking self-improvement, even philanthropy, and

rationality as a veil for the contained violence that takes place outside of the business

deal itself. Vito's undertaking also proves, as a successful business proposition should,

to be a lucrative one, and he soon accumulates enough money to lay out the start-up

capital for a legitimate olive oil importing business, which quickly becomes "the

bestselling imported Italian olive oil in America":

For the next few years Vito Corleone lived that completely satisfying life of a small businessman wholly devoted to building up his commercial enterprise in a dynamic, expanding economy. [...] Like any good salesman he came to understand the benefits of undercutting his rivals in price, barring them from distribution outlets by persuading store owners to stock less of their brands. Like any good businessman he aimed at holding a monopoly by forcing his rivals to abandon the field or by merging with his own company. [...] Even as a young man, Vito Corleone became known as a "man of reasonableness." He never uttered a threat. He always used logic that proved to be irresistible. He always made certain that the other fellow got his share of profit. Nobody lost. [...] Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly. (Puzo,The Godfather 210)

As the narrative of Puzo's novel would have it, Vito Corleone is first and foremost a

reasonable, professional man. Yet it also insists that he is a "man o f [...] genius" (212),

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leader" (214) or "the most far-seeing statesman” (290). As with other great American

individualists, then, this man who becomes known as the Don embodies the fantasmatic

paradox of being both the rule, the ordinary man who has judiciously embraced

individualism, and the exception, the extraordinary man whom individualism implicitly

promises to produce.

Again and again throughout The Godfather, it is this depiction of Vito Corleone

that is reiterated—even after he makes "the final step from a quite ordinary, somewhat

ruthless businessman to a great Don in the world of criminal enterprise” (211). The

persistence of this characterization coupled with Puzo's inability, or unwillingness, to

articulate clearly what constitutes the step from business organization to criminal

organization is thus a compelling feature of the novel. We are told that even in his early

days as a businessman Vito could not "use the common strangleholds of legitimate

businessmen," yet the proffered reasons for this inability fall flat under scrutiny: ”[H]e

had started off relatively helpless, economically, [...] he did not believe in advertising,"

and "truth be told, his olive oil was not better than his competitors'" (Puzo,Godfather

210). Nor is the description of Vito's "final step" explained as a matter of his principles

or methods, which have already included the controlled exercise of violence, but simply

as a matter of his decision to extend his business interests into the exchange of illegal

goods, alcohol, though only under Prohibition, and then gambling. If anything, Don

Corleone appears to hold the moral high card for his refusal to participate in the markets

for prostitution, pornography, and drugs. At the same time, his supposedly illegitimate

tactics as a businessman, and then as a Don—"[h]e had to rely on the force of his own

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men of "legitimate" power with whom he bargains and negotiates, be they politicians,

policemen, judges, or media moguls (Puzo,Godfather 210).15 They are all part of the

same system, one in which a "good businessman" does not become criminal but in

which a good businessman is always already criminal. As the Don says to Sonny in

trying to persuade him to finish his schooling rather than join the family business

outright, "[D]on't you want to be a lawyer? Lawyers can steal more money with a

briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks" (Puzo, Godfather 218). What

becomes apparent here is the extent to which the mle itself is its own exception.

Although grounded initially in human nature and the inalienable right to pursue

"happiness," the American doctrine o f individualism that is believed to be the

transparent basis for an egalitarian or pluralist system of social relations is itself

exceptional. That is, it isexclusionary, competing with and destroying the

socioeconomic, and by extension actual, lives of other individuals so as to secure its

"exceptionality."16

I do not think that this is a point lost on Puzo either, who begins his novel with

the suggestive quote from Balzac that "Behind every great fortune there is a crime"

(Puzo,Godfather 9). As Puzo states plainly in his essay collection The Godfather

Papers and Other Confessions (1972), his intention in writing The Godfather was to

critique white-collar crime and those who try to justify it as necessary, inevitable, or

even healthy, but that "most of the critics missed the irony in the novel and attacked me

for glorifying the Mafia" (70). The following quote from Puzo's 1966 satirical essay

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underscores where his sympathies really lie:

Is it not the duty of every American to live as selfishly and dishonestly as possible? What else will make the wheels of industry hum? The maligned businessman, fighting as ferociously for profit as sharks fight for a man overboard, was he on the right track all the time? Could it really be true that what is good for General Motors is good for America? Is the road to the happy life paved with lying, cheating and stealing? In our society the answer must be yes. And so "crime" is good for America. (The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions 79)

As Puzo finally insists, either we must accept that what he wryly refers to as

"productive crime" is part of what makes America great, or we must admit that

something is essentially amiss in our national self-conception. In his novelistic staging

of these sentiments about white-collar criminality, Puzo thus effects the unveiling of the

internal contradiction of capitalism—a free market theory that in practice lends itself to

monopoly—which in turn illuminates capitalism's "criminal” excess, its capacity to

produce great fortune for a few. And these are the dynamics that naturalize "productive

crime" by pushing the population at large into acquiescing to capitalism's (il)logic.

What I think Puzo did not count on, however, was the mythic pull of the very

kind of character he would need to create to make his critique. As we have seen, the

essence of Don Corleone the "good" businessman is deeply analogous to the essence of

the "good" individualist that resides at the heart of the American national imaginary.

Nor could Puzo have anticipated the way that the character of Don Corleone would play

to the historical moment in which he appeared. For it was a moment in which resurgent

notions of American manhood—already nascent to the fantasy of the successful

individualist cum businessman—yearned for new rallying points and ways of re-

legitimizing privilege and authority. Neoconservative discourse has in many ways been 195

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the deep resonance a character like Don Corleone would have for those on that search.

So, too, can we all the more appreciate a character like Michael Corleone who in

coming to occupy the position of his f/Father seems to belie any suggestion that

American manhood is or has ever been a precarious subject position. Indeed, the

character of Michael deepens the connection The Godfather has with the other novels

my project examines in its staging of American manhood in revolt, a revolt that Michael

then significantly rejects.

As we have seen, then, the movement toward American manhood through the

fetishization of capitalist individualism that occurs inThe Godfather is of a piece with

neoconservative ideology and with the criminality of its seemingly benign propositions,

but it is not individualism alone that opens Puzo's text to neoconservative deployment.

This becomes clear when we consider the coupling of this individualist ethos with the

Corleone contempt for the sanctioned authority of the ruling state—Don Corleone's

"enemies" who run "the greater world." This coupling is then made even riper for

neoconservative picking by the Corleone alignment with traditional morality and family

values. However, just as the issues of individualism, anti-statism, and traditional

morality and family values in Puzo's novel are embedded in the strong (almost hyper)

ethnic identification represented by the Corleones, so too is neoconservativism

embedded in an historical moment that witnessed ethnicity's renaissance in the United

States—what Michael Novak memorably described as "the rise of the unmeltable

ethnics." Before continuing my reading of The Godfather, then, I would like to return

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intersections of race and ethnicity attending neoconservativism's ascendancy.

It's the Culture, Stupid

Although often now often overshadowed in the face of the ongoing volatility of

race-related questions, ethnicity in fact played a central role in the varied and numerous

debates surrounding the movements for civil and other rights.17 For American

sociologists, an ethnicity paradigm had predominated in the modem sociology of race

since the early twentieth century; this paradigm understood race as a component of

ethnicity and situated its major debates around the subject of whether ethnic group

identities would be maintained or dispersed in American society over time, that is,

whether a cultural pluralist or assimilationist model would prevail. This was not a

disinterested investigation, but one spurred by the unprecedented influx of Central,

Eastern, and Southern European immigrants that took place around the turn of the

century, an influx that subsequently generated what can most generously be described

as an unprecedented xenophobia among the established American population.18 This

xenophobia is reflected, in part, in the highly restrictive immigration laws instituted in

the 1920s. In the post-WWII period, the assimilationist model continued to be viewed

as both inevitable and "healthy" and was thus the favored model. However, ethnicity

was applied almost solely to white European immigrants, who were distinguished from

"racial minorities," until the mid-1940s, when Gunnar Myrdal'sAn American Dilemma

(1944) made an appeal for African-American equality based on assimilationist ideals.

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mobilize an ethnicity paradigm as theoretical grounding in its calls for legislative

reforms that would secure blacks equality of opportunity and pave the way for an

integrated, "race-free" society. Focusing their energies primarily on the overt racism of

the segregated South, the leaders of the civil rights movement found this assimilationist

approach sufficiently radical for their purposes. Yet once met, the assimilationist

demands of the movement, achieved by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and voting rights

legislation of 1965, seemed to offer little hope for real change in the lived conditions of

African Americans, especially northern blacks and the black underclass who lived under

conditions of de facto segregation. Civil rights advocates began to recognize that

judicial activism and legislative reform were only part of the more sweeping changes

needed. For as the continued proponents of the original ethnicity paradigm would have

it, blacks and other racial minorities were analogous to previous (European) immigrant

populations. Citing the historical and structural discrepancies in this analogy, many

racial minorities came to reject assimilation in favor of a cultural pluralism, a shift

captured in the move toward race-based nationalism and power—as opposed to

freedom—movements. However, this is a shift that often did not reject the ethnicity

paradigm per se; in many instances, the participants in such movements came to

embrace notions of black ethnicity even more fully, as in the open adoption of African

cultural customs or the tracing of genealogical roots.

At the same time, beginning in the mid-1960s, sociologists and ethnic

spokesmen first brought attention to what some called the "new minority" of white

ethnics.19 Indeed, many whites—particularly first- through third-generation European

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embrace an ethnic self-definition in the face of racial interest groups, especially once

those groups embraced cultural pluralism and began to seek redistributive measures

from the federal government rather than just equalizing measures.20 Although no single

social phenomenon is easily reduced to a few causes, the surveys, research, and

literature examining white ethnics repeatedly return to the notion that the civil rights

movement and its reverberations were a primary catalyst for the renewed white

assertion of ethnicity.21 In his discussion of institutional responses to the white ethnic

movement, sociologist Perry L. Weed describes the white ethnic movement as "initially

negative and reactionary, exemplified by violent white demonstrations, marches, and

riots, by neighborhood protection groups and gun clubs, and by the attraction of such

men as George Wallace and Joseph Columbo" (18). Here again, Wallace is an

instructive example, in his attraction of supporters in Chicago during September 1968

who carried signs reading "Italian Power for Wallace" and "Polish Want Wallace"

(Weed SO). And in another example from a Wallace rally in the primarily white ethnic

suburb of Cicero in Chicago, writer Theodore H. White witnessed the following

physical attack of a young man protesting Wallace's platform: "[A] fat woman clawed

his face, slapped it. The crowd, approving her, yelled, *You nigger-loving homosexual!1

Take a bath, you dope addict!' An apparently [sic] Jewish reporter was taking notes,

and several yelled, Hey, you Hebe, you Jew bastard—how you doing, Moishe, you

writing backwards?"' (qtd. in Weed 50). The last group of slurs are a particularly ironic

commentary given that Irving M. Levine's American Jewish Committee (AJC) program,

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attempting to legitimate and address white ethnic concerns during this period.

As disturbing as these examples are and as clearly as they indicate reactionary

feeling, my intention is not to vilify the working class and white ethnic populations

from this era. There are many notable instances of people and institutions akin to

Levine and his AJC program attempting to respond responsibly and with great

conscience to the described tensions, such as Monsignor Geno Baroni's Center for

Urban Ethnic Affairs and Reverend Andrew Greeley's Center for the Study of American

Pluralism. Monsignor Baroni presciently insisted, for example, that to "develop a true

cultural pluralism in this country and reduce the 'inevitable group ... conflict,'” leading

institutions must "stop exploiting the fear of the ethnic, middle Americans," "bring

together a new coalition to press for new goals and new priorities for all the poor and

the near poor" and include a coalition of "the Blacks—the Appalachians—the Indians—

the Spanish-speaking—and the white urban ethnic groups" (Weed 30). At the same

time, polls taken during the late 60s and early 70s found that white ethnics were actually

less likely as a group than all whites to agree, in theory at least, that "the push for racial

equality had been too fast" (Colburn and Pozzetta 131).22

It is also vital to acknowledge the real marginalization experienced historically

by white ethnics and against which they continued to struggle as a significant

percentage of the lower and lower-middle class throughout the 1960s. While Assistant

Secretary of Labor Jerome M. Rosow reported that 40 percent of American families

"have incomes between $5,000 and $10,000 per year and might be termed 'lower middle

income,"' a 1969 Census Bureau survey taken at roughly the same time reported that

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had median family incomes below $10,000 (Weed 10-11).23 This same Census Bureau

survey also showed that almost half of all male blue-collar workers were of Irish,

Polish, and Italian origin, with concentrations of white ethnics in the blue-collar

workforce at nearly 80 percent in some northern industrial cities (Weed 9-10). In some

communities, conditions were particularly harsh. At mid-1960, a Polish-American

organization survey taken in Pittsburgh found the average yearly earnings of members

to be between $5,000 and $6,000, or at the poverty line; another survey of incomes in

Irish South Boston at the same time found their median to be $5,000 (Colburn and

Pozzetta 132). Meanwhile, the working class and white ethnics were also more likely to

be disproportionately affected among white populations by the realization of federally

mandated civil rights measures like school integration (e.g., forced busing) and

"affirmative" action (i.e., in its revised version, which applied timetables and racial

quotas to all federal hiring and contracting) and by the realities of the north's own racist

heritage (e.g., the red-lining of property values following black residential movement

made possible by open housing legislation).

As a result, in fashioning platforms and rhetoric intended to covertly appeal to

reactionary feelings against civil rights legislation, race-based redistributive measures,

and the rights revolution in general, neoconservatives found themselves becoming

attractive to northern lower and lower-middle class populations who had historically

voted more liberally. More specifically, neoconservatives found themselves appealing

to the working class and white ethnic constituencies of the north, who constituted easily

discemable and highly tactical political demographics that could assure a

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say that every measure springing from rights-related legislation and every action taken

by participants in the rights movements were unequivocally for the good. Not only is it

really beyond the scope of this chapter to make such arguments, but many of the

measures were still in key periods of implementation and refinement when they were

effectively dismantled by the right.

Indeed, what I do want to suggest is that the late 1960s witnessed a potentially

explosive encounter between race, ethnicity, and class that could have had as its

outcome the kind of coalition envisioned by those like Monsignor Baroni but that

crumbled under the purposeful manipulation of neoconservatives invested in shutting

down any real exchange of ideas and forwarding their own self-serving economic

agenda. For by the end of the 1980s, "While overall familyafter-tax income rose by

15.7 percent, the income of families in the bottom decile fell by 10.4 percent, from

$4,791 to $4,295 (in constant 1990 dollars) while the income of those in the top one

percent rose by 87.1 percent, from $213,675 to $399,697" (Edsall 23). This bottom-up

redistributive scale is the direct result of conservative-driven tax cuts intended to benefit

individuals at the top of the income distribution as well as other conservative

interventions on the behalf of business to lessen regulatory and tax burdens—that is,

neoconservatives have succeeded in furthering corporate welfare at the literal expense

of real people in need (Edsall 22). In essence, neoconservatives saw a political cash

cow in the ability of reactionary platforms and race- and gender- coded rhetoric to win

them new constituencies and played to the grievances of those groups without any

intent of addressing their concerns. Ultimately, then, neoconservatives successfully

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only as the great American individual or one of "the silent majority" but also as the

(white) ethnic.

What makes this move "successful" is the ability of ethnicity to diffuse the

specific ways that race is deployed by the state. Whereas ethnicity reduces itself to

culture, race has historically functioned as "a system of social control through the

development and maintenance of exclusionary classifications, institutions, and daily

practices" (Nelson 52). This distinction also allows us to see how and why ethnicity so

frequently bears the trace of race, since the arbitrary distinctions of nationality and

language have been just as easily racialized as skin color has been. There is a key

difference, of course, in the extent to which these arbitrary distinctions can be

transcended, the extent to which one can aspire to and assume "whiteness," the extent to

which one is "visibly" ethnic.24 As a result, the resurgent ethnic movement is a

problematic development where and when it enables whole groups of people to disavow

the ways in which they continue to participate in and benefit from the mechanisms of

the racial state. For example, white ethnics, among others, greatly benefited from what

can only be described as redistributive, even welfare, measures enacted under the New

Deal such as the Social Security Act and the GI Bill, legislation that could never mean

the same thing for racialized subjects. While the pervasive underemployment of blacks

meant that Social Security was rarely a privilege they would enjoy, real deand facto

segregation coupled with unequal educational preparation and facilities meant that black

veterans could never reap the same housing and education benefits allocated by the GI

Bill that other veterans could. Likewise, however tenuous the job situations and

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communities plagued by rioting during the late 60s that as much as 40 percent of the

population was without any employment whatsoever (Patterson 664).

Yet ethnicity is also a potentially valid site for resistance, one that holds the

promise of establishing common ground between ethnic and racial subjects without

necessarily diminishing the differences between the two. Neoconservatives have

intervened in the latter possibility by encouraging the elision of race by ethnicity.25 As

we have seen in the earlier discussion of presidential races during the late 1960s and

early 70s, Wallace concretized this situation while Nixon learned to capitalize on it.

Thus, at the same moment President Nixon is exercising everything within his power to

thwart the enactment of school desegregation measures and to sabotage the 1965 Voting

Rights Act, he is also lending his support to the passage of an ethnic studies bill "to do

research on and teach the cultural heritages of all ethnic groups in America" and that

will provide "an appropriation of $30 million between the time of its becoming law and

June 1973" (Edsall 83, Weed 199).26 These are the dynamics attending "the rise of the

unmeltable ethnics" and informing readers of The Godfather.

"Tmjust one o f those real old-fashioned conservatives'": Michael Corleone and the

Relegitimization o f White Male Privilege

From the context established in the preceding section, then, the turn back to The

Godfather should seem like a small one indeed. We have already seen how the novel's

exploration of individualism is grounded in ethnicity, and the importance of this

grounding is only compounded as Puzo addresses the resolute feelings of anti-statism

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grounding into consideration, what I have been calling American manhood might

appear to be a contradiction when applied to Vito Corleone and his kinsmen. After all,

although a whole section of The Godfather is given over to the tale of Vito's rise from

the immigrant streets of New York City, significant moments in the narrative also

recount the elder Corleone's apparent distrust of and even anathema for things

"American." When Michael announces his intention to enlist in the Marine Corps and

to fight in the Second World War, for example, we leam of the Don's interventions and

how he "had no desire, no intention, of letting his youngest son be killed in the service

of a power foreign to himself' (Puzo,Godfather 17). When Michael brings Kay

Adams, "the American girl," to Connie's wedding, we discover that his family thinks,

"She was too thin, she was too fair, her face was too sharply intelligent for a woman,

her manner too free for a maiden. Her name [...] outlandish" and "If she had told them

that her family had settled in America two hundred years ago and her name was a

common one, they would have shrugged" (Puzo,Godfather 17). And when Amerigo

Bonasera, who has failed to pledge his loyalty to the Corleones out of a desire to be "a

good American," comes to the Don seeking revenge for the violent assault of his

daughter, we witness the Don's bitter chastisement of him: "You never armed yourself

with true friends. After all, the police guarded you, there were courts of law, you and

yours could come to no harm. [...] The judge has ruled. America has ruled" (Puzo,

Godfather 31). Don Corleone and his family patently distrust the American

establishment.

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them so ripe for neoconservative affiliation, and all the more so in their identification as

an ethnic enclave. Part of the Corleone distrust of course derives from Vito's

experience of coming to the United States at age twelve to escape the corrupt power of

the mafiosi who tacitly ruled tum-of-the-century Sicily and murdered his father,mafiosi

who still reign supreme when Michael arrives there. Reflecting on how "the Mafia in

Sicily had become the illegal arm of the rich and even the auxiliary police of the legal

and political structure," Michael comes to appreciate his father's experience after

several months in Italy witnessing the governmental corruption firsthand: "[He]

understood for the first time why men like his father chose to become thieves and

murderers rather than members of the legal society. The poverty and fear and

degradation were too awful to be acceptable to any man of spirit. And in America some

emigrating Sicilians had assumed there would be an equally cruel authority" (Puzo,

Godfather 324-5).27 Don Corleone mistrusts not simply the American establishment,

but most men of power—especially those given the authorization of dominant society.

Most generally speaking, power "foreign" to the Don is in fact any power structure

outside immediate Corleone control.

Nevertheless, the Don spends the majority of his time indicting dominant power

in the United States, the result being that his accusations against the American

establishment accumulate considerable intensity. Moreover, these accusations and

validations gain a specific intensity when read within a post-60s social context,

especially when the once near-establishment Michael comes to validate his father's

vision. The fact is that much of the force of neoconservative ideology derives directly

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from its very injunctions against what Wallace coined "big government," which has

functioned as an incisive broad appeal to mass bureaucratic malaise. While "big

government" has held this kind of broad appeal, however, it has also functioned much

more significantly as code for the liberal establishment, which neoconservatives have

held responsible for the mostly federal interventions they perceive as ringing in that

dark age of reformist rights and values called the 1960s.28 If states and other more local

forms of government had only retained some real power in the political process, the

thinking goes, no community not wanting such reform would have had to allow it.29

Nowhere does the novel better capture this ideological thrust than in the

description of how Don Corleone comes to power and how he understands that power, a

moment that occurs early in his organized crime career when he initiates his first great

attempt at negotiating the peace between warring families across the nation:

He was the underworld apostle of peace [...], more successful than any Pope, he had achieved a working agreement amongst the most powerful underworld organizations in the country. Like the Constitution of the United States this agreement respected fully the internal authority of each member in his state or city. The agreement covered only spheres of influence and an agreement to enforce peace in the underworld. (Puzo,Godfather 221)

The Don, too, is a champion of local power, which for him as for neoconservatives

functions as a self-evident truth of American democracy. Yet in both cases, local power

is a qualified, and thus contrary, notion that involves a set of governing principles which

in fact inform each locality.30 At the same time, the Corleone objective of local power

for its ethnic group mimics the neoconservative objective of local power for its racial

group, a substitution made all the easier when the lines between race and ethnicity have

been blurred. In this way, The Godfather continues to replicate the implicit principle of

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privileged American male has been recast as the (white) ethnic.

The overriding goal of cultural assimilation and legitimacy coupled with a

strong ethnic identification also further denotes the Corleone enterprise as

fundamentally representative of a relegitimized American manhood and open to

neoconservative interpretation. Don Corleone's most explicit statement of this goal is

made to all of the major American crime family heads, during his negotiations with

them to bring Michael home:

We are all men who have refused to be fools, who have refused to be puppets dancing on a string pulled by the men on high. We have been fortunate here in this country. Already most of our children have found a better life. Some of you have sons who are professors, scientists, musicians, and you are fortunate. Perhaps your grandchildren will be the new pezzonovanti. None of us here want to see our children follow in our footsteps, it's too hard a life. They can be as others, their position and security won by our courage. I have grandchildren now and I hope their children may someday [...] be a governor, a President, nothing’s impossible here in America. [...] The time is past for guns and killing and massacres. We have to be cunning like the business people, there's more money in it and it's better for our children and grandchildren. (Puzo, Godfather 290)

In the face of these assimilative goals, we begin to see how the ethnic affiliation of the

Corleones is exemplary of the cultural pluralism that prevails in the historical moment

in which The Godfather appears and that has since reigned. That is, the Corleones, like

virtually all groups aligning with cultural pluralism, are not separatists; on the contrary,

their goals largely remain assimilative with the important exception of a kind of

cultural, ethnic imaginary that informs their self-identification and for which they seek

the acceptance and respect of dominant society.

This ethnic identification also evokes nostalgic notions of traditional morality

and family values—wherein conventional rules of social behavior and structure reign 208

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sacred, and procreation is duty—that serve a reactionary imaginary. While Puzo

purposely plays up these nostalgic associations as part of his ironic figuring of the self-

made American man, it is not hard to imagine how a neoconservatively inclined

audience might embrace such a depiction at face value.31 As more than one political

analyst has observed of late 1960s public feeling about the contemporaneous state of

law and order, "Ghetto riots, campus riots, street crime, anti-Vietnam marches, poor

people's marches, drugs, pornography, welfarism, rising taxes, all had a common thread:

the breakdown of family and social discipline, of order, of concepts of duty, of respect

for law, of public and private morality” (Sundquist 383-84). I would also add to the list

the women's and gay liberation movements. Appropriately, then, the literal law was in

fact a flexible component of "law and order" as it was deployed, since what the

neoconservative rejected was quite preciselylegal the gains for groups made by the

rights movement, which had moved well beyond its original focus on civil rights and

intensified the tactic of identifying collective grievances. Thus political analyst James

Sundquist seems correct in the preceding quote to give emphasis to family values and

morality, made traditional by the implicit desire to maintain the status quo. It is this

same emphasis that allows Don Corleone and his family to rise triumphant from the

context of supposed post-60s social decay and to symbolize American ideals of familial

intimacy and safety, even as a "crime" family—for the lay reader, for critics, and even

for Francis Ford Coppola.

We have already seen, for example, how the Don's refusal to deal with anything

involving illicit sex, such as prostitution and pornography, sets him apart from the other

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"notoriously straitlaced in matters of sex" (Puzo,Godfather 72) that he disdains sexual

relations of any kind outside of marriage, a feeling key in his rejection of his son Fredo

for reasons having primarily to do with the tatter's licentiousness. Moreover, Don

Corleone's refusal to participate in, and at first even sanction, the growing drug trade is

the central catalyst for the entire plot. Though Sonny makes his father more vulnerable

to attack as the result of his careless comments during the initial meeting between the

drug dealer Solozzo and the Don, it is clear that Solozzo and his supporting crime

families would have moved against the Don in any case. Thus the series of violent

events that takes place in the course of the novel is motivated not by the Don's

ruthlessness or even just business as usual but rather by his high morals. Further

situating the law—moral and other—within the local realm of the white, privileged

American male, rather than within a democratically structured state, is the Don's

exercise of his own personal notions of "law and order":

As soon as the Corleone Family set up their usual business liaison with the local police force they were informed of all [...] complaints and all crimes by professional criminals. In less than a year Long Beach became the most crime- free town of its size in the United States. Professional stickup artists and strong- arms received one warning not to ply their trade in the town. They were allowed one offense. When they committed a second they simply disappeared. [...] Resident young punks who had no respect for law and proper authority were advised in the most fatherly fashion to run away from home. Long Beach became a model city. (Puzo,Godfather 225)

For while his means may technically be "criminal," Don Corleone succeeds—for

example, in reducing street crime and eliminating the need for welfare—where the state

has failed.

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(temporary) agreement about the drug trade later reached between the other major

American crime families and the Don that targets blacks for their drug sales. In the

words of the Don from Detroit, and to which we are told the other Dons assent: ""They

are the best customers, the least troublesome and they are animals anyway. They have

no respect for their wives or their families or for themselves.' [...] That they had

allowed society to grind them into the dust proved them of no account" (Puzo,

Godfather 288). In the handful of moments where the characters even allow African

Americans into their consciousness, blacks register as a failed ethnic group, one that

remains disenfranchised and at the margins due in large part to their "natural" lack of

traditional morals and family values. This presumption should of course recall the late

1960s discourse over racial inequity spawned by the March 1965 document popularly

known as "The Moynihan Report," which however well intentioned, had the effect of

perpetuating the belief that black disenfranchisement was the result of an inherently

unstable black family structure.32 As the Don says to Johnny Fontane, "A man who is

not a father to his children can never be a real man" (Puzo, Godfather 37).

Indeed, what perhaps most fundamentally marks the Don's world as traditional

and appealing to reactionary sentiments is its adherence to strictly bound male and

female roles. The opening scene perfectly captures the terms of these boundaries in its

juxtaposition of Connie's marriage and the Don's powerful, sequestered business

dealings. These parallel events reveal that the Don functions as corporate executive not

just for his business but for the women in his family as well—he manages and finances

their lives and may even act within their space while they are subordinated to his desires

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and expressly forbidden from participating in the male sphere of power. In other words,

the male sphere here represents a space in which the white male as powerful, knowing

subject has achieved almost total omnipotence. Thus, among the Don's major pieces of

business on Connie's wedding day is not only his chastisement of Amerigo Bonasera for

capitulating to the American establishment, but his chastisement of Johnny Fontane for

capitulating to effeminate weakness and indecision. Having quietly listened to Johnny

rehearse his problems,

Don Corleone's face had become cold without a hint of sympathy. He said contemptuously, "You can start by acting like a man." Suddenly anger contorted his face. He shouted. "LIKE A MAN!" He reached over the desk and grabbed Johnny Fontane by the hair of his head [...]. ”[I]s it possible that you spent so much time inmy presence and turned out no better than this? A Hollywoodfinocchio who weeps and begs for pity? Who cries like a woman— 'What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?"' (Puzo, Godfather 36-7)

This is, in fact, the single moment in the entire novel when the Don loses control and

lets go of the reason and rationality for which he is famous. Far from the alternately

melancholic and hysterical subjects encountered in the other texts I have examined,

then, this subject of privilege not only succeeds in incarnating total knowledge, not only

succeeds in concretizing absolute sexual difference, but he succeeds in framing the

psychic and social constraint that attends American manhood as a natural necessity,

even a good.

Over the course of the novel, however, it is ultimately the narrative thread

involving Michael that most importantly plays out the neoconservative fantasy of

American manhood first embodied by Don Corleone. For unlike the Don, who appears

to have seamlessly come into his manhood, Michael must learn to accept his.

Subsequently, then, Michael's embrace of his father's ideals parallels the acceptance of

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. neoconservative ideology that insists on the decree of capitalist individualism. Key in

setting up the relationship between the Don and his youngest son is Michael's

introduction into the novel with his fiance, Kay, at Connie's wedding. Having refused

to be initiated into the family business and its traditional mores, Michael represents a

resistant white masculinity that is affiliated with the university (he wants to be a

mathematics professor) and liberated womanhood (he is engaged to the educated, free

speaking, and sexually uninhibited Kay). Yet Kay also affiliates Michael with the

establishment (she is moneyed, multigenerational New Englander), an affiliation

underscored by Michael's association with the state (he is a decorated war hero) and

official law (he rejects the family business because of its criminality). In this way,

Michael's placement within the supposed female sphere of the wedding at a table with

Kay, where he divulges secret details of his father's business to her and brings her into

the know, could be taken as a sign of growth that is then compromised when Michael

joins the business and Kay acquiesces to the role of traditional, uninformed wife and

mother. Puzo's novel, in fact, lends itself to this reading when the final scene of the

novel leaves us with Kay saying "the necessary prayer for the soul of Michael

Corleone" (Puzo,Godfather 443).

Within a neoconservative context, however, Michael perfectly distills a

reactionary perception of the late-60s liberal white male subject who is in collusion with

the establishment to undo the status quo. Read this way, far from a tragic compromise,

Michael's embrace of the Don and the family business becomes a triumphant return,

cementing the notion that the Corleone men are heroes of a different kind. That the

novel opens itself to this interpretation is perhaps testified to by Coppola's film version,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. which replaces the pitying image of Kay praying for Michael with the domineering

image of Michael glaring at Kay while his office door is shut on her. Indeed, by the end

of the novel, Michael is open in his espousal of a belief system that is necessarily more

akin to neoconservativism than liberalism in its replication of his father’s belief system:

"What do you believe [in]?" Kay asked quietly. Michael shrugged. "I believe in my family," he said. "I believe in you and the family we may have. I don't trust society to protect us, [...] that's for now. But my father's time is done. The things he did can no longer be done without a great deal of risk. Whether we like it or not the Corleone Family has to join that society. But when I do I'd like us to join it with plenty of our own power; that is, money and ownership of other valuables. [...] [MJaybe I'm just one of those real old-fashioned conservatives they grow up on your hometown. I take care of myself, individual. Governments really don't do much for their people, that's what it comes down to, but that's not it really. All I can say, I have to help my father, I have to be on his side." (Puzo,Godfather 363-64)

As this passage displays, the neoconservative American manhood potentially recouped

by a triumphant reading ofThe Godfather closes up the possibility of revealing

American manhood to have been fantasy all along. This is, in fact, precisely the goal of

the reactionary movements that took shape in the wake of 1960s liberationist

movements—to relegitimize what I have delineated throughout the preceding pages as

the impossible and ultimately chimerical notion of a fully realized manhood.

Coda: The Ends o f American Manhood

The 60s. The Sixties. The 1960s. Evoke what feelings and images they might,

any one of these simple phrases is bound to evoke something in the reader. At the very

least, any one of these phrases is sure to be read seamlessly, accepted as a whole: "But

of course, the 1960s." Indeed, regardless of the actual referent used to name this

decade, it has fiimly secured its place in the twentieth-century imagination as a critical

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. historical moment and cultural phenomenon for the United States. As should by now be

evident, the goal of my project is to intervene in the staid notion that the role of white

male subjects in the 1960s is reducible to a reactionary one catalyzed by political

movements organized by those on the margins of American society. From the Beats to

the antiwar movement, this working assumption has veiled how more universalized

movements and modes of resistance may in fact take some or all of their direction from

the particulars of white male identity. Such a working assumption has thus effectively

treated the white male subject as an omnipotent monolith, a treatment that critically

elides the structural and historical inability of American manhood to realize itself for

the impossible cultural ideal that it is. As I have attempted to show, the very structure

of subjectivity and of American democracy has animated a fantasy of manhood from

the nation's inception, an historically changeable fantasy that has wreaked psychic and

social havoc for everyone connected to the United States populace well into the

twentieth century. In imagining the privileged subject as somehow outside the travails

of subjectivity we have foreclosed on a potentially potent site of political intervention.

The readings that occupy the bulk of the preceding pages are, however, an

attempt to open up this site, to deliver on the potential political energy to be had in

literary representations and the more pervasive cultural myths and performances with

which those representations are intertwined. Linking the group of texts I have selected,

then, is each one's narrative staging of normative American manhood in conflict with

itself and within the context of key 1960s phenomena. Whereas in John Updike's

Rabbit, Run I find a novel that displays one white male subject's apperception of the

disingenuousness of middle American norms and his conflicted revolt against them, in

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ken Kesey*s One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest I discover a story situating that revolt in

the hands of an incipient counterculture similarly conflicted in its desire to eschew

normative demands without having to face the void underlying privilege and all

identity. And whereas in Michael Herr's writings on Vietnam I encounter a collective

text that progresses toward a conscious refutation of the fantasy of American manhood

through the intimate dramatization of identity's simultaneous seductiveness and

violence, in Mario Puzo'sThe Godfather I uncover a work that invites the re-invocation

of that fantasy in its depiction of a powerful, traditional ethnic family during an

historical moment witnessing the rise of neoconservativism and cultural pluralism. At

the same time, my detailed readings of these major literary texts are importantly

grounded in parallel readings of various fictional and non-fictional texts of all kinds that

speak to the cultural moment I am investigating.

As should also be clear by now, then, I take the reading and teaching of

literature to be a fundamentally political act. Intentionally or not, the stories we share

as a people and the disciplinary narratives we spin to describe the relationships between

those stories participate in forging the national imaginary at the same time the national

imaginary is refracted through those texts and disciplinary narratives. In the face of the

discourse over identity politics given rise by the 1960s that is typically situated on the

shoulders of the marginalized, my goal is nothing less that to unveil the identity politics

that have always informed the national imaginary and thus our literature and the

disciplinary study of it: the identity politics of American manhood.

Within American literary studies itself, my project seeks to re-energize work on

the post-1945 period. If, as Gregory Jay suggests in hisAmerican Literature and the

216

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Culture Wars, contemporary multiculturalism can be defined as the rejection of "models

of American literary study based on white ethnic particularism, idealized notions of

democracy, and faulty criteria of artistic excellence,” then my project can be understood

as taking its formative cues in part from multiculturalism. Likewise, if one of the

primary concerns of postmodernism is the decentered subject, then my project can be

understood as taking its formative cues in part from the poststructuralist assumptions

underwriting postmodernism. Yet ultimately my project seeks to contribute to the

carving out of a newer space, one in which the problem is not a matter of choosing

between the identity guaranteed by either a common culture or an overly particularized

culture, but a matter of showing how all coherent notions of identity are fantasy.

Moreover, in this new space, it is an absolute necessity that the decentered subject

meditated on is not just an abstract entity or a marginalized figure but a quite

specifically white male subject as well. In this way, my project is hardly a call for the

exclusive study of white American male literature but a call for the discipline's own best

recognitions to be extended beyond what is currently obvious and to the furthest reaches

of the body of work that comes under our purview.

Indeed, that third part of my dissertation title which was left undiscussed in my

introduction—American literature of the 1960s—here reveals itself not as a return to

some agreed upon set of meanings but as movement toward a more comprehensive

appreciation of the complexity of those terms. While some students of literary studies

might choose to do away with the terms "American" and "literature," I have chosen to

retain them in an attempt to do justice to the history of fantasmatic investments in things

American and literary and to insist that we continue to bear witness to that history. As

217

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. we have seen is the case with identity and desire in general, there is something perhaps

hysterical or melancholic about spending all of one's energies trying to seek out the self

designation that will fully satisfy. Rather, it seems that the ethical burden lies in

recognizing how dissatisfaction and lack mark all our relationships—personal,

professional, and other—and in demanding that our conversations and actions take that

as their starting place.

Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the privileged white male subject,

who like all subjects can aspire to certain master signifiers, but who at the same time is

subject to, or subjected by, them: to the fantasy of American manhood. Stating that

every subject is subjected by its own formation is not, of course, to absolve those

subjects who happen to be more privileged historically from responsibility for their

privilege; rather, it is a recognition that the agency of a subject can never be purely

external to or aligned with power. In her The Psychic Life o f Power, Judith Butler is

among the most recent to point out that "the purposes of power are not always the

purposes of agency. To the extent that the latter diverge from the former, agency is the

assumption of a purposeunintended by power” (IS). At the same time, as Butler

cautions that "the subject exceeds precisely that to which it is bound. Painful, dynamic,

and promising, this vacillation between the already-there and the yet-to-come is a

crossroads that rejoins every step by which it is traversed, a reiterated ambivalence at

the heart of agency" {Psychic Life 17). Indeed, a good many "reiterations" of identity

do merely serve to make the Master appear again and thereby verify the subject's

subjectivity through the reassertion of power over the subject.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Yet the hysteric's protest perfectly illustrates that power is not total, that its

proffering of images, ideals, and scripts fails fully to seduce every subject—and where

this failure exists, every subject is given groundact to in a way that contests the norms

dictated by power. In this way, power—inadvertently and inexorably—enables its own

undoing. This is, moreover, why privileged subjects ultimately bear responsibility for

their privilege: they are not powerless entities whose desires are entirely determined by

the prevailing norms and entitlements believed to capture and express the "natural"

meanings of anatomy and physiology. On the contrary, these norms and entitlements,

as I have argued, are already the stuff of fantasy—i.e., a way of coping with desire's

more fundamental instability, with the fact that we inhabit bodies without any one right

way to live them. My readings of books such asRabbit, Run, One Flew Over the

Cuckoo's Nest, Dispatches, and The Godfather aim in part to illuminate this inherent

potential of white male subjects to exercise their agency in less destructive ways—even

as I show such this potential is open to co-optation. But this co-optation can be read

both ways. Power, too, is marked by repeated co-optings. Perhaps the broadest

ambition of my project is thus to show how power's continual re-assertions in fact

provide us with a glimpse of the constitutive lack at its very core—a lack borne witness

to not just by vibrant and diverse cultural traditions, or political movements that clarify

all that power refuses to recognize, but by the difficulty with which privileged subjects

bear their own ideals.

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1 Thus, my working phrase is also a strategic selection in that I hope to destabilize what has come to be the seemingly benign, even mundane, and often uninformed self-description of so many people. 2 There is no getting around the fact that both conservatives and liberals and their bodies of thought have emerged from the political philosophy of liberal democracy, or traditional liberalism. Although the terms can overlap confusingly, I will try to distinguish liberal, as in politically leftist ideas or thinkers, from the political philosophy of liberal democracy as clearly as possible in my discussion. It is from this definition of the state that Omi and Winant arrive at their notion of "the racial state." 4 And, in a truly shocking irony, this support is evident as recently as the votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, both of which received greater congressional support from Republicans than Democrats. The vote on the 1964 bill in the House, for example, saw an 80 percent favorable vote from the GOP but only a 62 percent favorable vote from the Democrats (Edsall and Edsall 61). See Edsall, Chain Reaction (1992), for a comprehensive discussion of the post-WWII political party transformations attending the rise of the new conservativism. 5 This new brand of conservative drew in part from the likes of the 1948 Democratic splinter group known as the "Dixiecrats," an anti-civil rights and pro segregation faction led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina who called themselves the States' Rights Democratic party for a time (Edsall 34). 6 For example, in line with his orthodox conservativism, Goldwater opposed programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, Social Security, and farm subsidies, all of which his deep South constituents continued to support. The states carried by Goldwater in the deep South include the following: Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia (Edsall 41). 7 Wallace was not so much pro-war as he was "anti-anti-war," which yet again echoes his blue-collar constituency who tended to be more likely than the middle and upper class to oppose the war in Vietnam even as they despised the anti-war protestors (Patterson 699, Farber 296). 8 Having received 13.53 percent of the popular vote nationally, Wallace captured 4 million votes from outside the Old South, primarily from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—all labor heavy states (Weed 49). 9 Reagan received 66 percent of the white male vote nationally, with higher percentages in the South and West: 74 percent and 68 percent respectively (Omi and Winant 133). 10 For a detailed history of the novel's transformation into film, see Lebo, The Godfather Legacy (1997). 11 Indeed, it was the transformation of Puzo's novel into a major film that instituted the Hollywood practice of seeking out best-selling novels to turn into screenplays. Although the publishing industry's largest paperback advance to that date, Puzo's remuneration of $410,000 for the rights to The Godfather soon looked like a

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. measly sum compared to other advances and testifies to his novel's role in establishing this trend. 12 For critics of the former type, see Sinicropi, "The Saga of the Corleones" (1975), and Marino, ’"I Wanted to Be a Good American" (1998); for critics of the latter type, see Chiampi, "ResurrectingThe Godfather" (1978). 13 Cawelti's article, "The New Mythology of Crime" (1975), is an extensive analysis of contemporary crime fiction that focuses onThe Godfather as exemplary of new trends in such fiction. Jameson's discussion ofThe Godfather, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" (1978), is just one example in an article primarily dedicated to rethinking the assumed opposition between high culture and mass culture. 14 Ferraro also takes up the issue of ethnic stereotyping. He argues that Puzo's depiction of family and business counters the predominant twentieth-century assumptions, especially within sociology, about the negative effects of ethnic affiliation on assimilation. ls The most memorable example of this mutuality from the novel comes in the character of Hollywood movie producer Jack Woltz, who regularly uses his force of personality and reputation to seduce and rape young girls aspiring to be actresses. 16 One of die more recent and scandalous manifestations of this dynamic is the Enron bankruptcy, which Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill quickly abstracted into terms appropriately both mundane and exceptional: "Companies come go...and It's part of the genius of capitalism" (Thomma la). 17 See Omi and Winant for an in-depth discussion of the intersections of race and ethnicity in sociology and American culture, a discussion to which my own is greatiy indebted. 18 During the height of what was called "the new immigration," between the years of 1900 and 1921, over 10 million immigrants came to the United States from those parts of Europe alone (Weed 124). 19 That is, it at least appears to the men who got published and received the attention. Sociologists concerned with ethnic resurgence and white ethnicity include Nathan Glazer, Daniel Moynihan, Michael Novak, and Perry Weed; ethnic spokesmen include Monsignor Geno Baroni, Irving M. Levine, and Reverend Andrew M. Greeley. 20 Although this urge surely extended to the most assimilated white Americans as well. For a discussion of renewed interest in Scottish heritage, for instance, see Colburn and Pozzetta, "Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy" (1994). 21 Even articles defensive of the resurgence of white ethnicity and cultural pluralism in general, articles of the kind typically written by say Andrew M. Greeley, often take as their conceit the idea that white ethnics have a justifiable gripe with race- based interventions springing from the civil rights movement when white ethnics have shared a similar experience with blacks. For instances of this type of essay see, for example, Irving Howe's edited collectionThe World o f the Blue Collar Worker (1972). 22 The most compelling poll cited by Colburn and Pozzetta is the 1970 Lou Harris poll finding that "one-half of native whites, compared to only two-fifihs of Irish,

221

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Italian, and Polish Americans, believed that the push for racial equality had been too fast" (131). 23 More specifically, this November 1969 Census Bureau survey found that 66.4 percent of Irish, 62.4 percent of Italian, and 61.7 percent of Polish families had median family incomes below $10,000 (Weed 11). 24 For a probing examination of the relationship between race and gender and "the visible," see Robyn Wiegman. 25 Not that we can or should ignore the willingness of the general population to join in this elision. 26 Nixon tried to eliminate the "preclearance" provision of the Voting Rights Act, which established federal control of voter registration and election laws in place of local control—that is, white control and fixing. Passed by the Senate in 1971, the ethnic studies bill "Statement of Policy" is notable for its failure to specifically name the issue of race: In recognition of the heterogeneous composition of the Nation and of the fact that in a multiethnic society a greater understanding of the contributions of one's own heritage and those of one's fellow citizens can contribute to a more harmonious, patriotic, and committed populace, and in recognition of the principle that all persons in the educational institutions of the Nation should have an opportunity to learn about the differing and unique contributions to the national heritage made by each ethnic group, it is the purpose of this title to provide assistance designed to afford to students opportunities to learn about the nature of their own cultural heritage, and to study the contributions of the cultural heritages of the ethnic groups of the Nation, (qtd. in Weed 199-200) 27 Or as Vito himself says during the peace negotiations with the major crime families, "Tattaglia has lost a son. I have lost a son. We are quits. What would the world come to if people kept carrying grudges against all reason? That has been the cross of Sicily, where men are so busy with vendettas they have no time to earn bread for their families. It is foolishness" (Puzo, The Godfather 285). 28 This is where the term neoconservative is truly useful, since traditional conservatives would date the liberal establishment from the days of Roosevelt's New Deal whereas many neoconservatives are in fact former New Deal Democrats who benefited from those programs but do not want to see similar programs extended to newly recognized categories of people. Nevertheless, both types of conservatives share a loathing for federal interventions. 29 Thus neoconservative anti-statism, in a potentially confusing linguistic turn, is a rejection of "the" state and federal power in favor o f state or local power. 30 Don Corleone's early application of the tenets of monopoly capitalism to the politics that guarantee the power of his capital is here doubly ironic: "Like other great rulers and lawgivers in history Don Corleone decided [in 1939] that order and peace were impossible until the number of reigning states had been reduced to a manageable number" (Puzo,The Godfather 220). That is, the "logic" of the local that is to inform the "free market" exchange of political power is undermineda priori by the "logic" of centralized power, or monopoly.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 31 As Puzo says of growing up in one o f New York's Italian ghettoes in his autobiographical The Godfather Papers: "[L]ater in life when I was exposed to all the cliches of lovable Italians, singing Italians, happy-go-lucky Italians, I wondered where the hell the moviemakers and storywriters got all their ideas from" (13). 32 For an extensive examination of the report and its effects, see Rainwater and Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics o f Controversy (1967).

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