Changing Representations of Masculinity in Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club, and a Man in Full Bailey Player

Home , 20th Century Man, A Man in Full, A Reason to Fight, Bitter Heart, Just for Men, Larry McMurtry

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2006 "The True Male Animals": Changing Representations of Masculinity in Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club, and a Man in Full Bailey Player

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

“THE TRUE MALE ANIMALS”: CHANGING REPRESENTATIONS OF MASCULINITY IN LONESOME DOVE, BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, FIGHT CLUB, AND A MAN IN FULL

BAILEY PLAYER

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Bailey Player defended on June 30, 2006.

Leigh Edwards Professor Directing Thesis

Mark Cooper Committee Member

Barry Faulk Committee Member

Approved:

Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

For mom and dad.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Naturally, it is difficult to thank all of those who make a project like this possible, but it seems proper to start with my major professor, Leigh Edwards, who opened my eyes to new ways of understanding various representations of popular culture. Her insightful advice has helped me significantly develop the ideas presented in this thesis and her sincere encouragement over the past two years has helped me significantly develop my own understanding of myself as a student and an academic.

Amber Brock’s counsel and friendship has kept me grounded in my ventures, this most recent one included, and I thank her for her invaluable support. The guidance of my fellow graduate students, Amber Pearson, Jordan Dominy, and Alejandro Nodarse has also proved to be indispensable, as has their companionship.

I am also indebted to Mark Cooper and Barry Faulk for their helpful feedback and participation on my thesis committee. Their help and support throughout my career as a graduate student has been inestimable.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my mother, my father, and God, without whom nothing in this life would be possible.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract………...... …………. vi

Introduction: Reading Like a Man in the Modern American Novel………………………. 1

“You Men and Your Promises”:

Lonesome Dove and the Ride out from Civilization……………………………….. 17

“Show Me but Ten Who Are Stout Hearted Men”: Insulation, Pleasure Seeking,

and Public Masculinity in Bonfire of the Vanities...... ………. 32

A Father is Being Beaten: Decomodifying the Male Body in Fight Club…….…………... 49

“This Damned Machine”:

Masculinity Faces of Against Technology in A Man in Full………………………. 66

Conclusion: Manhood in the Twenty-First Century…………………………...... ………. 83

Footnotes…………………………………………………………………………….……... 94

References…………………………………………………………………………….……. 99

Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………………………….….. 107

v ABSTRACT

This study is an attempt to trace changing perceptions of masculinity as expressed by popular literature in the late twentieth century. In this thesis I argue that masculinity is a process and, as such, can be understood differently at different times. Employing Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove (1985), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998), I examine the ways in which these popular novels might be understood as expressing and mediating concerns surrounding masculinity at the time of their publication. By investigating these literary works, we might be able to more fully appreciate the fears and desires linked with a fluctuating hegemonic masculinity in America. Specifically within each text, I look at how the main male characters maintain and/or are denied separation from an encroaching and feminizing civilization and how these struggles for secession correspond to modern anxieties influencing hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, by studying literary works popularized under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, we can observe how traditional perceptions of masculinity as stoic, tough, and hard-boiled (a la Reagan) have been largely destabilized and softer, more docile forms of masculinity (a la Clinton) have become increasingly accepted and even normalized. As a result of enhanced and prevalent modes of technology, jobs that require muscular strength have decreased significantly in the last century, and so it has become increasingly unnecessary for men to define themselves in terms of their strength or toughness. Each of the novels considered in this thesis wrestle with these concerns. Finally, I extrapolate from these twentieth century works into the twenty-first century in an attempt to gauge what anxieties have been resolved and what remains to be reconciled. Overall, this thesis is an attempt to enter into a critical conversation with gender theorists such as Michael Kimmel who have suggested there is at least as much to discover about the constructedness of masculinity as femininity.

INTRODUCTION: READING LIKE A MAN IN THE MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL

No, when the fight begins within himself A man’s worth something. – Robert Browning

In Susan Bordo’s theoretical treatise The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private, she compares the male legacy in modern society to an odd practice performed by her dog: [I] view men’s “inheritance” as equivalent to my little Jack Russell’s inability to stop trying to bury that bone in places where it simply can’t be buried – like a leather sofa. The poor little fellow just simply keeps pushing his nose over that smooth surface as though it is a pile of dirt that can be dislodged. Finally, I just have to take the bone away from him in pity. I adore my little dog. But as smart as I think he is – for a dog – human brains have evolved to be much more adaptable to their environment than his has. (262- 63) Implications of this statement, as I understand it, are two-fold: first, the old-type masculinity – that aggressive, leering, brute posture – is becoming (or, perhaps, has become) not only outdated, but meaningless; and, second, that hope lies in the notion that humans are adaptable creatures and that men can find new ways to express themselves in a contemporary society beyond burying their proverbial bones in the cushions of societal leather sofas (so to speak). Growing up, boys are repeatedly told to “act like a man” – often even before they would be generally considered as “men.” Traditionally this has meant that the male child should “suck it up,” “deal with it,” “play through the pain.” The male is conditioned in these moments to deny

1 his body, to come to understand pain, and even sentiment, as something Others experience. The very phrase “act like a man” though implies masculinity’s own performance. The boy is instructed that he must establish himself constantly and consistently as strong, tough, and dominant before the audience of society so that he might not only be considered “a man” but also “manly.” Within the past century, and particularly within the past fifty years, much has been made of the difference between what is natural in men and women and what is learned, a difference that has been demarcated as the difference between sex and gender. Simply put, sex is the distinctive “equipment” men and women are given at birth which distinguishes one from the other while gender represents the roles that we perform in accordance contemporary society.1 Conventionally this has meant that men should be assertive, active and laboring while women should be reserved, passive and domestic. Beyond these simple definitions though, feminist theorists, beginning with Simon de Beauvoir, have suggested that there is, in fact, only one sex: female. As Judith Butler explains, “Beauvoir contends that the female body is marked within masculine discourse, whereby the masculine body, in its conflation with the universal, remains unmarked” (17). Monique Wittig nicely sums this argument as well, stating “[T]here are not two genders. There is only one, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general” (64).2 It is within this “generality,” this panoptical station of viewing and not being viewed, of marking while remaining unmarked, that men have existed, it is argued, for centuries. This privileged position began to be challenged in the 1950s though, and, with the rise of feminism, men have become increasingly more “visible” and “increasingly” less universal. Within this transition, there has also been a further move away from the basic sex/gender binary towards and understanding of the constant genderings of individuals that occur throughout history and the multiplicity that these genderings imply. “Gender,” as Butler defines it, “is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Gender Trouble 44). I would go even further to suggest here that these “repeated acts” in fact never congeal, and that each moment of gender expression is a (re)negotiation of how one understands societal norms and distortions and, consequently, how one desires to be perceived within these public structures of the body. Thus, just as Beauvoir has so famously remarked that “one is not born a women, but, rather, becomes one” (301), so too have men increasing come to recognize that one

2 is not born a man, but, rather, becomes one (and must work each day at maintaining this achievement). Yet even these divisions of “man” and “woman” have begun to disintegrate in the past half-century. The French feminist Luce Irigaray has written (in the vein of Beauvoir) that woman is “the sex that is not one,” implying that woman is multiply referenced and referential insofar as “woman has sex organs just about everywhere,” while “man” has only one true sex organ, the penis, and is referential of the privileged signifier, the phallus. Just as “gender” can be better understood as “gendering(s)” though, so too have men become increasingly understood in terms of their multiple embodiments, rather than their former, universal one-ness. As Bordo expertly describes: [M]ost men are not fully “one” with the cultural messages that tell them their power resides in their pants. Even those cultural messages are themselves not really unified, but bark out contradictory orders to men all the time. (Go for it, be a man, be a wild thing. But remember that no means no.) Ideas about the penis and masculinity, too, are hardly “one.” There are ethnic and racial ideologies that attribute special characteristics to the “black penis” and the “Jewish penis.” There are playful, ironic sensibilities that endow the penis in gay male culture with the divided personality of sexual icon and object of parody. There’s the mythic phallus, the cultural symbol of masculinity. And then there are penises of flesh and blood – clearly creatures of variety, not unity…. No, “one” is not the metaphor I’d use to describe the world of men. (43) In my own research I have come across various descriptions and definitions for various “types of men”: “The Alpha Male,” “The Hooligan,” “Metrosexuals,” “MetroHetero,” “MetroHomo,” “Übersexuals,” “The New Lad,” The New Bloke,” “Emo Boys,” and the list goes on. Clearly, it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine exactly who men are and who they aspire to be. Despite this balkanization of “The Male Ideal” though, one still could argue, as I do along with R.W. Connell, that “at any given time, one form of masculinity rather than others is culturally exalted” (77). Michael Kimmel (among others) has deemed this archetype as “hegemonic masculinity:” One definition of manhood continues to remain the standard against which other forms of manhood are measured and evaluated. Within the dominant culture, the masculinity that defines white, middle class, early middle-aged, heterosexuality is the masculinity that sets the standards for other men, against which other men are measured and, more often

3 than not, found wanting…. This is the definition that we will call ‘hegemonic’ masculinity…. (National Manhood 184) This cultural standard then does not necessarily become the heading under which all men fit, but rather outlines what is generally understood to be the aspiration of the average, heterosexual (white) male – what Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee have deemed “the crucial division…between hegemonic masculinity and various subordinated masculinities” (153). But, if we are to accept that gender is malleable and, as Kimmel has argued, “manhood…is historical,” how does one go about discovering what hegemonic masculinity is at any one given time? How can we unearth what was socially viable for men (who claim that they were “men”) 20, 10, even 5 years ago? How can we come to understand the tensions and conflicts that men felt in a given time as they constantly tried to perform and live up to masculinity as it was publicly understood? I would argue that examples of popular culture, specifically popular texts, hold the answer. For in our media-saturated and technology-inundated world, where local television stations can boldly promise “news as it happens” and AT&T has suggested that a phone call can literally “reach out and touch someone,” the “present” as we consider it is becoming less and less durable (consider that VH-1’s nostalgic program I Love the 90’s premiered less than 4 years after the 90’s were over.) Popular textual events, however, can offer a time capsule of sorts, and exhibit within their pages, images, and/or sounds the desires and beliefs possessed by a given society at a given time. In this way I agree with Roland Barthes and his notions of cultural “mythologies” as propagated in “operations of ideology.” That is, as John Storey has surmised, “ideology operate[s] mainly at the level of connotations, the secondary; often unconscious meanings, texts and practices carry, or can be made to carry” (6). In this thesis I examine four popular, American literary texts which exhibit four different notions of what masculinity is and what anxieties and concerns manhood faced in the time that these books were published. By analyzing Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (published in 1985), Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (published in 1988), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (published in 1996) and Tom Wolfe’s follow-up to Bonfire, A Man in Full (published in 1998) I intend to investigate the ways in which hegemonic masculinity is represented at the time of each work’s publication and how this representation is different from those novels that come before and/or after it. Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, I will show how the anxieties and disease surrounding these changes in masculinity are mediated and exposed in the four above-

4 mentioned novels. Anthony Rotundo has written that “manhood has a history” (American Manhood 2). In this thesis, I intend to historicize the manhood that lived and transformed from 1985 to 1998 (and beyond). Immediately, some issues arise. First of all, my selection of these four books is certainly not meant to be a catch-all for articulations of masculinity as it was popularly understood in the years that the books were published. The overview upon which I am embarking is a sweeping one, but I believe it may be instructive nonetheless. I have chosen these particular novels because they carry interesting and important “subtexts” which might bring to light some of the issues facing masculinity in the time each novel was produced. They are popular enough and pervasive enough to allow us to examine a segment of what cultural theorist Raymond Williams refers to as the “structure of feeling” of the time.3 This term captures both the internalization of culture – our personal connection to a text, how it makes us “feel” – as well as the external “structuring” of culture – how it makes us feel. Certainly the politics (and economics) or representation should not be ignored, but this thesis will examine the four aforementioned examples of popular culture more on the level of consumption and appropriation than on the level of production. Furthermore, I believe that the years in which each novel was published holds a certain significance as, in moving from one to the next in chronological order, we also move from the Reagan era, into the Bush presidency, to the Clinton administration up to the cusp of the election of George W. Bush. In examining each novel, I will attempt to place each work within historical context. Popular understanding of American masculinity at any one given time greatly depends upon and is greatly reflected by the masculinity embodied in the commander-in-chief. Certainly the president does not stand for the average American male and certainly he does not speak for all American men, but each administrations holds deep consequence for the ways in which masculinity was perceived and realized in America under each president. Also of importance are issues of popularity and what constitutes a work of “popular culture.” On many levels, “popular culture,” as a term, subverts and resists the boundaries of definition. Ray and Pat Brown have broadly defined popular culture as “mass media, entertainment, and diversions…heroes, icons, rituals, psychology, and religion…a way of life, the voice of the people (1). The OED defines popular culture as, “Designating (aspects of) art and culture whose forms appeal to or are favored by people generally; especially in popular art, music, song, etc.” If general appeal or favor defines popular culture, then Lonesome Dove,

5 Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full certainly fit the mold as all were immensely popular, each enjoying numerous weeks atop the New York Times bestseller lists. Fight Club, however, was not as initially popular as these blockbuster novels. Certainly, Palahniuk received some critical acclaim for his novel (it won the Oregon Book Award), but the book itself was never able to crack even the top 100 of the NY Times bestseller list in the year it was published. The film adaptation, released in 1999, was a different story though. Opening at number 1 on November 10, 1999, Fight Club grossed over 37 million in America and 63 million overseas,4 marking a sharp division between the popular reception of the book and the popular reception of the film. This thesis does not deal specifically with the film adaptation of the novel, but the film’s impact on the popularity of the novel after 1999, and indeed Palahniuk as a writer, is undeniable. Of course, it is also important to note that while the novel was nowhere near as well-received as the movie, 20th Century Fox certainly (and accurately) saw promise in the text’s production as a big-budget movie. Had 20th Century Fox never adapted the novel into a film and had the film subsequently not become a “cult classic,” Fight Club, hypothetically could have been lost to obscurity. This, thankfully, did not occur, and to-date Fight Club has sold over 300,000 copies, a majority coming after the film’s release. These issues hopefully resolved, my goal with this thesis will be then to track changing views and articulations of masculinity, employing the aforementioned novels as my primary texts, in America from the mid-eighties up to the edge of the new millennium and even extrapolating into the 21st century. I will explore how, as a result of feminism, men became more and more visible from the 1960’s onward as the enemy of certain feminists, what Anthony Rotundo has referred to as “faceless oppressors” (American Manhood 9) and how in contrast, men were offered fewer and fewer “viable” enemies – Others through which men could maintain their own universality. Susan Faludi suggests in her book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man that male children of the baby boomer generation were given two promises: a place as wild as the west to conquer and a war as worthy as World War II to fight in and win. What they received instead was space and the Vietnam War. Poor substitutes indeed, Faludi argues (26-7). The Vietnam War was particularly unfulfilling, especially if one agrees with Tanya Modleski’s statement that “war is the ultimate male referent” (66). Through heavy propaganda, the Communist was demonized and held up as the evil Other in order to provide the United States with an appropriate enemy (it seems no surprise then that masculinity during the 50s and 60s became synonymous with individuality.) When those men who went to fight in Vietnam

6 came face to face with this enemy though, they found it not to be the hardened, stoic men of political presentation and Hollywood, but rather boys, women and even children. At the chilling end of the now landmark Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket, director Stanley Kubrick painfully reveals the deadly accurate sniper who picks off two Marines to be a young Vietnamese girl. Certainly, the Vietnam soldier poses, this is not who my father encountered at Normandy. With the war winding down in the mid-1970s and second-wave feminism gaining strength, men began to seek ways in which they might, on one hand, solidify their decreasingly privileged position and, on the other, understand what their new position in society was. (Socio)Biological conservatives and moral conservatives looked for evidence that could justify divisions in the social sphere. Anti-feminists and some men’s rights groups even went so far as to argue that it was in fact men who were the subordinate group and that a new sexism had been born that thrived “on male bashing and male blaming” (Clatterbough 1997, p. 11). Again though, these reactions seem to be tied into an emphasis within the remaining hegemonic masculinity that asserted that men must establish their authority through the subjugation of a definable enemy. Increasingly, as patriarchy was seen as the enemy for feminism, frustrated and bewildered men believed women to be the enemy of men. Men attempted to mediate this changing sexual landscape by retreating more and more into offices, weekend expeditions, and sports arenas. Susan Faludi cites the replacement of baseball with football as the “new male pastime” and the resurgence of gentleman’s clubs in the 1960s and 1970s (17-8). For their part, Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club and A Man in Full each propose their own masculine retreat: the wilderness, the office, the basements of bars and clubs, and a 29,000 acre-plantation, respectively. The inclusion of these sanctuaries depict ways in which men have, at different times, sought to (re)engage in homosocial relationships with other men; to, as another mythopoeic member Sam Keen has put it, “become a man…[by] leaving [sic] women behind” (75). Certainly, the locales proposed in these novels do not encapsulate the myriad locations and means through which men have attempted to achieve a stronghold against the feminization of society, but they do symbolize the desire for a masculine retreat, a site set apart from the escalating gaze of women. Leading then into the 1980s, the American man finds Ronald Reagan elected to the oval office – an icon John Orman has described as “the quintessential macho president” (qtd. in Jeffords 35) – Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Hollywood model for the

7 new male hard body and a new hegemonic masculinity which to aspire. It is in this period that my argument begins, as I attempt to understand how Lonesome Dove fits into the 1980’s return to hard-boiled masculinity and rise in what has been deemed the mythopoeic men’s movement. Generally accredited to poet Robert Bly, who gathered men in drum-beating, poetry-reading searches for “deep manhood” in the mid- to late-1980s and then published his “findings” in the influential and problematic book Iron John: A Book about Men in 1990, the mythopoetic men’s movement saw some improvements on the earlier anti-feminist and men’s rights perspectives, and some reiterations of their sexist positions. Kenneth Clatterbough remarks that Bly on the one hand commendably believes that “the women’s movement has successfully taped into the unconscious minds of women and found a way to unleash women’s energy but…men have yet to find a positive and vigorous way of doing the same” (1997, p. 11). Yet Bly unfortunately goes further to criticize feminism for its “feminization of men,” citing that while “women can change the embryo into a boy, … only men can change the boy into a man” (16). In Lonesome Dove, this notion of male rearing is embodied in the character of Newt. The son of a dead prostitute and unaware that his father is the great Ranger and rancher Capt. Woodrow F. Call, Newt is effectively and collectively raised by the men of the Hat Creek Cattle Company. In his development, Newt is educated in all things masculine: we watch as he learns to shoot, fight, rope, ride and even kill. His physical journey with the Hat Creek Company is also a spiritual one (a common element of “masculine” literature) and by the time he reaches Montana he has effectively gone from boy to man. Even though Call never tells him that he is Newt’s father, he does give Newt his gun, his father’s watch and his horse which, as he says towards the novel’s end, he puts more value in than his name anyway. Those in Lonesome Dove who are unable to complete this turn from boyhood to manhood or, more often, unable to “maintain” their manhood are removed from the course of action. Sometimes they are eliminated, as with the case with the dim-witted Roscoe who is killed by the merciless Indian Blue Duck or Jake Spoon who is hanged by the Hat Creek outfit for letting the beautiful prostitute Lorie getting “stolen,” among other crimes. Others are discarded at Clara’s farm-house, a kind of dumping ground for ineffectual males – such is the fate of July Johnson, who is not only cuckolded but unable to “shoot a one” of the Indians who kidnap Lorie (McMurtry, Lonesome Dove 458); Dish Boggert, who, although he is recognized as top hand in the Hat Creek Company, nonetheless gives this position up to Newt in order to fulfill his

8 feminized love for Lorie; and, of course, the women themselves, Clara and Lorie, who end the novel both grieving for and besotted by the same man, that other great Ranger, Augustus McRae. As for their parts, Gus and Call embody that old, rugged, hard-edged masculinity that the mythopoetic movement prizes and seek a return to. Together they represent one incarnation of 1980s hegemonic manhood: stoic, durable, independent, not afraid of a fight, and able to take a shot (both from an arrow and from a bottle). And, of course, it should not be overlooked that they are, of course, both white, heterosexual men. This fantasy though also suppresses a pervasive fear in the 1980s that this brave and hard masculinity has numbered days. For more than anything, the outfit’s trek to Montana is a chance for its member, particularly Call, “to look at it before the bankers and lawyers get it” (McMurtry Lonesome Dove 85). Moreover, it is increasingly clear throughout the novel that Gus and Call have done their jobs too well and have wiped out all the good bandits, making the American west safe for businesses and families to inhabit. In essence, they have killed any chance for men of such hegemonic stance as Call and McCrae to engage with proper enemies and will soon be replaced by “bankers and lawyers” who, as Gus informs us “are just cannon fodder…for women children and settlers” (McMurtry 84). In the end, Gus dies from an arrow wound (or, rather, as Call would have us believe, from his own pride in not letting the doctor take both of his legs) and Call is left back where he started, Lonsome Dove, Texas after carting his friend’s body 2500 miles to bury it. Newt remains in Montana and, when we see him last, he wears his father’s role well. There is no doubt though that, even in Montana, the bankers and lawyers lurk just over the horizon – that, as Call knows, “Others would come” (McMurtry Lonesome Dove 833). In the world of Lonesome Dove, one not only finds a world in which the social spheres are clearly defined – women and feminized/emasculated men belong in the domestic setting, real men belong on the open range, in the wilderness – but also a world which, for the most part, is devoid of women. When on the trail, the men of the Hat Creek Cattle Company are amongst men only. Even when Lorie is following behind with Jake Spoon, she is hardly ever in sight and certainly does not willingly interact with anyone other than Gus. This community of men is a condition, indeed a fantasy of male separation, that results from the desires of the mythopoetic movement. This fantasy is held not only by a new generation of men though, according to Anthony Rutondo. In his historical examination of American manhood, Rutundo cites four major male movements he sees emerging in mid to late twentieth century: the team player, the existential hero, the pleasure seeker and the spiritual warrior. And while each “heading”

9 prescribes its own unique demarcations of how a man should live his life, “there is one important trait,” Rutundo says, “that all four ideals share:…each of them signifies a turning away from women” (286-89). As with the other novels discussed in this thesis, Lonesome Dove, on some level, represents the desire for men to engage with other men apart from, what Sam Keen has deemed, “the world of WOMAN” (17). In the world of Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman McCoy and the other “Masters of the Universe” seek this kind of environment at the office. As Rotundo again explains, this attempted community of commerce is yet another result of a changing American social landscape: Two centuries ago, the town and the extended family formed the matrix of life in the Northern states. For some, the church congregation also provided a society in which a man (or woman) might develop an identity. Now, at the end of the 1900s, those institutions have faded in importance for most middle-class folk….The large bureaucratic institutions where so many middle-class men work resemble eighteenth-century communities in certain ways: they are hierarchical, and they make elaborate demands on the individual. Unlike the genuine communities of the colonial and revolutionary eras, however, the great corporate bodies of time do not provide the individual with security, nor with any sense of organized connection to other people or the flow of human history. (American Manhood 284) Thus, the workplace can provide a kind of identity, but not a stable one and certainly not one that exists anywhere beyond the workplace (both literally and figuratively). At the office, Sherman presents himself with more bravado than anywhere and Wolfe extends this bluster with the language of war and violence (“Victorious warriors after the fray…Masters of the Universe” 54). Like Lonesome Dove, the job of men is work and work is, in turn, what makes them men. Unlike Lonesome Dove though, this work is now done by the bankers and lawyers, not to separate one’s self from them. The spaces in which this work is performed too is different, but the ends are the same. Whether Montana or the fifteenth-floor of the Pierce & Pierce building, the idea is not necessarily so much escape, but, as Sherman puts it, to “insulate.” Each domain of the hegemonic masculine character serves to separate him from the others, even, as we see in Lonesome Dove, they are always already invading. Another difference arises, both between Sherman and the Hat Creek Outfit: Sherman is not a cowboy (although he might imagine he is at times) and he is certainly not middle-class. At the novel’s beginning we find Sherman involved in brokering a $600 million deal, of which his

10 cut would be 1%: $6 million. With the money he makes, Sherman spends as only an American man on Wall Street in the 1980s can: cabs to work every morning, $1000 suits, an apartment that costs almost $3 million. Gone are the days when a man was expected only to provide for his family through hard, physical labor and be content to lead a sober life. In the time of Sherman McCoy’s “Mastery” the motto is “Get It Now!” (Wolfe 1988, p.17). As Rutundo remarks, there is a shift made from communities of commerce to “communities of consumption” (284). This consumption marks an important change in the hegemonic masculinity expressed in Lonesome Dove and that of Bonfire of the Vanities. John Berger has famously surmised that, in American society, “men act and women appear” (47). Included within this male act-ing is the performance of looking, creating within women a “double-consciousness,” according to Berger, which attempts to “see itself” through the male gaze. This conclusion seems to hold true in the case of Lonesome Dove as the men of the Hat Creek Cattle Company consistently described in action – fighting, riding, looking into the distance – while Lorie and Clara are described almost solely in terms of their appearance. When Lorie tries to look at them men on the cattle drive she only sees a blur. They are meant to do the business of looking; she is meant to do the business of being-looked-at. Sherman inverts this binary, creating of himself a spectacle, a man to be seen. While the men of Lonesome Dove do not appear in any mode other than action, Sherman spends almost the entirety of the novel keeping up appearances, making himself presentable. He is, as Rutundo has described, a “pleasure seeker.” He works not for the sake of work itself and for the ends it produces (indeed, when asked by his daughter to explain what he does for a living, Sherman is unable to do so), but rather for the sake of the money he will make and the things he can buy with it. Among these trappings are women as, for the pleasure seeker, “sex and beautiful women are consumer products, accoutrements to the good life” (Rutundo 287). In an undeniable bit of commentary though, it is precisely this approach that leads to Sherman’s ruin. As our champion remarks at the novel’s beginning, “Master of the Universe. A great height from which to view the world. A great height from which to fall” (27). 6 years later, this concern over “male appearance” is precisely what Fight Club takes issue with, among other things. By 1995, America was arguably still under the shadow of the Reagan era, but with the election of George Bush and his promise in his inaugural address “to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world”5 American political policy was becoming less about tough “issues” and actions and more about domestic “values” and feelings (Jeffords 102). The Clinton administration then further feminized, both literally and

11 figuratively, the “face of the nation.” For not only was Bill Clinton an explicitly liberal president who used even tears to his benefit in the 1992 campaign, but the role of Hillary Clinton during the his presidency has come to be understood as one that might be considered as influential as the President himself. Combine this with the fact that President Clinton appointed the highest number of women in history to the Presidential cabinet, and it appeared that politics was another space (perhaps the final frontier) in which men were “losing ground” (Matathia et al 42). Under this more feminine presidential administration, it seemed that more and more men were allowing those effects considered traditionally feminine into their own lives as well. Of course, this was nothing entirely new – plenty of men had embraced the feminist cause since the 60s and before. As with the hippie movement of the 70s (of whose male participants Reagan quipped that they had “a haircut like Tarzan and smelled like Cheetah, but walked like Jane”6), some men have increasingly embraced a style and appearance that skirts the line between what is male and what is female, or, perhaps more often, what is heterosexual and what is homosexual. Whatever the distinction, it is clear that by the time Chuck Palahniuk was writing Fight Club, Gus and Call were dead and gone and Newt might be spending his money on clothes rather than guns. In Fight Club, the first example we get of what Susan Faludi has called “ornamental masculinity” is former body-builder turned testicular cancer victim, Big Bob. As a result of the treatment of the disease Bob develops emasculating “bitch tits” – it is clear that Palahniuk means for us to understand Bob’s hulking muscles meant merely for display as, in fact, feminizing. The irony in this position, of course, lies in the fact that large upper-body muscular development is, as Michael Kimmel remarks, “one of the few areas in which men can differentiate themselves from women.” (National Manhood 16). The critique here though is not necessarily on the form of the male body, but rather on the function of it. Consistently in Palahniuk’s novel, men are criticized for not having bodies of action, or, more specifically, not occupying bodies that produce “masculine” action. As our hero Tyler Durden succinctly puts it, “how much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight” (Palahniuk 73). Clearly here, violence is linked with masculine identity. If Robert Bly were ever to write a novel, it might look a lot like Fight Club. Not only does fight club offer its members the opportunity to move from spectators or feminized spectacles to active participants in a ritualized performance of masculine aggression,

12 but it also provides a unique Other, a new enemy, something that the new hegemonic masculinity had been in desperate search. On some level, sports, particularly football, at the time offered an opportunity for the vicarious mediation of masculine aggression. Fans were given a team to root for, “boys in the trenches” who would “wage war” against the opposition and fight for the benefit of The Team.7 By the 1970s though, Monday Night Football was becoming a media franchise and, with uniforms now displaying the player’s names on the back, The Team had given way to superstars like O.J. Simpson and “Broadway” Joe Namath. Entering into the age of celebrity, football had become less about collective effort and winning “just one for the Gipper” and more about free-agent contracts and end-zone dances. It had become about individual statistics and egos as evidenced by star receiver Michael Irvin saying of his Dallas teammates in the same year Fight Club was published, “I am the original...Those are my disciples.”8 Thus, not only had both the Vietnam War and American football failed in its promise of providing a suitable rite of warfare for men of the time, but also the Cold War carried out under the Reagan era had now been deemed null (even to the point that Time Magazine named Mikhail Gorbachev it’s “Man of the Decade” in 1990) and even Iraq, complete with evil dictator and suffering masses, seemed hardly a respectable foe after being defeated in 43 days. The new enemy, Fight Club promises, is one that we must create for and of ourselves. With the main character, this division works literally. The narrator (who remains unnamed throughout the entirety of the novel) creates Tyler in order to have someone to fight. This embodiment of the narrator’s Freudian superego, as Tyler clearly is, seems to fall in line with Kaja Silverman’s argument concerning male masochism. For Freud, masochism is, psychologically, a female condition. In “A Child is Being Beaten,” Freud argues that the Oedipal male child represses the possible sexual pleasure that could be associated with punishment and instead opts to externalize the abuse suffered. The female child (being the opposite in everything male for Freud) is forced to internalize the fantasy and replay the moment through psychocontructive means of masochistic pleasure. As Silverman explains, “Feminine masochism, in other words, always implies desire for the father and identification for the mother, a state of affairs that is normative for the female subject, but ‘deviant’ for her male counterpart” (37-8). What we find in Fight Club, though is “a generation of men raised by women” (41), i.e. men without father with which to identify. Thus, the superego, which Silverman asserts has a “paternal identity,” must assert itself sadistically towards the masochistic ego (or, the narrator, in the case of Fight Club) who still identifies with

13 the mother. For the narrator and others, fight club then offers for the participant not only a meaningful adversary against which to re-establish his identity but also an opportunity to work through a “failed” Oedipal phase. Once fight club moves outside the basements of experimentation, the logic of the symbolic order must reify itself within the organization in order to maintain the phallocentric structure. This is evident in the homework assignment provided by Tyler which instructs members to start a fight with a stranger and to lose in order to, in Tyler’s words, “remind men of their power” (Palahniuk 106). By doing this, the participant is moving outside his own subject and becoming the passive, contra, feminized object through which the man on the street might realize what Robert Bly has called the “Wild Man…lying at the bottom of [man’s] psyche” (6). What has been a voluntary experiment on the part of the fight club members is now a forced event, compelling credulous men in the “real world” to (re)associate masculinity with violence. In the shift between fight club and Project Mayhem, the name fight club takes in the public realm, reflects the tension intensifying the 1990s between men’s desire to progress in their understandings and expressions of masculinity and the propensity to revert into outdated, aggressive standards of manhood. In coming to A Man in Full, we arrive somewhat full circle from Lonesome Dove, although with some very different conclusions. For again we are given an “aging hard body” (to borrow from Susan Jeffords) as our main character – in this case billionaire owner of Croker Global Industries, Charlie Croker – and again we are given the young(er) and more virile journeyman, Conrad Hensley who works in one of Croker Global’s food warehouses in San Francisco. Unlike Capt. Woodrow F. Call or Augustus McCrae though, we are introduced to Charlie after his time has come and gone. Once a college football giant, Charlie prides himself on having “masculinity to burn” (Wolfe, Man in Full 33). As with Bonfire of the Vanities, this masculinity is affirmed and reaffirmed in the workplace, but unlike Bonfire, this masculinity must also be sustained actively outside the office. Croker seeks his “Wild Man” at his country house Turpmtine and when asked what kind of exercise regimen he prescribes to, quips, “Who the hell’s got time for an exercise regimen? On the other hand, when I need firewood, I start with a tree” (Man 41). This sort of elemental masculinity is repudiated throughout the novel as Croker continuously loses hold of his family, his company and, most importantly, his body. Perhaps most interesting to note in Charlie’s metamorphosis is that, as a result of an old football injury Charlie suffered to his knee, he must have a titanium knee-joint surgically

14 inserted to replace his deteriorating one. He becomes, in the words of his doctor, a “bionic man,” no longer a self-made man, but rather one subsidized by metal aides. This not only effectively makes Charlie less of a man, but it also replaces a piece of Charlie which signified him as the “man in full” with a measure of technology, that dangerous development which takes away from the preeminence of male strength and levels the playing field, so to speak. No one feels this disagreement between masculine strength and technological aptness though, more than Conrad. As an employee of Croker Global, Conrad must load and unload heavy boxes of frozen food for his paycheck. The resultant muscles become a hindrance though when Conrad applies for a job as a data processor. His hands, “laborer hands,” turn out to be “so much wider and heavier and stronger, from working in the warehouse” that he keeps “constantly overlapping adjoining keys or else striking them too hard, causing the letters to repeat” during the required typing test (Wolfe, Man 250, 253). The subsequent events after the unsuccessful interview are catastrophic as Conrad is chastised by his wife, forced to steal his own car from the city impound during which he assaults an attendant and finally lands in prison. The message for Conrad is the same for Charlie: those who were once men in full, with “back[s] like a jersey bull” and “masculinity to burn,” are now obsolete (Wolfe, Man 6, 33). In conclusion, I mean to suggest with this thesis that through looking at these four examples of popular fiction spanning nearly 15 years, we might begin to understand the changing hegemonic masculinities men were (and, on some levels, still are) aspiring towards, as well as the apprehensions and dis-eases they felt within those aspirations. Lonesome Dove shows a masculine community that is cocksure and self-sustaining. Those men who are accepted into the “family” travel to Montana to be cowboys a bit longer before civilization arrives, while those males who are feminized must stay behind or return to Clara’s domestic haven. In Bonfire of the Vanities, the workplace is offered up as a stronghold for male competition and consolation. The man here also must “insulate” himself from the world outside or else be dragged into a lower-level jungle with which he is not familiar and in which he is unaware of how to survive. Fight Club presents a male society obsessed with appearance and gentility. The fantasy it suggests is one that provides the aimless man with purpose both in an appropriate rival (himself or another man in limbo) and in providing a passive Other for uninitiated men to recover their violent masculine forms. Finally, A Man in Full shows the breakdown of this powerful and muscular male form in the face of a technological and media-driven society.

15 Despite his attempts to cover up his “dumb animal hands” or to resume an antiquated hegemonic masculinity, the once proud “man in full” has been superseded (both thankfully and pitifully) by a newer, less hardened form of manhood. Figuratively put, he has become Bordo’s dog.

“YOU MEN AND YOUR PROMISES”: LONESOME DOVE AND THE RIDE OUT FROM CIVILIZATION

“The music of departure is now rather faint, the god almost out of hearing….[T]he one thing that is sure is that he was a horseman, and a god of the country. His home was the frontier and his mythos celebrates those masculine ideals appropriate to the frontier” – Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave9

You can have your ride in the crowded town! Give me the prairies free. Where the curlews fly and the coyotes cry, And the heart expands 'neath the open sky: Oh, that's the ride for me! – “A Cowboy’s Ride”

Throughout his career, writer and Texas icon Larry McMurtry has expressed an ambiguous relationship with his home state. A native of Akron, Texas, McMurtry’s grandparents settled originally in Denton County in 1877, at a time when Comanche Indians had still not been subdued and the influence of civilization was still decades away (McMurtry, Grave 145). There the McMurtry clan took up ranching and McMurtry “heard the stories and absorbed, but did not share, his father’s longing to have worked the country at the time of the cattle drives” (West 122). Early into his career as a novelist and screenwriter, McMurtry wrote almost solely

17 of the American West and his interpretations of the frontier mythology. By 1971 though, more than 20 years after McMurtry had launched his literary vocation, the writer claimed that he was “finished with the old men of the West” (Reilly 100). Even as late as 1981, McMurtry was “condemning such ‘back to the country’ excursions as being backward and hardly worth considering as literature” (Reynolds 27). Nevertheless, in 1985 McMurtry published what has come to be understood as his Magnum Opus: the Western epic Lonesome Dove. Spanning almost 900 pages, Lonesome Dove chronicles the cattle drive of Woodrow F. Call, Augustus McCrae and the other member of the Hat Creek outfit. Set in the late 1870s, Lonesome Dove takes as its period the end of an era, a time when the West had been all but won and civilization was quickly approaching. Despite situating the novel more than a century in the past though, Lonesome Dove spoke profoundly to the 1985 (male) reader. Lonesome Dove offered its male audience certain acknowledgements of modern concerns and, through identification with a variety of possible male characters, the male reader might have been able to moderate better the anxieties regarding gender roles of the mid- 1980s.10 As an expression of male fantasy, Lonesome Dove presents a world in which men are separated physically and expressively from women and boys are given as space of initiation into manhood, where there still exists a firm line between civilization and frontier, the refined and the wild. At the time of publication, Lonesome Dove represents a dream of the past while at the same time acknowledging the reality of the present cannot abide such a dream.11 The novel begins in the town of Lonesome Dove, a hamlet situated just over the American side of the Texas-Mexico border. Immediately, we are introduced to our heroes, Capt. Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McRae, two retired Texas Ranger captains who, along with the other members of the Hat Creek Outfit, spend their days working menial tasks, drinking whiskey and “scaring up card games” at the Dry Bean Saloon, where local prostitute Lorena conducts her business. The tone of these opening chapters is one of angst, not unlike the anxiety cited by advocates of the men’s mythopoetic movement promoted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like the male reader perhaps, Gus, Call, and the others are restless, waiting for an adventure to save them from a life of boredom and give their lives meaning. Enter another former ex-ranger, Jake Spoon, with tales of the “cattleman’s paradise” that is Montana. Call is immediately convinced and, after stealing some horses from Pedro Flores in Mexico and trading for cattle, the drive ensues.

18 Infatuated with Jake, Lorena attends the drive as well, along with seventeen-year-old Newt, who we learn is Call’s son. Lorena does not participate in the drive though, lingering behind with Jake and serving mostly to emphasize the separation between men and women in this world. The long drive consumes most of the action, with some noteworthy subplots included, the most significant of these being Sheriff July Johnson’s hunt for Jake Spoon for accidentally killing his brother and Gus’s own desire to see his bygone sweetheart, Clara Allen. Despite the sheer glut of conflicts that the Hat Creek Cattle Company encounters along the way, the group finally reaches Montana and builds their ranch. Along the way, they loses some core members, most notably Jake Spoon and Gus, the latter of whom requests that Call take his body back to Texas and bury him in an orchard where he and Clara used to picnic. The novel ends where it begins, in Lonesome Dove, though Call now is directionless and worn while his son Newt runs the cattle ranch in Montana. The novel was both a critical and popular success. It won the Spur Award of the Western Writers of America, a Texas Institute of Letters Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was adapted into a well-received mini-series and, to-date, the novel has sold over 500,000 copies in hardback. Of its voracious consumption though, McMurtry remains ambivalent. In a short article he wrote for a 2001 critical publication entitled Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), McMurtry compared the work to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” which the artist admittedly “grew very, very tired of having to sing, over and over again” (McMurtry, “On Lonesome Dove”130). The author also writes of his inability to control the ways in which the work has been understood, writing that Lonesome Dove is “as remote from me as the Athuriad, or the Matter of Troy, but which blooms eternally – a living myth-flower – to its readers” (“On Lonesome Dove”130). McMurtry’s words here testify to the meaning-making power of the audience-at-large. Born of McMurtry’s mind and own experiences, the novel has since been consumed and reproduced – both in medium and popular perception – becoming an article of the reader as much as the author. These readers, at the time of the book’s publication, were readers otherwise enmeshed in an urbane society which nevertheless still promoted the image of the hard-bitten and case- hardened man. In 1985, Americans were well-initiated in the Reagan era, that president who was the “model of the strong father and the moral man” (Matathia 84). Images of hard-bodied masculinity permeated the silver-screen, informing the hegemonic norm of the time: strong, tough, and durable. By no means does Lonesome Dove offer literary versions of Rambo. Its

19 main protagonists are aged cowboys, well past their prime, whose days of war and conflict are now mostly memories. What it does offer are heroes who are “uncivilized” inasmuch as they at once agents of and rivals to the wild. Of the concerns that Lonesome Dove manages through its narrative structure – loss of the father, lack of initiative rites, the need for an enemy – almost all emerge out of the fear that civilization was feminizing. For in the civilized world, those male qualities which were integral “in the wild” – brute strength, ability to protect the family – become less important, if not obsolete. Leading into the 1980s, even jobs which required upper- body strength were becoming less and less prevalent. “All over the developed world, the sorts of jobs that called for male muscle and daring are disappearing and being replaced by the type of work women can do at least as well as men. Office jobs, service jobs, jobs that involve working with people and information rather than with things and machinery are gaining in prestige and power – and in paycheck” (Matathia 108). Obviously this shift calls into question any further ascertains for male privilege and justifications of patriarchal society. This concern with civilization can be seen even in McMurtry’s earlier works. In In a Narrow Grave, McMurtry addresses this unease when writing of 1960s Texas: The state is at that stage of metamorphosis when it is most fertile with conflict, when rural and social traditions are competing most desperately with urban traditions – competing for the allegiance of the young. The city will win, of course, but its victory won’t be cheap – the country traditions were very strong. As the cowboys gradually leave the range and learn to accommodate themselves to the suburbs, defeats that are tragic in quality must occur and may be recorded. (xv) It is interesting to note here that the time period that McMurtry deals with in Lonesome Dove is of a similar transitional quality. John M. Reilly explains: [After the Civil War] population movement shifted from a north-south axis dependant upon river and coastal shipping to an east-west axis. Easterners spilled into new territories to take advantage of land secured from the Native Americans….[This migration] nevertheless spanned a brief period of time, from the arrival of the newcomers who displaced the Indians…and the closure of open land instigated by the spreading use of barbed wire, which by the 1880s was being manufactured at the rate of 10,000 pounds a year. During that window of time, the great trail drives from the lower states to middle western rail heads created the occupation of the cowboy herder. As railroads spanned the continent, the U.S. Army drove Native Americans onto reservations, and towns grew in

20 the West, the window of cowboy glory times closed, changing the free riders of the plains into ranch workers. (10) What the cattle drive in Lonesome Dove offers its reader then is a time just before cities and civilization, before “bankers and lawyers,” as Gus and Call euphemize. Throughout the narrative, civilization is constantly addressed, at times seeming to be right at the horseshoes of the drive. By taking his audience along for the ride, McMurtry allows the reader to experience a kind of old-way initiation, a trial by fire (or at least the heat of South Texas sun). As Elliot West explains, “Our western myth…tells of a dual metamorphosis, a violent sort of blood wedding of the people and the land, and at the end it’s not always easy to say who was victorious. The wild country was subdued, but it absorbed and shaped the people, too” (123). While this argument might be reminiscent of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s (in)famous and problematic frontier thesis that the character of the American people grew out of “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,”12 West’s contention points more to the myth of the West though as a proving ground for masculinity, one in which there exists a dialogue between the cowboy and the land. The cattle drive, particularly for young Newt, becomes a “suitable rite of passage, which…involve[s] separation from the dependency and weaknesses of childhood and a new sense of belonging to a distinctive world of adult males” (Segal 131). Other than an initiation rite, the West in Lonesome Dove also provides other intrinsic responses to the anxieties of those characters involved and the 1980s reader. First of all, while Montana is the destination for Call, Gus and Co., the journey is decidedly more important in this novel than the destination. Moreover, the idea of Montana, its promise, is representative of the perfect passage into manhood. “The old world was crowded and set in its ways. Its individuals lived within narrow possibilities. The new world was open and full of promise and essentially a social void, without cultural form or shape. It was a wilderness, full of unforeseen dangers and undreamt-of challenges” (West 122). As the “new world” becomes the rite of passage for boys and uninitiated men with its “unforeseen dangers and undreamt-of challenges,” so then does Montana become the feminine reward, passive and waiting at the end of the journey. Throughout the novel, Montana is referred to as “she” and is endowed with “virgin soil” (182) and “yawning country” (824). The “cattleman’s paradise” becomes the understood agreement between the man and the land. Should he survive the barren and harsh land, he will receive a plot in unconquered country, the damsel who waits for her prince.13

21 Implicit in this contract also is the promise of a worthy enemy after the end of the Civil War and the conquest of such culturally marginalized masculinities as Mexicans and Indian- Americans. As it is after World War II, the question for those in the novel is, “who is left to fight?” Early into the novel, we find Capt. Call almost lamenting the conquest of the Comanche Indians, a tribe in Texas that, apparently, he and Gus seemingly drove out single-handedly. Still, in considering the Hat Creek Outfit’s plot near the Rio Grande, the narrator remarks that, “If the Comanches ever came again, it stood to reason they would make it for their old crossing, but Call knew well enough that the Comanches weren’t going to come again” (27). As the narrator comments more succinctly on the following page, “[Call] was still the captain, but no one had seemed to notice that there was no troop and no war” (28). What the cattle drive offers for Call is both a troop (“the boys”) and a war – his enemy is the land: Call…views aspects of the frontier landscape as obstacles which must be overcome if he is to prove himself an outstanding plainsman. He sees the difficulties of the environment as challenges to him, and he decides to learn mastery techniques not only from other plainsmen but also from Native Americans, for he recognizes they possess skills which could benefit him. Because he is obsessed with mastering the environment, Call expects the people with whom he works to overcome natural obstacles…. He does not accept the argument that Nature is more powerful than humanity. (Boyd 259-60) For Call and others, the land through which the Hat Creek boys must travel provides not only a proving ground for untested or idle masculinities but further offers a suitable enemy for a company led by two captains “without a troop and without a war.” Furthermore, Boyd rightly calls attention to the Native American in Lonesome Dove as stewards of the land. Like the ground which they cross, Native Americans are, for Call and Gus, worthy adversaries deserving of their efforts. In their battle for the land, Call and Gus have learned from Native Americans and their respect for those indigenous to the land is often referred to throughout the novel. Yet, just was with the land, their conquering of the Native Americans is necessary in order for them to prove their superior masculinity. Even with this stimulating quest and the promise of admirable foes though, McMurtry adds some trepidation even before the drive commences as to whether the journey is not only needed, but also whether it will be enough for the men of the Hat Creek outfit to regain their once virile manhood. As McMurtry presages through the voice of Call:

22 Though everything seemed peaceful, he had an odd, confused feeling at the thought of what they had undertaken. He had quickly convinced himself it was necessary, this drive. Fighting the Indians had been necessary, if Texas was to be settled. Protecting the border was necessary, else the Mexicans would have taken south Texas back. A cattle drive, for all its difficulty, wasn’t so imperative. He didn’t feel the old sense of adventure, though perhaps it would come once they got beyond the settled county. (227) It is unclear whether Call gains this “old sense of adventure” back or not, but just the fact that uncertainty is introduced into Call’s thoughts though – a character who prizes conviction above all else – is enough. Moreover, it seems that McMurtry has a talent for ambiguity. Lonesome Dove offers opportunities for mollification of typical masculine anxieties, but it also problematizes them as well. In a 1988 interview with Mervyn Rothstein regarding Lonesome Dove, McMurtry remarked, “I’m a critic of the myth of the cowboys. I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it….The myth of the clean- living cowboy devoted to agrarian pursuits and the rural way of life is extremely limiting.” If McMurtry’s expressed intention is to critique “the myth of the cowboys,” then we should hopefully seek to understand not only how the Western “genre” is realized in his novel, but how it is revised – look not only to the action, but also to the asides. Having established the issues with which a large part of Lonesome Dove is concerned, we can turn now to the cattle drive itself, where those issues are exercised. The crucial aspect of the cattle drive lies not only in the understood opportunity for the male character to (re)forge himself in reaction to the harsh and admirable Western landscape, but that he is doing so in a mode of separation, both from society and, more importantly, from women. Not surprisingly, McMurtry deals specifically early on with the loss of separation in conjunction with the rise of civilization: The cowboy’s temperament has not changed much since the nineteenth century; it is the world that has changed, and the change has been a steady shrinkage. There are no more trail herds, no more wide open cattle towns, no longer that vast stretch of unfenced land between Laredo and Calgary….The big western ranches are breaking down into smaller and smaller ranches, and with the advent of pickups and horsetrailers it is no longer necessary to spend weeks on the roundup. The effect of this has been to diminish the

23 cowboy’s isolation, his sense of himself as a man alone. From solitude and the clarity solitude sometimes brings he is being drawn toward the confusions of the urban or suburban neighborhood. (Grave 26) The would-be cowboy then is unable to gain “a sense of himself as a man alone” because he is unable to exist as a man alone. The inherent trepidation in this argument is not that men will be forced to live in close community with other men – rather, this is the ideal. Instead, the concern springs from the fear of the female gaze, the gaze of a civilized world. In the mind of Gus, Call, and all the rest, a looming civilization not only threatens to end their way of life, making obsolete the subjugation of Native Americans and the land on which they live, but it more significantly threatens to bring women into the world of men and vice versa. Besides Lorie’s short stint on the cattle-drive, the reader only comes into contact with women in the novel when the setting is a town. Thus, the threat of civilization, the threat of mayors and banker and lawyers, is also the threat of the feminine eyes and not knowing how to act under their inspection. After all, how can a man be a man with all these non-men watching? Naturally this interest in separation is intrinsically linked with an interest in maintaining the gender status quo, as for a man “to maintain his status and prestige in his social life with his peers, he must consciously – and conspicuously – distance himself from his wife and children,” and, I would argue, from other’s wives and children (Segal 8). Gerald Fogel has written that “[i]t is not surprising that…for most men the problem is women” (9). Lonesome Dove is a novel that offers its readers a historical solution to this “problem.” Not unexpectedly then, once the outfit is on the trail, we find Call and Gus truly in their element, experts of every test, hitting their stride even in old age. Even Gus, who chides Call mercilessly along the way, calling him a fool and an ass for being so quick to start off for Montana, finds himself forced to admit to young Newt, “I can’t think of nothing better than riding a fine horse into a new country. It’s exactly what I was meant for, and Woodrow too” (756). They are men in isolation (which is to say, men amongst other men) and are free to do manly things such as clean their guns, rope steer, and not talk to one another. Lorie is along for the ride for half the trip, but her presence seems predicated on her being a victim. Her silence is legendary and her most attractive feature is in fact a scar above her lip she received in retaliation for having pistol-whipped an ornery former beau John Tinkersley. Her abduction by Blue Duck, the nefarious Indian enemy and son of the worthy former adversary Buffalo Hump, provides impetus for Gus to reassert his masculine capabilities by tracking the warrior, killing those in his

24 camp and saving Lorie. After this horrendous tribulation, Lorie decides to stay at Clara Allen’s house in Ogallala, thus reinscribing her femininity as one that belongs in the private sphere. Only Call, Gus and “the boys” go north. Call and Gus are not the only ones given an opportunity to define their masculine selves though. Newt, in particular, can be understood as literally passing from boy to man as he travels from Lonesome Dove to Texas. Along the way he is given distinct articles denoting his level of maturation: Call gives him a gun in Lonesome Dove, marking his entrance into the phallic order; Jake Spoon gives Newt his horse just before he dies, indicating a shift between the older and younger orders of masculinity; and, most importantly, Call gives Newt his own horse (the “Hell Bitch”), his rifle and his watch just before leaving to return to Texas with Gus’s body. Call’s gifts to Newt also mark distinctive symbolic implications. For while Call gives Newt a gun in Lonesome Dove, the rifle and horse he offers Newt in Montana are his own, denoting a replacement of the father with the son. Indeed, when Call leaves, Newt is given Call’s position as range boss over top hand Dish Boggert and senior member Pea Eye. The watch, which was Call’s father’s, not only furthers the idea of conveyance, but also refers directly to the timeframe in which Lonesome Dove operates and what the text suggests is Newt’s duty when Call is gone. As Susan Jeffords explains, “…[I]f stories of American decline and loss are to be rewritten, and the emblems of previous times are to be retrieved, then history must come under the control of the present. In other words, the father and all he represents cannot be brought back unless the son controls time” (89).14 Of course, it is important to address the fact that the one thing Call does not give to Newt is his name. Despite his promise to Gus and his masculine resolve, Call cannot bring himself to say the words. The scene is heartbreaking: And yet, when he looked at Newt, standing there in the cold wind, with Canada behind him, Call found he couldn’t speak at all. It was as if his whole life had suddenly lodged in his throat, a raw bite he could neither spit out nor swallow. He had once seen a Ranger choke to death on a tough bite of buffalo meat, and he felt he was choking, too – choking on himself. He felt that he had failed in all he had tried to be: the good boy standing there was evidence of it…. All his life he had preached honesty to his men and had simultaneously discharged those who were incapable of it, though they had mostly only lied about duties neglected or orders sloppily executed. He himself was far worse, for he had been dishonest about his own son…. (836).

25 Having thus shamed himself from both not being able to accept his role as father and not being able to commit to the physical act of honest speech, Call must leave the new land to “good boys” like Newt, and turn himself back towards Lonesome Dove, the land of the dead and the dying. It is in this leaving that Newt loses his last father. For while Call is his biological father, Newt is actually raised by nearly all of the older members of the company. Ernestine Sewell translates the Latin phrase Gus paints on the sign of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, Uva Uvam Vivendo Varia Fit, to mean “the cluster of grapes – many-sided, parti-colored, diverse – through living, begets one grape” (224).15 Sewell takes this reference to suggest that “[Newt] may be of Call’s seed, but he is actually the product of the Cowboy-God” (225), a term she uses to describe the notion of a Freudian composite identity amongst Jake Spoon (Id), Gus (Ego), and Call (Superego). I would argue that Sewell gets it half right. Newt is a product of more than one father, and through this production he eases the anxieties of the spiritual warrior movement which voiced concerns in the 1980s “about the dangers of a boy learning his vision of manhood through the eyes of mothers and other women” (Rotundo, Manhood 287). Jake, Gus, and Call represent a father by committee, recalling the “communal manhood” of the previous century where “a man’s identity was inseparable from the duties he owed to his community” (Rotundo, Manhood 2). This creates not only solidarity amongst the men, but also a distinction from women as on the trail there are no mothers and other women, only fathers and other men, and so men maintain the sole duty of creating a man from a boy. The reduction of Jake, Call and Gus into one personality though, and into one God-the- Father, is too orderly. This argument neglects the influence of Deets and Bolivar, also mentors and friends to Newt, and even Dish Boggert, Newt’s cowboy idol. The fatherhood presented in the novel is truly one of community – just as every member of the outfit must share in the responsibilities, so too must they participate in the duty of shaping young Newt. By the novel’s end though, Gus, Deets, and Jake have died; Bolivar and Call have returned to Texas; and Dish resides in Ogallala, doomed to forever woo the beautiful Lorena. Newt has taken over his father’s place, and with those who brought him up either dead or gone, Newt can rightfully claim that he “ain’t kin to nobody in this world” (837). As for their part, women and emasculated men have their place as well: Clara’s house in Ogellala, Nebraska. A former sweetheart of Gus’s, Clara marries horsetrader Bob Allen, much to Gus’s bafflement, and moves to Ogallala while Gus and Call stay in Texas. Over the years, Clara and Bob work hard to dig out a life for themselves, building up Bob’s business along with

26 a house. Clara has five children, three boys and two girls. Of these, only the girls survive, the young boys succumbing either to extreme weather or illness. Bob himself is kicked in the head by one of his own horses, leaving him unresponsive and invalid. Clara and the girls persevere though as Clara takes over the horsetrading business and ends up running it better than Bob ever did. Almost as much of an ideal in Gus’s mind as Montana is in Call’s, the reader is nevertheless introduced to Clara halfway through the novel and finds a character who is not only quite real but perhaps the only match for Gus’s brazenness. John M. Reilly writes: All of the women are portrayed sympathetically and allowed complexity that assures that they are more than just whores, but it is Clara alone who furnishes a world for herself. She becomes a capable horsewoman and dealer, a self-determining person who knows who she should not marry, a caring mother, the executive of a farm household, a counselor, and a woman who has selected, rather than fallen into, her life. If Gus and Call are the normative men in these novels, then Clara must be the normative woman, a person readers can identify with when they grow tired of the limitations set by the male world of the Old West. (109-10) Certainly, Clara is all of these things: self-actuating, autonomous, resilient, audacious. In other words, she represents many of the same qualities that the men of the Hat Creek Outfit exhibit. She is also something that they are not – or, rather, the exact opposite of what the men are. Above all, she is the willing mother. The first moment in which we find Clara, she is giving milk to a newborn mare from a rag “determined to save it if she could” (589). Later she performs the same procedure with the newborn infant of Elmira Johnson, the wife of July Johnson, who has run off with two buffalo traders to find her old beau, Dee Boot. In fact, throughout the scenes in Ogallala, Clara is either acting the part of mother to her own children, to others’ children or even to pacified men. All told, Clara ends up adopting four new members into her house: Lorie, who wants the house; Dish, who wants Lorie; July, who comes to want Clara; and July’s baby boy, Martin, whom Clara wants from the moment he is born. The fact that Clara must adopt “boys” and cannot have any of her own speaks to the feminine and feminizing nature of the domestic space over which she is sovereign. When Martin gets ill and Clara cares for him (in July’s stead), she breaks down crying: “I hate it when a child is sick….It’s like there’s something that doesn’t want me to get a boy raised” (819). This “something” is the same thing that keeps Newt from taking up Clara’s

27 offer to live in the house along with the rest. He is meant to be raised by men just as Clara is never meant to have a boy of her own. July acquiesces to his “adoption” (Gus’s word, 693) after he has been emasculated trying to aid in Gus’s rescue of Lorie. At the moment of ambush, Gus and July rush in although it is Gus who “shoot[s] the whole bunch” while July is unable even to “shoot a one” (458). Afterwards, on his way back to the campsite, the inaction weighs heavily on July’s mind: July had never felt so inadequate. He was not even sure he could find his way back to where they had left the others. He was a sheriff, paid to fight when necessary, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for the slaughter he had just witnessed. Captain McCrae had killed six men, whereas he had not even fired his gun when the old bandit was aiming at him. It had all seemed so rapid, all those deaths in a minute or two. Captain McCrae had not seemed disturbed, whereas he felt he could scarcely think. Death and worse happened on the plains. (461-62) To add to July’s troubles, he returns to camp to find Joe, his adopted son; Roscoe, his dimwitted deputy; and Janie, a mountain girl all murdered at the hands of Blue Duck. This final turn is the termination of July’s confidence and self-knowledge: “Something had happened which he would never be free of. He had lost the chance to die with his people” (462). As he cannot “even fire his gun” and cannot protect “his people,” July’s sense of himself as a man is negated. Therefore, he is relegated to Clara’s house. As for Dish, he gives up a top position at the ranch in Montana to return to Ogalalla, work for Clara, and swoon over Lorie. His voluntary admittance into the domestic sphere consigns him from a man of action to a man of feeling. What remains in Ogalalla then is the perfect mother, the hooker with the heart of gold, Clara’s unsullied daughters and two men who have turned in their guns for rags. The West is the proving ground for men and so all non-men must be consigned to the same domestic, feminine sphere. Just as civilization seems to always be right behind the cattle drive, so too does Clara’s house remind us that boys will not always have cattle drives to instruct them in the ways of hegemonic masculinity. As a literary construct Martin, in this way, serves as a foil to Newt and a reflection of the spiritual warrior’s greatest fear: a boy raised by a house of women. Even for those men who pass the trial/trail of the West, everlasting masculine conquest is not guaranteed. In fact, the novel acts in many ways like a gender catch-22 for those men involved on the cattle drive. For, if “McMurtry emphasizes that the end of the line is less important than the journey itself” (Busby 195), then the very moment of Newt’s initiation –

28 arriving at ground where the outfit will build their ranch – becomes the very moment when the proving ground ends. Just as he is deemed “a man alone,” his enemy, the worthy enemy of West, is taken away. Gus speaks to Call of a similar conundrum while they in San Antonio looking for a cook to replace Bolivar. After passing two settlements, Gus exclaims “Look at that…. The dern people are making towns everywhere. It’s our fault you know…. Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with” (323). Just as Newt has ridden through the fire and proved himself a man to arrive at a place void of ways to consistently express this manhood, so too have Gus and Call gone so far outside civilization to encounter the borderland and the edge where the white man and the Indian meet in combat that there is, in fact, no more border to define or protect. All has been, or will soon be, subsumed. When leaving San Antonio, Gus remarks, “The way this place is settling up it’ll be nothing but churches and dry good stores before you know it. Next thing you know they’ll have to round us on a reservation to keep us from scaring the ladies” (331). In the restless and fretful masculine mind, he is only half-joking. This paradox of the journey without an end, the war without spoils, the ritual without reward is perhaps no where more expressly displayed than in Call’s return back to Lonesome Dove. As an ending, Call’s return seems all wrong. For while the journey is where the Western novel lives, the destination nevertheless offers promise as the boys still, to some extent, signify home (Tangum 65). Even in Gus’s dying “favor” to Call in return for taking his body back to Texas, the undertaking feels meaningless: “‘[T]hat’s my favor to you,’ Augustus said. ‘It’s the kind of job you were made for, that nobody else could do or even try. Now that the country is about settled, I don’t know how you’ll keep busy, Woodrow. But if you’ll do this for me you’ll be all right for another year, I guess’” (796). There is no real adventure in Gus’s task though, no promise of restoration for Call. On Call’s return, almost nothing occurs, save for an episode where Call watches Blue Duck jump out the second-story window of a jail house to his death. While the story of the ride up to Montana takes place over 800 pages, the ride back takes only 18. The Lonesome Dove Call comes back to is miserable and desolate. Bolivar rings the dinner bell for no one and is hysterical when he sees the Captain. The Dry Bean is gone and we learn that the owner, Wanz Xavier, burnt the establishment down around him after Lorie left with Jake. Not surprisingly, Call feels displaced: “He had never felt that he had any home on the earth anyway. He remembered riding into Texas in a wagon when he was just a boy – his parents were already dead. Since then he had been mostly roaming, the years in Lonesome Dove

29 apart” (855). Here the novel ends on its final paradox: home for Call and all of the other cowboys in novel is, in fact, no home at all. Home is the plains, the West, the drive. Home, for the men in Lonesome Dove, is a horse. Thus, in the final moments when McMurtry promises to secure the characters of his novel into a stable relationship with themselves and one another, to solidify the momentum of men and time, to offer conclusive solutions, he doesn’t. As Janis Stout explains: With Call’s decision to return to Texas, the reader’s expectations are again shifted. It appears that the point of the narrative was neither the reaching of a destination nor the affirming of the road itself but something about returning to roots. Now, we think, we understand the generic affliction of the novel. It appears that the Captain will at long last acknowledge the bastard son, entrust the new cattle kingdom to him, and return to his old, known place. But the book does not sustain that satisfying variant on the conventional form either. Call cannot bring himself to speak the word of acknowledgement that will pass authority on to his son and bring new order into being. Again and again, the barren patriarch starts back to Texas, leaving his men leaderless and his herd ownerless. Instead of reaffirming the established order (the characteristic motive force for a trail drive), moving from an old order to a new order (the migration), or challenging the validity of existing order (the picaresque), Lonesome Dove has moved from dissolving order to no order at all. (248) It might be added to this list that in the sequel to Lonesome Dove, Streets of Loredo, we find out that the Montana cattle ranch has failed. Perhaps it is difficult to say whether Lonesome Dove is a Western or a tragedy; an epic or a cautionary tale. In the end, those moments that seem so promising for an addled masculine identity dissolve or are dissolving. Newt has become a man, but the test he has gone through is the exact event for which he was being prepared. The boys of Hat Creek have come to Montana, but the success of their ranch depends on the settling of the land in order to have costumers to which to sell their cattle. Gus and Call have undergone their last great adventure, but at the price of Gus’s life and Call’s friend. Perhaps in the end, Lonesome Dove is a love story. Some critics such as Mark Busby have suggested “a latent homosexual relationship between [Gus and Call]” (193). This reading attempts to regulate the love between these two men into too-definable categories, however. In her study of Citadel Military Academy cadets before the school was sexually integrated, Susan Faludi found that the men felt that could be more expressive if they were with other men: “‘It’s a

30 family,’ a cadet volunteered…. ‘Males feel more affection with each other when women are not around’” (Stiffed 126-7). Of course, the novel is a representation of a different condition than them men quoted here. The separation of fiction and real-life, time and situation are enormous gulfs, but the fact that the thematic connection of men desiring to be with men apart from the gaze of women exists despite these gulfs, bears witness to the integrality of this want of separation. Now, certainly McMurtry does not provide the reader with any scenes of the two cowboys holding each other or “telling each other how they feel” – the mere idea in the context of the novel is laughable. However, as John Reilly points out, “[I]t is, after all, Call who [Gus] calls upon…to undertake the remarkable act of devotion encumbered in the transport of his body on a reverse trip from the new cattle country where he meets his death back to the land where Gus and Call began their partnership as Texas Rangers and ranchers” (103). The final concern surrounding civilization then becomes the final irony. For only those adherent to a different code of masculinity might come to see Call and Gus’s relationship as “laten[ly] homosexual.” The approach of civilization, it seems, means that the cowboy will have to learn how to be a new man.

“SHOW ME BUT TEN WHO ARE STOUT HEARTED MEN”: INSULATION, PLEASURE SEEKING, AND PUBLIC MASCULINITY IN BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES “Richness of attire may announce a wealthy man, and elegance a man of taste…[but it is] in the rustic clothes of a farmer and not beneath the gilt of a courtier that strength and vigor of the body will be found” – Jean-Jacques Rouseau16

“Manliness, manhood, manly courage...there is something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff, no matter what a sophisticated rational age one might think he lived in” – Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff 17

Writing for Harper’s Weekly in 1989, two years after the publication of his wildly successful novel Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe made clear in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” that he wanted to be taken seriously not only as a novelist and fictional journalist, but also as a literary critic with something to say about the art of writing the novel. Wolfe’s article called for a return to “the realistic novel,” a form which Wolfe claimed had been all but abandoned in the previous 20 years and for which “the intelligentsia have always had contempt” (Wolfe, “Stalking” 47).18 Specifically, Wolfe asserted that he wrote Bonfire of the Vanities “to prove a point”: “I wanted to fulfill a prediction I had made in the introduction to The New Journalism in 1973; namely that the future of the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism more thorough than any currently being attempted, a

32 realism that would portray the individual as intimate and inextricable to the society around him” (Wolfe, “Stalking” 50). The society Wolfe chose was New York, namely Wall Street, that citadel of Reaganomics which provided its members with such affluence as to make “the Sun King blink” (Wolfe, “Crime and Punishment” 14). Essentially, Wolfe’s focus on realism and reporting was a means whose end was to show the city to itself: [N]ot for a moment did I ever think of The Bonfire of the Vanities as prophetic. The book only showed what was obvious to anyone who had done what I did, even as far back as the early Eighties, when I began; anyone who had gone out and looked frankly at the new face of the city and paid attention not only to what the voices said but also to the roar. (Wolfe, “Stalking” 55). In an article written for Harper’s exactly a century before Wolfe’s submission, William Dean Howells wrote that “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” (966). In his return to realism, Wolfe’s “material” is New York in the 1980s and his journalistic aim of verisimilitude offers The Bonfire of the Vanities up as much as a mirror as it is a looking glass. Wolfe’s desire with The Bonfire of the Vanities, it would seem, was to create a literary work that was as much of a report as it was a novel. Upon its release, both the style and content of Bonfire struck a chord with reading America. Rolling Stone originally serialized the novel, creating an interest so avid, its comprehensive publication warranted a 150,000 unit first printing (Rouse 12). The work became the number one longest-running best seller in 1988 and even beat out perennial best-selling author Stephen King’s Tommyknockers in the last weeks of that year (Weatherford 81-2). I can personally remember the novel’s entrance into popular lexicon among my father’s friends and co-workers. A member of a prominent Atlanta law firm at the time, my father would receive phone calls at our house and men would leave messages such as “well, just tell him the real ‘Master of the Universe’ called” or “I’m trying to get in touch with the Lion of Neely and Player,” in reference to the father of Bonfire’s main character. It was a book on every bookshelf and its characters quickly became household names. Evidently, Wolfe had created something which spoke not only to New Yorkers, but to the bulk of those living and reading in America in the late-1980s. The book follows the life and eventual collapse of the life of Sherman McCoy. A bond salesman at the prestigious Pierce & Pierce firm, Sherman lives in a realm of decadence exemplary of the 1980s. He, along with the other “Masters of the Universe,” lives by the code of

33 “Make It Now!” and spend “it” almost as quickly. When Sherman is involved in a hit-and-run with his mistress, Maria Ruskin, his insulated world quickly begins to fragment as his criminal actions are exposed by media coverage and police investigation. Public outcry snowballs when journalist Peter Fallow discovers that Sherman McCoy, Pierce & Pierce’s “biggest producer,” is in fact involved with the crime and the Bronx D.A. office begins to drool over the idea of “The Great White Defendant.” The novel ends with Sherman still on trial, his marriage in shambles, and his wealth all but gone. He becomes a “career defendant” who has fallen from impeccable suits and unimpeachable manners to sport shirts, hiking boots and the behavior more akin to an animal than the man he once was (Wolfe Bonfire 658). As Carol McNamara explains, the title Bonfire of the Vanities “refers to the practices of Savonarola who encouraged the wealthy of Florence to pile up their treasures on a great bonfire to expunge the sins of their vanity and materialism” (126). Just as this bonfire proposed to destroy those trappings of aristocratic wealth, so too does The Bonfire of the Vanities systematically deny Sherman the opportunity to maintain his own pleasurable masculinity by destabilizing his insulated world and taking away his ability to reify his hegemonic masculinity through work. By the novel’s end, Sherman has been stripped not only of his wealth, but also of his manhood, ironically leaving him raw, hard-edged and bloody-knuckled, the image of the true “warrior after the fray” that he imagines the devoted and ruthless workers of Pierce and Pierce to be. Despite all of his syllogizing over the “the Male Battle!” and the “war zone” of stocks and bonds, Sherman’s most potent weapon is money and his most efficacious armor are his $1,800 Italian suits. Sherman is ill-equipped, in his Wall Street shroud, to compete in a world where true “Male Battle” still exists. By the end of the novel, he is transformed from a man of appearance to a man of war, but in the world Wolfe presents, it is the former that is more desirable. In regards to issues of masculinity, there exist some surprising connections to the Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove published two years beforehand. At the heart of each novel, in fact, is the question of how a man maintains his masculinity in the face of modern civilization. Both novels seek to answer, or at least address, questions that McNamara has acutely asked: “Is there a place for manliness in American liberal democracy? Does capitalism give men a false sense of their manliness? Or, do both capitalism and liberal democracy simply try to undermine manliness altogether because it is fundamentally incompatible with American life?” (121). Again, how can a man become “a man” if he does not have the natural proving grounds and

34 definable enemies upon which and against whom he can bear out his masculinity? Lonesome Dove offers its reader a time just before and apart from liberal democracy and capitalism, where men lived in connection with the land and, indeed, gained assurance of their masculinity from it. The Bonfire of the Vanities, on the other hand, takes its reader directly into Gus and Call’s worst nightmare: a world filled with bankers and lawyers. Despite their depictions of New York as a “jungle” and the office as a “war zone,” the men in Bonfire are quite unfamiliar with physical violence or physical danger. Sherman, the novel’s (anti) hero, is completely unprepared for his hostile encounter with two black youths on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx. Similarly, Larry Kramer, Ray Andruitti, Jimmy Caughey and the rest of the “Power that ran the Bronx” are so terrified of the citizens they represent as district attorneys that they all choose to order in sandwiches from a nearby deli every day rather than “go out into the heart of the Bronx at high noon and have lunch in a restaurant” (Wolfe, Bonfire 130). Yet there does exist a similarity between the offices where the men of the novel work, bluster, and chew their sandwiches and the Western landscape of McMurtry’s novel: both spaces mark areas separate from women. As is necessary with Gus and Call’s home on the range, the office for the men in Bonfire constitutes a home away from home where each can practice his masculine bravado and situate himself solely within the presence (and eyes) of other men. Bonfire’s narrator mentions specifically that “not one of the eighty members [of Pierce and Pierce] was…female” and the only time a woman enters the Bronx courthouse, that other office, is when Miss Shelly Thomas, concupiscently known as “The Girl with the Brown Lipstick,” appears as a juror in one of Kramer’s trials and subsequently becomes the object of his male lust. The offices in Bonfire then are all-male, save for the woman who may enter (like Lorie for a short time in Lonesome Dove) to submit herself to the male gaze and reify a member’s masculine stance. This notion of separation though is also an idea that differentiates concepts of masculinity in Bonfire from those represented in Lonesome Dove. For while both present spaces apart from female assessment, the former is clearly interior while the latter is intrinsically exterior. Both involve a kind of escape from civilization, but while the Hat Creek Company literally and actively exists outside the democratic and capitalistic world, Sherman and the other members at Pierce and Pierce are ensconced deep within it and, in fact, serve to maintain it. The offices in Bonfire offer temporary relief from a society where the appropriate expressions of

35 masculinity are becoming less and less definable, but, more importantly, they offer what Sherman calls “insulation”: Sherman’s father had always taken the subway to Wall Street, even when he was the chief executive officer of Dunning Sponget & Leach. Even now, at the age of seventy- one, when he took his daily excursions to Dunning Sponget to breathe the same air as his lawyer cronies for three or four hours, he went by subway. It was a matter of principle. The more grim the subways became, the more graffiti those people scrawled on the cars, the more gold chains they snatched off girls’ necks, the more old men they mugged, the more women they pushed in front of the trains, the more determined John Campbell McCoy that they weren’t going to drive him off the New York City subways. But for the new breed, the young breed, the masterful breed, Sherman’s breed, there was no such principle. Insulation! That was the ticket. That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used. “If you want to live in New York,” he once told Sherman, “you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate….” (Wolfe Bonfire 54-5) This insulation is precisely why Sherman takes taxis into work every morning, precisely why he lives on Park Avenue, in an $8,000,000 apartment, and precisely why Sherman loves his job as much as he does. At the office, Sherman can pretend, as the other members do, that there is no outside, that women and old men are not being taken advantage of, that “those people” who scrawl graffiti on the trains running deep under the city aren’t waiting to confront them – in short, that others don’t exist. They can pretend that they truly are “cowboys” and “warriors” and part of a “squadron” fighting fiercely together (Wolfe Bonfire 61, 70). As James Smith succinctly explains, “in a cocoon of one’s own, a sphere of influence…one can at least pretend to be a ‘Master of the Universe’” (43). Consistently within the descriptions of offices, be it the fifteen-floor of Pierce & Pierce or the “Gibraltar” of the Bronx County Courthouse, Wolfe employs militaristic language to heighten the implied aggression and, often, belligerence of these spaces. At the courthouse we find attorney Kramer “embrac[ing] life and wad[ing] up to his hips in the lives of the miserable and the damned…[to] stand up on his feet in the courtrooms and fight, mano a mano, before the bar of justice” (35). The scene of Pierce & Pierce at five o’clock makes this notion of the office as war room even more explicit: Sherman leaned back in his chair and surveyed the bond trading room…George Connor stood beside Vic Scaasi’s chair with his hands in his pockets, just chatting. Vic arched

36 his back and rolled his shoulders and seemed to yawn. There was Rawlie, reared back in his chair, talking on the telephone, grinning and running his hand over his bald pate. Victorious warriors after the fray…Masters of the Universe…. (71) The “fray” that Sherman muses upon is, for the members of Pierce and Pierce, just the average workday, the battle that occurs diurnally from 8 to 5. The workplace provides for its constituents then not only an insulated asylum from the civilized world, but also a mock battlefield, a revised theatre of war. This depiction of the office as the site of ritualized male conflict coincides with Susan Bordo’s idea “that real manliness (and sexual vitality and zest for life)…found outside man-made culture is merged with the idea of the workplace as the man-made jungle where a man might realize himself, if he’s the right sort of animal” (253). For Anthony Rutundo, this “need for the office” has to do with the dissolution of secure male communities (such as one finds in Lonesome Dove). For Rutundo, the workplace resembles eighteenth-century communities in that “they are hierarchical and they make elaborate demands on the individual.” The corporate space differs from these communities though inasmuch as they “do not provide the individual with security, nor with any sense of organized connection to other people or to the flow of human history” (284). Sherman discovers this pretense when he is ousted both from his job and his apartment co-op shortly after he is arrested and charged. Kramer likewise is fired from his position when he attempts to sleep with Shelly Thomas in Maria Ruskin’s apartment. Despite its claims to provide its members with a sanctuary against the feminization of civilization, “the office” as represented in Bonfire provides neither the fraternity nor the loyalty of a truly cultivated community. Unlike in Lonesome Dove, where Call and Gus support one another in life and in death and young Newt can be raised en masse by the “Company,” the companies portrayed in Bonfire offer only the suggestion of ceremony and community, a game rather than true male competition, institutions that deny its members when they might need them most. What these companies do provide, particularly in Sherman’s case, are “status groups” with which the individual might identify. In an interview Wolfe gave with Tony Schwartz in 1981, the year in which he began researching Bonfire in earnest, Wolfe claimed that “the fundamental unit in analyzing behavior is not the individual, but some sort of status group or status structure” (46).19 Wolfe’s belief here is clearly realized within Bonfire. Each individual character is adherent to a particular status group and each character defines himself or herself in terms of the status group more than any other quality in their lives. Within Sherman’s status

37 group, the fact that the office becomes a “war zone” depends on the fact that each member of the company is in competition to see how much more he can make than the next man: How stories circulated on every campus! If you weren’t making $250,000 a year within five years, then you were either grossly stupid or grossly lazy. That was the word. By age thirty, $500,000 – and that sum had a taint of the mediocre. By age forty you were either making a million a year or you were timid or incompetent. Make it now! That was the motto burned in every heart, like myocarditis. (59) This shift towards individual competition within male community is one that has been the focus of much masculinity studies’ scholarship. Compare Rutundo’s assertion that men of the colonial and Revolutionary eras “especially were judged by their contribution to the larger community…[their] and ‘social usefulness…” (13) to Michael Kimmel’s ascertain in Manhood in America that “American manhood [has become] less and less about an inner sense of self, and more and more about a possession that needed to be acquired” (ix). This transition from a manhood which is based in and around community to one not only dependant of individual competition, but of competition based on property, is of clear concern in Wolfe’s novel. For in Bonfire, the possession of manhood to be acquired relates specifically with the possessions with which one might signal their membership in the upper echelon of manhood. For Sherman, observance of this manhood, particularly when he is engaged in such manly activity as walking his daughter to the school bus stop, is paramount: Sherman liked to have his fatherhood observed…. As they crossed Park Avenue, he had a mental picture of what an ideal pair they made. Campbell, the perfect angel in a private-school uniform; himself, with his noble head, his Yale chin, his big frame, and his $1,800 British suit, the angel’s father, a man of parts; he visualized the admiring stares the envious stares, of the drivers, the pedestrians, of one and all.20 (49, 51) It is not enough that Sherman should own the $1,800 suit or carry his “Yale chin” – he must be seen, validated, by “one and all.” As a “man of parts,” Sherman considers himself as an equation, a conception of certain variables (clothes, daughter, frame) which add up to equal awe and admiration in the eyes of onlookers. Despite his need for insulation, he still requires the gaze of others to confirm his own impression of himself as a good father and an imposing man. For their part, men who are not in Sherman’s position do witness and are envious. Perhaps no one is as desirous of Sherman’s life as Lawrence Kramer, assistant to the Bronx district attorney who receives a salary of $36,000 a year and who’s meager life is consistently

38 juxtaposed with Sherman’s opulent one. Kramer becomes most fraught when he considers his to-be mistress, Shelly Thomas, The Girl with the Brown Lipstick: On this side of the street, where he was walking, was a cliff of elegant apartment houses overlooking the museum. There were doormen. And then he got glimpses of marbled halls. And then he thought of the girl with the brown lipstick….He was going to do it! He was going to call her….He was tired of watching other people lead…The Life. The girl with the brown lipstick! – the two of them, looking into each other’s eyes across a table in one of those restaurants with blond wood and exposed brick and hanging plants and brass and etched glass and menus with crayfish Natchez and veal and plantains mesquite and cornbread with cayenne pepper! (34) It is important to note here that while Kramer’s thoughts revolve around Shelly Thomas, the section begins and ends with thoughts of consumer goods – perks of The Life. Kramer observes the fine apartments he could never afford and thinks of the girl with the brown lipstick. He thinks of the girl with the brown lipstick and considers a fine restaurant he could never afford. The girl with the brown lipstick then becomes just another possession, another affect of The Life. Sherman, a member of The Life, also views women this way. When considering having accidentally called his wife thinking it was his mistress, Maria, Sherman justifies his infidelity: “[H]e didn’t want much, compared to what he, a Master of the Universe, should rightfully have. All he wanted was to be able to kick the gong around when he pleased, to have the simple pleasures due to all mighty warriors” (70). Not only do women become an entitlement for Masters of the Universe for Sherman, but they are in fact the spoils of office warfare. The Life is for Sherman what lower men like Kramer imagine it to be – a life directly related to and dependant upon “possessions.” Anthony Rotundo defines this type of manhood, the type typified by Sherman and sought after by all other men in Bonfire, as that of the “pleasure seeker”: [The pleasure seeker] is a man who works hard at his job so that he can afford as much satisfaction of his passions after work as possible…. [He] can become a consumer connoisseur, pursuing the finest clothes, the finest cars, the finest art and entertainment, or the finest women…[S]ex and beautiful women are consumer products, accoutrements to the good life. They are one outlet for the masculine passions of the pleasure seeker. (287)

39 Work is outlined in this definition then as a means to an end, that end being conspicuous and rapacious consumption. The pleasure seeker is less concerned with how he can act like a man and more concerned with how he might look like a man. If the workplace offers some bastion of masculine zeal, this is a bonus. But if the motto of day is “Make it now,” the implication is that one spend it just as quickly. Naturally, Sherman falls cleanly into this categorization, and others in the novel, particularly Kramer, offer due deference and fawning over Sherman’s status.21 As Carol McNamara succinctly remarks, “Sherman’s self-perception as a man of stature and power rests on his public respectability and material success and the symbols of it” (127). If, as Wolfe has suggested in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter and Vine, “fashion is the code language of status,” then Sherman is an ambulatory monologue, speaking his standing as a pleasure seeker (and finder) constantly. Were all of these “symbols” of his status to be taken away, as is the case in Bonfire, Sherman would not only lose the signs of his manhood, but the referent as well, for the masculinity Sherman practices is, again, one based solely on possessions. As the reader sees in Bonfire, without his possessions, Sherman becomes adrift, unable to find a new center for his individual self. Being ousted from his “status group,” as Wolfe names it, Sherman becomes purposeless, a man in limbo seeking desperately for that new position against which he might define himself. It should be noted here that not only does “fashion” signal status, but the male body itself must be maintained in such a way as to denote masculine strength. Susan Bordo has noted that male bodies can become “a kind of natural armor” and the male bodies presented in Bonfire certainly present themselves as effectively as the clothes which cover them. The first scene in the first chapter offers a picture of Sherman with his “aristocratic chin,” “imperious…posture” and overall “imposing figure” (10, 11). His moniker for himself and other members of Pierce & Pierce, “The Masters of the Universe,” comes from plastic dolls that Campbell plays with which “looked like Norse gods who lifted weights” (12). Sherman imagines himself this kind of Herculean being, both in physical and public presence.22 Throughout the book he is constantly shifting his body, throwing his chin forward, generally exhibiting what Tom Ryan has called “the defensive posturing inherent in masculinity” (27). His body, along with the suit that covers it, is an indicator, a gesture Sherman practices to present himself as a real man.

40 Kramer too is imminently concerned with how his body looks and, more importantly, is perceived. When the trial against Sherman begins, a courtroom artist depicts Kramer in mid- argument and the reader finds Kramer pleased when he sees the result: He could see it as if the TV screen were right in front of him…Attorney Lawrence N. Kramer…on his feet…his forefinger raised…his massive sternocleidomastoid muscles welling out…[I]f the drawing did justice to his powerful frame…that’s what they would see. The whole city of New York would see it. Miss Shelly Thomas would see it. (407) Kramer could never hope to afford Sherman’s suits or his “Yale chin,” so he must gain masculine posture through more organic means. Likewise, Andruitti, Caughey, and Goldberg are all “hosses…part of the new generation, in which the terms triceps, deltoids, latissima dorsae, and pectoralis major were better known than the names of the planets” (102). In fact, not once does there appear a male character in Bonfire who, even if he is not powerfully built, is nevertheless not distinctly concerned with his image as a powerful man (the key word here being image). Muscles, for men like Kramer, are things to display rather than things to use – in fact, it is in their exhibition that they gain use-value. Male strength, in Bonfire, is only as potent as it is visible. Unlike the men of Lonesome Dove who are utterly unconcerned with the look of their bodies (who would judge?) but rather what their bodies can do and how much they can endure, Sherman, Kramer and the rest are distinctly concerned solely with what it appears their bodies could do; how much they could endure. When Kramer is harassed by a bus full of incoming defendants, he “pretend[s] not to hear them” (42), avoiding confrontation until the aged but dogged Judge Kovistky steps in to face what Kramer and his strong body cannot. John Berger wrote in 1972 that “a man’s presence is dependant upon the promise of power which he embodies” while a woman’s “presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence” (45-6). In the world of Bonfire though, these distinctions have been inverted. Kramer’s body may suggest power, but it cannot promise it, for there is no fight in Kramer. For Sherman, he is illustrative of the manifest presence that Berger outlines as particular to women. No longer, as Berger has written, do “men act and women appear” (47). In the world Wolfe creates, masculinity is almost unreservedly dependant on appearances, with little referent to action. Unlike Lonesome Dove in which male bodies are only concerned with action, the male bodies in Bonfire are simply interested in becoming a spectacle. Unlike

41 Lonesome Dove which offers its male audience masculine tasks for its male characters, Bonfire directly presents to its reader male bodies which are for display purposes only. The masculine anxieties alleviated, or at least suspended, by Lonesome Dove in 1985 are, in 1987, being directly represented by Bonfire. Even after Sherman is linked with the Mercedes that struck “honor student” Henry Lamb, after the media get a hold of the explosive story, and after he is arrested, Sherman is constantly concerned with keeping up appearances. At first, Sherman (with some help from Maria) sees his actions in the Bronx as reasonable, even commendable. Both he and Maria refer to the incident as occurring in “the jungle,” highlighting the difference and Otherness between the couple’s insulated life and the world outside. Sherman’s confrontation with the two black youths create in him the feeling of a victorious warrior: “I beat them both. Never had there been such music in the ears of the Master of the Universe. Play on! Never stop!” (96). Sherman McCoy, that Great White Master, understands the situation as thus: he had ventured into the jungle, encountered the natives and defeated them. He imagines himself akin to Lonesome Dove’s Gus in this manner, one who comes to the rescue of his white lover in the face of a non-white enemy. Of course, the reality is that Sherman is never truly threatened and is, in fact, saved by Maria in some sense as she is the one who drives the car and provides the “escape.” This makes no difference though, for Sherman understands, and Maria validates, that he behaved heroically. He can imagine that he has put his masculine body to use, even if it is to the extent of throwing a tire at one 15-year- old boy and hitting another with his Mercedes. The evening ends with Sherman and Maria naked, exposed, undulating together on the floor of Maria’s “rent-controlled love nest” (658). The Master’s body is uncovered and it takes as its possession just another privilege of the heroic warrior. Once connected to the felony though, Sherman reverts back to covering the male body with as many symbols of his status as he can. When the police first come to question Sherman, he is sure to choose his appearance carefully: How should he look? Should he put his jacket and tie back on? He had on a white shirt, the pants of a gray nailhead worsted suit and a pair of black cap-toed shoes. With the tie and the jacket on, he would look terribly Wall Street, terribly conservative. They might resent that. He hurried into the other bedroom, which had become his dressing room, and took out a tweed jacket with a plaid design from the closet and slipped it on….Much more casual, relaxed….But the soft teed jacket didn’t go with the hard-finished pants.

42 Besides…a sport jacket…a sport…a young rip who takes wild rides in a sports roadster…He took off the tweed jacket and threw it on the daybed and hurried back into the master bedroom. His jacket and tie were strewn across a stuffed chair. He put on the tie and pulled it up into a tight knot…. He put on the jacket and buttoned it….Wall Street….He lifted his chin. Be strong. A Master of the Universe. (313) Here, Sherman is desperately trying to portray the appropriate “image,” attempting to gauge not so much what he wants to look like, but rather how he wants to be seen. As the police linger downstairs, waiting to ask Sherman some straightforward and “routine” questions (315), Sherman debates whether he wants to appear “casual” or “Wall Street.” It is important to note that the image he decides upon is, in fact, “Wall Street…A Master of the Universe.” The $1,800 suit and tie become Sherman’s armor, his muscle, his uniform. Paraphrasing physiologist Jose M.R. Delgado, Wolfe has contended that “[each person] is a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment” (qtd. in Scura 257). Despite Sherman’s attempt to solidify his figure, even he realizes that his manhood is very much beholden to this kind of transience. He realizes that in different clothes he would become, essentially a different man. Judith Butler has remarked that gender is “improvisation within a scene of constraint,” and that “one does not ‘do’ gender alone…[but rather], [o]ne is always ‘doing’ with or for another…” (1). The performative nature of Sherman’s masculinity is such that his costume and props determine wholly what kind of man he is. By writing his novel around a “pleasure seeker,” Wolfe exposes this brand of masculinity as particularly transitory – the clothes, in Sherman’s case, really do make the man. Unfortunately for Sherman, it is precisely after this disastrous interview with the police officers, after he has been “outrageously violated” by those “two…insolent…Low Rent animals,” that his world begins to crumble (322). His loss of insulation and property quickly effeminize him, leaving him “an open cavity,” for all to penetrate: By the thousands, no the millions, they now came scampering into the cavity of what he had presumed to be his self, Sherman McCoy. He could no more keep them from entering his very own hide than he could keep the air out of his lungs….They said nothing. They just poked their long noses inside the cavity and sniffed and sniffed at his shame, until their faces stiffened from the stench. (492-3). Once Sherman is public-ized, once he exposed and made recognizable to all for something other than his tailored suits and lavish lifestyle, he essentially becomes the site of societal rape.23 He has gone from a representative of the impenetrable phallus to a submissive and abject cavity,

43 unable to stay the probing muzzles of “Them.” Once the outside world has “invaded his life” (322), Sherman can no longer conceal himself in his Park Avenue apartment or his Wall Street office or his Mercedes-Benz 2-door or his $200-a-yard suits. He is a pleasure seeker whose property can no longer validate him. Even Maria and his wife, Judy, deny his possession, his right to the last “accoutrement of the good life.” Sherman’s loss of self results not only from his becoming a vacuous object denied his safe and untouched position but also from his loss of relational selves against which his might rediscover his masculine bearings. Maria and Judy deny him both as lover and husband, refusing Sherman’s ability to identify himself in a sexual or epithalamic manner. Sherman is further denied opportunity to realize himself in a filial manner as well, both in terms of father and in terms of son. In the same scene in which Sherman cannot understand himself as “Sherman McCoy” but as “The Cavity” he realizes that Campbell will be similarly obscured: “She wouldn’t be finding her father…He wasn’t her father any more…wasn’t anything anyone had ever known Sherman McCoy…He was only a cavity filling fast with hot bile” (524). Likewise, later Sherman is unable to consider himself as his father’s son: “‘…I’ve always thought of my father…as a ruler, an aristocrat. And maybe he was, but I’m not related to him anymore. I’m not the person my wife married or the father my daughter knows. I’m a different human being’” (625). What is interesting here is that Sherman is able to define his father as “ruler” and “aristocrat,” but is unable to understand himself in this role anymore and that this is the reason why he is no longer his father’s son or his daughter’s father or his wife’s husband. Relations of family for Sherman are, in his awareness, only further representations of his “status group” and are as provisional as status affiliations. When Sherman walks Campbell to the bus stop with “his Yale chin, his big frame, and his $1,800 British suit,” Campbell becomes something of an accessory to Sherman’s appearance – indeed, the most important thing for Sherman about his fatherhood is having it observed. Through his catastrophic actions and subsequent legal, media and regulatory reactions, Sherman is finally made aware that his entire life revolves around possessions and relations to possessions. In the end, Sherman realizes that he, and even his father, are not men, but in fact boys; boys who never truly grew into men: And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his

44 own, as best he could, out of sense and duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. (432) Like his father before him, Sherman finds “the Protector’s armor” too heavy to maintain. Even here, Sherman cannot help externalizing the natural status of fatherhood – fatherhood as something a man wears. For Faludi, this is example of masculinity in the “culture of adornment”: “The internal qualities once said to embody manhood – surefootedness, inner strength, confidence or purpose – are merchandised to men to enhance their manliness. What passes for the essence of masculinity is…sold back to men” (35). Sherman has “bought into” this “culture of adornment” so eagerly, that he no longer understands himself in terms other than how he “looks.” Unlike the men of Lonesome Dove who embody all the qualities Faludi lists, Bonfire offers its reader a “hero” whose masculinity is based solely on appearance and can be bought like so many suits and ties. By the novel’s end, Sherman has been reduced to the corporeal, the beastly thing. Ironically, Sherman appears more of a “man” at the end of the novel than anywhere else. He charges the crowds outside the courthouse waiting for him and shows up in court in hiking shoes and with “abrasions on the knuckles of both hands” (658). Sherman’s daring in hurling himself into the throngs of onlookers though is more akin to lunacy than bravery and his hiking shoes and bloody knuckles are only signals of his new status group, of his “Diminished Life-Style.” He no longer possesses his $8,000,000 “insulated” apartment (“he now rents two modest rooms in a postwar high-rise building on East 34th Street near First Avenue” 658); he no longer works long hours at Pierce & Pierce with the other Masters of the Universe; he no longer has his fine clothes or his proper wife or his beautiful mistress. Instead of defining himself on what he can possess, Sherman can, by the novel’s end, only define himself in terms of his body and mind.24 Instead of living The Life, Sherman can now only hope to survive the Diminished Life. He has become l’homme savage (or, if we are to accept Sherman’s understanding of himself and his father, l’enfant terrible). Sherman McCoy, the man of standing and $1,800 suits is dead; Sherman, the “career defendant” of sport shirts and khaki pants has replaced him. It is not difficult to read The Bonfire of the Vanities as a satirical take on economics, race, and gender in 1980s New York.25 If we are to understand Bonfire as an example of satire though, we must come to see it as degenerative in nature as it does not offer any (re)solutions to

45 the problems it presents.26 Indeed, almost no one in Bonfire can accurately be viewed as a “good person” (Judge Kovitsky is, perhaps, the only possible exception) and certainly the fortunes at the end of the novel seem to be the reverse of what karma would allow: Maria Ruskin is never charged for her part in the hit-and-run; alcoholic yellow journalist Peter Fallow wins the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the McCoy case; Henry Lamb, the only true innocent in the novel, dies. In its treatment of masculinity, Wolfe’s satire exposes the deficiencies in the ornamental manhood which was becoming more and more “in fashion” in the mid- to late-1980s.27 In Faludi’s Stiffed, she defines the “culture of ornament” that arose in the 1970s and 1980s as promoting: [A] manhood…defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger…. These are the same traits that have long been designated as the essence of female vanity, the public face of the feminine as opposed to the private caring, maternal one…. No wonder men are in such agony. Not only are they losing the society they were once essential to, they are “gaining” the very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanizing. (39) While I might argue with Faludi as to what extent the societal focus on female appearance has been “shucked off,” she makes a valid point about the emergence of masculine “vanity.” To some extent, I would suggest that Wolfe’s task in Bonfire is to show what happens to “men whose vanities lose their virginities” (Wolfe Bonfire 642). What happens when the insulated man becomes exposed to the Other? What happens when the man of fashion has his appearance taken away from him? What happens when the pleasure seeker looses the means through which he might find this pleasure? The results are disastrous. As a model of degenerative satire though, Bonfire offers no alternatives to this pleasure seeking masculinity, to the culture of ornament. All the men in Bonfire are imminently concerned with their appearance and, if they do not have The Life, they want it. They are “public men” and, as such, they yearn to appear as rich and powerful and as masculine as possible. If we are to believe Faludi when she suggests that by the 1980s men were “losing the society they were once essential to,” then the men in Bonfire are examples of a masculinity which means to appear in control, to have its manhood observed. There is no other way in Bonfire. Not only do the men offer themselves up as societal spectacles, but they have no choice. Wolfe means only to expose the failings of ornamental masculinity, not to offer solutions.

46 In his introduction to the Journal of American Culture’s special edition focus on Tom Wolfe, Marshall Fishwick writes that “the key word…Wolfe [uses] to describe America in the 1980s…is baroque – the style prevalent especially in the seventeenth century, marked by elaborate and sometimes grotesque ornamentation and expression” (2). In his own graduate thesis, Wolfe asks “have [we] not managed to translate the dun bulk of the material into our most spirited thoughts, deadening them, novocaining our self-expression and ultimately our conscience?” (qtd. in Fishwick 1). For Wolfe, the major theme running not only in Bonfire, but through nearly all of his work, is the inversion of the dichotomy between intellectualism and animalism, between the fashionable and the visceral. For Wolfe, there is a “true man,” a man who lives under the clothes and under, even, the male body. He lusts, thirsts, bristles, is quick to act and even quicker to fight. This is no real option however as this animalistic man is no longer applicable or acceptable in modern society. He is not welcome in the civilized world. In Lonesome Dove one finds a world before civilization where “men are men” inherently and are able to maintain this manhood by escaping the approaching world of civilization. Two years later, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, civilization has arrived and has consumed the men who live within its borders. Whereas Lonesome Dove offered the possibility of masculine escape, Bonfire offers only the temporary solution of internal insulation, of retreat. While the men of Lonesome Dove are men of action, the men of Bonfire are men of appearance. They purchase their masculinity one article at a time and must have their manhood observed. Bonfire represents a shift from nostalgic masculinity to ornamental masculinity – Wolfe has revealed that the Emperor is, in fact, all clothes. In doing so, Bonfire identifies the crisis but does not offer suggestions for restructuring. Nevertheless, Bonfire is a significant moment in fictional masculine representation, one that exposes the Masters of the Universe as little more than boys in their father’s suits.

A FATHER IS BEING BEATEN: DECOMODIFYING THE MALE BODY IN FIGHT CLUB

“After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man.” – Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857).28

“To write about Fight Club is to violate the first rule of Fight Club” – Boon, Kevin Alexander, “Men and Nostalgia for Violence” 29

In the nine years between the publication of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), what it meant to “be a man” in America was constantly being revised.30 The presidency shift in 1989 from Reagan to Bush was a move, as Susan Jeffords has noted, “from the single-imaged and hard-bodied style of the Reagan years to what might be seen as a sort of schizophrenia as Bush tried to balance his Reagan inheritance with his own interests” (90). This balancing act was one that resulted in the Bush presidency promoting a “kinder, gentler” America than had been furthered during the Reagan era. Gone was the cowboy president: that typifying masculine ego who might, as Antony Easthope has suggested, “master every threat” (39-40). Replacing him was the diplomatic president, a

48 president who was forced “to straddle the images of himself as a man who ‘cares’ about people and [still be] a tough commander and chief” (Jeffords 95). This masculine split-personality would be fully realized in the realm of “caring” when President Clinton entered the oval office in 1993. A true “man of feeling,” Clinton proved that a presidential candidate could in fact weep openly in public and still be elected.31 And rather than being exemplary of the “hard-body” that the Reagan presidency elevated, or even the well-suited body of President Bush, Clinton was constantly lampooned for his plump, feminized body: During the campaign and his first year in office, the press would seize mercilessly on Clinton’s doughy physique, as though his soft, undisciplined body and taste for French fries – immortalized in a Saturday Night Live Sketch which had him jog from on fast- food stop to another – exposed just how “unpresidential” he was. (Bordo 55) Despite constant satirizations of Clinton’s unregulated tear ducts, soft corpus, or his imagined submission to his strong-willed wife, Clinton nevertheless represented a change in American masculinity away from hard-bodied manhood of the 1980s to a more nuanced and even more feminized manhood in the 1990s.32 Beginning in 1990, the press became fascinated with what was being called the new “crisis of masculinity.” Articles with titles such as “Men on Trial,” “The Trouble with Boys,” and “Are Men Necessary?” started showing up in major American magazines.33 While Robert Bly was declaring that “the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out” (Levine 61), designers such as Calvin Klein and Gianni Versace were targeting men through popular advertisements in the same way as so many designers before them had targeted women (Bordo 168). Then, in November of 1994, writer Mark Simpson put a name to the phenomenon – or, at least, printed it: metrosexuality. In a piece for The Independent in which he covered the fashion show “It’s a Man’s World – Britain’s first style exhibition for men,” Simpson outlined this new breed of man: Metrosexual man, the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade. In the Eighties he was only to be found inside fashion magazines such as GQ, in television advertisements for Levis jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s everywhere and he’s going shopping. (“Here Come the Mirror Men”) Moreover, Simpson suggests in the article that “[i]t was in the style-obsessed Eighties that the ‘gay lifestyle’ – the single man living in the metropolis and taking himself as his own love-object

49 – became an aspiration for non-homosexuals.” For Simpson, the metrosexual of the 1990s grew out of what the “pleasure seeking” masculinity of the late-1980s, that brand of masculinity so shrewdly exposed in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Simpson himself bemoaned the trend, calling the metrosexual a “commodity fetishist, a collector of fantasies about the male sold to him by advertising” (qtd in Matathia et al 54). He joined the throngs of other journalists and public voices chronicling and criticizing the “death of the macho” – singing a dirge for masculinity.34 It is between this tension of metrosexuality and the “deep masculinity” which Bly and other mythopoets proposed that Palahniuk’s Fight Club emerges. Published in 1996, Fight Club was a critical, if not immediately popular, success. It won the Oregon Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and was subsequently picked up and re-issued by W.W. Norton (Tomlinson). The most important recognition though came from director David Fincher who saw promise in the book’s possible film adaptation and helped incite Twentieth-Century Fox to purchase the screen rights only thirty-seven days after Norton’s publication (Sult). Since the film’s release in 1999, both movie and book have become remarkably popular. Currently the book has sold over 300,000 copies and the film has grossed over $100 million worldwide.35 In considering the book’s popularity, it is interesting to notice a similar alienation that Palahniuk feels towards his project as Larry McMurtry has expressed towards Lonesome Dove. As Palahniuk remarked in an interview with DVD Journal: [T]he book just has this complete life of its own now…. And part of me feels like this little baby of mine has gone off to live its own completely different life autonomous from me. There’s no way I could control it at this point. (Taylor) Just as McMurtry sees Lonesome Dove “as remote from me as the Athuriad, or the Matter of Troy, but which blooms eternally – a living myth-flower – to its readers” (130), so too has Palahniuk come to understand his most popular novel as “different” and “autonomous” from himself. The popular novel is not only consumed by the culture which it enters but it is subsumed as well – it becomes part of what E.D. Hirch has described as the “cultural literacy” of a given space and time.36 In the 2004 reprint of Fight Club featuring the author’s introduction, Palahniuk recounts “young men…scarring kisses into their hands with lye or Superglue” – a lá the book’s main character, Tyler Durden – and some even legally changing their names to become Tyler Durden (Palahniuk xii). This fanaticism suggests an investment far beyond casual interest. Rather, this kind of personal alteration in reaction to the novel suggests more of a living connection to the text, an appropriation of plot and characters. Just as with Lonesome Dove and

50 Bonfire of the Vanities, then, Fight Club is best understood in context with the culture and notions of masculinities that surrounded its release. Furthermore, I would argue that Fight Club as a novel expresses the metaphorical fight for hegemonic white masculinity to maintain its status within a shifting cultural terrain. On the whole, Fight Club is a novel which tracks various forms of male metamorphosis: from weak to strong; from artificial to natural; from private to public; from masochistic to sadistic. The large amount of criticism paid to the novel’s treatment of reasserted masculinity has focused largely on Palahniuk’s belief that men are hunters trapped in a world of shopping.37 This chapter will seek to enter into this critical conversation, employing heavily Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed as a kind of companion reader. I will also move specifically into the practice of fight club to investigate what Freud has deemed “the economics of male masochism” and to see how masculine violence expresses itself inside and outside of “the basement.” In their article “The Search for Male Identity within Modern Society,” Barbara Pinkering and Scott Wiki make a call to future scholars of both the novel and the film: Palahniuk and Fincher contend that while Fight Club is an extreme example, nevertheless, men must find ways to express their violent feelings without being criticized and emasculated. While we acknowledge the author’s and director’s claims, it is not our intent to endorse this perspective on violence. Future scholars should continue to pursue this line of argument in order to more fully understand the place of violence and aggression in human behavior. (74) While I in no way am qualified to speak of violence in behavioral terms, I will attempt to engage with the textual violence expressed within the pages of Fight Club. Specifically, I will argue that the violence of Fight Club is a reaction to the 1990s turn towards male consumerism, and that while the battles within the rules and walls of fight club exhibit a healthy experimentation with male masochism, the metamorphosis of fight club into Project Mayhem marks a dissolution of the principles of fight club and indicates a desire for the white male to turn his attack from his own body to the body politic in response to his slipping hegemonic position. The story of Fight Club is a complex one, filled with the macabre incidents and surprises for which Palahniuk has come to be known. The novel begins with the Narrator (we are never told his name) and Tyler Durden at the top of the Parker-Morris building, Tyler’s gun pressed in the Narrator’s mouth, ten minutes until the detonation of the building they are in. Flashback a year and we find the Narrator as a white-collar drone, slave to his own “IKEA nesting” lifestyle.

51 He is addicted to support groups, attending as many as he can until their soothing effects are made null by the intrusion of a woman’s gaze, Marla Singer’s. He meets Tyler though and his life starts to change. His apartment inexplicably explodes and he and Tyler move to an abandoned house on Paper Street. Most importantly, the Narrator and Tyler start fight club together, a gathering in the basements of bars or clubs where men can brawl, tête-à-tête and unrestrained, from the hours of 2 am to 7 am on Sunday mornings. Soon, Tyler becomes sexually involved with Marla and the Narrator begins to be shut out of his own life. Fight club moves from the basement to society at large as Tyler implements “homework assignments” involving elaborate pranks of destruction which eventually evolve into what the anti-hero calls Project Mayhem. As the Narrator goes on a cross-country search to catch up with Tyler, he begins to realize how much Project Mayhem is growing (through recruits, new assignments, objectives) without his knowledge. What he doesn’t realize until he finally re-encounters Tyler though is that he and Tyler are the same person – Tyler is essentially the Narrator’s alter-ego. At the novel’s end we return to its beginning, atop of the Parker-Morris building, minutes from detonation. The explosives don’t work and the Narrator, realizing that Tyler is just a figment of his imagination, and that he is in fact holding the gun in his own mouth, pulls the trigger and “kills” Tyler. The final pages leave us with the Narrator laid up in a hospital bed, Project Mayhem recruits buzzing around and comforting the man they believe to be Tyler Durden, telling him that “everything is [still] going according to plan.” What Fight Club offers its readers in the beginning then is not The Master of the Universe found in Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, but rather a nameless nine-to-fiver whose job it is to determine whether certain defective vehicles fiscally warrant a recall based on “the probable rate of failure” and “the average cost of an out-of-court settlement” (Palahniuk 20). The workplace is no longer the insulatory force it was, a masculine community of retreat. Rather it is a dreary bureau where no one is willing to address the scars on a co-worker’s face. As Pinkering and Wiki explain, the Narrator is exemplary of those “‘gray collar’ workers…stuck in an unsettling middle ground between traditional blue-collar and white-collar management” (68). He is representative of the broken promise from baby-boomer father to baby-boomer son which “deals with the angst associated with traversing the change between childhood freedom and entry into the adult workforce” (Pinkering and Wiki 68). The characters in Fight Club cope with these broken promises in different ways. For the Narrator, this means filling his apartment with the appropriate stuff:

52 You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then in a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. (34) As with Bonfire, the apartment becomes a means of insulation – but, moreover, in Fight Club the Narrator’s apartment becomes a means of defining himself, even replacing himself as he remarks “the things you used to own, now they own you” (34). The Narrator goes even so far as to state that “The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue” (33). The male libido has been replaced with a need for feminizing domesticity. It is perhaps not surprising when we later discover that it is, in fact, the Narrator who subconsciously demolishes his perfectly decorated living space in order to prepare himself, subconsciously, for initiation into fight club. For the character of Big Bob, the initial answer to this anxiety is not to adorn his home, but rather his own male body. The reader first encounters Big Bob at a support group for testicular cancer ironically referred to as “Remaining Men Together.” The defining feature of Big Bob are his enormous “bitch tits,” a result of shooting steroids for body-building competitions. Bob here is representative of the male spectacle, strength just for show: …[Bob] showed me a photo of himself huge and naked at a first glance, in a posing strap at some contest. It’s a stupid way to live, Bob said, but when you’re pumped and shaved on stage, totally shredded with body fat down to around two percent and the diuretics leave you cold and hard as concrete to the touch, you’re blind to the lights, and deaf from the feedback rush of the sound system until the judge orders: “Extend your right quad, flex and hold.” “Extend your left arm, flex the bicep and hold.” This is better than real life. (12) Like the Narrator in his apartment, Bob has become effeminized through his entrance into what Susan Faludi has dubbed “the gladiatorial arena of adornment.” This “enslavement to glamour,” Faludi argues, is precisely what women have been trying to escape since the 1960s and before. While the impetus was different, the “destination” is the same: Truly, men and women have arrived at their ornamental imprisonment by different routes. Women were relegated there as a sop for their exclusion from the realm of power-striving men. Men arrived there as a result of power-striving, which led to a

53 society drained of context, saturated with a competitive individualism that has been robbed of craft or utility, and ruled by commercial values that revolve around the most, the best, the biggest, the fastest. The destination of both roads was an enslavement to glamour. (599) What begins with “power-striving” men like Sherman McCoy ends with aimless men like Big Bob and the Narrator trying to find the proper affects with which to drape themselves. Whether it be their clothes, their apartment, or their very bodies, these men have become deeply concerned with proper ornamentation, gilding which will signify appropriately in the modern society. What the Narrator’s creation of Tyler offers, first for him and later for other men who become members of fight club, is the possibility of a break from this fixation. The means by which Tyler offers this opportunity is by offering himself up as a three-fold representation: 1.) father; 2.) initiator; 3.) enemy. At the first night of Fight Club the Narrator remarks, “Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don’t remember anything” (41). Here the Narrator articulates another broken promise from father to son.38 As Faludi explains: “Having a father was supposed to mean having an older man show you how the world worked and how to find your place in it…. He was a human bridge connecting the boy to an adult life of public engagement” (596). “In the age of celebrity,” Faludi asserts, “the father has no body of knowledge or authority to transmit to the son. Each son must father his own image, create his own Adam” (35). While Faludi is speaking metaphorically here, this is precisely what the Narrator accomplishes through Tyler Durden, “the Great and Powerful. God and Father” (Palahniuk 190). Tyler becomes initiator as well, circumventing what Alexander Mitscherlich calls (along with Robert Bly) the “demons” which fill the fatherly space if the father is absent. Stephen Wicks explains: If healthy ideas about manhood are not introduced to him, a boy will take whatever he can get – a gun, a knife, a car in which to drive recklessly. Perhaps he will use alcohol and other drugs to alleviate the emptiness he feels for want of male guidance. It is important to realize that no boy can initiate himself into manhood, and that boys must be guided by an older male or males who have themselves been successfully initiated. (66- 7)

54 Here, Palahniuk is clearly working in the mythopoetic tradition. Eschewing what contemporary society has accepted as modes of formal initiation (“being confirmed, or receiving the Bar Mitzvah ceremony, or getting a drivers license” Bly 121), the Narrator creates Tyler and Tyler, in return, creates a means through which the Narrator might access his inner “Wildman.” Just as each son “in the age of celebrity” must “father his own image,” so too must the Narrator fashion his own initiator into “natural” masculinity, as there are no successfully initiated males around. The initiation Tyler suggests though is not the “expansion [sic] sideways into the glory of oaks, mountains, glaciers, horses, lions, grasses, waterfalls, deers” that Bly upholds (121), but rather “tasks of endurance, infliction of pain and suffering” that Ray Raphael asserts (138). The initiation Tyler promotes is not one concerned with a move outward into nature, but one that moves inward and forces the initiate to recognize the boundaries of his own body. Within these “tasks of endurance” which might create “separation from the dependency and weaknesses of childhood and a new sense of belonging to a distinct world of adult males” (Segal 131), Tyler then finally offers himself as an suitable enemy to complete the initiation into manhood and to rectify the father’s final broken promise. As I have discussed in the Introduction to this thesis, the modern (white) man’s loss of a definable enemy gives considerable cause to his angst. As Fadudi remarks, “If men have feared to tread where women have rushed in, then maybe that’s because women have had it easier in one very simple regard: women could frame their struggle as a battle against men” (603). Not yet willing to fight the very system (or “apparatus,” as Foucault has called it) which has created the ornamental masculinity the male characters in Fight Club so desperately rail against, Tyler is born to offer men easily found and fought enemies: other men. For if, as Tanya Modleski argues, “‘women’s experience of political oppression’…[is an] experience that [women] have organized and [it] out of this experience that they developed a sense of solidarity, commonality, and community,” then Tyler and fight club might offer men a similar sense of “solidarity, commonality, and community” through struggle against a common enemy. The difference for Tyler and the other members of fight club is that theirs is an enemy created. It is then out of the rise of defiance against what Mark Simpson has called “the mapping of the male body” (“Metrodaddy Speaks!”), the desire for father, initiator, and enemy, that men in fight club venture into the dark basements of bars to beat and scar each other once a week. It is interesting to note that the basement is, of course, the very “quentissential 50s space where Dad could escape the routine family life to pursue the solitary hobbies that would bolster his

55 flagging masculinity” (Modleski 94). The basement is representative of a kind of collective masculine subconscious, a space which might offer solace and separation from the wife and kids, and the responsibilities they imply. Similar to their 1950s fathers, though in a more desperate fashion, the members of fight club venture into the basement to (re)confirm their own masculinity, feeling “saved” when they wake up on Sunday afternoon (Palahniuk 43). On the surface (literally), fight club becomes a severe denial of the male body as fashion accessory. Regarding the idea of fight club, Palahniuk has asserted his belief that “People need to be broken and rebuilt, and to have scars to prove it” (Sirius). Stephanie Remlinger claims that this corporeal scarring serves a double purpose for the men in Fight Club as “they are signs of protest as well as real damages to the ‘body economic.’” As she explicates: The Fight Club members are like machine breakers of a post-industrial age. Through hurting themselves, the men destroy human capital, they refuse to be of service or to function efficiently. They want to be more than just a link in the chain of production; they want the world to know about their struggle and appreciate their newly gained independence. (147)39 Through scarring their bodies then, the men of fight club deny society the opportunity to view them within the “gladiatorial arena of adornment.” In one way this might be understood as these white men acting to maintain their universality, their invisibility, insofar as they are denying themselves as spectacles. Big Bob is set up early on as window-dressing strength – masculinity as accessory. Fight club removes men like Big Bob from public gaze though and allows them to practice at being what Bly has called, “The Wildman.” The reader later finds Big Bob remasculated through fight club as the Narrator encounters him on the street months after “Remaining Men Together” and finds Bob possessed of a body “quilted with muscle and so hard they shine” (91). Through Fight Club, Bob has transformed himself from a masculine spectacle and emasculated victim to an active masculine agent. He has gone from being a casualty of the gladiatorial arena of adornment to being a champion of the basement, proud owner of a purposeful body. In another way though, the violence expressed and experienced within the frame of Fight Club can be understood as at a reaction to the self, as the working out of an internal problem. In her book, Masculinities, Violence, and Culture, Suzanne E. Hatty provides us with one definition of violence as a perpetuation of the “self-determining spirit of modernity”: “Violence, in the service of the modern self, preserves individuality and for-stalls the possibility of fusion with the

56 dangerous non-self. Violence, as a modern strategy guarantees both individual and social control while maintaining and perpetuating hierarchy and inequality” (10). Jessica Benjamin has suggested along these lines that “violence is the outer perimeter…of the tendency of the subject to force the other to either be or want what it wants, to assimilate the other to itself or make it a threat” (68). These appealing definitions seem to stall though when applied to the very specific case of the Narrator and Tyler Durden. For what at first appears to be an aggressive mutual masochism later turns out to be an individual act of self-destruction. Tyler’s/the Narrator’s desire “to know more about himself. About self-destruction” (43) is not about forestalling “the possibility of fusion with the dangerous non-self.” Rather, it is about forcefully confronting a repressed self, a revision of Freud’s uncanny. Furthermore, this violent physical confrontation with the self is one that is emblematic of the violent emotional severing that modern masculinity requires of its participants. As bell hooks explains: The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self- mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power to assault his self-esteem. (66) This emotional crippling, this “masculine compartmentalizing” as M. Scott Peck has called it, is a symptom within the dis-ease of patriarchal masculinity. (We might recall Sherman McCoy walking his daughter to school, imagining himself as an image of power and wealth, considering himself, proudly, to be “a man of parts” Wolfe 51.) Inasmuch as men are encouraged to be rational, stoic, detached, so then do “patriarchies produce alienations [of men] from [themselves]” (Hearn 19). Rather than confronting their own emotional contradictions, men rather are encouraged to create their own Tyler Durdens to fight, as “rage is the easy way back to a realm of feeling” (hooks 73). Yet, a question remains: could the violence of Fight Club be understood as a kind of attempt at healing? Can fighting be a kind of communication? In an interview with Evan Sult, Palahniuk expressed his hope the Fight Club would “make honest violence okay.” In a semantic turn which connects fighting with “deviant” forms of sexuality, Palahniuk later commented that “Fight Club violence is entirely consensual between adults. It’s an honest expression of violence

57 between two people” (Sult). How can we come to understand this “honest expression” then, and is it productive? In short, how does fight club speak? In her book on violence and language, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry posits that normal-use language fails in direct articulations of pain. In pouring over authors from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Scarry noted that rarely had any of the great writers bothered to describe pain and, when they did, their descriptions amounted to little more than perfunctory cries: “Ah! Ah! Ah!” and so forth. I would suggest that Tyler/the Narrator addresses, perhaps revels even, in this very idea of the inarticulateness of pain with his delineation of the rules of fight club: The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club…. I just don’t want to die without a few scars, I say. It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of the dealer’s showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste. The second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. (39) Here Tyler/the Narrator is enjoining a realm of silence around the activities of fight club. Part of the reason for this is “because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends…. Even if you told the kid in the copy center that he had a good fight, you wouldn’t be talking to the same man” (39-40). Moreover though, the first two rules of fight club restrict expression of the group to the movement of bodies and the performance of violence.40 Even the men who are not fighting (“Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time….Those are the other rules of fight club” 40), do not convey themselves through the symbolic, but rather through “hysterical shouting in tongues in church” (43). Furthermore, Tyler/the Narrator’s injunction, inasmuch as it is a verbal recognition of fight club which bars its members from doing the same, is a direct and repeated inversion of natural logic. The first two rules of fight club deny symbolic logic within the space of fight club, thereby creating an opportunity for men to endeavor alternate forms of expression. As a result of this inversion, the men of fight club are then given a space of experimentation where they might challenge psychosocial expectations and taboos. As with the range in Lonesome Dove and the workplace in Bonfire of the Vanities, fight club represents a space which is, perhaps most essentially, apart from the female gaze. The Narrator informs us that “[w]hat you see in fight club is a generation of men raised by women” (41). Somewhere Robert Bly cringes at these words. Fight club offers men not only separation from women but also a chance to become what Anthony Rutundo has called “the spiritual warrior”:

58 They seek outlets for passion that are free of consumerism and the competitive ethic. They want to be in touch with what they see as the spiritual core of maleness without having to live at the margins of society. Moreover, the ideal of the spiritual warrior defines male passions more broadly than the other ideals, to include spiritual yearnings and a longing for connection to others (primarily male others). (289) What is important to note about this definition in conjunction with fight club is that fight club is truly about connection to male others and not about competition. The fights of fight club are not about winning and losing, but rather about recognizing the borders of the male body and reaffirming the chest underneath the suit, the blood under the skin. The “pleasure seeking” masculinity that Sherman McCoy represented is precisely what creates competition among men in society (the finest clothes, the fastest car) and it is this kind of competition that the men of fight club are, in fact, fighting against. Furthermore, it is within this value of “enduring pain rather than inflicting it” that Nicola Rehling suggests that violence in Fight Club “is posited as a means of remasculation.” Traditionally, the kind of masochism exhibited by the men of Fight Club who endeavor to receive a punch rather than deliver one has been identified as a psychologically feminine phenomenon. In his essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Freud posits that, through the Oedipal phase, female children become masochistic as they identify with the mother/victim while male children become sadistic as they must separate themselves from, and identify themselves in opposition to, the mother. Freud suggests that this event creates a corresponding masochistic or sadistic fantasy which females and males re-enact and reinterpret respectively within their heterosexual encounters. What one finds in Fight Club though is a glorification of what might be understood as “male masochism,” a diegetic perversion of Freud’s model. This kind of male masochism is not as exceptional as Freud might have us believe though. Donald Pease has even gone so far to suggest that “insofar as men submit…to the cultural imperative to be men, they are really undergoing a ‘cultural feminization’” (qtd. in Modleski 11) and Theodore Reik’s research has led him to conclude that “the male sex is more masochistic than the female sex” (qtd in Silverman 37). Nevertheless, the cultural understanding of masochism is one that maintains association with the feminine. So how might the men of fight club be “remasculated” through prostrating themselves in masochistic fashion? First of all, we must recall Fight Club’s schism from social regulation. Concomitantly, Kaja Silverman remarks that “the male masochist magnifies the losses and divisions upon which

59 cultural identity is based, refusing to be sutured or recompensed. In short, he radiates a negativity inimical to the social order” (53). As a space apart, fight club allows for this kind of experimentation without social censure. Moreover, it is precisely the division that Tyler/the Narrator em-bodies that male masochism celebrates. As Nick Mansfield explains: [The masochistic subject] enjoys his power only as it is performed as powerlessness. He is both poles of those oppositions at once. He is similarly both self and other, masculine and feminine. He enjoys pain and pleasure in the one act. Activity and passivity are indistinguishable in him. The masochistic subject defies logic in more ways than one. (10, my emphasis). If “masculine compartmentalizing” is the disease, or at least the symptom according to Scott Peck, then perhaps masochism, specifically reflexive masochism, is a kind of therapy. Freud explains that reflexive masochism is “masochism which is situated between masochism and sadism, where the subject enjoys pain without assuming a passive position.” (“Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” 125). According the Kaja Silverman then, this reflexive masochism “is ideally suited for negotiating the contradictions inherent in masculinity. The male subject can indulge his appetite for pain without at the same time calling into question either his virility, or his paternal lineage” (196-97). This idea leads Rehling to suggest that “in Fight Club, masochism becomes the means by which the male characters assert phallic mastery over themselves” (188). Yet Rehling’s argument goes too far in my view as she argues that Fight Club represents “a deeply misogynist sentiment and a desire for lost paternal authority” (188). I would argue for a more nuanced understanding of fight club itself as a space of experimentation and, as Palahniuk says, “honest expression[s] of violence.” When asked what he was fighting on the first night, Tyler responds that he was fighting his father. Like the Narrator, Tyler doesn’t know his father and is therefore another representative of “a generation of men raised by women.” As such, Tyler, the Narrator, and other members of this generation would conceivably never have successfully separated from their mother as there was no father with whom to identify. Herein lies the angst that Fight Club addresses. Insofar as Tyler is a.) manifest father and b.) manifest enemy, the Narrator creates a complete inversion of the Freudian dialectic. Not only is the male masochistic in Palahniuk’s creation, but it is the Father who is beaten, not the child. I agree here with Rehling’s reading that:

60 Indeed, the father is being beaten because he is the wrong kind of father, a non-phallic father who left the Narrator to be raised exclusively by his mother. Put another way, the father may well be beaten but only ultimately replaced, in the Narrator’s case, but his ego ideal/substitute father, Tyler, who offers a more masculine form of paternal authority. (193) Where I differ from Rehling is that while she reads this understanding negatively, I read it positively. Within the very specific boundaries (the basement walls), rules (you do not talk about fight club), and timeframe (2 am to 7 am on Sunday mornings) of fight club, the members of fight club are given an opportunity to act out their aggression at being “the middle children of history” (116). In her book The Male Body, Susan Bordo writes of the “Double Bind” of contemporary masculinity: We fabulously reward those boys who succeed in our ritual arenas of primitive potency…[b]ut, at the same time, we want male aggression to bow to civilization when a girl says “no” and to be transformed into tender passion when she says “yes.” The fact that these contradictory directives put a real person in a difficult (if not impossible) double bind gets masked by the fact that we’ve created numerous fictional heroes who successfully embody both requirements, who have the sexual charisma of an untamed beast and are unbeatable in battle, but are intelligent, erudite, and gentle with women. (242) In the words of Tyler Durder, “We are…raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t . And we’re just learning this fact” (157). What fight club offers is a space for men to rid themselves of this double bind by allowing them to express themselves through sheer, physical aggression and fight simply for the struggle rather than fighting to win. In short, fight club allows each man the opportunity to fight the father he never knew. This exercise deteriorates though into the kind of misogynist rhetoric Rehling discusses when fight club moves from the male body to the body politic. Within fight club men fight for themselves, to purge themselves of their own aggressions. In Tyler’s Project Mayhem though, the members of fight club “take it to the streets” to force themselves and Tyler’s philosophies onto society at large. Tyler gives the men “homework assignments,” one of which is to pick a fight with a non-fight-club member and let him win. In doing so, Tyler suggests, they will “remind these guys what kind of power they still have” (111). Here, Tyler is instructing the men

61 to affect an emasculated position in order to re-play the standard patriarchal dialectic. They are pressing other men towards a dominant position predicated upon violence and based upon an Other’s masochistic victimhood. What had been the Narrator’s super ego has now become the phallocracy’s super ego, agent to the King. Outside the basements and free of the “rules” of Fight Club, the expression of violence must return to the Symbolic order (or, as close to it as is possible) and therefore must reinforce the Symbolic agenda. Tyler’s social strategy is to have every man realize the Tyler within themselves, to equate violence with their own masculinity. Tyler, as it turns out, is working for the very patriarchy that has caused the Narrator to create him in the first place. And so, by the novel’s end, the Narrator is forced to one, seemingly inevitable, end: suicide. As drastic as this conclusion might seem, Michael Kimmel, Warren Farrell, Herb Golberg and others have suggested that men are, in fact, the “suicide sex” (Clatterbaugh 78). As Goldberg explains: By what perverse logic can the male continue to imagine himself “top dog”? Emotionally repressed, out of touch with his body, alienated and isolated from other men, terrorized by the fear of failure, afraid to ask for help, thrown out at a moment’s notice…when all he knew was how to work….The male has become an artist in the creation of many hidden ways of killing himself. (181-182, my emphasis) On some level this male suicide is a very real problem. A study conducted in 2001 found men aged twenty to twenty four were seven times more likely to commit suicide that women of the same age (Matathia 94). On a symbolic level however, theorists have argued that, inasmuch as men have become experts in “compartmentalization,” they must also kill off parts of themselves into order to present themselves appropriately “as a man.” The Narrator’s “hidden” form of suicide in Fight Club comes as derivative of his murder of Tyler. For Marla Singer, who finds the Narrator on the roof of the Parker-Morris Building, gun thrust against the back of his throat, this looks like unadulterated suicide. The Narrator screams though as she comes closer, telling her “I’m not killing myself….I’m killing Tyler” (Palahniuk 196). For a man struggling with a culture that encourages self-isolation and masochism, this ultimate act of violence against this representative self/other seems the only conclusion. bell hooks has argued that “The vast majority of contemporary [texts]…send the message that males cannot escape the beast within. They can pretend. They can dissimulate, but they can never break patriarchy’s hold on their

62 consciousness” (134). For the Narrator, this break is possible, but it requires the ultimate desperate measure, the decisive act of self-violence. Palahniuk remains unclear at the novel’s end though as to whether the Narrator has been able to separate himself from Tyler – whether he has killed only Tyler or whether Tyler has taken the Narrator with him. The final chapter begins, “Of course, when I pulled the trigger, I died. Liar. And Tyler died” (197). Most critics have argued that Tyler is gone at the novel’s end and only the Narrator remains, but there is mention of the Narrator being able to “sleep in heaven” (198). Whether dead or alive, the members of Project Mayhem (so-called “space monkeys”) clearly understand the Narrator’s body as Tyler’s, one space monkey whispering in the novel’s final line, “We look forward to getting you back” (199). The ending seems to suggest that no matter whether the Narrator “comes back” or not, Project Mayhem will still run towards its goal of “freeing the world from history” as the space monkeys reassure the Narrator that “everything is going according to plan” (199). This plan, it seems, has nothing to do with the Narrator, and has nothing to do, anymore, with fight club. In his “fictional memoir,” A Fan’s Notes, written two years after Fight Club, Fredrick Exley writes of the reasoning behind so many fistfights entered into after attending football games: “I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny – unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd – to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan” (357). Like Exley, the men who fight in Palahniuk’s novel are representative of perpetual spectators, objective onlookers, desperate for an enemy, a reason to fight. Fight club is even compared to watching a football game when the Narrator suggests that “after you’ve been to fight club, watching football on television is like watching pornography when you could be having great sex” (41). Like the sexual encounter, fighting for the men in the novel is a visceral, corporal act, untranslatable into the outside world and impossible to represent through any means other than the act itself. Just as “fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends” (39) so then do the men who participate in fight club only exist as members within this same time frame. Other times they are spectators to their own lives. As the Narrator tells us, “This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time” (Palahniuk 17). Fight club offers all those present between two and seven on Sunday mornings though to be part of a congregation, each seeking salvation. The fight is the call and the witnessing is their response. Just as with the Narrator, fight club blurs the line between self and other, between spectacle and

63 spectator, between sadism and masochism, between father and son and enemy, between physical and emotional and spiritual, and, in the end, between life and death. As Faludi has noted, the question for the modern man is “how can men invade their own territory?” (605). In some ways, fight club is the answer. Through the act of reflexive masochism, fight club offers the possibility of fighting and not being concerned with winning, with the spoils a pleasure seeking man must have. It does not advance “guys trying to be like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says” (Palahniuk 46) but rather re-places men in the basements of their fathers to celebrate the male body electric, in action, unadorned. It allows for the characters to feel control in their lives again, even if this control is one of self-destruction.

“THIS DAMNED MACHINE”: MASCULINITY FACES OFF AGAINST TECHNOLOGY IN A MAN IN FULL

We hear a lot about women’s incursions into traditionally male lines of work, from engineering to law, investment banking to computer technology…. But, in general, the catcalls have been reserved for the opposite trend: namely, men entertaining fields typically associated with women. And suddenly, there are quite a lot of them looking to do so. – Ira Matathia, The Future of Men41

A man who can’t handle tools is not a man – Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman42

It had been more than ten years since Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities dropped like an anvil on the literary scene that he finally published his follow-up novel A Man in Full; and if critics and readers had been buzzing at the publication of Bonfire, they were foaming at the mouth for Man in Full. The Seattle Times called the novel “this fall book season's hottest literary property” and it was nominated for a National Book Award – both more than month before its publication (Fry; Goddard). As word surfaced that Wolfe had set the book in Atlanta, old-money natives began to grow restless, worried that the sharp satirist who had created Sherman McCoy to send up New York eleven years earlier might make a similar turn and burn Atlanta. My mother recalls attending a luncheon at the Piedmont Driving Club where Wolfe

65 spoke just before the book’s release and how “everyone was nervous that they might be the one [Wolfe] would come after. As it turned out, everyone in that room knew someone in the book.” Likewise, my father remembers that “in the business community…everyone was waiting until they could get the book. And then, once they got it, the big question was, ‘who is this character supposed to be and who is that supposed to be?’ There was definitely a huge buzz.”43 As for his part, Wolfe had good reason for the hiatus. Falling into depression after the success of Bonfire, the journalist-turned-author rarely made public appearances in the early- nineties, choosing instead to remain in his Park Avenue apartment, insulated from the world, not unlike the main character of his wildly popular first novel. Nevertheless, Wolfe was, to some extent, heard but not seen when he published his controversial article “Stalking the Billion- Footed Beast” in Harper’s magazine in November of 1989. In it, he called for a return to the realistic novel, one based deeply in research and one which was not afraid to draw out details. “In other words,” as The Independent’s David Usborne frankly noted, Tom Wolfe was advocating that “more novelists should write as he did in [Bonfire of the Vanities]” (11). The New York Times’ Michael Lewis went even further to suggest that “Stalking” was “a flamboyant end zone jig of an essay” by which “Wolfe ceased to be merely annoying [and became] a public nuisance” (2). Despite his reclusivity, it seems Wolfe never lost the ability to do what he does best – rattle cages.44 Just as important as what the article promoted though was what it denounced – Wolfe’s advice on how not to be a writer. Wolfe asserted that a shift had occurred in the twentieth century which encouraged writers to equate the age-old adage, “Write about what you know,” with the new mantra “The only valid experience is personal experience” (Wolfe, “Stalking” 52). What then occurs as a result, according to Wolfe, is that “The young person who decides to become a writer because he has a subject or issue in mind is a rare bird, because he has ‘something to say’ is a rare bird. Most make that decision because they realize they have a certain musical facility with words” (Wolfe, “Stalking 52). The “material,” as Wolfe identifies it, becomes secondary to “the unique talent that is secure inside some sort of crucible in his skull” (Wolfe, “Stalking” 53). For Wolfe, this philosophy is inverted as it is the material which is paramount while personal genius must mold its talents around it. Just as the realism movement of the late nineteenth century grew out of a reaction to the idealized romantic literature of the early nineteenth century, so too did Wolfe in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” call for a return to novels based on research and social study in the face of “personal experience”

66 literature which he sees permeating much of the mid twentieth century. Some called Bonfire “prophetic” after its release as some of the scenes contained within the novel’s pages seemed to be playing out in reality, but Wolfe denied these assertions of augury, stating that his novel only “showed what was obvious to anyone who had done what I did” (Wolfe, “Stalking” 55). For Wolfe, art should not only imitate life (and vice verse), but art, particularly the art of the novel, should situate itself firmly within the theater of real life, should itself become an agent in the world. And so, having been established not just as a major journalist but also as a major-league novelist, and having thrown down the literary gauntlet with his postscriptural essay, Wolfe published A Man in Full in the fall of 1998 to the sounds of buzzing critics and baying literati.45 As with Bonfire and the 1980s, many looked to how Wolfe would define the zeitgeist of the 1990s. The State Journal-Register’s Shawn Candela declared that Wolfe’s novel affirmed that “the ‘80s were about control, while the ‘90s are about…the overabundance of controllers (banks, politicians, rich people, sports)…that no man can really stay on top with all these forces pulling at him” (13). LA Weekly’s Steve Oney went even further to situate A Man in Full within direct context of current events: This is a slippery age, one when the president of the United States resorts to double talk to avoid a prosecutor’s questions and O.J. Simpson suggests he was a victim of spousal abuse by the woman he murdered, one when everyone seems willing to cut a deal and few seem to be willing to make a principled stand. And so the debates animating A Man in Full – Can a man betray a friend without betraying himself? Can he surrender his dignity without surrendering his soul? – are exceedingly pertinent. (13) Oney’s comments here seem to coincide with Wolfe’s own about the “moral fever” he proposed would dominate the 1990s. Speaking at the beginning of the decade, Wolfe remarked that, “People are starting to talk about morality and ethics, partly because there such a hangover from what went on in the 1980s.” Wolfe then went on though to add that, “moral fever is only a fever. It doesn’t mean that morals change. They could…if people are concerned about the topic enough. It doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to happen” (qtd. in McKeen 136). In this light, A Man in Full is a kind of morality tale, though the lesson is certainly more Byzantine than its sixteenth century predecessors (after all Charlie Croker is no Everyman). In some ways, the novel is an extrapolation of Bonfire and Charlie could be read as a revised version of Sherman McCoy. As Carol McNamara suggests, “A Man in Full appears to be

67 Wolfe’s response to the unmanliness of Sherman” (132). Indeed, whereas Sherman had been representative of what Anthony Rotundo deemed “pleasurable masculinity,” Charlie is a “self- made man,”46 that Algeristic myth-being who goes from veritable rags to riches “that would make the sun king blink” (Wolfe, Man in Full 32). Other important thematic differences exist as well between the two novels. Whereas in Bonfire, the office offered the site of masculine insulation, in A Man in Full it is Charlies 29,000 acre plantation, Turmptine which offers itself up (however ineffectually) as the space of manly refuge. And whereas threats for Sherman come from external forces, those Others outside his penthouse walls, 65-year-old Charlie is himself already marginalized as the embodiment of an archaic masculinity. Through Charlie and the younger, though ill-fated, Conrad, Wolfe creates a diegetic argument around the impropriety and, in fact, illegality of outdated forms of masculinity in the face of civilization and, most importantly, technology. By the time of its publication 13 years after Lonesome Dove, A Man in Full presents to its reader Capt. Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae’s worst nightmare: a refined world with no place for initiation, no room for virile manhood, and no true place of masculine retreat. In short, Wolfe creates a world in which the bankers have defeated the cowboys. As with Bonfire, A Man in Full constructs a plot around so many characters, settings, and events as would make Charles Dickens blush. The novel centers around Charlie Croker, ex- Georgia Tech football star turned real estate magnate. Owing PlannersBank more than $500 million dollars in loans, Charlie looks for investors in his near-bankrupt Croker Concourse lest he be forced to sell off his prized possessions, even his beloved plantation, Turmptine. Rather than sell such a “remarkable institution” (Man in Full 55), Charlie decides to mollify the bank by selling Croker Global Foods which includes a freezer warehouse in Santa Anna, California, where 23-year-old Conrad Hensley works. Laid-off and desperate, Conrad enters into a Dantean spiral down the hinterlands of the Bay Area, eventually finding himself penniless and in jail. As a prisoner, Conrad serendipitously comes across a copy of a book entitled The Stoics and quickly adopts the writings of Epictetus as his own life philosophy. Released from his unjust incarceration by an earthquake,47 Conrad makes his way from one side of the country to the other, eventually becoming the caretaker of Charlie who has recently had knee surgery. The Charlie that Conrad finds is a despondent and depressed man. Having stalled the bank as long as possible, Charlie is presented with a dilemma. The new Georgia Tech football star, Fareek “The Cannon” Fannon, has been accused of raping the daughter of arriviste Inman

68 Armholster, who also happens to be Charlie’s best friend. Mayor Wes Jordan offers Charlie sanction from the creditors’ threats – if he speaks out on behalf of Fareek. Thus, Charlie must decide between loyalty and status, between honor and Turpmtine. In reality though, this plot device serves as a nub around which Wolfe maneuvers his cast of characters from scene to scene, from situation to situation, letting them send up and tear down old-boy racism, Realpolitik, and stalling masculinities in the New South. Of the latter subject, Mary Kutz has suggested that the book is, overall, constructed around manly weight: “Everything about this book is brawny, from its physical heft to its winding plots and subplots to the characters, many of whom are described by their musculature” (3). Indeed, when we first encounter Charlie, in the very first sentences of the book, he is flaunting his size: Charlie Croker, astride his favorite Tennessee Walking horse, pulled his shoulders back to make sure he was erect in the saddle and took a deep breath…Ahhh, that was the ticket…He loved the way his mighty chest rose and fell beneath his khaki shirt and imagined that everyone in the hunting party noticed how powerfully built he was…. For good measure, he flexed and fanned out the biggest muscles of his back, the latissimi dorsi, in a Charlie Croker version of a peacock or a turkey preening. (3) Upon first read, it is easy to compare this scene to a similar scene in Bonfire of the Vanities mentioned in chapter 3 of this thesis when Sherman is walking his daughter to school. As we recall: Sherman liked to have his fatherhood observed…. As they crossed Park Avenue, he had a mental picture of what an ideal pair they made. Campbell, the perfect angel in a private-school uniform; himself, with his noble head, his Yale chin, his big frame, and his $1,800 British suit, the angel’s father, a man of parts; he visualized the admiring stares the envious stares, of the drivers, the pedestrians, of one and all. (49, 51) Yet the masculinity presented here is clearly representative of “pleasure seeking” masculinity as Sherman is as much concerned with those things that surround and cover his body than his body itself. In the opening scene of A Man in Full, Charlie is more akin to Bonfire’s Bronx crew of Andruitti, Caughey, Goldberg, and Kramer and their pumped-up physiques than Sherman. For Charlie, his muscular body is outward evidence of his inward virility. Even his balding pate is not a sign of old age, but rather of the fact that he has “masculinity to burn – as if there was so

69 much testosterone surging up through his hide it popped the hair right off the top of his head” (Wolfe Man in Full 35). It is this kind of machismo that allows Charlie to, at first, be immune to the setting at the PlannersBank “workout” session, a kind of guerilla financial intervention. The description from the lean accountant Raymond Peepgass’s point of view sets the scene: …[Charlie] was reared back confidently in his chair with his suit jacket thrown open. The fool seemed to think he was still one of those real estate developers who own the city of Atlanta. He was grinning at the underlings on either side of him, his lawyers, financial officers, division heads, his aging Banking Relations puppies, and his so-called executive assistants, who were a couple of real numbers with skirts up to…here…. (35) Despite Peepgass’s mocking of Charlie, he is clearly nevertheless taken with Charlie’s boardroom swagger. Later, when Charlie removes his jacket and loosens his necktie, Peepgass observes how “his chest flexed into a couple of massive hillocks” and “his mighty neck swelled out until it seemed to merge with his trapezii in one continuous slope to the shoulders” (42). When Charlie rolls up his sleeves to reveal forearms “like a pair of country hams,” he not only is exhibiting his strength but also suggesting that there is something worth rolling up his sleeves for – that loans and finances are earthy business and that in dealing with capital a man might get his hands dirty. Accompanying his frame and labour is Charlie’s near-mythical history as a Georgia Tech running back. As the reader discovers, this is an aspect of Charlie of which Peepgass is, again, keenly aware: Back in the 1950s, when Georgia Tech was a national football power, Charlie Croker had been not only a star running back but a linebacker, one of the last players on any major football team to play both offense and defense, earning him the title, on the Atlanta sports page, of “the Sixty-Minute Man” (40). The fact that Charlie was a sports star is keenly integral to understanding Charlie’s character as sports initiates males into “the language of domination…and the otherwise faltering ideology of male superiority” (Messner & Sabo 5). The fact that Charlie was not only a running back but also a linebacker offers us further insight into what Charlie represents. Donald Sabo, social theorist and former college football player, suggests that, of all positions in sport, “the linebacker embodies the aggressive, tough, masculine stereotype. The image of the linebacker is attractive to males; they find it useful to separate themselves from women and to compare themselves to

70 other men” (72). Thus, just as we have seen with Lonesome Dove, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Fight Club, the idea of male separation enters into A Man in Full. Sports, as an institution, is one of the few remaining where muscular strength still truly matters.48 Through his participation in not only sports, but by specifically playing the positions of running back and linebacker, Charlie creates of himself a masculinity that is not only implicitly separate and dominant over women, but also assertive over other men.49 Similar to Charlie, Conrad Hensley is possessed of a sizable upper body as a result of his loading and unloading large crates of food at a freezer storage warehouse of Croker Global: At a glance he might have passed for an athlete. He was tall enough and young enough, and he looked strong enough, despite his slight build. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, and his forearms bulged beneath the long johns, tapering down to hands with long fingers that had been delicate just six months ago but were now so muscular, his wedding ring bit into the flesh like a cinch. (109) Like Charlie’s muscles, holdovers from his days on the gridiron, Conrad’s muscles are naturalized through their connection with physical labour. As with Big Bob in Fight Club, ornamental muscles are scorned in favor of active, useful muscles. This notion of manual labour being implicit in “natural” masculinity can be traced back to nineteenth-century American ideals, when “manhood” was the opposite of “boyhood” (not “femininity” as has become the case with “masculinity”) and the transition between the two meant the initiation into the workforce (Rutundo, Manhood 168-178; Kimmel, Soceity 2-42). Just as the nineteenth-century man was “made to labour” so too do Conrad and Charlie equate their masculine prowess with the practice and results of their work. As Lynn Segal notes, “Work, it has often been noted, is one of the main anchorages of male identity. Men’s engagement in paid work, in ‘skilled’ work, is central to the social construction of masculinity, or, as the contrasts in men’s working lives would suggest, masculinities” (297). This connection between manly labour and manly stature permeated the twentieth-century, even up to the ‘70s, ‘80s, and (it would seem) ‘90s, leading sociologists such as Paul Willis to suggest that “Manual labour is suffused with masculine qualities and given certain sensual overtones for ‘the lads.’ The toughness and awkwardness of physical work and effort…takes on masculine lights and depths and assumes a significance beyond itself” (159).50 Just like their bulging trapizii and bicep muscles, Conrad and Charlie are established in their masculinity through muscular efforts. For Conrad, it is his engagement with manual labour; for Charlie, it is his football past, a past which, according to historian Michael

71 Oriard, was “the ideal training ground for a managerial elite” (qtd. in Faludi 156). When asked by Atlanta magazine what his exercise regimen is, Charlie responds, “‘Exercise regimen? Who the hell’s got time for an exercise regimen? On the other hand, when I need firewood, I start with a tree’” (Wolfe Man in Full 40). Both Charlie and Conrad have muscles earthy as the trees of the forest, hard as a frozen crate. Yet there is a difference as well in the way these two men come by their muscular forms. For while both represent strength tied to purpose, the ends of their individual means of winning this strength are poles apart from one another. As mentioned above, Conrad’s strength is sited in the arena of physical labour, intrinsic to the lower class to which he belongs. As the reader discovers later in the novel, this strength not only reveals itself to be tantamount to a jail sentence, but also serves to maintain Conrad in his plebeian status. The muscular strength Conrad gains from his unskilled labour is precisely what keeps him from vertically repositioning himself outside of this handwork. Charlie’s strength, on the other hand, is tied in directly with his celebrity as a Georgia Tech football player. In a study conducted in 1980 which examined the social implications of having been a first team, second team, or reserve football player at Notre Dame, Allen Sack and Robert Theil found that, 20 years after graduation, 41 percent of first team players were making at least $50,000, while only 30 percent of second teamers and 13 percent of the reserves made as much. Furthermore, of the first team players, 34 percent were found to be top executives in their companies (presidents, vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, or treasures) while this was only true of about 14 percent of both second teamers and reserves (63-5). Unlike Conrad’s muscles which circumscribe him to a lower class existence, the muscles Charlie gained from playing football – or, moreover, from being a star football player at a major university – coincide with an increased opportunity for him to enter into the echelons of the upper classes after graduation. This possibility is only further augmented when one considers that college football became nationally televised in the 1950s, the same decade in which Charlie played, creating for him the chance to not only become a local hero, but a national hero as well.51 Therefore, while both Charlie and Conrad are possessed of “natural” muscles and while both revel in their potency, the meanings of their muscles are different for each man. For Charlie, his muscles reference an entrance into notoriety, indicators of his status as a Ballplayer. For Conrad, his muscles signal his lower class standing and his confinement therein. While Charlie is enfranchised by his strength, Conrad is, literally and figuratively, imprisoned by his.

72 These men do share a similar pride in their strapping appearance however. Despite the sincere means through which each man has obtained his strength, they are not the antithesis to Fight Club’s Big Bob as they enjoy flaunting their muscles before others and, even, themselves. One can clearly see this with Charlie “preening” before his hunting party at Turpmtine and consciously exposing the body beneath the suit at the PlannersBank workout session. Conrad too reveals his own vanity when he receives a suggestive look by an Asian schoolgirl and turns to catch his reflection in a mirror: He wanted to see himself as she had seen him…He studied his lean face, his dark eyes, his moustache…Not bad at all!...He liked the way the T-shirt stretched across his chest and his shoulders which were tightly defined…He pulled up the T-shirt our of his pants and slid it up over his ribs so as to bare his midsection, and he tensed his abdominal muscles until they popped out like a six-pack. He was…cut, ripped, as the bodybuilders like to put it, from wrestling with all those tons of frozen products at Croker Global…Then he lifted his forearms and hands and made two fists…His forearms were positively gorged with muscle, and for a brief moment he admired himself enormously. (168) Compare this scene to the moment in Fight Club where Big Bob recalls competing in bodybuilding competitions: “…the judge orders: ‘Extend your right quad, flex and hold.’ ‘Extend your left arm, flex the bicep and hold’” (Palahniuk 12). Likewise, Conrad is on display, even considering himself in bodybuilder terminology. Also interesting in this moment is that it comes just after Conrad has been laid-off and is self-reproving, calling himself “miserable failure!…jobless statistic!…pathetic excuse for a father!” (165). Conrad’s body interrupts this chastisement, offering itself as something he can be proud of. Conrad and Charlie revel in their bodies, wear their muscles, as Susan Bordo has suggested, “like armor.” Ironically, just like Big Bob, this exposure is feminizing though, as men are “meant” to “act,” and women to “appear” (Berger 47). As Bordo explains, “[T]he classic formula for representing men is to show them in action…. They never fondle their own bodies narcissistically, display themselves as pure ‘sights,’ or gaze at themselves in the mirror” (197). Clearly, Charlie and Conrad, despite their naturalized strength, are participatory in a different “formula.” Wolfe wrote in Bonfire that “[t]he bodily vanity of the male knows no bounds” (571). The consequence of this idea is an inversion of the traditional paradigm regarding the male relationship to his own bodies. In

73 Gender Trouble, Judith Butler, arguing alongside Simon de Beauvior, identifies the theoretical body as a thing distinctly female: [The] association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes…the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom….The female body is marked within masculinist discourse, whereby the masculine body in its conflation with the universal, remains unmarked. (17) The male characters in Wolfe’s writing consistently upset this contingency through their representations of “the bodily vanity of the male.” Inasmuch as these male characters are not only aware of the profile of their own bodies, but are also practiced in its posturing, the universality of the male is then axiomatically contradicted. Ironically, the fact that these men are so narcissistically invested in their own musculature serves to feminize them insofar as it presents them as men more concerned with appearance than action. Furthermore, the fact that Charlie and Conrad’s strength is organic serves to archaize them as, in the civilized world of the 1990s, this muscular body truly has no outlet for action outside of sports and manual labour.52 Ira Matathia, Ann O’Reilly, and Marian Salzman have suggested that the increasing importance of and reliance upon technology has greatly decreased the significance of bodily strength: “In the world of work, technology first made males’ testosterone-driven muscle advantage less important, then irrelevant, and has now perhaps made it a disadvantage” (9). This irrelevance, or even disadvantage, occurs alongside the rise of what has traditionally been considered “feminine” work, those jobs that require interpersonal skills and administrative familiarity: All over the developed world, the sorts of jobs that called for male muscle and daring are disappearing fast and are being replaced by the type of work women can do at least as well as men. Office jobs, service jobs, jobs that involve working with people and information rather than with things and machinery are gaining prestige and power – and in paycheck. (Matathia et al 108) Conrad encounters this rising tide of clerical work directly when he applies for a job at the appropriately-titled company, ContempoTime. The “interview” process, Conrad discovers, revolves around a typing test, one to determine “how well you type, how fast you are and how accurate you are” (252). Conrad begins the test confidently, but soon begins to panic as he finds he is unable to strike the correct keys on the keyboard: “He knew something had gone wrong.

74 He stared…Instead of This he had somehow typed Rhhhodd. Instead of the T, the i, and the s, he had hit the letters next to them…. He was baffled and appalled. How could that have happened?” (252). Conrad continues to struggle, mistyping grossly incorrect words, unable to approach anywhere near the “eighty-five words a minute” he had achieved when taking a course at a community college in Mount Diablo (251). Presently, he discovers the cause of his imprecision: Then he realized what the problem was. His hands! His fingers were now so much wider and heavier and stronger, from working in the warehouse, he was constantly overlapping adjoining keys or else striking them too hard, causing the letters to repeat. He had lost the touch in his own fingers! Two grotesque musclebound strangers, his hands were! My own hands! He stared at them as if he had never seen him. (253) Conrad’s hands, those same fists that had been the source of so much pride that very morning, are here the Judas of his body, betraying him within the now foreign domain of technology. In three minutes, Conrad has discovered that “Man’s physical prowess and his facility for backbreaking manual labor… might be excellently suited to a world that depended on brute force, [but] in a society…where offices make interpersonal skills more important, men are simply ill equipped for the modern age” (Matathia et al 19). More than just “ill equipped” though, Conrad finds his body prohibited by the modern age. After finding his car towed for being parked on the sidewalk – Conrad, it seems did not actually park the car there, but rather his tiny Hyundai has been pushed into the prohibited position by a giant Chevrolet Suburban that was parked behind him53 – Conrad must figure a way to have his none-too-pleased wife wire him $35.00, pick up the money from the Western Union, take a bus down to the slums of East Oakland, and retrieve his car from the pound before it closes at 7:00 pm. Arriving at the payment office with one minute to spare, Conrad finds that he is, in fact $77.00 short of the amount needed to retrieve his car. Bedlam ensues as Conrad nevertheless tries to get his car out of the lot, scraps with an attendant, and is eventually arrested and jailed for trespassing, larceny, and assault. In prison, Conrad is out of his element – or so he believes. Afraid for his life and his anal virginity, Conrad tries his best to keep to himself and, at all costs, avoid the beastial white- supremacist, Rotto. Conrad’s efforts are for naught however as he is eventually brought into conflict with the menacing inmate. At first, Conrad tries to “use da mouth,” as his cellmate Five- O advises, insisting, “All’s I wants is to do my time” (456). Unfazed by Conrad’s invective

75 though, Rotto maintains his dominant and aggressive stance. To Rotto’s surprise though, Conrad is in possession of les mains terribles: With his left hand [Conrad] seized Rotto’s right hand and wrenched it off his cheek. Immediately he sensed that his grip enclosed all four of Rotto’s knuckles. For all his massive shoulders, arms, and chest the brute’s hands were not big. Conrad’s product of the Suicidal Freezer Unit…were bigger and more powerful…. Conrad was now an engine devoted solely to closing the vise. The muscles of his chest, his back, his abdominals were contracted to their very limits at the service of his hands. Rotto’s knuckles and metacarpal bones – he willed their destruction – willed it – willed it…. (457) Whereas Conrad’s hands had been the source of his disgrace and ruin in civilized society, those same hands are valuable apparati in jail. In prison, that house of the illegitimate sons of society, Conrad’s beefy hands are useful again. Inasmuch as they are criminal in the outside world, they become potent again in the criminal world. Here again one notices the discrepancy between the significance of Conrad’s muscles as opposed to that of Charlie’s muscles. Having developed on the “gridiron” of college football and having been honed, apparently, in his vast capitalistic dealings, Charlie’s strength still serves to inspire awe and reverence in the company of other men. His reinforced male body may not be able to save his financial stature, but it can still nevertheless render less-thans, such as Raymond Peepgass, overwhelmed. Conrad’s body, on the other, having been gained through the processes of manual labour, not only denies him the ability to escape his lower class condition, but forces him into a criminal space where brute strength is all that matters. Whereas Charlie’s celebrated strength can maintain some level of potency, no matter how illusory, Conrad’s blue-collar hands reveal themselves to be powerful enough to drag him down to the bottom rung of society. As a result of his illustrious past, Charlie is exempt from such severe ruin as Conrad experiences. Yet, while Charlie’s corrosion in the world of technology and modern sensibility is perhaps less dramatic as Conrad’s, it is certainly as palpable. Part of the reason that Charlie is able to maintain his masculine posture in the face of civilization is that he has the natural retreat of Turpmtine to rejuvenate his waning manhood and reify his essentialistic principles. When at the plantation, Charlie is able to cast off the feminizing coat of the city and return, literally and figuratively, to his roots:

76 “This morning,” said Charlie, “I’m only gonna shoot the bobs.” Morning came out close to moanin’, just as something had come out sump’m. When he was here at Turpmtine he liked to shed Atlanta, even in his voice. He liked to feel earthy, Down Home, elemental; which is to say, he was no longer a real estate developer, he was…a man. (5) Important to note here is the difference between being a “real estate developer” and being “a man.” Despite the machismo he exhibits for the benefit of the members of PlannersBank, Charlie is still not truly involved in masculine enterprise when he is speculating property or signing contracts. Rather, real estate is a means to achieve Turpmtine, a place where old-style masculinity still means something. As Charlie states, “You had to be man enough to deserve a quail plantation. You had to be able to deal with man and beast, in every form they came in, with your wits, your bare hands, and your gun” (9). So integral is Turpmtine to Charlie’s definition of himself as a man that his understanding of the 29,000 acre plot moves from natural to super-natural: “Putting it into words would have been beyond Charlie, but he knew the magic of Turmptine depended…[on] a manly world where people still lived close to the earth, a luxurious bygone world in which there were masters and servants and everybody knew his place” (277). Despite the obvious racist overtones of Charlie’s perception of Turmptine, the prosaic “magic” in which he so firmly believes further underscores Charlie’s desire for a clean division between male and female, with himself representing the icon of what is male. During the book’s opening quail hunting expedition, Charlie remarks that “a quail shoot was a ritual in which the male of the human species acted out his role of hunter, provider, and protector, and the female acted as if this was part of the natural, laudable, excellent, and compelling order of things. None of this could Charlie have put into words, but he felt it” (15). Taking a step back for a moment, we can see that a kind of circle has been achieved in Anthony Rutundo’s theory that hegemonic masculinities promote “men regain[ing] their manhood through common ritual that excludes women” (American Manhood 288). In Lonesome Dove, we saw the Western fantasy, men separated totally from the gaze of women, free to conquer, be initiated by, and be one with the land. In Bonfire, the separation moved from external to internal as Sherman “Insulate[s]!” himself in the masculine war room of his Wall Street office. In Fight Club, the move was again internal, but this time it is a move to the basements of their fathers and deeper still to the basements the Narrator’s ego. A Man in Full returns to the external, but only as a method of re-presentation and re-production. In fact, Turpmtine could even be considered an “insulated” space as it serves to be a kind of vault for

77 antiquated terms of gender and race in contemporary times. It is the postmodern simulation, or even simulacrum, as the “a luxurious bygone world” Charlie imagines never truly existed.54 Within his remarks about the quail shoot however, we see that even though Charlie has a distinct fantasy surrounding the “magic” of Turpmtine, he is nevertheless aware of the “acting” that occurs within the assignment of gender roles. To say that the male acts out “his role of hunter, provider, and protector,” means that these responsibilities are unnatural and therefore must be reinforced through ritual. The quail themselves are brought in and released on the property for the purposes of hunting. The hunting, providing, and protecting is only an exhibition, an antediluvian showcase that Charlie must create through artificial means. For Charlie, Turmptine offers an opportunity to deny the world outside the property, to make believe against what even he knows to be true. For Charlie, all of Turpmtine’s a stage. Part of what helps Charlie believe in the magic of Turpmtine though is the plantation’s peculiar restorative powers on Charlie’s infirmed knee, the result of an injury he sustained playing college football. At times Charlie excuses the injury, even takes pride in it, referring to it as his “honorable wound of war” (6). Other times he is ashamed of the knee, considering it as evidence of himself as “a toothless, eyeless, gimping alpha lion” (70). When trying to capture a rattlesnake at Turpmtine though, Charlie is suddenly healed of his affliction: “Step-gimp-step- gimp-step-gimp-step-gimp…he walked as slowly and softly as he could…pausing by a row of rattles…eight of them…And now he crept on toward the head, and a strange and wondrous thing happened. The pain began to recede from his knee” (85). In a mystical turn of pathetic fallacy, the plantation responds empathetically to Charlie’s pain; the manly retreat offers alleviation to the “wound of war” of the Man in Full. In the realm of PlannersBank though, no such mitigation presents itself. Rather, in the face of the loan officers, the injury flairs up worse than ever, revealing Charlie to be vulnerable prey, “an old man” (70). The world built on capital rather than strength has no sympathy for Charlie’s “wound of war,” nor does it recognize it as such. Rather, the world made of “bankers and lawyers” that Gus and Call feared and disdained so much in Lonesome Dove, measures gain and loss in terms of money in the pocket rather than years of a life or yards on a field. In the workout session with PlannersBank, Charlie is able to hold his own as the true “alpha lion” – until, that is, he is confronted with a “Male Animal” the same kind as himself: [L]o! – somewhere in the shallows of the PlannersBank hormone pool the bank had found the likes of Harry Zale, the workout artiste, the bank’s own Marine drill instructor.

78 Harry was here to make the shitheads pop to, to render the fat, melt down the ego, separate the soul from its vain props, and create a new man: a shithead who actually focuses on paying the money back. (47) The fact that Harry is not only referred to as “the bank’s own Marine drill instructor,” but also that boot camp philosophy (“pop to,” “melt down the ego”) is employed to address instances of malfeasance, inverts the world of Lonesome Dove, conflates the Soldier with the Banker. In this way too, Charlie’s place in the world is inverted also; from dominant man to insolent child; from boss to subordinate; from “Cap’n Charlie” – as he is known at Turpmtine – to “shithead.” As with Conrad and the typing test, Charlie has been forced to realize that “as increasing numbers of men begin to make their livings using their heads rather than their hands…our ideas about masculinity have changed accordingly” (36). Harry Zale is exemplary of this new kind of masculinity, one that marries a militaristic heritage with economic and technical savvy, while Charlie finds himself “ill equipped” for the challenge. Emasculated by this encounter with Henry Zale and his team and by the deterioration of the phallic Croker Concourse (“Had to build a tower, didn’t he…had to take the name Croker soaring up forty stories into the sky…with a dome to top it all off” 65), Charlie finds that his waning power is beginning to effect not just his corporate interests alone: Since he believed that his performance as a developer, as an entrepreneur, as a plunger, as a creative person, was bound up with his sexual vitality, then he also believed that if he ever lost that, he would lose his…power…in business and everything else. And now he was afraid that the pressure had rendered him exactly that: impotent. He could sense it; he could feel it; somehow he knew it. But he didn’t want to have to take the test and find out for sure not tonight. (227) Sitting upon his bed, trying to avoid the advances of his twenty-something second wife, Serena, Charlie comes to realize that his increasing economic and social impotence has now become physical as well. Published in 1998, A Man in Full was released the same year as Viagra and a year after Newsweek announced “The New Science of IMPOTENCE.”55 Officially made available in May of 1998 (a six months before A Man in Full was published), Viagra immediately cemented itself into the American consciousness56 by becoming the fastest selling new drug on the U.S. market (Handy 42). Susan Bordo has noted that the language which surrounded Viagra upon its introduction produced “contradictory messages.” In considering the above-mentioned Newsweek article, she writes:

79 On the one hand that ugly shame-inducing word “IMPOTENCE” was emblazoned throughout the piece. On the other hand, we were told in equally bold letters that science was “REBUILDING THE MALE MACHINE.” If it’s all a matter of fluid dynamics, I thought, why keep the term “impotent,” whose definitions…are: “want of power,” “weakness,” “lack of effectiveness, helplessness,” and (only lastly) “lack of ability to engage in sexual intercourse”? In keeping the term “impotence,” I figured, the drug companies would get to have it both ways: reduce a complex human condition to a matter of chemistry, while keeping the old shame machine working, helping to assure the flow of men to their doors. (60) Having been published during the “Viagra craze” then, readers would have almost certainly considered Viagra when reading of Charlie’s impotence and, being the consummate researcher that he is, it is difficult to imagine that Wolfe would have missed this consequence. In considering Charlie’s shame in 1998, his impotence implies its solution – a solution which lies in technology, “better living through chemistry.” Yet this technology brings to the fore the “natural weakness” implicit in impotence. As with Harry Zale, that new man who is an amalgamation of both Soldier and Banker, Viagra suggests that the new sexual man can be one of both nature and technology.57 If Charlie had only asked his doctor, perhaps he could have been hard forever. By the novel’s end, Charlie does, in another way, become the kind of man that Viagra proposes. Having endured his aching knee for most of the narrative, Charlie finally decides on surgery to have it replaced. With PlannersBank bearing down hard, Charlie no longer has time for the fountain of youth that is Turpmtine. Rather, he resigns to the fact that he must be “fixed” through a more man-made process, a technological process – as Charlie’s doctor Emmo Nuchols jokingly suggests, he must become “a bionic man” (620). In doing so, he breaks with his heroic sports past, denies the “wound of war,” and contradicts his much-prized natural masculinity. As the narrator explains through Charlie’s point of view during the surgery, “His right knee was a construction site, and he had contracted himself out” (620). By the time Conrad and Charlie finally encounter one another, civilization and technology have fully subsumed the two men. Conrad has escaped from prison and is still an avid reader of Epictetus, but he is also a nurse-aide in charge of aiding Charlie in his rehabilitation. Not only is Conrad then placed in a traditionally feminine job, but Charlie’s position is again inverted as he moves from once-boss to now-dependant. Depressed and still

80 undecided about the dilemma involving Inman Armholster, Fareek Fanon, PlannersBank and the mayor of Atlanta, Charlie is resigned to his incompatibility, his obsoleteness: “Charlie was not a man who had grown up with a consciousness of his own powers. He didn’t have a back like a Jersey bull any longer…[b]ecause the source of his strength had been his money, his reputation, his success in worldly affairs” (687). With these sources of strength gone, Charlie is completely powerless, completely irrelevant, completely out of place. We recall that in Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman makes a “terrible discovery” that all “men make about their fathers sooner or later”: “[H]e realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself” (Wolfe 432). Charlie, likewise, is exposed as a boy, weak and confused in his outmoded body. All his life he had played the hero, the boss, the “Cap’n.” Now, at the end of it, he must learn how to play the child. Charlie does not betray Inman in the end, choosing instead to use the scheduled press conference to wax philosophical – however incomprehensibly – about the teachings of Epictetus. Stripped of his fortune and possessions, Charlie becomes an evangelist of stoicism, perhaps trying to regain some semblance of the (super)natural masculinity he found at Turpmtine, perhaps unable to keep his mind in a modern world. Conrad turns himself in to the California police as an escaped convict, re-incarcerating what remain “the forearms and hands of a man twice his size” (687). Perhaps the scene that captures the crisis of masculinity as expressed in A Man in Full best though is one early in the novel when Charlie is on his G-4 jet with his 32-year- old chief financial officer, Wismer Stoock, a man Charlie simply calls “the Wiz.” As the two discuss possible selling points of Croker Global in order to appease PlannersBank, Charlie is distracted by The Wiz’s calculator: He produced an HP-12C calculator from the side pocket of his jacket and the ditch down the middle of his forehead deepened and he began pecking away. That damned HP-12C was the Wiz in hardware form. It was the wizard’s wand of the technogeeks. Charlie couldn’t stand the sight of it, because it utterly baffled him and made him feel how cut off he was from the new generation coming out of the business schools. Curious about the thing, he had once asked the Wiz to let him try it for a second. He tried to enter 2+2. He couldn’t get 4! Couldn’t get 2+2=4! Turned out that with this damned machine, you had to enter +2 plus +2. It worked backwards or something. Charlie’s frustration with the calculator juxtaposed with the Wiz’s proficiency with it is endemic of Charlie’s defunctness. The Wiz is a representative of the new man: a man who is one with

81 machines rather than land; a man who is “young and fit…neither manly nor unmanly” (67); a man who sees Charlie as “an aging, uneducated, out-of-date country boy” (74). For Charlie, the calculator – that technological Doppelganger of the Wiz – goes against the simplest of logic. For Charlie, the new world is an inverted world, one where “know-how” is more important than vigor and muscles forged by labour can land you in jail. Superiors become subordinates, men become children. The Bankers have won. The Politicians have won. The Worker and Football Hero have been excommunicated. By the novel’s end, the Man in Full has been reduced by half.

CONCLUSION: MANHOOD IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The earthquake that is shaking men and women, their roles and interrelationships, is part and parcel of this shifting of the world culture’s tectonic plates. The changes in our gender roles are only one aspect of the upheaval that accompanies the death of one epoch and the birth of another. And we will be in the birth process for several generations. – Sam Keen, A Fire in the Belly58

Maxim magazine, a “men’s” publication that coves such manly endeavors as “sex, sports, beer, babes, gadgets, clothes, and fitness,”59 has claimed to have identified the crisis confronting the twenty-first century man and they have named it Mantropy. Started in 2002, www.mantropy.com, a website created and maintained by Maxim, classifies mantropy as a disease, not of the body, but of the spirit: In recent years, a new disease has advanced unseen across the American landscape. Mantropy. A cruel, degenerative disease that sets in during the best years of a Man’s life, causing the Man inside that Man to slowly wither and die until the victim is literally a husk of his former self. By attacking on a non- cellular, spiritual level, the disease often avoids detection until its victim is irreversibly hollowed-out. Mantropy knows no social or economic boundaries, attacking Men of all races and tax brackets without warning. Although most of its victims are between

83 18 and 34, severe cases of Mantropy have been documented in Men of every age. And while there are no physical symptoms, subtle warning signs common to many afflicted Men have been documented. These “subtle warning signs” include such feminizing appurtenances as “buffed fingernails” and “lightly tinted glasses” and such emasculatory activities as “frequent seaweed wraps” and “excessive smoothie consumption.”60 The page’s sister site, www.engangeredman.com, even goes so far as to provide the viewer with “A Petition to List Man (Homo sapiens masculus) as an Endangered Species Pursuant to the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973”61 which the viewer can download, print, sign and send to United States Secretary of the Interior and the Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Of course, these websites are ironic in nature and meant to be taken humorously, but, as Harold Williamson has remarked, “Humor just isn’t funny unless it reflects some semblance of truth.” (1). What www.mantropy.com and www.endangeredman.com reflect is the belief (and subsequent fear) that masculinity, and even men, are moving towards extinction. Ira Matathia forebodingly concludes the introductory chapter of The Future of Men by stating that “With the female’s need for the male of the species increasingly tied to the biological function rather than the provision of food, shelter, protection, or even comfort, modern man had better hope his procreational and sexual offerings aren’t made obsolete anytime soon” (13). Dramatic as it may sound, there is, perhaps, call for such a warning. In April 2004 (six months before Maxim’s “petition”) scientists at Tokyo University of Agriculture published a paper announcing the birth of a mouse with two mothers – without the need for sperm or male chromosomes (Matathia 27). Science writer Brian Sykes referenced this very study in an interview with Bill Thompson concerning Sykes’s book Adam’s Curse: A Future without Men. Sykes’s own findings were that the Y chromosome – that chromosome which is “added” to the unborn fetus to make it genetically male, thereby determining men, according to Sykes, as “genetically modified women” – is “mutating very rapidly and will eventually decay into nothing” (Thompson). When that happens, Sykes theorizes, men will become extinct and “girls will inherit the earth.” The books discussed in this thesis predate these discoveries, but these discoveries themselves merely substantiate the anxieties expressed and mediated in Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club, and A Man in Full. The modern age asserts that there is no space for masculine retreat away from the civilized (and what is often understood as “feminized”) world. It testifies that men must learn to live with technology or be exterminated by it. In the February

84 1992 edition of Texas Monthly, Lawrence Wright asked, “Are Men Necessary?”62 Increasingly, there has been a very real fear that the answer is no. This change from a static and dominant patriarchy began with the rise of feminism in the 1960s (and before). As Lynn Segal has concisely suggested, “[S]ince ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are conceptually polarized and complementary, and men and women are responsive and dependant upon each other, it is hard to see how women’s lives could change substantially without affecting men’s” (280). With women’s changes comes accompanying realizations for men: that masculinity is a role, a very trying role, which demands of its performer constant vigilance and an arduous commitment to, as Maxim magazine touts, “sex, sports, beer, babes, gadgets…” and whatever else the culture might deem manly. Nigel Armistead has claimed that: Masculinity…is power seeking, it is being closed-up, drab, insensitive, interested in things and goals rather than people and processes…. Men are forced into this role…. We can join encounter groups with women and gays, we can go on demonstrations, pickets, etc., but the most important thing we can do about it is change ourselves. And that involves consciousness-raising – especially for men, who tend to resist sensitive exploration of each other’s experience and feelings. (6) Admitting that men need to change though effective implies that men deny that typifying masculine role, letting go, as Susan Faludi has put it, of “the illusion of control” (14).63 It means shrugging off the heavy cloak of hegemony and, simultaneously, forfeiting (false) power, “the power to assert control over women, over other men, over their own bodies, over machines and technology” (Segal 123). In order to do this though, men must first recognize how this power is constructed and how this power is dependant upon the subjection of women. Feminism, to some extent, has tried to demonstrate this and to enlist men in what many feminists have declared to be a common cause. To suggest that feminism affects not only women, but men as well is, of course, nothing new. Gender theorists from Monique Wittig to Betty Freidan to Gloria Steinem to Judith Butler and more have maintained that feminism is not just about women; it is a movement that affects the culture at large. Gender is not solely based on difference, but also on relationships of power. As the French social theorist Michel Foucault has written, “Deployments of power are directly connected to the body - to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures” (151). These “discourses of power” then not only allow us to explore “the power that men as a group have over women as a group…[but] also the power that some men have over other men

85 (or that some women have over other women” (Kimmel, Society 92). The aim of this thesis has been to investigate how literature might offer a space of articulation for these discourses and present itself as somewhat representative of the variable differences not only between men and women, but also among men and women, and even, to some extent, within men and women. Not surprisingly perhaps, men still struggle, wrestle with themselves, in the rift between the power that these discourses create, no matter how illusory or forged, and freedom. Each of the four books examined in this thesis participate in this struggle. Lonesome Dove offers its reader a fantasy of male separation and initiation. Its heroes, Capt. Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McCrae, embody between them the ideals of hegemonic masculinity – strength, stoicism, rationality, skill with weaponry, and, of course, whiteness. For young Newt, the novel is a bildungsroman as he is taken, at puberty, into the harsh wilderness and offered a distinctly masculine site of initiation, a lost rite in 1985. Lonesome Dove is literature as dream, harkening back to a time when “men were men and the sheep were scared.” Bonfire of the Vanities offers, at first, a similar fantasy set in modern times. Our hero this time is Sherman McCoy, a man so rich he can participate in the grandest examples of conspicuous consumption and a member of a company so powerful in Pierce & Pierce that he is offered insulation from the dangerous and feminizing world outside. He is a “pleaure seeker” using his enormous capital to purchase things that might offer him gratification, including women. Wolfe vociferously exposes Sherman to this world though, creating of him a cavity into which “They… poked their long noses and sniffed and sniffed at his shame…” (Wolfe Bonfire 493). Most significantly, Sherman refers to himself as a Master of the Universe in reference to his daughters toy doll, revealing in one phrase both the overt egotism and plastic posturing inherent in hegemonic masculinity. Eight years later, Fight Club signifies a literary experiment – the possibility of transforming the spiritual struggle of masculinity into a physical one. The separation suggested here is not out on the open range or into boardrooms and offices, but underground, into dark basements, suggestive of, at one time, both the recesses of the male subconscious and the former retreat of the 1950s father. Here men scar and wound one another and themselves, denying a “culture of adornment” the opportunity to fetishize their bodies. Even further, the separation proposed is a separation within the self, suggesting that in “an age of celebrity,” an age in which “the father has no body of knowledge or authority to transmit to the son….[e]ach son must father his own image, create his own Adam” (Faludi, Stiffed 35).

86 Finally, A Man in Full exposes (in full) the bluster and swagger necessary to maintain old-type masculinity in the modern society. The retreat of the 29,000 acre plantation Tupmtine is denied before it is ever established and our “hero,” Charlie Croker is a decaying, antediluvian, pitiable old man. Thirteen years after Lonesome Dove, the muscular strength and keen nerve exemplified by Gus and Call has not only become obsolete but is an encumbrance as we find in the case of Conrad Hensley. By the novel’s end, Charlie has become an evangelist, preaching the gospel according to Conrad. Old-type masculinity has become a cult, or, perhaps more accurately, a myth. Increasingly, civilization and technology has altered societal perceptions of hegemonic masculinity, revealing more and more the boys and women within the men. By tracing representations of masculinity through these novels, we can come to understand that, as Anthony Rutundo has suggested, “manhood has a history.” Insofar as it does, we can then extrapolate from this avowal to conclude that manhood is also a.) constructed and b.) malleable. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have written, “‘Masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are constructs specific to historical time and place. They are categories continually being forged, contested, reworked, and reaffirmed in social institutions and practices as well as a range of ideologies” (29). Yet, if we are to accept this as true, then why has there been such reliance upon what Michael Kimmel calls “the interplanetary theory of gender difference” – i.e. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.64 Kimmel concludes that this adherence suggests that Americans “want desperately to believe that the differences between men and women are significant” (The Gendered Society 46). This would explain as well why there has been such an ardent resurgence of articles arguing for biological explanations regarding the differences between genders. At times even, the arguments even seem to promote that men and women are not just different genders or even just different sexes, but different species as well. This is particularly true for the ways in which men often view the gendered world. Women are emotional, “crazy,” and so not understanding their motives or actions is part and parcel with being a rational, stoic man. So has it been for centuries and so it shall be for centuries to come, men assure themselves. Along these lines of reasoning, champion mythopoet Robert Bly has written that “the structure at the bottom of the male psyche is still as firm as it was twenty thousand years ago” (230). For Kimmel, this is the easy way out. He remarks: There’s…a certain conceptual tidiness to biological explanations, since the social arrangements between women and men (gender inequality) seem to stem directly and

87 inevitably from the differences between us. Biological arguments reassure us that what is is what should be, that the social is natural. (The Gendered Society 22) Of course, in reality, there is nothing “tidy” about the relations between and among the genders. There is no “deep masculinity” and there is no sensible biological reasoning for gender inequality. As sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein has sensibly asked, “if male domination is natural…why…must it also be coercive, held in place by laws, traditions, customs, and the constant threat of violence for any woman who dares step out of line?” (qtd. in Kimmel The Gendered Society 42). No, as is demonstrated in the four books discussed in this thesis, manhood is not static, not fixed, not “as firm as it was twenty thousand years ago.” As Kimmel writes: Manhood is not the manifestation of an inner essence; it is socially constructed. Manhood does not bubble up to consciousness from our biological makeup; it is created in culture. Manhood means different things at different times to different people. We come to know what it means to be a man in our culture by setting our definitions in opposition to a set of ‘others’ – racial minorities, sexual minorities, and, above all, women. (“Masculinity as Homophobia” 182). The novels examined in this thesis, bear witness to this statement. Witness Sherman McCoy in his “blue-gray nailhead worsted suit, custom-tailored in England for $1,800” walking his daughter to the bus-stop, proud to have “his fatherhood observed” (Wolfe Bonfire 49). Contrast this with Capt. Woodrow F. Call, a man who never spent a dime in his life for anything other than tools and horses, a man unconcerned with his “image,” a man unable to tell young Newt that he is his father. Witness Charlie Croker, an old man on the verge of bankruptcy, impotent, nursing an ailing knee, seen by his younger, able-bodied financial officer as “an aging, uneducated, and out-of-date country boy” (Wolfe Man in Full 74). Compare this to Tyler Durden, Fight Club’s narrator’s alter ego, the peak of the masculine form who “is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world” (Palahniuk 165). It would seem that Michael Kimmel is correct when he writes that we should “explore the differences among men and among women, since, as it turns out, these are often more decisive than the differences between men and women” (Society 10). In the words of Susan Bordo, “‘one’ is not the metaphor…to describe the world of men” (43).65 By understanding gender then, in Judith Butler’s terms, as “an ongoing discursive practice…open to intervention and resignification” we can come to better track the differences

88 among men, from one culture to another, one time to another, one man to another. Monique Wittig has argued that literature is an appropriate focal point for the application of gender theory. In her essay “The Site of Action,” Wittig proposes a “first” and “second” social contract which work within language and use words to dominate others of their rights of speech. Literature though, is released, as it were, from these contracts. As Wittig remarks: [T]he paradise of the social contract exists only in literature, where the tropisms, by their violence, are able to counter any reduction of the ‘I’ to a common denominator, to tear open the closely woven material of the commonplaces, and to continually prevent their organization into a system of compulsory meaning. (139)66 Thus, although the four novels discussed in this thesis do by no means wholly reflect the desires and anxieties of masculinity in the time that they were written, and although they are by no means wholly reflective of a culture as they are popular enough to also be productive within the culture they enter (I still sometimes catch my father and his lawyer buddies calling one another “Masters of the Universe”), these novels nevertheless offer us an “opening” into “the closely woven material of the commonplace” –they are a moment in time, a picture made of words. And although the map may not be the territory it is nevertheless important because is shows us the territory as it was believed to have existed at the time of the mapping. It shows us where there are mountains and lowlands and where there were capitals and borders that have since changed. Perhaps most significantly, it shows us those places the mapmaker cannot account for as no one has been out that far, places where it might be written, “Cave! Hic Dragones.” What the maps of Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club, and A Man in Full offer us is indeed (re)interpretations of the same territory, with revisions of boundaries and adjustments to the size of certain peaks and the depth of certain chasms. The major chasm that is negotiated in each novel is, as Anthony Rotondo has written, the turn “away from women in an attempt to establish a firmer manhood” (288). This break coincides with the mythopoetic focus on “deep masculinity” and “spiritual manhood.” As mythopoet Sam Kearn writes: The average man spends a lifetime denying, defending against, trying to control, and reacting to the power if WOMAN. He is committed to remaining unconscious and out of touch with his own deepest feelings and experience…. We begin to learn the mysteries unique to maleness only when we separate from WOMAN’s world. (14-5)67 Where this “man’s journey” away from WOMAN should lead him, Kearn is hesitant to specify (the woods? A ballgame? An all-you-can-eat steak buffet?). Lonesome Dove offers a dream of

89 naturalized separation as men are the only ones strong enough and brave enough to suffer the untamed wilderness. Bonfire of the Vanities suggests, at first, that separation is possible at work. Such a prospect is nothing new. As Michael Kimmel notes, “Since the early nineteenth century, the workplace has been seen as a masculine arena, where men could test and prove their manhood against other men in the dog-eat-dog marketplace” (Society 175). As early nineteenth century business writer and railroad expert Henry Varnum Poor remarked, “there is nothing like work…to give [a man] self-respect” (qtd. in Rotundo 4). Yet, as is apparent in Bonfire and even more so in Man in Full, the workplace is no longer the insulatory bastion of masculine competition and comradery it once was. Fast forward from Henry Poor’s time 150 years and one can clearly see that women have become an integral part of the workforce. The percentage of women working has increased from 20.6 percent in 1900 to 76 percent in 1995 – and the number is still growing (Kimmel Society 173).68 No longer is the working world a man’s world; “gone forever is the male breadwinner who supports his family on his income alone” (Kimmel Society 175). Once upon a time, individual achievement was of the utmost concern for men only – after all, who ever heard of a self-made woman? As Bob Dylan sang during the rise of the feminist movement though, “the times, they are a-changin’”: The doctrine of…[men’s and women’s] spheres enshrined individualism as a male privilege, making men’s sphere the locus of individualism and women’s sphere the place where a woman submerged her social identity in that of her husband. With the grant of the vote and the slow accumulation of other rights, women have made some progress toward power and the privileges of individualism in the twentieth century. They have opened new doors in the workplace, increased their awareness of themselves as a group with common interests, and thrust gender issues onto the nation’s public agenda. Feminists have spread the idea that a woman should be a person with the same legal protection and political rights as a man, and the same claim to self-definition and even the same range of potential skills. (Rotundo 290) What all this means for men is that separation from women is getting harder and harder to come by as there are fewer and fewer arenas that are considered distinctly male. The appropriately titled military institution The Citadel was forced to admit Shannon Faulkner in 1995. That hallowed Southern institution, Augusta National country club has been under fire for its all-male membership policy for years and looks to start allowing female members under its new chairman, Billy Payne. In 1998, the Oxford and Cambridge University Club opened its

90 admission to women, ending a 200-year-old men-only tradition. Even the Princeton Club, with its slogan “Where women cease from troubling and the wicked are at rest” imbedded in the floor of its barroom, has become coed. Likewise the regions of male separation in Lonesome Dove, Bonfire, Fight Club, and Man in Full are all infiltrated. The open range of Lonesome Dove is a distinctly male sphere throughout the novel, but it is understood by the end that “women and bankers” are just over the horizon. Sherman McCoy is banished from the stronghold of his office and his two million six hundred thousand dollar apartment proves a poor fortress in the face of modern media. The experimental site of Fight Club’s basements succeed to some extent in providing its members with a retreat to male aggression, but these exploits fail, prove fatal, in the outside world. Finally, Charlie’s Turpmtine is little more than the Alamo to his David Bowie, a once mighty fort that can no longer protect its most loyal subject from external forces.69 In fact, the only truly successful sphere of separation is the prison in which Conrad Hensley is placed in A Man in Full and to which he returns at the end of the novel. Here brute force masculinity and stoicism triumphs and, at the same time, is proven criminal. The “masculine journey” Kearn emphasizes is one that, at least according to Wolfe, ends not in separation but detention. The impetus behind this desire for separation though lies in the desire for true connection between men without the threat of being labeled a “sissy” or, worse, a “homo.”70 Michael Kimmel argues that this anxiety is a result of the “rapid industrialization” that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and carried well into the twentieth which “severed the connection between home and work.” As Kimmel writes: Now men left their homes and went to work in factories or offices, places where expressions of vulnerability or openness might give a potential competitor an economic advantage. Men “learned” to be instrumental in their relationships with other men… The male romantic friendship, so celebrated in myth and legend, was, in America an historical artifact. (Society 214) We can see this in the “legend” of Lonesome Dove. While Gus and Call never express their commitment towards one another verbally, they do so through action which, in their world, is more significant. At Pierce & Pierce, Sherman considers his coworkers as fellow “warriors” and “soldiers,” but the loyalty between the men is hollow. The Narrator of Fight Club must create his own male love object who then expresses this love through violence (in the words of the Narrator, “You know that saying you hurt the ones you love. Well, it works both ways” 42).71

91 The crux of A Man in Full is whether Charlie will stand by his best friend Inman Armholster or choose to attend his financial security. In the industrialized age men are, more times than not, condemned to empty relationships with other men based on fetishized consumerisms such as sports, beer, movies, etc. Lynn Segal has argued, along with author John Fowles, that, “Men remind other men…that successfully acquired masculinity has a hollow interior, for the structures which support it are those of a commercial world of manipulation and shallowness, compromise and betrayal” (128). Observe Donatella Versace sewing razor blades into men’s clothing and calling it the “fight club look.” Listen to former employees of McDonald-Douglas, victims of lay-offs, speaking “rarely…off lost work” but rather of “lost paychecks…lost cars…lost square footage of their split-level ranches they once owned” (Faludi 82). In the spring of 2004, fashion designer Nicole Farhi , working with Gucci, released a line of men’s clothes she dubbed “cowboy chic.” What was functional for Gus and Call is now ornamental. Men in these novels and in reality seek separation from women because they see this culture of adornment as the product of public femininity. Just as feminism is often (falsely) understood as taking men as the enemy, so too have men come of often (falsely) understand that our American society which increasingly values image over action is women’s fault. But, as Susan Faludi rightly claims, men and women are participants in a common battle: The “femininity” that has hurt men the most is an artificial femininity manufactured and marketed by commercial interests. What demeans men is a force ever more powerful in the world, one that has long demeaned women. The gaze that hounds men is the very gaze that women have been trying to escape. (599) Despite what some men’s activism groups have claimed, women are not the enemy and neither is feminism. Rather, it is this very belief which shrouds the true crisis which revolves around our obsession with celebrity status (what Faludi calls “brand naming”) and our additions to the trappings of capitalism. It is as Betty Freidan, author of The Feminist Mystique, has famously said, “Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims.” British writer Paul Frasier has written that “In 2005, a real man has a six-pack stomach. A real man has at least one shirt that needs cufflinks. He keeps calm in a business meeting. He is successful. He is single, with a succession of long-term model girlfriends. He is George Clooney. He is a media invention” (qtd. in Matathia 48). What Fraser is speaking of is “hegemonic masculinity,” that image of masculinity, as Michael Kimmel defines it, “which has become the standard in psychological evaluations, sociological research, and self-help and

92 advice literature for teaching young men to become ‘real men’” (“Masculinity as Homophobia” 184). The important aspect to note here about hegemonic masculinity is that it is not static, but rather “a constantly changing collection of meanings that we construct though our relationships with ourselves, with each other and with the world” (Kimmel “Masculinity as Homophobia” 182). Recently, there has been a shift away from “metrosexuality” back towards rougher, tougher images of men. In an article for the New York Times entitled “Paul Bunyan, Modern- Day Sex Symbol,” Eric Wilson writes of the current stylishness of beards and how these “trends in scruff have reached new levels of unruliness, a backlash…against the heightened grooming expectations that were unleashed with the rise of metrosexuality as a cultural trend.” Ira Matathia et al assert that the recent presidential race between George Bush and John Kerry in 2004 was “an exercise in macho posturing, with John Kerry constantly reprising his war heroism and George W. Bush exhorting his foes to ‘bring it on’” (39). In the end, it would seem, the best cowboy won. Certainly then, much has happened since Larry McMurtry released Lonesome Dove in 1985. America has been through three presidents, a post-1980s economic recession, boom, and recession again, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers in New York City, and, not to mention, two wars with Iraq. Masculinity, in particular, has seen its share of watershed moments, from Calvin Klein’s release of sexy men’s undergarments to Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays in the military to the invention of Viagra and the male contraceptive pill. The changing representations exhibited in the four books discussed in this thesis reflect these changing developments in society as well as the desires and anxieties that go along with them. Through exploring these alterations I have hopefully exhibited not only the important differences between men, but also within men. Simon de Beauvoir has written that gendered bodies are “styles of the flesh” and Judith Butler has similarly contended that “gender…[is] a corporeal style, an ‘act’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Gender Trouble 177). These performances are not scripted, but rather “improvisation within a scene of constraint” (Butler, Undoing Gender 1). The four novels discussed in this thesis attest to the struggle inherent in performing masculinity. They attest to the fact that, as Norman Mailer has written, “being a man is the continuing battle of one’s life” (222).

1 For a more in-depth explanation of the difference between sex and gender see Diamond, Milton. “Sex and Gender Are Different.” Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. (2002): 1-3. 2 Judith Lorber has observed, contrastingly, examples of “third genders” in some Native American communities and Indian societies. See Lorber, Judith. Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 3 Williams defines “structure of feeling” as "the distilled residue of the organization of the lived experience of a community over and above the institutional and ideological organization of the society." 4 See http://www.boxofficemojo.com 5 See http://www.yale.edu 6 See http://www.cbsnews.com 7 The 1994 movie The Air Up There actually tells the fictional story of two warring tribes who, instead of settling their grievances on the battlefield, do so on the basketball court. 8 In Stiffed, Susan Faludi tracks the trauma of Art Moddell moving the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore and its devastating effect on the Cleveland superfans, the “Dawg Pound.” Big Dawg, the head of the group, remarked that the injury felt like, “loosing a loved one” (131). 9 McMurtry, Larry. In a Narrow Grave. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968: xvii 10 This is not to suggest that Lonesome Dove would have reconciled the anxieties of all male readers as some kind of guidebook or that the novel would have reached only men. On the contrary, Lonesome Dove serves only as a select representation which addresses some of the issues facing men in the 1980s. Furthermore, Lonesome Dove’s popularity is certainly not confined to men, a fact which gives evidence to the novel’s complexity and universality. In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which Lonesome Dove might offer a fantasy for a restless male audience, but this does not deny the marked possibility that the book presents itself available to a myriad other interpretations and readings. 11 It is difficult to know how accurate McMurtry is in his invisioning/revisioning of the American west. Many critics, such as John M. Reilly, suggest that while the general setting and events are plausible, many of the specifics, particularly in regards to the cattle drive itself, are somewhat spurious. When I write of Lonesome Dove as a “dream of the past,” I mean to suggest that the novel represents a fictionalization of the time period in which it is set and (re)presents itself as more pertinent to a modern reader than as an historical text. 12 The time at which Turner defined his frontier thesis generally corresponds with the time in which Lonesome Dove is set. His argument was that the individualism of American society was part and parcel with the expansion from East to West. With what he referred to as “the closing of the frontier,” Turner suggested that “the nation would be forced to undergo a painful transition, from a perception of America as a land of endless boundaries, to one which required Americans to accept that their nation was finally a closed-space world, replete with the limitations inherent therein” (Flagg 24). 13 This idea also seems to corresponds with Henry Nash Smith’s conclusion in his book Virgin Land that “the image of an agricultural paradise in the West, embodying group memories of an earlier, simpler and, it was believed, a happier state of society, long survived as a force in American thought and politics” (124). Just as Lonesome Dove as a novel can be understood as a dream of the past, so too is the frontier myth as a whole a dream of a pure, unadulterated land, what Nash calls, “The Garden of the West.” 14 This quote refers to films which were released around the same time as Lonesome Dove – Back to the Future (1985), Return of the Jedi (1983) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) among others – which emphasize not only the continuity between father and son, but also the substitution of the father with the son. As Jeffords remarks, “In each case, a ‘happy ending depends upon the ability of the hero to overcome the limitations of time, to rewrite history, to restructure the future, or to rescue the father from the burdens of time itself….exactly the terms in which Reagan carried out his own narrative in history…. In each case, the son must develop his own individualized characteristics, under the mentorship of the father, to produce a set of abilities that are appropriate to the future” (88-9). 15 The Latin phrase, in fact, does not coherently translate into anything. On the surface, the phrase is a joke as Gus pulled it from a “Latin schoolbook that had belonged to his father” where “unfortunately the mottoes had not been translated” (1985, pgs. 90-1). Gus only puts the motto on the sign “mostly for looks anyway” (91). Most likely the phrase is a bastardization of the scholia to Juvenal 2.81 which cites the proverb "uva uvam videndo varia fit" which means something like "a grape changes color, or ripens, when it sees another grape" which, in turn, goes back to a Greek proverb “botrus pros botrun pepainetai” meaning “a grape ripens in the presence of another bunch of grapes.” Thus, if not a direct translation, Sewell’s version does still capture the overall meaning suggested by the proverb. 16 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques. The First and Second Discourses. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964. Pg. 37. 17 Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Bantam Books, 1973. Pg. 14.

18 Many critics disagree with Wolfe’s contentions regarding “the death of the realistic novel” (Wolfe “Stalking” 47). For a particularly thorough evaluation, see Weatherford, Kathleen J. “Tom Wolfe’s Billion-Footed Beast.” American Studies in Scandanavia. 22.2 (1990): 81-93. 19 This philosophy further coincides with the standard of realism as outlined by Richard Chase which states that “class is important; perhaps the most important element of Realism” (75). 20 Compare this passage to John Berger’s essay “Ways of Seeing” in which he suggests this kind of awareness of being viewed as a phenomenon particularly feminine. 21 While I deal more or less specifically with the character of Lawrence Kramer, it should be noted here that he is not, in fact, the only male who expresses esteem for Sherman’s wealth. After their initial visit to Sherman’s apartment, homicide detectives Martin, Fitzgibbon and Goldberg cannot help reveling in the luxury of Sherman’s apartment: “‘[Y]ou shoulda seen this fucking shit up around the ceiling,’ said Martin. ‘There’s all these fucking people carved outta wood, like crowds of people on the street, and these shops and shit in the background. You never seen anything like it.’” Even those who want nothing more to expose this member of The Life as a criminal, those who pride themselves on their machismo, cannot avoid drinking in the lavishness of Sherman’s world. 22 During his affair with Maria, Sherman considers himself as King Priapus, the Greek god known for his enormous member. Worth noting here is that Priapus was considered powerful only as a result of his penis and would become “weaponless” without it. We might come to understand a similar connection between Sherman and his possessions. 23 Here I am drawing on Jeff Hearn’s argument regarding “The problem of public men.” Hearn, Jeff. Men in the Public Eye: The Construction and Deconstruction of Public Men in Public Patriarchies. London: Routledge, 1992. Pgs. 18-9. 24 Specifically, Sherman must utilize his body to endure being in jail and use his mind in court as he eventually decides to defend himself. 25 For more on the satiric value of Bonfire, see Varsava, Jerry A. “Tom Wolfe’s Defense of the New (Old) Social Novel; Or, Perils of the Great White-Suited Hunter.” Journal of American Culture. 14.3 (1991): 35-41. 26 Darryl Dickson-Carr defines degenerative satire as “‘[A] means of exposing modalities of terror and of doing violence to cultural forms that are overtly or covertly dedicated to terror.’ Within the degenerative model, virtually all hegemonies are ridiculed often through the use of appalling grotesqueries or mere tropes” (17). Compare this with Steve Weisenburger’s definition of generative satire: “a rhetoric of irony or ridicule used against exemplars folly and vice, with an eye toward their correction, according to norms of ethical and right thinking” (qtd. in Dickson-Carr 17). Dickson-Carr, Darryl. African-American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. Columbia: UP Missouri, 2001. 27 Susan Bordo more or less traces this trends “rediscov[ing] the male body” back to Calvin Klein’s exposure of it through his underwear ads starting in 1980. Of particular interest is a billboard in Time Square which Klein purchased in 1983 and promptly proceeded to display advertisements of muscular 40-foot-men wearing only briefs. The selling point was: masculinity comes with the underwear (Bordo 179-186). Living in New York at the time, less than 5 blocks away from Times Square, Wolfe would have no doubt seen these billboards as well as Klein’s (and other designers’) influence on male fashion. 28 Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). Qtd. in Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. New Jersey: Rutgers, 1990, 104. 29 Boon, Kevin Alexander. “Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” The Journal of Men’s Studies. 11.3 (2003): 267. 30 For clarity’s sake, I will use italics in Fight Club when referring to the novel and standard type “fight club” when referring to the actual organization within the novel. 31 See Fulford, Robert. “Male Crying: Now It’s Mandatory.” The National Post. 7 May, 2002. 32 For more on this see Somerson, Wendy. “White Men on the Edge: Rewriting the Borderlands in Lone Star.” Men and Masculinities. 6.3 (2004): 215-239. 33 Taylor, John. “Men on Trial.” New York. 16 Dec. 1991, cover story. D’Antonio, Michael. “The Trouble with Boys.” Los Angelos Times Magazine. 4 Dec. 1994, cover story. Wright, Lawrence. “Are Men Necessary.” Texas Monthly. Feb. 1992: 82. 34 See McInnes, John. The End of Masculinity. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998. 35 See www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com and www.boxofficemojo.com 36 See Hirch, Jr. E.D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 37 See Boon, Kevin. “Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Journal of Men’s Studies. 11 (2003): 267-76. Grønstad, Asjbørn. “One Dimensional Man: Fight Club and the Politics of the Body.” Film Criticism. 28 (2003): 1-23. Lee, Terry. “Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This is What Transformation of Masculine Ego Feels Like.” Journal of American and Comparative Culture. 25 (2002): 418-25.

38 Specifically, for Faludi the father’s word is broken inasmuch as it is never offered: “[T]he men I got to know could have bourne even their fathers’ failure to bestow a legacy; they could have weathered the disappointment of a broken patrimony. What undid them was their father’s silence…. The layer of paternal betrayal felt, for many of the men I spent time with, like the innermost core, the artichoke’s bitter heart. The fathers had made a promise, and then had not made good on it” (597-8). 39 Implicit within this argument is a Marxist critique which many critics have explored in-depth. See Ashcrcaft, Karen & Lisa Flores. “Slaves with White Collars’: Persistent Performances of Masculinity in Crisis.” Text and Performance Quarterly. 23 (2000): 1-29. Hunter, Latham. “The Celluloid Cubicle: Regressive Constructions of Masculinity in 1990s Office Movies.” Journal of American Culture. 26 (2003): 71-86. 40 Here I am avoiding analysis of this physical language in terms of Kristeva’s semiotic, the pre-Oedipal, feminine language which finds articulation through “dance, poetry, madness.” It seems clear to me that the men of Fight Club are addressing distinctly post-Oedipal, masculine issues through their fighting, and, while they may be thought of as trying to understand themselves apart from the Lacanian symbolic, this does not necessitate their venturing into the semiotic to do so. See Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. 41 Matathia, Ira, Ann O’Reilly & Marian Salzman. The Future of Men. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005. 42 Miller, Arthur. The Portable Arthur Miller. Ed. Harold Clurman. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Pg. 38. 43 Although Wolfe has never publicly acknowledged any connection between his characters and actual personages, the consensus among Atlanta society is that A Man in Full’s main character Charlie Croker is based heavily on real estate mogul R. Charles Loudermilk. Wolfe spent time with Loudermilk at his south Georgia plantation in 1995 and it was shortly thereafter that he changed the book location’s from New York to Atlanta, altering his main character from a Rockafeller-type tycoon into an aged good ol’ boy whose prized-possession is a South Georgia plantation. 44 The December 1989 issue of Harper’s Magazine published a full page of reactions to Wolfe’s article, most of them negative. Some of the most notable criticisms came from fellow-authors and long-time Wolfe rivals, Harold Bloom and John Updike. 45 It should be notes here that many of the same writers who criticized Wolfe for “Stalking” did the same for A Man in Full. Norman Mailer wrote in the Nov. 9 New Yorker that A Man in Full was “entertainment, not literature” while Norman Mailer suggested in the Dec. 17 New York Review of Books that the novel “was chosen by the author to be a best seller than a major work of fiction.” In reaction to these derisions, Wolfe asked Malcolm Jones in an interview for Newsweek, “Why are these old men rising off their pallets to condemn to condemn my book? Because my book has cast a very big shadow, and people like Mailer and Updike find themselves in the dark.” Despite the disapproving responses from such noteworthy authors though, the majority of critical response towards the book was positive. 46 Rotundo sees the self-made man emerging in the late eighteenth century and defines him as “a man [who] took his identity and his social status from his own achievements, not from the accident of his birth.” “Thus,” Rotundo surmises, “a man’s work role not his place at the head of the household, formed the essence of his identity…[and] men fulfilled themselves through personal success in business and the professions, while the notion of public service declined” (American Manhood 3) 47 Many critics took issue with the convenience of this event, including Norman Mailer who called it a deux ex machina. 48 Sabo also comments on this idea, writing that “With the twentieth century decline in the practical need for physical strength in work and welfare, representations of the muscular body as strong, virile, and powerful have taken on important ideological significance” (Messner & Sabo 96). 49 The game for which Charlie is known exhibits this masculine dominance as he not only scored a touchdown running the ball, but also stripping the ball from the quarterback on the ensuing possession, “knocking [sic] the fullback to the ground like a bowling pin” and running forty yards for another touchdown, winning the game , 21-20 (Wolfe Man in Full 40) 50 See also Connell, R.W. Connell. Gender and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. Pp. 99-107. Connell defines three main relationships underlying relationships between (and serving to differentiate) men and women: labour, power, and desire, each of which have their own “gender regimes” for maintaining male authority. Specifically in regards to labour, Connell argues that “dominant masculinities and subordinated femininities are produced in the workplace” (111). 51 It is worth noting as well that 1951, the very year Georgia Tech won its only national championship of the 1950s, was also the year that the NCAA lifted its blackout on televised college game and allowed one college game a week to be nationally broadcasted.

52 In some sense, the diminishment of manual labour can be cited as a impetus for the rise in sports activity in the twentieth century. As Rotundo explains, “As men felt their real sense of masculinity eroding, they turned to fantasies that embodied heroic physical action, reading novels of the Wild West and cheering the exploits of baseball and football players” (“Body and Soul” 32). Sports then became a vicarious gratification for the restless man, offering him, as Michael Kimmel suggests, “the symbols and props that signified earlier forms of power and excitement” (118). 53 For an excellent and concise outline of Conrad’s breakdown, see Kenneth Smith’s review “A Satirist ‘in Full’: Tom Wolfe Lights Another Bonfire” on page B8 of the 15 November 1998 edition of Final Edition. 54 Here I am drawing on Baudrillard’s definition of simulacrum as a simulation “which [never] conceals the truth… [but rather] it is the truth which conceals that there is none” (166). See Baudriallard, Jean. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Pp. 166-184.; I also clearly do not mean to suggest here that there was never a time of “masters and servants” in the American South, but rather that Charlie’s imagining of it as “luxurious” and somehow harmonious is obviously flawed and of pure fantasy. 55 See Leland, John, et.al. "The New Science of Impotence. Can It Be Cured With a Pill?" Newsweek, 17 Nov. 1997. 56 As Bruce Handy noted in his article “The Viagra Craze” for Time magazine, Viagra gave “talk-show hosts something other than Bill Clinton and Pamela Lee to crack smarmy jokes about” (40). 57 The Pfizer website promises that Viagra helps men “achieve erections the natural way.” 58 Keen, Sam. Fire in the Belly. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. Pg. 5. 59 The slogan for Maxim magazine. 60 It is perhaps ironic to note here that in the same year as www.mantropy.com was created, Maxim teamed up with Just for Men to create their own line of male hair dye, allowing men the opportunity to change their hair color to “Jet Black,” “Sandstorm,” or “Beach Blond.” 61 Maxim editor-in-chief, Ed Neeham, remarked that “according to section 4(b)(3) of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, ‘any interested individual can petition the Fish and Wildlife Service to list a species as endangered.’ We at MAXIM are more than interested.” 62 Wright, Lawrence. “Are Men Necessary?” Texas Monthly. Feb. 1992: p. 82. 63 Gloria Steinem even more directly addressed this “illusion” when advising men to support women’s careers, proclaiming, “Men – support feminism! You have nothing to lose but your coronaries!” 64 Ira Matathia et al have also noted that in the pervasive debate over “nature vs. nurture” that “the last few years have seen the resurgence of certain biological ‘truths’ and the reemergence of the idea that gender differences are innate, not learned. Where once the so-called thinking classes dismissed masculinity and femininity as a mirage of social construction, now we demand a genetic explanation for everything” (17) 65 Along these lines, I contend, along with other contemporary gender theorists, that we must revise the conclusion drawn by Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray and others that “…there are not two genders. There is only one: the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general” (Wittig “Point of View” 64). Such arguments hinder examination of the specific applications of masculinity within both men and women. As Kimmel suggests, we should consider not masculinity vs. femininity, but masculinities and femininities. 66 Similar arguments have been made by Mikhail Bakhtin in his essay “Discourse in the Novel” and by Jacques Derrida in his influential book Of Grammatology. 67 Of his application of the term “WOMAN” in all caps, Kearn writes, “I am not talking about women, the actual flesh-and-blood creatures, but about WOMEN, those larger-than-life shadowy female figures who inhabit our imagination, inform our emotions, and indirectly give shape to many of our actions” (13). 68 Obviously, this by no means established women’s equality in the workplace or in society in general. As of 2006, most public officeholders are men as are the CEOs of major corporations. And while women’s earnings in comparison to men’s have increased dramatically since 1970 (more than 15 percent) it was, as of 2003, well short of equivalent at 75.5 percent (Matathia 95). 69 It is worth noting here that Charlie’s most prized possession, other than Turpmtine, is a painting of David Bowie on his deathbed, still fighting off Mexican soldiers. The narrator comments that Charlie often “concentrated on the painting…and tried to draw strength” and that to Charlie, the painting said, “Never say die, even when you’re dying” (62). 70 As has been widely written on, the word homosexual was, until the turn of the last century, used to describe behaviors, not individuals. The modification from adjective to noun also brough stigma and homophobia. As Michel Foucault has written, “the disappearance of friendship as a social institution, and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem, are the same process” (qtd. in Kimmel 215).

71 Some critics have argued that Tyler is the Narrator’s method of mediating his own latent sexuality. Within this claim, Jethro Rothe-Kushel has suggested this is the reason why Tyler and the Narrator meet on a nude beach and the reason why Tyler has sex with Marla and not the Narrator. See Fight Club: A Ritual Cure for the Spiritual Ailment of American Masculinity.” The Film Journal. 8 (2002). 8 April 2006. http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue8/fightclub.html.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Bailey Thomas Player was born in Atlanta, Georgia and received his B.A. at Furman University in 2002 where he majored in English Literature. He received his Masters in English Literature from Florida State University in 2006. He plans on working towards his doctorate in the fall of 2007. In addition to American literature and gender theory, he also has interests in psychoanalytic theory and creative writing.

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