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TRAGIC AND COMIC MODES IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE:

WILLIAM STYRON AND JOSEPH HELLER

William Luttrell

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

June 1969

Approved by Doctoral Committee

/Ȓ J Adviser Dg$artment of English

Graduate School Representative ABSTRACT

William Styron and Joseph Heller are important contemporary American writers who can be associated with a certain "climate of opin­ ion" in the twentieth century. The intellectual basis for this climate of opinion is that the world we know today, metaphysically, historical­ ly, scientifically, and socially, is one that does not admit to a secure and stable interpretation. Within such a climate of opinion one hesi­ tates to enumerate metaphysical truths about the universe; one doubts historical eschatology, except perhaps in a diabolical sense; one speaks scientifically in terms of probability and the statistics of randomness rather than absolute order; and one analyzes social problems in terms of specific values in specific situations rather than from an unchanging and absolute frame of reference. Indeed, it is because of a diminishing hope of achieving an absolute or even satisfying control over the world that many have come to live with contingency as a way of life, and have little reason to believe that their partially articulated values rever­ berate much beyond themselves.

Through their fictional characters William Styron and Joseph Heller are contemporary observers of this climate of opinion. Styron reveals in his novels a vision of man separated from his familiar values and unable to return to them. To live—or to survive—demands man's adjustment both to a world without a continuing order and to a world not necessarily concerned with his welfare. Heller's comic vision has a similar orientation: an individual struggles to maintain his values and aspirations in a world of mere surface order and harmony. Furthermore, the tragic and comic responses of their characters are to some degree different from the responses observed in traditional tragedy and comedy; in some instances these responses become an ironic blend of tragedy and come

It is because of the radical intellectual attitudes which com­ prise this twentieth century climate of opinion that a significant body of literary criticism suggests that a large portion of contemporary writing is neither tragic nor comic in ary genuine sense but is rather a study in victimization. It is the view of this inquiry that victim­ ization is the central issue for many contemporary writers, but it is important to understand, first, the nature and scope of victimization and, second, the nature of a character's response to it. Victimization need not lead to total defeat. It can lead toward rebellion, a rebel­ lion against those forces which threaten an individual with total deper­ sonalization. William Styron and Joseph Heller offer virtual paradigms of the novel of victimization. Their central characters are subject to disintegrating forces over which they appear to have little control. But within this victimization are perception of and rebellion against Ill that condition. Indeed, perception of and rebellion against the forces which threaten depersonalization are the identifying marks of the tragic and comic responses in the works of these writers. Styron's work is at least nominally associated with tragedy and Heller's with comedy. Be­ cause tragedy and comedy in traditional usage are honorific terms and the terms describing contemporary fiction (and drama) are often pejora­ tive, this study attempts to reveal how two contemporary writers con­ tribute in a significant way to the tradition of tragedy and comeciy al­ though their contribution somewhat alters and redefines the tradition. IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CONTEXT ...... u

A TWENTIETH CENTURY TRAGIC ATTITUDE ...... 16

WILLIAM STYRON ...... 33

Lie Down in Darkness...... 33 The Long March ...... S3

Set This House on Fire ...... 63

Confessions of Nat Turner ...... 8U

The Victim and His Rebellion ...... 100

JOSEPH HELLER:A BSURD COMEDY AND CATCH-22 ...... 103

Absurd Comedy ...... 103

Catch-22...... 108

CONCLUSION...... 133

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 1^0 I

I

INTRODUCTION

William Styron and Joseph Heller have established themselves as

important American writers of mid-century. Though each develops his

material within different forms, one comedy, the other tragedy, both are

associated with a certain "climate of opinion" in the twentieth century.

This climate of opinion can be reasonably well articulated, though one

is more accustomed to the reverberations of simple phrases (e.g., "ex­

istential absurdity" or the "fragmented universe") than to meaningful

analysis. The intellectual basis for this climate of opinion is that

the world we know today, metaphysically, historically, scientifically,

and socially, is one that does not readily admit to a secure and stable

interpretation. Within such a climate of opinion one hesitates to enu­

merate metaphysical truths about the universe; one doubts historical

eschatology, except perhaps in a diabolical sense; one speaks scientif­

ically in terms of probability and the statistics of randomness rather

than absolute order; and one analyzes social problems in terms of spe­

cific values in specific situations rather than from an unchanging and absolute frame of reference. Indeed, it is because of a diminishing hope of achieving an absolute or even satisfying control over the world that many have come to live with contingency as a way of life, and have little reason to believe that their partially articulated values rever­ berate much beyond themselves.

Two important recent studies explore the nature of man—in terms 2 of how he understands himself and in terms of his relationship to fam­ ily, community and universe—in this twentieth century climate of opin­ ion. After defining what he calls an "existential pattern" (somewhat similar to that outlined in the preceding remarks), Ihab Hassan, in

Radical Innocence examines three ironic modes found in the contemporaiy novel. Each of the three modes reveals a specific understanding which a character achieves in regard to his place in the universe and the ori­ entation he makes to his family or community. This orientation and under­ standing, however, are less matters of mythic trancedence or tragic in­ sight and more ironic exercises in survival. They usually end in some form of defeat. Hassan's discussion reveals, furthermore, the difficulty of fitting the modes into the traditional framework of comedy or tragecy.

At best, the modes "veer" or "hover," to use Hassan's words, toward trag­ edy or come

Through their fictional characters Joseph Heller and William

Styron are also contemporary observers of our world. Their works could be an answer to the question, "how does one live in a world lacking in­ tellectual and moral security?" To a large extent there is a parallel between the twentieth century's climate of opinion and their works.

Styron in his novels reveals a vision of man separated from his familiar values and unable to return to them. To live—or to survive—demands 3 man’s adjustment both to a world without a predetermined or continuing

order and to a world not necessarily concerned with his welfare. Heller’s

comic vision has a similar orientation: an individual struggles to maintain his values and aspirations in a world of mere surface order and harmony. Furthermore, the tragic or comic responses? of their characters

are to some degree different from the responses associated with the tra­ ditional understanding of tragedy and comedy; in some instances these responses become an ironic blend of tragedy and comedy redefined under contemporary conditions.

This study will begin with a brief description of the "climate of opinion" prevailing among many perceptive observers of the world today but with the end in mind to illuminate how such a climate influences tragedy and comedy as they appear today in two significant contemporary writers. William Styron and Joseph Heller will be examined separately to reveal how tragic and comic modes, as we view them today, fashion ex­ plicit modes of response to the world. Styron's work is at least nomi­ nally associated with tragedy and Heller's with comedy. It is hoped that such an analysis will reveal first the character of tragedy and comedy in the works of these two authors and, second, how tragedy and comedy today differ from traditional tragic and comic modes. Because "tragedy" and

"comedy" in traditional usage are honorific terms and the terms describing contemporary fiction (and drama) are often pejorative, this study should have value in revealing how two contemporary writers contribute in a sig­ nificant way to the tradition of tragedy and comedy although their con­ tributions somewhat alter and redefine the tradition. V

I

CHAPTER I

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CONTEXT

In drama or fiction the shape and direction of a character’s

actions tell us much about the quality of his existence. A heroic or pathetic, unified or fragmented character emerges from his manner of

adaptation to his world, and his world includes not only the immediate social context made explicit by his actions or reactions but by his under­ standing of his place in the universe as well. This adaptation begins with a character's limited perception of himself, his world and the de­ mands made upon him by that world, and grows more complex as he searches within and beyond himself for an understanding of the problems that con­ front him. In broadest terms this is the central problem of most dra­ matic and fictional literature. It could be asked, then, why make a point of so basic and broad a problem? It is important because the re­ lationship between individual and world occurs in a specific time and place, possessing its own peculiar dynamics. Generally an artist develops this relationship as he construes it at some given time, probably his own, though he is free to choose a point of view that is not within his own time and place.

An historical attitude toward literature holds that an under­ standing of the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of a period will con­ tribute to an understanding of the literary work—not define it but con­ tribute to the background that hovers about it and to some degree is as 5

much a part of the artist’s material as the strictly formal aspects of t his craft. Hence, a knowledge of the background an artist works against

is ultimately helpful in understanding or at least appreciating the re­

lationships between his characters and the world they live in. With

this in mind, before one is prepared to deal directly with contemporary

tragedy or comedy—genres which reveal quite explicit relationships be­

tween individual and world—he would find it helpful to present several

cultural and literary attitudes prevailing in this century. Awareness

of these attitudes should illuminate, perhaps even indirectly, the

"problem" of tragedy and comedy today, for, indeed, many consider the

genres now either non-existent or so highly qualified as to be something

other than what could be called tragedy or comedy. A discussion of these

attitudes and beliefs should reveal, perhaps in a small but still mean­

ingful measure, why tragedy and comedy are what they are today. When we

then turn directly to current specimen selections of tragedy and comedy,

an understanding of their central problems and resolutions should be more meaningful because of the understanding of a portion of the intellectual background of the century in which they are written.

In recent history, at least from the nineteenth century, cultural commentators have noted a deterioration of intellectual and moral secur­ ity. Philosophically, we talk no longer in absolute terms—the meta­ physics of the permanent and universal—but in contextual terms, that is, observing situations oriented to specific problems and their immediate solutions. Nominally such pragmatic orientation might seem to suggest an optimistic attitude regarding man's condition, but when we speak in broader, more generalized terms about man and his place in the universe 6

discourse often takes a pessimistic turn, and creates a metaphysics of

contingency, error, and despair. The fashionable image of such a meta­

physics is Sisyphus, symbolically dying each time the rock overcomes

him.

Whether or not the current point of view emerged from the devel­

opment of science as a systematic method in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, or the social sciences of the nineteenth, or scientific atti­

tudes in the twentieth is not relevant to this study. More relevant is

the sense of dislocation so frequently spoken of and widely sensed in

the mid-twentieth century. Insecurity, isolation, the fragmented accom­ modation to the world that we now experience have their genesis in the deterioration of unquestionable intellectual premises and indisputable moral claims. The anti-heroic and anti-utopian novel, the confidence man, the nihilist, the "beat," and absurd comic are symptomatic of this.

A few comments about history, science and social action should suggest how a metaphysics of contingency, error and despair has come about.

Irving Howe describes the deterioration of faith in history as the bearer of social salvation; he simultaneously reveals the more imme­ diate problem of man and community.

To minds raised on the assumptions, whether liberal or Marxist, of 19th-Century philosophies of history—assumptions that the human enterprise has a purposive direction, or telos, and an upward rhythm, or progress—there is also the churning fear that history itself has proved to be a cheat. And a cheat not because it has turned away from our expectations, but because it betrays our hopes precisely through an inverted fulfillment of those expectations. Not progress denied but progress real­ ized, is the nightmare haunting the anti-utopian novel. And behind this nightmare lies a crisis of thought quite as intense as that suffered by serious 19th Century minds when they dis­ covered that far more painful than doubting the existence of 7

God was questioning the validity of his creation."’'

The irony of his remark deserves comment. Deterioration does not occur

in history because it is replete with increasing barbarism but rather

because the very idea of progress—of achieving that "transparent uni­

verse in which all categories are fixed, the problematic . . . banished, o unhappiness . . . treason, the gratuitous act beyond imagining" —con­

tains the germ of destruction. Superb technological success not only

is no guarantee of heroic action but may well eliminate such action.

This is the vision of Orwell, Huxley, and Zamiatin.

Howe's vision of the threat that exists in a "transparent uni­

verse" with its fixed categories has remarkable similarity to a physical

concept, entropy, recently discussed as a metaphor to explain the lack

of heroic action in contemporary fiction.

The concept of entropy, to explore further a metaphor which serves remarkably well to dramatize that process with which the novel of disintegration is concerned, may be defined as the tendency of an ordered universe to go over into a state of disorder. This is another way of saying that the behaviour of things tends to become increasingly random; and in any system tending toward the random there is a loss of direction. The universe as we have thought of it from Aristotle to Einstein was a system controlled by laws that produced a cosmos instead of a chaos—that is, the universe was highly structured; but entropy is a drift toward an unstructured state of equilib­ rium that is total.3

■’•Irving Howe, "The Fiction of Anti-Utopia," New Republic, April 23, 1962, pp. 13-ll|. 2Ibid., p. lit.

3Alvin Greenberg, "The Novel of Disintegration: Paradoxical Inpossibility in Contemporary Fiction," Contemporary Literature, VII (Spring, 1966), 10i+. Of course, Wylie Sypher's chapter, "Existence and Entropy," Loss of Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, 1962), is the famous precursor of Greenberg's suggestion. 8

The positions of Howe and Greenberg are not similar, of course, in the kind of threat they suggest. Howe speaks of structured fixity of human belief and behavior and Greenberg of a physical "unstructured state of equilibrium"; indeed they are more like polar opposites that ironically indicate the same end: stasis. Such an end demands of life only endurance; insight and purposeful action are as irrelevant as they are dangerous. In Joseph Heller's Catch-22 Chaplain Tappman, the fright­ ened and ineffectual spiritual advisor to the airmen on Pianosa, senses a cosmic degeneration similar to entropy: "There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning dazzling, majestic sun was in a progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too."^

From these observations it is but a small step to Saul Bellow's caustic summary of the case contemporary writers make against public ac­ tion.

Public life, vivid and formless turbulence, news, slogans, mysterious crises, and unreal configurations dissolve co­ herence in all but the most resistant minds, and even to such minds it is not always a confident certainty that resistance can ever have a positive outcome. To take narcotics has be­ come in some circles a mark of rebellious independence, and to scorch one's personal earth is sometimes felt to be the only honorable course. Rebels have no bourgeois certainties to return to when rebellions are done. The fixed points seem to be disappearing.5

"Unreal configurations" dissolving coherence could well be a metaphor

^Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York, 1961), p. 279.

-’Saul Bellow, Recent American Fiction, A Lecture Presented Under the Auspices of the Gertrude Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund by the Library of Congress (Washington, 1963), p. 2. Bellow, however, ultimate­ ly argues against this pessimistic social thesis. 9

for entropy. But its exact opposite is in Huxley's vision of absolute

fixity, and perhaps each could imply the other as a form of action and

counteraction. It is just these frightening extremes, however, that

lead to the ironic mode that is common to much contemporary fiction. As

Ihab Hassan points out, irony magnifies arbitrariness, isolation, gro­

tesque scapegoat rituals that become nightmares of self-deception.In a world of ordered perceptions and a hierarchy of unchanging beliefs such characteristics are at most temporary phenomena.

Ihab Hassan describes the fictional "hero" that lives in an ironic world as living an "existential pattern." The fifth point in his five point outline of the pattern is peculiarly relevant as a summary of the preceding thoughts of Howe, Greenberg, and Bellow.

In a world dominated by error, even heroes do not possess the gift of complete knowledge. The hero acts or is acted upon, but his perception of the situation remains both limited and relative. . . . Because the hero seldom attains to full knowl­ edge, he is seldom a tragic figure in the classic sense. And because his life is so rarely devoid of genuine pain, he is rarely a comic figure of harmless compromises.?

Hassan's own analysis of a great segment of contemporary American fic­ tion is in three parts and is inclusive of tragedy and comedy. But his analysis suggests not really tragedy or comedy in any traditional sense but rather literary modes with a "hero" who is either a "victim" or one

Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence (New York, 1966), p. 121. Robert Brustein in the Theatre of Revolt (New York, 196)4), pp. 3-U, 31- 32, makes a similar point in regard to irony in the contemporary drama.

^Hassan, p. 118. The other four are (l) chance and absurdity dominate human action; (2) conduct and attitudes have no external norm to which a character may turn; (3) the character is an alien, at odds with himself or society; (I4) irony and contradiction mark human motives (pp. 116-117). 10

who "gives the illusion of escaping from necessity." The three modes

of fiction, to use his words, "border" on tragedy or "touch" on romance;

or "veer" toward comedy. He points out that contenporary comedy is basically different from traditional comedy because even though the hero

"enjoys considerable freedom and gives the illusion of escaping from

necessity," the "presence of death is strongly felt ... as is the presence of disorder, and the traditional comic redemption of society is markedly absent."®

All of the foregoing remarks suggest what could be called radi­ cal intellectual conditions. They are radical, first, because they are basic or fundamental to a point of view toward man and his world de­ scribed by many writers and critics today, and, second, extreme in assert o ing a specific kind of relationship between man and his world.

It is this existential claim with all the alienation it implies that Marcus Klein in After Alienation argues is not characteristic of several important contemporary writers. Hassan’s position suggests es­ trangement or separation but Klein's thesis qualifies this by asserting that a form of "accommodation" prevails today.

By "accommodation" I mean to suggest that simultaneous engage­ ment and disengagement which is the characteristic movement of the novel in these past years. The hero begins in freedom of the self and discovers that he is isolated. The hero chooses community—he assumes racial obligations, or he declares him­ self a patriot, or he makes love—and he discovers that he has

^Hassan, p. 201. 9 ^Hassan's use of radical also involves a condition being funda­ mental and extreme, but it is a condition of character: innocence. The above remarks suggest an intellectual temper of our time rather than a state of character. 11

sacrificed his identity, and his adventures begin all over again.

Yet Klein's thesis also illuminates the problem of significant action

in a world described by Howe, Greenberg, and Bellow. If the world can

be adjusted to, the adjustment is tentative.

The goal is the elimination of the distance between self and society, the perfect union of self and society, but the issue ... is at best a lesson in the perpetual necessity of kill­ ing adjustments. What is at best to be achieved in this neces­ sary marriage is a cautionary, tentative accommodation. . .

The most essential characteristics of accommodation for a fic­

tional character are (l) maintenance of a "tricky distance between the 1 ? sense of one's self in one's freedom and the sense of society";

(2) the "lesson in the perpetual necessity of killing adjustments";

(3) his awareness that he "exercise his wits and . . . live within his dilemma" (a dilemma because accommodation is defined as "simultaneous engagement and disengagement").-^ gut these phrases are suggestive of exceptional measures taken to insure some mode of survival in a world that stands as an "existential" threat. Yet certainly within Klein's position is something similar to a comic analysis of the contemporary novel because he believes accommodation is a mode which allows for con­ tinued life and significant action.

The problem of accommodation, however, is really as old as

-J-°Marcus Klein, After Alienation (Cleveland, Ohio, 196£), p. 30.

-L1Ibid.

12"The hero begins in freedom, chooses community, discovers he has sacrificed his identity, and his adventures begin all over again" (After Alienation, p. 17).

l^Klein, p. 30. 12 literature. The real merit in Klein's position is not the argument for accommodation but more the mode of accommodation: what form it takes.

There is, however, a case against accommodation and Hassan comes close to stating it. He has good reason because today destruction is not merely death but symbolic death, where frustration and absurdity render human energies useless. Radical intellectual conditions imply such dis­ orientation: human energies only appear free from destructive neces­ sities. More than perhaps at any other time the question of how man can live is important because radical intellectual conditions destroy credi­ bility in a benevolent universe and a melioristic history. Hassan's re­ marks emphasize the tension in orienting or adapting to the world and this tension does not resolve itself into perfect tragic insight nor the veiled hope in naturalistic defeat. One of Hassan's three categories

("modes" which Hassan believes describes much contemporary fiction, each mode defining the "hero" in some special sense) suggests naturalism, rather than any tone of tragedy, but it is more extreme—"the hero ap­ pears primarily in the guise of a victim or scapegoat . . . railed by necessity"—but the world of the scapegoat or victim "is not merely harsh and brutal; it leaves us with no sense of how injustice may be rectified. The characters do not simply submit to some external neces­ sity; they are their own executioners."^ This obviously doesn't de­ scribe accommodation in ary real sense of the word but more simply en­ trapment. Hassan's second and third categories are less somber, though they echo frustration.

■^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. lf>l. 13

In addition to these quasi-tragic and comic forms we even speak today of an odd mixture of comedy and tragedy. In current terms this is absurd comedy or black humor. These terms are useful for they ac­

centuate "predicament," living by one's wits, but the problem is more essential than the disproportion that predicament or quick-wittedness implies. It is a writer's mode of perception and his character's mode of survival.

The new comic spirit in American literature attends a special awareness of reality, a new sense of error and incongruity. It unites horror and slapstick, realism and surrealism, in the most antic manner. Writers nowadays seem anxious to respond to the incoherence of life, to its openness and absurdity. . . . The new comedy, which combines boisterousness and bitter­ ness is really an attempt to restore sanity through madness or buffoonery. Above all, the new comedy seeks to preserve the health of the community through a qualified tolerance of dis­ order.-^

But absurd comedy is not quite the comic form Klein considers as accom­ modation. Its stress on incongruity, madness and disproportion echoes more tragedy than comic resolution. What accommodation it reaches is oftentimes bizarre and "anti-heroic." But tragedy and comedy or some combination of the two suggest some successful reckoning with the world.

Insight emerges from frustration and despair in the first and from tenta­ tive and temporal maladjustments in the second. Therefore, tragedy and comedy are honorific terms; existential tragedy and absurd comedy, the terms often used to describe much contemporary fiction (particularly that of the two writers in this study), are often presented as derogatory ones in the sense they are said to portray the human condition as less than human. It is the hope of this study to reveal how two contemporary

■^Ihab Hassan, "The Dismemberment of Orpheus," American Scholar, XXXII (Summer, 1963), U76. Hi writers—William Styron and Joseph Heller—are not only in the tradi­ tion of tragedy and comedy but to reveal as well how their works have shaped and directed that tradition as it appears in the twentieth cen­ tury.

Because William Styron and Joseph Heller live in a period per­ vaded by the intellectual temper described in the foregoing pages and their works are often labeled existential tragedy or absurd comedy, it does not follow that they create a world of victims who lack the admir­ able basic characteristics we look for in tragic and comic figures.

Though the writings of these two authors cannot totally "define" tragedy and comedy today, they well can serve as excellent examples of the forms tragecfy and comedy have taken in recent years. Before discussing either of these authors, this study will attempt to formulate a "tragic atti­ tude," principally an attitude made up of man's vision of himself cut away from absolute frames of reference—a metaphysical isolation—and a vision of himself as a victim of many forces over which he has little or no control. Such a tragic attitude is congruent with the themes in the works of Styron and Heller. But it will be pointed out, however, that man's tragic stance need not end in acceptance of his metaphysical isolation but can continue with his rebellion against those forces which attempt to victimize him. Furthermore this tragic attitude is as rele­ vant to the absurd comedy of Joseph Heller as it is to the tragic novels of William Styron. Both modes—absurd comedy and contemporary tragedy— are responses to similar worlds. They are worlds formulated in radical intellectual terms, terms which demand that a character perceive his isolation and finitude, but worlds which demand that he must formulate IS some sense of rebellion against the manifold forces which threaten to victimize him. William Styron and Joseph Heller reveal man’s isolation and victimization yet each suggests that rebellion is essential to man remaining man. CHAPTER II

A TWENTIETH CENTURY TRAGIC ATTITUDE

John Gassner has noted that a dramatic work may be "non-tragic

yet more absorbing than a work we can easily certify as a tragecy.

It is also true that one might experience the tragic atmosphere of a

work before discovering (or accepting) definitions or historical ex­

amples that confirm or deny its tragic character. Such attitudes as

these make incidental whether or not a work fits a classic paradigm or

basic definitions in achieving tragic stature. Yet we do retain the

idea of tragedy (and comedy) if for no other reason than it allows us

to indicate some mode of relationship a fictional or dramatic character

establishes between himself and the world. Traditional criticism, often

working from classic paradigms, attempts to discover clearly the charac­

teristics of a genre and thereby develop something of an inductive gener­

alization about that genre. On the other hand, rejecting paradigms and

definitions, in the instance of tragedy,.allows one to pursue broadly what might be called a tragic temper. Gassner aptly characterizes and

approves of this, noting "tragedy should be the end-result of a writer's struggle with his matter rather than a collection of previously assembled

■’•John Gassner, "Tragic Perspectives: A Sequence of Queries," Tulane Drama Review, II (May, 19!?8), 10. For example, he suggests that it would be difficult to compare favorably the poetic tragedies of the English Romantic and Victorian poets with The Cherry Orchard "which its author called a 'Comedy,1 or Juno and the Paycock, in which the admixture of comecy and tragic elements can be disconcerting only to purists" (p. 11). 17

fi ? attitudes, caveats, and aspirations. . . . Gassner's remark does im­ pose a substantial burden, however, for each work one desires to call a

tragedy demands not only a subtle and extensive grasp of what that work

attenpts to do but also ignites the volatile judgments of the past and each reader's sensibilities on what is tragic.

Defending tragedy in contemporary writing is particularly dif­ ficult. Ihab Hassan's study very nearly destroys the idea of contempo­ rary tragedy. Hassan indicates in his discussion of the ironic mode, a mode which he feels dominates much contemporary fiction, that the "hero" appears as a victim, a scapegoat with little or no freedom of action; such a hero "borders" on tragedy but there is no real change in his life and no self-renewal. Hassan follows Northrop Frye in rejecting tragedy in the ironic mode because the ironic hero is "'inferior in power or in­ telligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of bondage, frustra­ tion, absurdity.' . . . Irony isolates from the tragic situation the ele­ ment of arbitrariness, the sense of isolation, the demonic vision. . .

It is precisely this sense of "victimization" of a protagonist that alienates many readers and critics when confronting much contempo­ rary writing, fictional or dramatic. Such victimization has explicit roots in the naturalistic novel because there man is a victim of political, economic and hereditary circumstances. The "victim" does not command much sympathy, however, and for many he precludes a discussion of a work on serious tragic grounds; the victim degrades the human condition; he lacks

2Gassner, p. 11.

^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 121. The interior quotation is from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1937), p. 3h. 18

nobility and often insight. Such a protagonist does not die but rather

succumbs to pressures over which he has no control; he accomplishes

neither self-mastery nor understanding—in short his is an ignominious

defeat. Hassan discusses Lie Down in Darknessas an instance of the

first ironic mode, specifically the hero as victim or scapegoat, one

ruled by necessity. Such a form is "closed to any real change in the

life of the hero, any self-renewal."-’ For exanple, one of its protago­

nists, Peyton Loftis, commits suicide at the conclusion of her intense

Joycean monologue at the close of the novel; her father, Milton Loftis,

tortured by frustration and alcohol, leaps at the throat of his wife,

Helen, during the chapel services for Peyton. Even this rage fails

Milton and he is last seen "bounding past wreaths and boxwood and over

tombstones, toward the highway." Helen remains leaning against the chapel

door—"'Peyton,’ she said, 'Oh God, Peyton. My child. Nothing! Nothing!

Nothing! Nothing!'" (389). Yet tragic figures are usually thought to be those who suffer, struggle and fail but in failure come to some knowl­ edge of their position in the world, a position which though not neces­ sarily sublime and redemptive is neither base nor ignoble.

In a long essay on tragedy Richard Sewall discusses not only the nature of fictional and dramatic tragedy but precisely what is not trag­ edy. His remarks point up the basic problems raised by Hassan via Frye, that tragedy is not, to use Frye's term, the "ironic mode" we experience today. Sewall discusses tragedy under such headings as "the tragic

^William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (New York, 195>7).

-’Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 123. 19

cosmos," "tragic man," and "tragic man and society." His conception of

tragic man derives from the act of suffering and is supported by

Dostoevski's remark from Notes from the Underground, that "suffering is

the sole origin of consciousness." But this suffering ultimately must

lead to a universal stance whereby a tragic figure speaks for all men

and does not remain locked in private suffering. Furthermore, this

stance becomes an "affair with the gods. In taking arms against the

ancient cosmic evil, he transcends the human situation, mediating be­

tween the human and the divine.What might appear as tragedy in

twentieth centuiy writing could well be an affair "with the social order,

or the environment, or the glands . . . certainly where it becomes so

the muse of tragecy walks out; the universe loses its mystery and its 7 grandeur." In transcending the human situation "tragedy discovers a p principle of goodness that coexists with the evil." (my italics)

"Principle" is the key word. It implies some structured relationship

for Sewall between the individual and his world and provides the proper

tragic tension.

The relationship is not necessarily one involving perfect com­

munity relationships nor a cosmic vision of the orthodox Christian God.

It is "nearer the folk sense that justice exists somewhere in the

^Tragedy: Modem Essays in Criticism, ed. Laurence Michel and Richard Sewall (New Jersey, 19o3), p. 128. Sewall acknowledges an ex­ tensive indebtedness to commentators on tragic history and criticism. His position is discussed in this study not for its originality but for its general synthesis of many commonly held positions.

7Ibid., p. 122.

8Ibid., p. 121. 20 universe ... it may be a vision of some transcendent beauty and dig­ nity against which the present evil may be seen as evil and the welter o as welter." Joseph Wood Krutch suggests much the same point when he speaks of man having a central place in the universe, "where he assumes that each of his acts reverberates through the universe" and where out of the "dissonances of life [man] manages nevertheless to hear them as harmony."'*'0

Must one accept the proposition that for tragedy to exist there must be this far-reaching or absolute principle in man's life? Albert

Camus, for example, argues quite the contrary, that the absence of such a transcendent relationship spoken of by Sewall and Krutch creates a ten­ sion which accentuates man's importance far beyond what it would be otherwise. He points out that in traditional philosophy "it was previ­ ously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning."}'}' "No meaning" for Camus is to be taken as having no metaphysical significance. Hence one might say, contrary to both Sewall and Krutch, that in spite of the absence of a divinely oriented universe and man's lack of a supra-human significance, man's sense of his worth and his need to act significantly is as strong as it would be in a divinely oriented one. Though metaphysical isolation

^Tragedy* Modem Essays in Criticism, pp. 121-122.

}-°Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Tragic Fallacy," The Modem Temper (New York, 1929), p. 133.

^Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York, 1938), p. 33» This quotation simply presents the conclusion of his posi­ tion and of course does not point out how he reached it. 21

does indeed appear to be the dominant temper of much contemporary writ­

ing, such isolation is less disturbing to the experienced reader than

the concomitant experience of victimization that seems so pervasive of

much recent literature. It is indeed victimization rather than meta­

physical isolation that is the more difficult to integrate into a con­

ception of tragedy because victimization suggests something less than human. If modern tragecty- can successfully reckon with victimization it

can justifiably be called tragedy rather than an exercise in futility. « Hassan's argument against the modem existential novel as tragic is based upon the absence of freedom experienced by the characters—the

"hero" is a scapegoat ruled by strict necessity. When freedom does exist and characters are not ruled by strict necessity, the novel "veers" toward comedy, something like an accommodation without "shrill optimism or unwarranted affirmation." It is understandable why Hassan speaks directly to the issue of freedom, for freedom is usually thought to be central to tragic behavior. As noted earlier, however, it is the sense of victimization that alienates many readers and critics from many mod­ em novels, because victim not only suggests passiveness, inconsequential action, but perhaps even the absence of freedom to alter a state or con­ dition. The "climate of opinion" described as radical intellectual con­ ditions in the first part of this study and what Hassan calls the "ex­ istential pattern" in many contemporary novels underscores this sense of victimization.

Victimization today suggests that the individual succumbs to forces that direct him and leave him without viable choices. In such a condition he is unable, to use Sewall's words, to "sense that justice 22

exists in the universe" and unable, to echo Krutch, to discover harmony

amid dissonance. The victim accomplishes neither self-mastery, under­

standing of his circumstance, nor significant action because little in

the world as he knows it is conducive to self-mastery, understanding or

significant action. Victimization as it appears in fictional charac­

terization is strikingly concrete though it occurs in many varied forms.

It can be absolute and encompassing, such as the condition of the literal

slave or the condition of man in terms of strict psychological determin­

ism; it can be of a lesser degree than either of these, such as the con­

dition of the alcoholic who functions normally and freely on many occa­

sions and yet succumbs to the compulsion of prolonged alcoholic states

on other occasions. Though victimization can be total or in some measure

less than total, it is an injustice to the problem of man and freedom to

oversimplify the forces that threaten domination of him. And it appears

evident as civilization grows more complex that additional forces are

discovered which make of man a victim rather than a free agent, one who

has little capacity or freedom to alter his condition. Therefore, a dis­

cussion of "types" of victimization will illuminate the problem. First,

a discussion of its meaning in a total sense and, second, a discussion of it as a matter of degree, where genuine individuality and victimiza­ tion intermingle.

I

Absolute and total victimization for fictional characters ap­ pears as metaphysical determinism, in which human freedom is as unreal as the "freedom" of cosmic forces. Such determinism understands the 23

entire cosmos as a predetermined order and man as subservient to that

order. In such a cosmic order man is neither responsible for his actions

nor capable of changing his circumstance. Yet in an entirely different

way, death has functioned for many artists as a metaphysical determinant,

not one that controls actions but one controlling the end to which all

action arrives. It is the reaper waiting only for time and place. So

much is the presence of death felt as a master no man escapes that it

functions as the central force to be reckoned with in many artistic

works.

A total sense of victimization also appears, however, when man

is viewed as a product of social or economic forces, as in Marxist de­

terminism, and his actions are explained in terms of the historical evo­

lution of institutions rather than personal volition. In anti-utopian

literature, as it was for the black American in substantial areas of nine­

teenth century America, the state, as an absolute master, victimizes the

individual by virtue of its complete control. The anti-utopian nightmare

of history, as Irving Howe noted, is a perfectly controlled society from which all uncertainty and human idiosyncrasy have been removed. Aldous

Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell's 198U are just such fixed entities and its people total slaves to the state. The scope of servi­ tude in I98I1 is readily apparent in the concluding chapters. The "Inner

^2The "reaper" image is highly suggestive of man subordinate to a higher power. In Shakespeare's sixtieth sonnet Time doth transfix the fourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty's brow Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth * And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow. In yet another image Ingmar Bergman's acclaimed film, The Seventh Seal, is a stunning presentation of death the master chess player, who captures pawn and king no matter how shrewd and calculated their moves. 2h

Party” of Oceania cannot be satisfied with control over a party member's

actions; it must have control of the interior life as well. As O'Brien,

the interrogator for the Inner Party tells Winston Smith, it is not

enough that one fear Big Brother, one must also love Big Brother.

O'Brien methodically proceeds to "reconstruct" Winston so that this last

area of freedom, the interior life of reflection and self-consciousness,

is surrendered to Big Brother. The last pages of the novel portray the pathetically enslaved "new" Winston Smith. Huxley's Brave New World accomplishes much the same purpose but through a biochemical means. The range of possible personalities is prefabricated biochemically before birth and is indicated as letter groups—Alphas, Betas, etc. The end is the same as the one achieved in 198U: total servitude of the indi­ vidual to the social organism. And within that servitude is his victim­ ization.

A conception of the individual as victim can originate in man's understanding of those forces which are responsible for his actions.

Twentieth century investigations by psychologists in areas of personality structure, behavioral patterns, hereditary characteristics suggest a psychological determinism which explains man's actions not as a result of volition but as a product of deeply recessed internal forces that he is permanently incapable of understanding or altering. William Styron has spoken of psychological determinants:

depression doesn't arise so much from political conditions, or the threat of war, or the atom bomb as from the terrific in­ crease of scientific knowledge which has come to us about the human self—Freud, that is, abnormal psychology, and all the psychiatric wisdom. My God, think of how morbid and depressing Dostoevski would have been if he could have gotten hold of some 2i>

of the juicy work of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, say Sadism and Masochism.13

Indeed literature and the psychoanalytic traditions have taught us that

man can become a victim to forces within himself which he is unconscious

of and could never control without adequate therapy—if then.

II

Victimization in the foregoing senses is all-embracing and total.

It is similar to the servitude of the literal slave held in bondage: vo­

lition is hardly a practical reality and actions are controlled by forces beyond choice. But victimization has roots, however, in places other

than determinism and its encompassing control. Anything that diminishes a man, that retards his efforts to act freely and significantly or seri­ ously compromises his condition creates a degree of victimization. A metaphysics of chance or whim rather than one of determinism can con­

tribute to the victim's condition by asserting that the universe at un­ disclosed times plays havoc with aspiration and action, destroying through indifference or chance expectation and fulfillment. Thomas

Hardy's poem "Hap" suggests this experience when the speaker observes that "purblind Doomsters had as readily strown / Blisses about my pil­ grimage as pain." Gloucester in King Lear makes a similar observation—

"As flies to wanton beys are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport."—that suggests not determinism but man subjected to "sportive" pleasures that arise when the gods are at play. Neither image, Hardy or

’~3writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. with an in­ troduction by Malcolm Cowley (New York, 19^8), p. 201. 26

Shakespeare's, suggests an absolute force controlling man's actions on all occasions, but both indicate, however, that attendant upon man's ac­ tions are fragmentation and destruction which he is unable to control or alter. Though man may be free in his actions, he still can become vic­ tim of whim and circumstance. It is difficult not to believe that all men have experienced this sense of victimization at some time in their lives.

Yet man's perception of himself as a victim also occurs in his relationship to his institutions, not in the sense that he is a product of their historical development nor an entity totally controlled by them but more in that sense of the specific demands made upon him in their quest for stability and their own private goals. Much social commentary today (e.g., The Organization Man; The Hidden Persuaders) describes the demands and the goals of institutions: some degree of control over the individual, a control often to no one's benefit save the institution ini. tiating it. Motivational psychologists in conjunction with corporate ad­ vertising agencies are excellent examples of institutions which attempt and often succeed in controlling large numbers of people by reducing their viable choices to actions motivated by powerful unconscious ener­ gies. Indeed, much social commentary is directed toward the problem of man remaining free in spite of institutional demands. It is not that institutions are necessarily unjust but rather that their power makes them quite capable of extending demands to the point where legitimate compromise becomes a thinly disguised servitude of man to institution.

Such servitude is nothing more than victimization.

A third though not necessarily total sense of victimization is 27

that which man experiences when he is consumed by a passion or an idea

that "unbalances" his state of being (e.g., Chillingsworth's obsession

with the torture of Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter) or that

experience of disengagement when he is without significant purpose or

direction. This sense of victimization can lead to the "bondage" Paul

Tillich describes:

If man's freedom ... is a series of contingent acts of arbitrariness, it falls under the control of forces which move against one another without a deciding center. What seems to be free proves to be conditioned by internal convulsions. . . . Parts of the self overtake the center and determine it without being united with the other parts. . . . This is the ontological character of the state described in classical theology as the "bondage of the will."-^-

Tillich's statement resembles Aristotle's analysis of hamartia, the basis

for much commentary on tragic behavior. This form of victimization

"springs from within," such that the protagonist appears to create his own tragic downfall rather than having it imposed from without. Whether or not it is the only source of tragic action is a point frequently de­ bated. But as a source of victimization, the lack of a "deciding center" is as important to understanding victimized man as the other sources that have been discussed.

It should be evident, however, why the victim and the possibility of his tragic status arouse hostility in many commentators on tragecfcr: too many things "happen" to the victim, some of which are not of his own choosing and oftentimes beyond his power to control. Oscar Mandel's re­ jection of the victim as potential tragic hero is based upon this point.

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, II (Chicago, 19f?7), 63. 28

Tragedy deals with an action harmful or fatal in its nature. The fatality which reaches us "out of the blue" is one thing; that which we call upon ourselves by our will and our deed is quite another. . . . That is why we eliminate . . . the seri­ ous work of art which concerns itself with a victim.15

It is impossible as well as unnecessarily limiting, however, not to con

sider those forces that originate beyond will but which influence man's condition.^ Ultimately, the origins of the forces acting on man are

less important than how he reacts to them. But victimization is indeed

an apt word for the state of contemporary man because the sources for

such a condition are manifold. And the opposing issue is not man pos­

sessing absolute freedom—freedom from all control—but rather possess­

ing that reasonable freedom that allows for a genuine human condition.

Total or absolute freedom is a fiction; total or absolute bondage is a

hell. Somewhere between the two exists meaningful human action. But

it has become increasingly difficult today to locate that "reasonable"

freedom.

This brief outline of victimization is intended to suggest no .

more than the kind of world within which many contemporary protagonists

find themselves. It is oftentimes a "world of degradation, enervation

and defeat. But most of them [contemporaiy novelists] do not drag us

into the depths simply for the sake of the dragging or the depths; nor

do they leave us there.Many of them believe

that somewhere, somehow, there exists a transcendent set of values which the individual can discover and achieve, if he

3-^A Definition of Tragedy (New York, l?6l), p. 103.

3-^To remove chance or accident from Othello, for example, would be to alter seriously the very structure of the play.

3-7joseph J. Waldmeir, "Quest Without Faith," Recent American Fiction, ed. Joseph J. Waldmeir (Boston, 1963), p. 29

suffers long and hard enough, and is very lucky in his search for them. The message is almost medieval, though of course defrocked, for there is no fixed religious system to impose order and control . . . and no God to whom the individual can appeal for guidance or aid in identifying true values from false.

It is the view of this study that perception of and rebellion against

those forces directed against man, those forces that retard, degrade

and limit his fulfillment, are the identifying marks of a portion of

contemporary writing and are man's "transcendent" values.

William Styron and Joseph Heller offer virtual paradigms of the novel of victimization. Their central characters are subject to disin­ tegrating forces over which they appear to have little control. Both authors portray the contemporary condition in such a way as to pointedly reveal man the victim. But within this victimization are perception of and rebellion against that condition. William Styron's characters are vividly aware that something has gone askew and they are losing viable choices and significant action. Joseph Heller's central character,

Yossarian, is equally vividly aware that his society is bent on making him a total victim, that is, enslaving him to insane means in order to reach equally insane goals. Rebellion in Styron's Lie Down in Darkness culminates in a rejection of an existence which has passed beyond redemp tion; in The Long March develops into a determination to endure an op­ pressor that very nearly seems unendurable; in Set This House on Fire becomes a determination to live significantly in spite of personal limitation and metaphysical isolation; in Confessions of Nat Turner culminates in the violent rejection of that total experience of

l^Waldmeir, p. $6. 30

victimization, man as property. Joseph Heller's Yossarian perceives

that much of his world, though thought by many to be sane and rational,

is indeed insane and irrational. His rebellion is emphatic; he refuses

any further conplicity with his "captors" and takes flight to Sweden.

It is not that rebellion is of one form in these works, but that rebel­

lion is some form of assertion against a state of existence that has

become destructive of authentic experience.

Ihab Hassan has suggested that many modern novels which appear

as tragic contain little or no real rebellion and the "hero" is a scape­

goat ruled by necessity. Because much contemporaiy fiction appears to

present man as a victim and his actions at best futile gestures, in

short a scapegoat ruled by necessity, it would be useful to examine the

works of two writers who have been associated with these attitudes. If

Styron's works are examined collectively, however, it is evident that

his characters are not only perceptive of their condition but capable

of rebellion against those forces which victimize them. Their tragic

stance is in their perception and rebellion. A precise discussion of

the victim and his rebellion in Styron's novels should illuminate those

shadowy areas of the "existential" novel where man supposedly sits alone

amid empty and futile gestures, suffering total defeat. There is a tragic

"tone" in the "black" or "absurd" comedy of Joseph Heller. Hassan's dis- 19 cussion of contemporary comedy, ' in which the "presence of death is as

strongly felt ... as is the presence of disorder and the traditional

19 zHassan calls this "encounter with possibility," where the hero enjoys some degree of freedom and "gives the illusion of escaping from necessity. It is a mode which "veers" toward comedy. Radical Innocence, p. 123. 31

20 comic redemption of society is markedly absent," describes the world of Catch-22. Indeed it is Yossarian's unique perception of his society’s disorder, and the haunting omnipresence of death within his world, that make him an interesting character and his world as threatening as a tragic one. The aim of this study, then, is to explore in some detail the na­ ture of victimization and the substance of perception and rebellion in the novels of William Styron and Joseph Heller. But Styron's work has not been examined collectively (an examination which should include the recently published Confessions of Nat Turner) in order to understand the precise nature of victimization and the substance of rebellion he re­ veals. Similarly, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has not been examined as ab­ surd comedy that is very similar to the victimization and rebellion in contemporary tragedy. This study will try to reveal how both authors understand victimization and what each thinks rebellion to be. Because a protagonist's action is central to him as a protagonist, it should be evident that rebellion is very similar to what is usually identified as tragic action. Rebellion is the assertion of an individual's will against those forces which threaten to cancel his identity, and a strong word like rebellion is essential to this study because the forces directed against man are awesome.

Today rebellion as the artist views it is cast against a back­ ground of forces that appear determined to control or fragment man's ex­ istence, forces which, for example, range from advertising manipulators who see him as a puppet to determinist psychologists who "predict" his

Radical Innocence, p. 201. 32 behavior. Yet these forces need not be manipulative or deterministic

to be dangerous. They might be nothing more than indifference or whim man experiences in his daily intercourse, those occasions when all that

is important to him is subjected to "faulty anodes on an IBM machine,"

as a character in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 complains, or the "sportive pleasures" of the gods. Furthermore, man lives with the haunting pos­ sibility that rebellion will achieve nothing or that achievement is at most provisional and temporary. But the failure of rebellion is similar to the inevitability of failure that haunts all tragedy. It is, there­ fore, logically difficult to hold with Sewall that tragedy's optimistic view is in its "vitalism, which is in some sense nystical, not earth­ bound, in its faith in a cosmic good; in its faith, however fleeting, 21 of a world in which all questions could be answered." With or with­ out this optimism, however, the question of rebellion remains essential because it is in rebellion that genuinely tragic modes are born in the twentieth century.

^Sewall, p. 123. 33

CHAPTER III

WILLIAM STYRON

With the publication of Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967 it is

possible to view in Styron's novels a persistent theme in varying forms:

the individual as a victim who attempts to alter his status as a victim

by an act of rebellion. Like the radical conditions under which he

lives, his rebellion is radical, for it is an "all or nothing" leap for

an identity, where he might become an acting subject rather than remain­

ing a submissive object. Nat Turner in Confessions of Nat Turner is a

literal slave as victim in Virginia in I83I. Milton, Peyton, and Helen

Loftis in Lie Down in Darkness; Cass Kinsolving and Mason Flagg in Set

This House on Fire; Captain A1 Mannix in The Long March are also victims.

And each of them is marked by some kind of rebellion against their status

as victims.

I

* ... it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes . . . the brother of death daily haunts us with dying momentos, and time that grows old in itself, bids us no long duration;—diutumity is a dream and folly of expectation.

—Sir Thomas Browne Urn Burial

Lie Down in Darkness was Styron's first novel. Published in

1932 when Styron was twenty-five, its wide acclaim established him as an important writer. The general reaction, however, was that the novel 3h

was "Faulknerian" and part of the Southern Tradition, mainly because of

its techniques of handling time and dialogue, the location (Virginia),

and family guilt and disintegration. Virtually all of Styron's commen­

tators discuss the pathetic condition of the Loftises, the central

characters, in terms of emotions and actions that lead them into tur­

moil and death, as if the family had no genuine control over or under­

standing of their condition. This is to say that the Loftises are "driven"

into misunderstandings and ill-conceived actions. But one can ask, how­

ever, what are the "things" that drive them into unfortunate ends, that

make them victims rather than free agents? What oppressive forces exist

in their world that contribute to that experience of being led to the

bleak end suggested by the inscription from Sir Thomas Browne's Urn

Burial?

Death is the first oppressor in LDP. Even when death is not

near at hand, it is experienced in the novel as a generalized idea or

emotion hovering in the background of human action. This of course is

a repeated experience in literary forms ranging from the sonnet to the

novel. Certainly Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and the carpe

diem themes of the seventeenth century and the mutability themes of Shelley

and Wordsworth, to name but a few examples, suggest death the oppressor.

It commands absolute power over the individual because all men come neces­

sarily to that end and all attempts to escape it are illusory. But death has unusual significance when there no longer exists a power to which it must answer or to which it is subservient.'*' In LDP, as in many

\john Donne, like many of his contemporaries and predecessors, saw death (or mutability) as indeed subservient to a higher power. In "Death, be not proud . . ."he writes, "One short sleep past, we wake 35

contemporary novels, there is no appeal of death's judgments. In ear­

lier periods there certainly was such appeal, but in LDP death is a

master who makes the final reckoning.

A second oppressive force in LDP bears a similarity to psycho­

logical determinism. The Loftises act but never really understand why

they act the way they do; it is as if their actions are motivated and

pressured by obscure causes and forces originating from the murky and

opaque recesses of their guilt-ridden and tormented minds. Compounding

this ignorance of self is ignorance of one another. They have as little

understanding of one another's motivations as they do of their own, hence

they act absolutely from positions of ignorance. They are, then, victims

of themselves—man as his own worst enemy—and this is a condition long

known to theologians and psychoanalysts. Ignorance of self and others

can be the cruelest of conditions.

A third oppressive force (or atmosphere) can best be called the

lack of a redemptive point of view, something external to the Loftises which could aid them to see in their abortive actions a remedy which would lead them from disorder to stability. Such a point of view, how­

ever, does not exist and the Loftises remain to flounder as if they were

the cruel jests of a higher and indifferent power. Victimization is eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die." From the time of Donne, however, a general weakening of man's faith in a per­ sonal triumph over death has occurred. The radical intellectual condi­ tions described in Chapter I of this study suggest that contemporary man has lost contact with a belief which would, account for his individual value in absolute terms. We are more inclined today to view the indi­ vidual as part of a specific cultural context, and once departing from that context he is no more. But the Christian position from which Donne speaks posits man in absolute terms, i.e., man has an external and im­ mutable status beyond his earthbound existence. Indeed, "existential" despair is to some degree derived from the awareness that the individual does not have a status in eternity and that "death does not die." 36

quite real in LDP. The victimization that the Loftises experience is

very little different from literal and physical domination of one person

by another, because the consequences of both instances are the same:

the individual ceases to be or never becomes the master of his life.

The present action of the novel takes place during a several

hour period of one day, beginning with Milton Loftis arriving at a Port

Warick, Virginia dock to meet his daughter who arrives "silent, invisible

in a coffin," and ends with services for her in a cemetery chapel in Port

Warick. But the novel’s central concern is for the past, a past reaching

as far back as Milton's university days and the past as near as Peyton's

suicide, a few weeks prior to her funeral in Port Warick, the present of

the novel. Her bocty’ is returned some weeks after her death to Port

Warick because of delayed identification. The narrator presents several points of view in the many flashbacks which occur during Milton's journey from pier to cemetery. Milton, Helen Loftis, his wife, Peyton, Dolly

Bonner are the central characters in these flashbacks and each with a point of view which "circles in" on events and experiences that are im­ portant to each of them, and each event and experience brings out these characters'blunted actions and unfulfilled desires. The episode central to the novel and symbolic of the Loftises' frustration is Peyton's mar­ riage, occurring only a short time before her suicide. It is in that event that Milton's slavish devotion to his daughter, Helen's jealous hatred of Peyton, Peyton's desire to escape a family decay which is just as much inside her as in her family proper, crystallize in blind hatreds and futile actions. From that point to Peyton's death, all of them be­ gin to "lie down in darkness." 37

The flashbacks do not folloft a .chronological pattern but, like ! ’ -i u those in Joseph Heller '■ s•> Catchy, qontain many events which are seen ^5. ~ << from several points of vi,ew and emerge, to fulfill dramatic needs rather than orderly sequence. Throughout the entire period suggested by the novel, including the most distant flashback, is the Negro. In the imme­ diate foreground are the Loftises' Negro servants and in the far back­ ground, serving what Styron called a leitmotif, is Daddy Faith, a spir­ itual healer who has sailed down to Port Warick aboard a raft to conduct services that will bring forth the spirit of Jesus and the cry from his

Negro followers—"Yes Jesus! I seen Him! Yeah! Yeah!" But the story remains with the Loftises and their tormented conditions. There is no

Jesus for them. They, like the existential man, must work out their own salvation. And this they fail to do. Bit by bit they fall victim to irreversible forces that are both corruptive and overwhelming.

Criticism over the past decade reflects the temper of these pre­ ceding remarks: the central characters "repudiate the possibility of 2 man's capacity to endure"; "On its symbolic level, Lie Down in Dark­ ness is a tragedy of decaying values—a study of a paradise fallen into chaos. . . .’*;3 "The Loftises fail and tiy again to squeeze a permanence and beauty from each other which none of them can give."^ These conclu­ sions derive from the sense of total frustration which marks the Loftises

2Jerry H. Bryant, "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," South Atlantic Quarterly, LXII (Autumn, 1963), 5U2.

^Jonathan Baumbach, "Paradise Lost: The Novels of William Styron," South Atlantic Quarterly, LXIII (Spring, 19610, 208. ^Shaun 0 'Connell, "Expense of Spirit: The Vision of William Styron," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 25. 38

lives, creating not really a spirit of tragedy but a process of inten­

tional and unintentional victimization. They destroy themselves and one

another.

The first oppressive force in LDP is death. The title is a

chilling evocation of the human condition as is the inscription taken

from Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial; that one's life ends in darkness^ and immortality is an illusion. But the novel appears to accept this judgment not as a temporary condition of man, but as a final statement of his end, the final "reconciliation" of his values and persistent struggles. Death is the final reduction (hardly reconciliation) of man's human condition. Man's finality in ashes is first made explicit in a scene in Potter's field in New York, where Peyton was buried after her suicide because there were no means of identifying her. As Harry,

Peyton's husband of two years, and his friend Lennie locate the grave, several people nearby are on a similar quest.

There was a sudden cry from the opposite side of the pit. Another coffin was open and the colored girl peered down into it, her eyes goggling. "God in heaven" she squealed, in a clear Brooklyn accent, "doesn't he look terrible!" (33h)

This scene appears irrelevant because these people have nothing to do with the plot but it is, indeed, structurally significant in revealing the bleak power of death. In Hamlet there is a scene which appears ir­ relevant but which is structurally basic to the play. While talking with the clown-gravedigger about the various remains in the Elsinore graveyard, Hamlet abruptly asks Horatio, "Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a Bunghole?"

Answering the question himself, Hamlet speaks of the scope of death:

"Alexander dies, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the 39

dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam . . . might

they not stop a beer barrel?" (V,i). Death is the most persistent ob­

jective representative of the oppressor man is subject to. Death is

not only a leveler of all persons without respect to caste or origin

but is degrading in the use to which it puts man’s remains. This is

also evident in the Potter's field scene in LDP.

Dolly, Milton's erstwhile mistress, a somewhat dull though sen­

sually satisfying and relatively stable woman, fears entrapment by death. Milton had left her once before for a temporary reconciliation with Helen and now, on the day of Peyton's funeral, Dolly fears a second reconciliation. If this should happen there would be nothing to do but

"leave town, go to Norfolk or Richmond, or back to Emporia and sit by her mother's bedside, watch the withered, wasting flesh of multiple sclerosis, look at her twitch and moan, change her clothes when her sphincter gave way" (323-2U). Imminent death in the form of aging and permanent debilitation is as powerful a reminder of death as the end of life.

Shortly before her death Peyton, too, senses spiritual death in her repeated description of her state of anguish. "I feel adrift, as if

I were drowning out in dark space somewhere without anything to pull me back to earth again" (38). Alone, wandering adrift in New York, her long interior monologue repeats this metaphor—"I'm drowning"—at every criti­ cal juncture in her long walk. But it is Albert Berger, friend of her husband, Harry, who brutally summarizes the meaning of death to her when she meets him during this walk to death.

My view of the universe is harsh and brutal. In each act of creation, be it the orgasm of the simplest street cleaner or ho

the explosion of atoms, man commits himself to the last part of the evolutionary cycle; by that I mean death, frosty, cruel and final. (367)

In LDP there is a persistent and "black-comic" objective cor­ relative of death in the mechanically defective hearse carrying Peyton to the cemetery. As Milton returns to the present from memories of earlier days, the hearse stalls, fails, and begins again. Peyton is not borne with dignity nor can Milton reflect in tranquility. As Alexander was reduced to a stopper for a bunghole and the shocked grimace reflected the terror when the coffin was opened, so Mr. Casper’s belching hearse blows away the dignity which might ease the procession of death.

Once more the hood of the hearse went down with a crash. Mr. Casper stood erect and wiped his hands. Barclay got in and started the engine; it made a fitful, hacking noise, like a dog coughing up a bone, then caught; an umbrella of blue smoke rose to the heavens and Barclay waved his arm valiantly out of the window. Mr. Casper returned with a distressed look and climbed back into the front seat. The hearse moved ahead. "I'm terribly sorry," Mr. Casper said. "Terribly. On a day like this. ..." His voice sank into a murmur of vague, inaudible recriminations, and the limousine, too, began to move again. (140

The concluding scene at the chapel is the final reminder of death:

Milton in a paroxysm of hate attempts to murder Helen. Death hovers over the novel as a persistent reminder of what man labors under in his struggle with his existence.

The second oppressor in LDP is a blind ignorance of the causes of the Loftises' disintegration, an ignorance borne by the Loftises them­ selves as well as by their friends. A consequence of this ignorance is a gross lack of understanding of themselves and each other. "How can a strong novel be written about weakness, when the causes of the weakness hi

£ are so ill-defined . . . ?" Davis' answer is rather unsatisfying, sug­

gesting only that Styron's sensitivity with language succeeds whereas

his characterization fails; his characters are "extremely limited, self-

centered and basically uninteresting people," who appear far more sub­ stantial than they really are.^

There are possible explanations for their condition: Helen's

jealousy of Peyton; Milton's incestuous desire for Peyton; Peyton's re­

jection of her competitor-Mother. But much is made in the novel of not

understanding why things are what they are—and this is thematically im­

portant. Nothing need be explained to the victim; it can be part of his

condition as a victim. Efy far the most penetrating examination of Styron's

characters with their "inadequately explained actions" has been done by

John Aldridge, who suggests that Styron's basic flaw is in his pastiche

imagination—an imagination that substitutes certain attitudes and tonal­

ities of previous writers, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, for inadequately

developed characterization. At best the Loftises are victims of circum- 7 stances no larger "than their own cultural limitations and neuroses."'

More specifically their only curse is of "the House of Seagram's and the Q House of Oedipus." There are echoes of Faulkner's blood guilt and Fitz­

gerald's generation guilt but "these elements exist without relation to

-’R. G. Davis, "The American Individualist Tradition: Bellow and Styron," pie Creative Present, ed. Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons (New York, 1963), p. 133. 6Ibid.

?John W. Aldridge, Time to Murder and Create (New York, 1966), p. 38. ^Ibid., p. 36. U2 the thematic meaning that they are ostensibly designed to express.

There is no real or felt agony to account for their implications of 9 agony, no grand moral issue to account for the grandeur of their size."

The Loftises appear for Aldridge as tortured characters without any really significant reasons for their condition other than alcohol and private neuroses. It is true we don't know the causes for many actions, and the motivations do indeed seem "opaque and confused" but Styron, rather than hiding from this fact, seems to make it evident or inten­ tional. Peyton is conscious of her lack of knowledge and this deficiency points up her pathetic condition. In her last letter to her father, shortly before taking her life, she speaks of the inadequate understand­ ing she has of her life:

Oh, Daddy, I don't know what's wrong. I've tried to grow up— to be a good little girl, as you would say, but everywhere I turn I seem to walk deeper and deeper into some terrible despair. What's wrong, Daddy? What's wrong? Why is happiness such a pre­ cious thing? What have we done with our lives so that everywhere we turn—no matter how hard we try to—we cause other people sor­ row? (39)

Remembering a "dumb" friend she senses a melancholy hope:

Sometimes I see Laura—you remember her. We all went to the Vanguard that night. She's very tiresome, but I envy her somehow. Maybe that's the key to happiness—being sort of dumb, not wanting to know ary of the answers. (39)

Those ignorant of causes include Harry, an individual free of the cor­ ruptive "blood" of the Loftises. When Harry and Lennie locate Peyton's grave in Potter's field, "Harry turned away, his stomach heaving. He bent over and looked down toward his shadow, regarding the earth, weeds, a cloud of gnats. No, he thought, I .just don't know whose fault it

^Aldridge, p. 36. h3

is" (33lt)- Peyton echoes a similar thought in her last meeting with

Harry when she cries, "oh my Harry, my lost sweet Harry, I have not for­

nicated in the darkness because I wanted to but because I was punishing myself for punishing you: yet something far past dreaming or memory,

and darker than either, impels me, and you do not know ..." (377).

Peyton and more directly Milton have met with frustration and

defeat in the goals they have set for themselves as well as in their relationships with others. Milton's condition in particular suggests ennui and decay. He recognizes his debilitated condition on the day of

Peyton's funeral. Dolly has been his illusion of something stabilizing in the shattered remains of his life but on this day he also thinks about his relationship to her.

During the last few years he had relied upon her steadfast gaze of love and longing, perhaps unconsciously enough, as one among the assortment of props and crutches—along with all the whiskey and with Peyton. . . . (U3)

"Props" and "crutches" vividly evoke the debilitated man who has lost meaningful freedom. Yet rather than suggest motives for the Loftises' actions or causes for the collapse of a meaningful world, Styron appears to make this lack of knowledge of motives and causes basic to their con­ dition. Each is entrapped within actions and situations he helps create but which he does not genuinely understand and for which he is unable to determine responsibility. Such a condition is similar to the Christian conception of sin whereby an individual becomes victimized by forces and powers within himself he neither truly understands nor can control and is "set free" only through an act of divine grace. Similarly, the psychoanalyst observes that one can become victimized by deeply recessed Uh internal forces which are only partially understood and virtually be­ yond a subject’s control, yet capable of driving him to self-destruction.

This sense of victimization is explicit in LDP.

Milton and Helen's vain struggle to adapt to each other after

Maudie's death in spite of not knowing what had driven them apart sug­ gests the scope of the ignorance of their condition. In a rare display of passion Helen says to him, "'Oh my darling, you do understand me, after all.'" Milton reflects later:

No, he hadn't understood her, ever, but at that moment there had been no need of understanding: she was his once more, they were together and she believed in him. It was as if he had lifted by his self-abasement all the troubles from her shoulders, and afterward it was only when the desire for whisky became almost impossible to bear that he began to think glumly that he had let himself in for a hell of a situ­ ation. (236)

Peyton and Milton are at least conscious of their predicament; however, Helen is not. Her distorted but empty world is characterized by the crippled daughter, Maudie, anxiety dreams of corruption and death, and empty consolations from a close friend, Reverend Carey Carr. It is

Peyton who speaks directly to Helen about Helen's condition. Her remarks characterize much of Helen's actions throughout her marriage as well as her relationship to her children.

"You can't even suffer properly," Peyton broke in, her voice solemn now; "You're like all the rest of the sad neurotics everywhere who huddle over their misery and take their vile, mean little hatreds out on anybody they envy. You know, I sus­ pect you've always hated me for one thing or another, but lately I've become a symbol to you you couldn't stand. Do you think I'm stupid or something, that I haven't got you figured out? You hate men, you've hated Daddy for years, and the sad thing is that he hasn't known it. And the terrible thing is that you hate yourself so much that you just don't hate men or Daddy but you hate everything, animal, vegetable and mineral." (311-12) U5

This exchange occurred during the early evening of the day of Peyton's

marriage to Harry, shortly after Milton, having drunk too much had per­

haps too warmly embraced his daughter. Helen reacts violently to both

Peyton and Milton but more to Peyton as if Peyton created her father's

drunken condition. Milton, himself, had failed to understand the hate

between the mother and daughter that drove Peyton to these judgments

about Helen.

God help him, hadn't he known all along that they hated and despised each other? Had he had to spend twenty years deceiv­ ing himself, piling false hope upon false hope—only to dis­ cover on this day, of all days, the shattering, unadorned, bitter truth? Those smiles ... of course . . . how Peyton and Helen had always smiled at each other like that! There had been words, too, attitudes, small female gestures which it had been beyond him to divine, or even faintly to under­ stand. (283-8U)

It is in Reverend Carr that the ignorance of the causes of the

Loftises' disintegration is pointedly revealed.

Who was to blame? Mad or not, Helen had been beastly. She had granted to Loftis, in her peculiarly unremitting way, no forgiveness or understanding, and above all she had been beastly to Peyton. Yet Loftis himself had been no choice soul; and who, finally, lest it be God himself, could know where the circle, composed as it was of such tragic suspicions and misunderstandings, began, and when it ended? Who was the author of the original misdeed? Peyton, think of Peyton. Was she beyond reproach? Other children had risen above even worse difficulties. (239)

If there is a coming into knowledge, a point of disclosure in this novel, it comes shortly before Peyton's funeral. Milton, speaking with Carr, says, "there was a time . . . when I thought I'd found some kind of answer. God, we go through life fooling ourselves, thinking we've got the answer, only its never the answer really" (2li3-HU)• If there is an answer it is in some kind of struggle and personal U6

commitment: "I didn't realize that honor isn't given automatically, but you have to fight for it just as strongly as I guess you do for

love. ... I hadn't fought hard enough" (2ljl|). But this suggestion of understanding gives way a few moments later to the pent-up frustrations which are vented upon Helen with the intention of destroying her.

A third sense of victimization derives from a negative state:

the absence of a redemptive point of view. No one has the ability to set things right or even to understand or to interpret accurately what has gone askew. The organized church as a central institution in the community manifests itself as an empty and lifeless ritual, as ineffec­ tual as Reverend Carey Carr, an Episcopalian minister whose name echoes a child's toy. Milton remembers a Methodist church service of some years ago.

A Sunday school choir commenced a falsetto chirping. Jesus loves me. Methodist, probably. He could almost see it: a row of maple chairs, young women with bad breath and half­ moons of sweat beneath their armpits, a basement somewhere smelling of stale leaking water and moldy religion. A sad, shadowy place, where the timeless rattle of Proverbs and Commandments outlasts age and decay and even the dusty, pious slant, itself, of Sunday sunlight upon worn hymnals and broken electrical fixtures and cobwebbed concrete walls. Methodists. They hated beauty. Ah, God ... He yawned. . . ,(55-56)

Carr's simple, Episcopalian-Fort Warwick faith comprehends little beyond the vacuity of spiritual uplift. Comforting Helen at one point in her shaky marriage with Milton he says to her in effect to keep a stiff up­ per lip: "'I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: hence­ forth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness'" (127). Their relationship could xrell be that of two high school chums.

They became good friends, they talked about other matters; on one or two occasions she failed to mention Milton or b7

Peyton—"her sorrow," as she put it once in an embarrassingly awkward attempt at irony. She seemed totally lacking in a sense of humor, but it really didn't matter: they talked of God, immortality, time and space, all in the enthusiastic, dis­ organized, eclectic way of high-school seniors, which Carey, being nominally, at least, and at the most unquestioningly, committed to Faith, hadn't employed in years, and which finally disturbed him so much that he guided the conversation back to the value of prayer, (lij.2)

With greater intellectual power Carr might have identified the Loftises

errors or perhaps aided in a catharsis of understanding through pain.

Hassan notes Carr is at best a reflector of what has happened and "use­ less as comforter or savior."}’0 Carr's last words echo Judge Brack in

Hedda Gabler when the astonished and "learned" Brack observes Hedda's

suicide ("People don't do things like that"); Carr can say nothing more

in that last macabre scene when Milton leaps for Helen's throat than

"People, people."

Nothing exists that can correct or redirect these twisted ener­

gies and blunted hopes. Hassan describes it as a living hell, the

Loftises' encounter with a necessity which culminates in defeat and de­

struction.

And of course there is no surcease of terror as we move from the domestic to private experience where all terror be­ gins, where it must end. The hell of love, the hell of pur­ chasing one's happiness with another's pain, the hell, even, of failing to know the love one is supposed to know—these are dramatized in scene after scene.11

But tragedy in some special sense is liberation because it cul­ minates in knowledge of error in oneself and knowledge of the workings of the world as well as some kind of assertion. But in LDP neither of

-^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 128.

i:LIbid., p. 130. U8

these—knowledge or assertion—emerge as normally acceptable resolutions

to badly mangled lives. Peyton and Milton know only the anguish of

their lives and the need to make some dramatic assertion to diminish

that anguish. And their assertion is suicide and attempted murder.

They see suicide and murder as the only options open to their victimized

states. Continued victimization is not an option to the man who has be­

come aware of the condition that hinders and destroys him. Paradoxically,

suicide is an alternative when no other alternatives to a despicable

state exist. Cass Kinsolving in Set This House on Fire jestingly replies

to a psychiatrist who has asserted that suicide is the coward's way out,

"self-destruction is the triumph of a man whose back is to the wall, it

is at least one cut above imperishable self-loathing." When the victim's

back is to the wall, his last act of rebellion can be murder or suicide;

the final assertion of his dignity as he understands it. In this sense

it is a mode of raw and primitive assertion: a rebellion. This final

act of negation remains, however, only an extreme mode of tragic action because in it the victim dissolves into the last oppressor: death. It

is an option taken when all others seem even more futile and hopeless.

Peyton and Milton choose suicide and murder. Both are aware, however, of their sickness—it is the causes that remain obscure. In one last desperate appeal to Helen, when they meet at the cemetery chapel for Peyton's funeral, Milton pleads with her: "'Why have I wanted you?

. . . Because you're the only thing left! That's why! My God, don't you see? We're both sick, we need to make each other - -'" (387). These are not the words of a spirit totally stunted by its environment and private neurosis but rather those of someone aware of impinging total

9 49

failure who desperately attempts to retrieve a modicum of value. In a

final burst of rage he shouts at Helen, '"Why, God damn you, don't you

see what you're doing! With nothing left! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!'"

Peyton's suicide has created no reservoir of feeling in Helen for their

relationship. In his last paroxysm of agony "Loftis pulled Helen about

so that she faced him and began to choke her. 'God damn you!' he

yelled, 'If I can't have . . . then you . . . nothing!'" (388). He does

not kill her but relaxes his grip, and is last seen running through the

cemetery toward the highway. Milton's actions emerge in a fury of pro­

test—against himself and Helen. At that moment the form of the protest

ceases to fit a moral criterion; it is simply a violent reaction to the

intellectual and spiritual condition Milton and Helen have known. The victim's fury can be telescoped into one violent act of rebellion, irre­

spective of its moral quality or practical consequences. Milton's act is and remains the violent act of protest, a fury directed against Helen, who at that moment becomes the symbol of oppression. She persists in

continuing the sickness that has shackled all of them. And this Milton's

fury tries to destroy.

Peyton's monologue, as she wanders through familiar spots in New

York City, culminates in a defiance that is as extreme as Milton's—her suicide. The familiar Faulknerian-Joycean structure accentuates her awareness of that wreckage: past and present intermingle syntactically as well as intellectually, revealing a web of interior conflicts and criss-crossing motives. The central and repeated images of the monologue are a jeweled clock she has purchased and the phrase, "I'm drowning."

The clock is harmony and regularity, time contained in perfect movement. 5o

Once I'd had a dream: I was inside a clock. Perfect, complete, perpetual, I revolved about on the mainspring forever drowsing, watching the jewels and the rubies, the mechanism clicking ceaselessly, all the screws and parts as big as my head, inde­ structible, shining, my own invention. Thus would I sleep for­ ever, yet not really sleep, but remain only half-aware of time and enclosed by it as in a womb of brass, revolving on that spring like a dead horse on a merry-go-round. (335)

But she ultimately smashes the clock and drowns in a sea of unfulfilled and only partially understood desires and fears. Yet the monologue is an extraordinarily lucid reflection, bringing into violent juxtaposition immediate present and distant past to create the precise intellectual and emotional disturbances felt by Peyton. Her condition is her bondage to and ignorance of the threads of the past that have influenced her.

Yet her lucidity is her awareness of this bondage, which parallels

Milton's awareness of his and Helen's sickness. Peyton has been unable to establish a wholly meaningful relationship with Harry and has drifted into a number of sexual relationships—the last affair initiates this monologue. From this meeting she threads her way through parts of New

York, ultimately meeting friends of Harry and finally back to Harry and their apartment, all the while constructing a mosaic of the fragments of her life. But this mosaic is a brilliant presentation of her depleted condition. When Harry forces her to leave, disgusted with her instabil­ ity, she takes a subway to 125th Street, walks up several flights of stairs to a warehouse loft and leaps from a window. Peyton knows what is happening to her and asserts her will in one final act of choice: suicide. Reflecting on her relationship with Harry and the corrupt, tangled threads that are her life, she faces a self-imposed execution, with 3i

the ax raised on high and I awaiting only the final, descend­ ing, bloody chop: oh my God, why have I forsaken you? Have I through some evil inherited in a sad century cut nyself off from You forever, and thus only by dying must take the fatal chance: to walk into a dark closet and lie down there and dream away my sins, hoping to wake in another land, in a far, fantastic dawn? (382)

But she knows there is no hope nor an alternative to continued frustra­

tion: "What a prayer it was I said; I knew He wasn't listening, mark­

ing the sparrow but not me. So to hell" (383). As she falls to her

death unclothed, shreds of memory and hope fall from her consciousness.

Her nakedness is total as she lies down in darkness, amid the faint 12 glimmers of her expiring life.

Suicide and attempted murder culminate the actions of the two

central characters in LDP. These actions originate less from carefully

planned motives than from the pressures of frustration and suffocation

felt by Peyton and Milton. Both are individuals who have been chained

to forces that they neither understand nor from which they could gain

freedom. Their final acts are terminal acts which affirm nothing more

than disgust and despair with life as they have experienced it, but their

justification is simply that Peyton and Milton find the consequences of

such terminal acts less odious and hopeless than the stultification and bondage they have previously experienced.

There is little doubt that there is significant and genuine

-I o Pavid L. Stevenson suggests that for Peyton "existence or death can be decided by no act of affirmation that can be isolated from the tumbled events of her life" ("William Styron and the Fiction of the Fifties," Recent American Fiction, ed. Joseph H. Waldmeir [Boston, 1963], p. 266). It is evident, however, that Peyton perceives clearly the "tumbled events of her life." Whether one calls her action the choice or death of instinct depends on how much he wants to accentuate her voli­ tion. It does appear, however, she acts (destroys herself) because of what she has come to know. Perhaps, too, this perception destroys in­ stinct. 52 victimization in LDP. Time after time Styron reveals his major charac­ ters subject to some condition that hinders and destroys significant action. Unlike the transcendent God of Donne and Milton through whom one appeals this flawed existence,

the Loftises are victims of an age in which God is dead; that is, the universe has no outer structure and everyone is awash in his own ego; an age in which family has neither social necessity nor moral import, there being, in effect, no worth­ while social structure and no agreeable morality.3-3

Yet Peyton and Milton are "victims" who are aware of their condition but who are unable to take meaningful action save in two desperate acts: suicide and attempted murder. Obviously, Styron’s portrait of man is a bleak one in this novel. Rebellion against the bleak conditions of their lives is manifested in Peyton and Milton not as meaningful and significant action but only as violent protest that originates from despair. But in that protest there is some measure of sympathy between reader and character because the character is aware of his condition and attempts to alter it. In the case of Peyton and Milton, the attempt is futile; but their burst of energies reveals them as human beings assert­ ing themselves rather than remaining dull and witless observers of an environment bent on choking them slowly lifeless.

Rebellion against the limitations a character observes in him­ self and his environment is quite pronounced in Styron's next novels.

Rebellion, however, takes a direction and form that suggest more than futile protest. There is greater "tragic grandeur" in the assertions of

Styron's characters in The Long March, Set This House on Fire and Confes­ sions of Nat Turner.

3-3q'Connell, "Expense of Spirit," p. 22. 53

II

Not because the hike was good or even sensible . . . but out of hope of triumph, like a chain-gang convict who endures a flogging without the slightest whimper, only to spite the flogger.Id

Philip Rahv selected The Long March as one of the works to ap­

pear in Eight Great American Short Novels (1963). In recent years the

novella has received far more attention that it did at the time of its

publication in 1952, one year after LDP. On its literal level it has

much to say about tragic man as victim rebelling against his circum­

stance. The handful of commentators who recognize its worth view it

either as allegory or myth, seeing its central character, A1 Mannix, as 15 "original Adam" consumed with pride and defiance; a Christ figure which

"shows that Mannix must be seen not just as an individual rebel but as a

spokesman for the worth and human dignity of all people who have endured centuries of pain and persecution;"^ "a grotesque caricature of Christ"

as well as an Adamic hero with a pride and will that "blind him to his own tyranny."^ No degree of allegory or mythology succeed, however, without an exact understanding of the literal components of the story.

The story contains hints (e.g., Mannix develops a heel wound during his

•^The Long March (New York, 1952), p. 72.

-’Eugene McNamara, "William Styron's Long March; Absurdity and Authority," Western Humanities Review, XV (Summer, 1961), 270. ^Peter L. Hays, "The Nature of Rebellion in The Long March," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 72.

^August Nigro, "The Long March; The Expansive Hero in a Closed World," Critique, IX, 3 [n.d.77lo£

ordeal; Colonel Templeton appears as a god, etc.) that suggest, for ex­

ample, a mythic overtone. But the story is strikingly organized on its

literal level in the development of its theme.

The victim as servant is basic to this work. A marine commander

Colonel Templeton, has ordered an endurance march of thirty-six miles

for his battalion, a battalion which includes a company of reservists

that has recently been reactivated and whose members are years removed

from the rigor of army life. The march is an order but appears as a

senseless one because it has no logical relation to physical fitness or

capability. It is merely Colonel Templeton's desire to prove USMC dif­

fers from USMCR only alphabetically; he overlooks the qualitative physi­

cal differences between the older and poorer conditioned reservists and

the younger regular marines. When company commander Captain A1 Mannix

and Lieutenant Culver, two of the reactivated reservists, learn of the

march it is in a tent lighted "like the stark, desperate, manufactured

quality of the light one imagines in an execution chamber" (2U). Mannix

endures the march much like a prisoner accepting severe punishment, ulti­ mately appearing like a beaten man, "a ponderous, bobbling motion which

resembled that of a man wretchedly spastic and paralyzed" (113). This

sense of victimization is as strikingly evident as that which was found

in LDP, but the oppressor is more clearly defined and crystallized.

The Long March begins with an event that appears structurally unrelated to the plot. Two mortar shells—for an unknown reason—have

fallen on a lunch line of marines who have bivouaced some thirty-odd miles from their base camp near Charleston, South Carolina. The eight

dead marines have not so much "departed this life, but as if sprayed 55

from a hose, they were only shreds of bone, gut, and dangling tissue to

which it would have been impossible ever to impute the quality of life,

far less the capacity to relinquish it" (3). When Mannix sees them he

cries ciyptically, "'Won't they ever let us alone, the sons of bitches

. . . won't they let us alone?"' (63). But these marines were not part

of Colonel Templeton's battalion, hence they are not related to Temple­

ton's plans for the forced march. Several hours before the march begins numerous flashbacks occur, including those concerning Lt. Culver, the principal narrator and Mannix's friend, and his life before the call-up, and flashbacks from Mannix's earlier life, principally as a regular marine. About one-half of the story describes the events of the march itself, some thirty-six miles from the bivouac area to the base camp.

The military environment serves as an excellent setting for

Styron. But this environment does not provide the ordered and revered authority a man may trust in and willingly subordinate to. It is rather one that Mannix loathes.

He had a violent contempt for the gibberish, the boy-scout passwords which replaced ordinary conversation in the military world. To Mannix they were all part of the secret language of a group of morons, morons who had been made irresponsibly and dangerously clever. (42-43)

This world is counterpoised against the world Culver remembers, a lost world now, where he could "return home to warmth and peanut butter and liverwurst, to the familiar delight of the baby's good-night embrace, to the droll combat between beagle and cat, to music before sleep" (10).

Colonel Templeton is literally important to the story because he is Mannix's superior officer whom Mannix must obey; his voice is

"neither harsh nor . . . particularly gentle. It was merely a voice 36 which expected to be obeyed. ..." (18). But Templeton acquires sym­ bolic significance: he is god-like or a representative of some superior power.

In men like Templeton all emotions—all smiles, all anger— emanated from a priestlike, religious fervor, throbbing in­ wardly with the cadence of parades and booted footfalls. By that passion rebels are ordered into quick damnation but simple doubters sometimes find indulgence— (30)

When Mannix learned of the march from Templeton, Mannix had a "quick look of both fury and suffering, like the tragic Greek mask, or a shackled slave" (31)« Bryant’s point is well taken: "Templeton is above the conflict; he is the Olympian who coolly and disinterestedly ordains the fate of his underlings, singling out no favorites, admitting no peer. "J"0 This is fitting, for the "shackled slave" never establishes a rapport of equality with the master. The master, in this instance Temple ton, "fixes" the world Mannix is to accept and the logic of the world he orders is irrelevant to what Mannix considers acceptable. Mannix characterizes Templeton’s march as gross stupidity:

"He can't take green troops like these and do that. After a couple of seven- or ten- or fifteen-mile conditioning hikes, maybe so. If they were young. And rested. Barracks-fresh. But this silly son of a bitch is going to have all these tired, flabby old men flapping around on the ground like a bunch of fish after the first two miles. Christ on a frigging crutch!" (33)

Furthermore, Templeton's command coincides with another senseless event— the destruction of the eight marines by the two mortar shells—for which no explanation can be given other than that the mortars were probably old, left over from Guam and World War II. This is the world Mannix must contend with, and contending with Templeton is little different

^Bryant, "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," p. 3U3» 57

from contending with straying mortar shells. As both can destroy as well as "bind” men in death, Mannix's world is especially made for vic­ timization.

Mannix's past especially equips him to face Templeton and the world he represents. Shortly after boot camp Mannix and several friends were drunk in a tenth story San Francisco hotel room and Mannix experi­ enced a horrifying and senseless event; he was held by his heels from the window by his drunken friends—

"I just remember the cold wind blowing on ny body and that dark, man, infinite darkness all around me, and my ankles be­ ginning to slip out of their hands. I really saw Death then, and I think that all I could think of was that I was going to fall and smash nyself on that hard, hard street below. . . . And I was reaching out, man, clutching at thin air. Then I wondered what that noise was, that high loud noise, and then I realized it was me, screaming at the top of ny voice, all over San Francisco." (57-8)

Later, in the South Pacific, on Peleliu Island, he was under heavy

Japanese fire while he held an outpost. It was here he received multiple wounds. As the Japanese poured in mortar fire, Mannix pleaded over the phone for counterfire, finally begging for anything from rifle grenades attack planes. His pleadings went unanswered. He tells Culver later in recalling this incident, "'and just before I passed out I looked down at that telephone. You know, that frigging wire had been blasted right out of sight all that time'" (b5). These two situations—talking into a disconnected telephone and hanging by the heels from a tenth story hotel with drunken friends on the other end—are more than comic episodes

They are grotesque and feared situations because a slip of a drunken hand and a disconnected phone are arbiters of a man's fate. To die because of either situation is as senseless as dying from old mortar shells 58

dropping on lunch lines and forced marches that are born from a belief

that only the alphabet separates USMC from USMCR. To live in such a world suggests that man's values can topple unexpectedly and that he is

able to do nothing about it. As Thomas Hardy writes in "Hap," if one happens to be where pain is "strown" rather than "pleasures" (or being in that lunch line rather than this one when mortar rounds are fired), then he and all of his values can be decimated by chance. For a moment man becomes a victim and his future is no longer in his hands but, as

Styron reveals in the opening incident to LM, in the "hands" of chance.

But the destructive march originates from a concrete oppressor, not chance. The march is a command from a master and Mannix, realizing this, fears

not simply fear of suffering, nor exhaustion, nor the lingering horror, which gripped both of them, of that bloocfy wasteland in the noonday heat. But the other: the old atavism that clutched them, the voice that commanded, once again, you will. (69)

Culver too senses Mannix's frustration. "In the swamp, frogs had begun a brainless chorale; their noise seemed perfectly suited to his sense of conplete and final frustration" (69). And just before the march begins

Mannix discovers a nail in his boot; it slowly cripples him during the ordeal. This chance event is as painful to Mannix as Templeton's absurd quest. The nail works its way into his flesh during the march and proves as physically damaging to Mannix as Templeton's order has proved damaging to him and his company. Both events slowly reduce Mannix to pulsating fury.

This work includes an examination of revolt as well as a descrip­ tion of victimization and Mannix is the first of Styron's characters who &

methodically plans his revolt. He first reveals his defiance of Temple­

ton during a routine series of lectures given by Templeton to his staff

of junior officers. When Mannix is chosen to respond to a "generalized,

hypothetical question," Mannix's defiance is a simple "I don't know,

sir" rather than the expected generalized, hypothetical reply. When pressed, he goes beyond this but only to state emphatically that his presence there as well as that of the other reservists is absurd and pointless. Tenvleton simply stares at him incredulously.

Mannix's ultimate stance as the rebel is created in his choice

of a mode of action. It is as dramatic as Peyton's suicide and Milton's attempted murder. It echoes Dostoevski's underground man who chooses spite and discomfort to assert his freedom and thereby escape moral philosophies that attempt to predict his actions mathematically. The underground man could choose pleasures and happiness rather than the pain and discomfort of his "underground hole," but to do so would suggest that he is a creature mathematically conditioned by the pleasure principle.

He chooses rather to suffer, to prove he can indeed endure the painful consequences of his choice. Mannix might have rebelled by choosing not to make the march but instead he accepts the pain and discomfort of it.

It is an ironic rebellion in that it conforms to the initial demands of the oppressor. When Templeton commands Mannix to ride to the base at mid-point in the march, Mannix refuses and chooses to continue the march and suffer even greater pains. But Templeton's quest has been pointless— the march accomplishes nothing—and Mannix refuses to be broken by the pointlessness of it. It would appear "normal" that the underground man and Mannix would choose lesser evils and discomforts; but both choose 60

greater ones and in so doing assert their understanding of rebellion.

Mannix will endure the march, in spite of that oppressor, as a sheer

act of defiance.

Not because the hike was good or even sensible, Culver thought, but out of hope of triumph, like a chain-gang con­ vict who endures a flogging without the slightest whimper, only to spite the flogger. (72)

Culver is the only one to see this in Mannix; "he had detected in the

Captain's tone that note of proud and willful submission, rebellion in reverse" (73)«^ And this is Mannix's stance: he will carry out the

command and thereby assert his dignity and humanity by defiantly endur­

ing what would not be acceptable under humane circumstances. But to be

successful, this defiance must be carried far beyond the merely ordinary

commitment to an unpleasant duty. Mannix must commit himself to it total ly and achieve a rebellion that dramatically illustrates the power of human endurance. And Mannix does commit himself totally to this end.

The several commentators—McNamara, Hays, Nigro—who discuss this story in detail fail to see the "rebellion in reverse" theme. It is not a rebellion in the traditional sense of doing what was forbidden (e.g., Prometheus, Adam) but is one that does what is ordered and liv­ ing with the lunacy of that order. The peculiarly modern temper of the story is man living with this absurdity, and virtually the entire plot reveals Mannix's determination. In view of this, it is irrevelant to muddy the waters with excessive ."mythologizing." Furthermore, Mannix's rebellion is the kind of rebellion open to the totally oppressed, he who chooses not to destroy the oppressor or even disobey him, both of which might be futile gestures, but rather he who chooses to carry out the insane desires of the oppressor and say to him, "Look what you have wrought. It is on your headl"

2i^Culver senses that Mannix's "gestures were not symbolic, but individual, therefore hopeless, maybe even absurd. ..." (33-36). This statement emphasizes the degree of victimization rather than diminishes the sense of rebellion. The hope of practical consequences emerging from the rebellion is diminished. Because of his extreme condition as a victim, Mannix in all probability will achieve veiy little save an "inner" satisfaction. 61

During the march the nail in Mannix's boot penetrates his foot, first causing only a minor puncture, then bleeding and swelling, and finally toward the end of the march his gait becomes "a grotesque and indecent parody of a hopeless cripple, with shoulders gyrating like a seesaw and with flapping, stricken arms" (114). Something of a symbolic structure is apparent in the literal situation: Mannix, the woulded and suffering Christ-figure and the stern but callously indifferent god-mask

Templeton who

looked still not so much the soldier but the priest in whom passion and faith had made an alloy, at last, of only the purest good intentions; above meanness or petty spite, he was leading a march to some humorless salvation, and his smile—his solicitous words, too—had at least a bleak sin­ cerity. (87-88)

When Templeton first learns of the "wounded" Mannix he really can say nothing but "well . . . well . . . well" and it is this bleak gesture that ignites the final reservoir of hate in Mannix.

He didn't hate him for himself, nor even for his brutal march. Bad as it was, there were no doubt worse ordeals; it was at least a peaceful landscape they had to cross. But he did hate him for his perverse and brainless gesture: squatting in the sand, gently, almost indecently now, stroking Mannix's foot, he had too long been conditioned by the system to perform with grace a human act. Too ignorant to know that with this gesture—so nakedly human in the midst of a crazy, capricious punishment which he himself had imposed—he lacer­ ated the Captain by his very touch. (89-90)

Templeton then suggests Mannix ride the rest of the way:

If there had been ever the faintest possibility that Mannix would ride in, those words shattered it. Mannix drew his foot away abruptly, as if the Colonel's hand were acid, or fire. "No, sir!" he said fiercely—too fiercely, the note of antagonism, now, was unmistakable—"No, sir! I'll make this frigging march." (90)

The confrontation achieves larger proportions as it envelopes the men caught between Templeton's absurd command and Mannix's fanatical 62

desire to endure it:

Most were sprawled in the weeds or the dust of the road in attitudes as stiff as death . . . And the men close at hand— the faces he could see in the indecisive light—wore looks of agonized and silent protest. They seemed to be mutely seeking for the Captain, author of their miseiy, and they were like faces of men in bondage who had jettisoned all hope, and were close to defeat. (9H-95)

As the march devastates the "shambling horde of zombies in drenched dungarees" (their servitude is double—to Mannix and Templeton), Mannix himself survives only through rage.

If in defeat he appeared despondent, he retained one violent shred of life which sustained him to the end—his fury. It would get him through. He was like a man running a gauntlet of whips, who shouts outrage and defiance at his tormentors until he falls at the finish. (107)

Mannix's defiance is total. In the final hours of the march

Templeton orders Mannix to ride in on a truck, but Mannix cracks:

"'Listen, Colonel . . . you ordered this goddam hike and I’m going to walk it even if I haven't got one goddam man left!" (ill). Mannix ac­ cuses Templeton of "crapping out" on the march and Templeton in his first display of emotion attempts to restore the proper relationship of superior to inferior but Mannix cuts him short with, "Fuck you and your information. ..." (112). Mannix's commitment to the impossible reaches rhapsodic proportions: "if one did not know he was in agony one might imagine that he was a communicant in rapture, offering up breaths of hot desire to the heavens" (llh).

Styron's final crystallization of the plot is the work of a genuine craftsman. Mannix and Culver stumble into the base camp, wounded and bleeding. Some hours later after a stunned, semi-conscious attempt at sleep, Culver, the ever-present witness and apostle to Mannix, makes 63

his way to the shower room in the officers' quarters. As he turns the

corner, he sees Mannix stumbling toward the shower room,

clawing at the wall for support, his face with its clenched eyes and taut, drawn-down mouth was one of tortured and gi­ gantic suffering. The swelling at his ankle was the size of a grapefruit, an ugly blue, and this leg he dragged behind him, a dead weight no longer capable of motion. (119)

But directly in Mannix's path is a Negro cleaning woman who, seeing

Mannix, cries "'Oh my, you poor man. What you been doin'? Do it hurt?"'

The towel wrapped around Mannix slips and he stands there, "a mass of

scars and naked as the day he emerged from his mother's womb." Mannix

replies "only with the tone of a man who, having endured and lasted, was

too weary to tell her anything but what was true. "'Deed it does,' he

said" (119-120).

Indeed the Negro knows it hurts and the two victims, one with

a heritage of endurance, the other, an isolated man, stand locked in one another's gaze as communicants. Mannix has created his defiance; the Negro's history is marked with defiance. In The Long March Mannix's stance creates a perspective from which to view the other senseless event, the slaughter of eight marines by misfired mortar rounds. Mannix does not act in terms of why events are what they are but in spite of what they are. Mannix defies by refusing to break under the most awesome of circumstances. Defiance is also a basis for accepting the death of the marines: to endure in spite of a potentially absurd end to human action.

The Long March is a symbolic situation and the parallels are many. August Nigro suggests several, ranging from the "American experi­ ence in which the individual's dream of a free and peaceful Utopia is betrayed by the suppression and bondage of a closed, tightly-organized 64

society" to the "degeneration of the hero in Western civilization" and 21 finally to Mannix as an "Ahab-like hero," Christ, Atlas, and Moses.

And so on. But the story is not really so diffuse. Templeton is a master in The Long March and he makes absurd demands. Yet he remains

aloof and remote. Little is known about him save in his capacity to

command. It is indeed possible for the victim as servant to know little about his master. Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial is executed "like a

dog" and is as ignorant at the end of his ordeal (save in his knowledge

of the paradox of the "law") as he was at the beginning. Templeton is defined only in person (a military commander) but not in purpose—there is no real explanation for why he commands what he commands. As a sym­ bol he is the aloof and unknown god who commands but does not explain, as Yahweh commands but does not explain to the suffering Job. When the marines are destroyed in the lunch-line, there is no explanation as to why it occurred other than "old shells." The existential world cannot discover a rational and benevolent superior power. It discovers, rather, forces that act sometimes benevolently or destructively, sometimes with deliberate intent or random selection. But man can defy (or rebel) or remain a passive chess piece. Mannix's choices are not negative ones;

Mannix is not broken by the command that breaks virtually everyone else, save the aloof Templeton. Though wounded, Mannix survives. His deter­ mination to endure is his revolt.

21’Nigro, pp. 104, 110, 111. 65

III

... we are serving our sentences in solitary confinement, unable to speak. All of us. Once we were able to talk with our Jailer, but now even He has gone away, leaving us alone with the knowledge of insufferable loss. ... we can only leave notes to Him—unread notes, notes that mean nothing.22

By I960, with the publication of Set This House on Fire, Styron achieved enough acclaim as a significant writer to justify some thirty odd reviews of this latest work. By 1967 at least a dozen scholarly articles had appeared, devoted entirely to STHF or the three novels to­ gether. Gunar Urang, in a 1966 issue of Critique, devotes all of his twenty-three page essay to this work. The novel lends itself to many points of view, including symbolic and nythic parallels. L. Hugh Moo re 3 has pointed out extensive Greek nythic parallels in plot, characteriza­ tion and narrator-as-chorus. However, much of the novel, including the tormented central character, Cass Kinsolving, who is filled with despair and self-loathing, is presented in "biblical material . . . present throughout the novel in the implicit forms of imagery and symbolism. . .

Each chapter seems to have its own special image or symbol of judgment or of grace.As social criticism, O'Connell notes that in STHF America is a culture that produces "plastic flowers, Hollywood (debased dreams), the automobile (pointless protracted motion). Its best and its worst

22set This House on Fire (New York, i960), p. ¿4.97-

23l. Hugh Moore, "Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, and the Use of Greek Myth," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 80-81. 2^Gunar Urang, "The Broader Vision: William Styron's Set This House on Fire," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1965-1966), 53« 66

young men flee its suffocation and gather in Sambuco, Italy, to rape 23 and murder." Finally, it has been read as a contemporary pot-boiler:

"The spirit of Hollywood looms and hovers over this absurd book like

some Unholy Ghost, giving it its vast Cineramic shape, its hectic vulgar

supercoloration, its hollow belting loudness of tone, and its ethos of pZ commercial self-excitation.

The work is neatly divided in two equal parts but both focusing

on the same events: a grotesque "party" in the Bella Vista hotel in a

small Italian village, Sambuco; the murder of an Italian peasant girl,

Francesca; and the death of Mason Flagg, a central character. These

three events occur within hours of one another and are focal points for

the direction and theme of the novel. In Part I, Peter Leverett, a

young American lawyer talks about his past, his boyhood friendship with

Mason Flagg, and their encounter years later as adults in New York and

Sambuco. Part I culminates with the party in Sambuco. Part II is dom­

inated by Cass Kinsolving, an American painter living in Sambuco after

previous unsuccessful periods in Paris and Rome. This part also covers

a substantial period of time, from Cass' boyhood days in South and North

Carolina through his European experiences, and also culminates with the

events in Sambuco. The present of the novel is a meeting of Cass and

Peter in Charleston, South Carolina, years after the events in Parts I and II, where both men, now in their early thirties, reflect upon their

2^Shaun O'Connell, "Expense of Spirit: The Vision of William Styron," Critique, VIII (Winter, 1963-1966), 29. ^Richard Foster, "An Orgy of Commerce: William Styron's Set This House on Fire," Critique, III (Summer, I960), 39. 67

past and the strange events in Sambuco. This present filters in and out

of both parts but there is no confusion of location or time, as each

shift logically follows a prior sequence of events. While several charac

ters dominate Lie Down in Darkness, the last three novels concentrate

on one: A1 Mannix in The Long March, Gass Kinsolving in STHF and Nat

Turner in Confessions of Nat Turner.

In STHF there are pervading and extensive levels of victimiza­ tion. The first is a "self-victimization," a loss of self-control and direction, where undirected impulses are responsible for the individual's thought and action. This is remarkably similar to the self-victimization the Loftises experience in Lie Down in Darkness. They, like Cass Kin­ solving, are without self-control or inner direction. The second is domination by and subsequent alienation from culture, where a culture dictates certain modes of activity, and exiles, spiritually or physical­ ly, he who fails to conform to these modes. This cultural deprivation echoes the words of Milton Loftis' father who saw strangulation occurring in American culture and its citizens standing "at the backdoor of glory.

Now in this setting part of time we are only relics of vanquished gran­ deur. ..." (LDP, 184). Such disintegration is almost cultural entropy; the "system" loses energy and direction and reaches a state of random­ ness. A third is the domination of one person by another, not in the physical sense of a literal slave, but an emotional or spiritual enslave­ ment of another. A fourth is suggested by the introductory quotation, a metaphysical imprisonment: man is contained in a metaphysical Jail and no longer able to talk with the Jailer. As the haunting atmosphere of death prevailed in Lie Down in Darkness, so its parallel, a haunting 68

atmosphere of imprisonment, spiritual death, prevails in STHF. Victim­

ization derives from many sources in STHF; it ranges from the immediate

and private experience to a generalized and encompassing metaphysical

statement.

It is Cass who first speaks of a personal, self-inflicted vic­

timization, where one becomes dominated by unrestrained passion and un­

disciplined intellect, lacking what Tillich calls a "deciding center"

that avoids "bondage to will." Such a person is hardly free in any

viable sense of the word. Lacking proper control, significant thought

and action continually elude him. When Cass and Peter meet in Charles­

ton years after the Sambuco affair, Cass reflects upon his earlier lack

of self-mastery.

"When I was in Europe I didn't know anything at all. I was half a person, trapped by terror, trapped by booze, trapped by self. I was a regular ambulating biological dis­ aster, a bag full of corruption held together by one single poisonous thought—and that was to destroy nyself in the most agonizing way there was." (5i|)

Much of Cass' monologue in Part II, before he meets Mason in Sambuco,

is a description of being entrapped by an unrestrained and undisciplined

self—of being "half a person"—and the entrapment manifests itself in

alcoholic and sexual extravagances.

Until the time Cass speaks with Luigi MLgliori, the Italian de­

tective Cass comes to know in Sambuco, he remains virtually without self-

mastery. He appears to be a tormented and driven man: "Cass' normal

condition is an alcoholic stupor, which, combined with his guilt, suffer- 27 ing and his ulcer, brings him perilously close to the brink of madness."

2?Moore, "Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, and the Use of Greek Myth." * 69

When Peter and Cass are together years later in Charleston, Cass remarks,

"God I was a regular puddle of self." But Styron seems to make Cass'

lack of understanding of causes of his condition as thematically impor­

tant to this novel as it was to Lie Down in Darkness. Cass not only

pursues activities that are destructive to himself but, like Helen,

Milton, and Peyton Loftis, really does not understand why he pursues

them. In Charleston Cass describes a dream to Peter that he vividly re­

calls but which occurred during his hellish wanderings in Paris. He was

imprisoned for reasons he did not understand and amid shouts of "gas

him, gas him." While imprisoned he "seemed to be forever climbing end­

less steel prison ladderways and going through clashing gates and doors,

chased down by a guilt I couldn't name and burdened with ity own undis-

coverable crime." Finally, "I was being led off to the lethal chamber"

(273-74). Cass never really comes to a complete understanding of the

causes of the condition the dream symbolizes, though he slowly comes to

an awareness of his total lack of self-mastery.

Though both central characters in STHF, Peter Leverett and Cass

Kinsolving, are Southerners, the "Southern" character of the novel is

in the leitmotif the Negro represents. The Negro filters in and out of

Cass' memories of his past. Part of his debased sense of self derives

from his involvement in a senseless act of destruction years earlier,

as a boy of fifteen or sixteen, in Colfax, Virginia. While working in

a hardware store with his father's cousin, Lonnie, the two of them re­

claim a radio from a Negro sharecropper who had failed to meet the pay­ ments due on it. After locating the slightly cracked radio in the cabin,

Lonnie in fuiy decides to use the sharecropper as a lesson for "'every 70

black son of a bitch in this country.'" The lesson is virtual total

destruction of the Negro's cabin. At first Cass is stunned by the wan­

ton destruction and fails to stop Lonnie—

and therein, he knew, lay his ponderous share of the blame. For although he was sickened to his entrails in a way he had never been, his newborn manhood—brought to its first test— had failed him. . . . something within him refused to allow him to give voice to the monstrousness he felt at his heart and core. . . . (377)

But worse, Cass enters into the destruction, "as if I'd picked up some

of this young lout of a maniac's fury and was set on teaching the niggers too. By God, this feeling, you know, I remember it—it was in my loins, hot, flowing, sexual" (377). This experience of debasement haunts Cass in his adult life and appears to underscore his inability to live with himself and the world. He is tormented by his past actions.

"No, there are no amends or atonement for a thing like that. But there is another thing, and though it won't bring back ary busted stove or plaster bulldog or picture either, it's something, and it's strong. What I mean is, you live with it. You live with it even when you've got it out of your mind—or think you have—and maybe there's some penance or justice in that." (379)

The actions with Lonnie, where Lonnie was something of a master, struc­ turally parallel how Cass finally saw himself in relation to he who be­ came almost a literal master in Sambuco, Mason Flagg. Mason, through his wealth and Cass' debilitated spiritual and physical state, dominated 28 Cass and saw in him only one more article to be used and abused. Cass literally struck back at Mason when he learned Mason committed a wanton

?8 Gunnar Urang aptly points out Mason's baseness and its symbolic overtones, quoting Cass' remarks to Peter that Mason is a creature from "a different race who had taken on the disguise of a man," who originated out of nothing and was committed to nothing (Urang, pp. 36-37). 71

outrage against Francesca, a poverty stricken, Italian peasant girl who

also had recently arrived in Sambuco with her aged and tubercular father,

seeking what primitive medical facilities existed in Sambuco for her

father’s illness. When Mason first saw her it was in terms of another

’’lay," or in Cass' direct terms, another "humping machine," as were all

women in Mason's life. But to Cass she was simply the painter's aesthetic

object—incredibly beautiful, "this sweetness and radiance she had which

made me simply want to contemplate her, to sit in this light of hers.

..." (ii39). Later, while talking with Peter in Charleston, Cass sug­

gests that the episode with Lonnie reverberated in the brutal situation—

Cass' destruction of Mason—at Sambuco the morning he learned of Fran­

cesca's murder.

"I could remember thinking of Lonnie and his ugly flat mug, and the cabin and the smell, and the picture and those sweet sad proud black faces, like ghosts still haunting me after so many years. And the guilt and the shame half-smothering me . . . adding such a burden to the guilt and shame I already felt that I knew that, shown one more dirty face, one more foul and unclean image of myself, I would not be able to sup­ port it." (379)

Though Cass loathes Mason, he sees in him all that is foul and unclean in himself. It is this foul and unclean self which has dominated Cass most of his adult life.

If Cass is a "puddle of self," his condition is worsened by

Mason Flagg, one who victimizes those around him. This need to dominate, which is obvious in Mason in Part II of the novel, is evident in Part I, before Mason arrives in Sambuco and enslaves his primary victim, Cass.

One critic saw little need for Part I of the novel because it appeared to spend too much time exploring the extraneous character of Peter 72

Leverett (three years before the events in Sambuco). But it is Peter

Leverett who first introduces Mason Flagg, for he attended prep school

and exchanged letters with him, and finally, some years later, spent a few days with Mason in New York. In Part I Mason's special sense of corruption and his gross disregard of civilized relationships are ap­ parent. His most significant acconplishment in prep school was the se­ duction of a thirteen year old retarded child. What passes for his "new morality" is old fashioned debauchery. During one of the parties in New

York (when he and Peter meet there as adults) he stages a bizarre sexual exhibition with his mistress while his wife talks with friends in the next room. Later Leverett stumbles into the unlocked bedroom to bid

Mason good evening only to find Mason and his mistress locked in a sexual embrace. Peter is also witness to Mason's "artistic concerns" which ultimately involve only repeated excursions into all forms of erotica

(a photograph of a "strapping, grinning, coal black African in mettlesome coition with an ostrich"), excursions that lead Peter to reflect that this art has "to all except perhaps the pubescent and the unbalanced, the least staying power of all ..." (l5l).

Mason's friendships are similar to his erotic art collection: both are replaced when the sensations grow weak. Just before Peter leaves for Europe, during his stay in New York with Mason, Celia, Mason's wife, comes by Peter's room suffering from a head injury inflicted by

Mason. Mason "explains" this to Peter as Peter boards ship, "Oh Peter, women! Sometimes I think I'll switch to beavers. -Or moose. Or

Rotarians" (169). When Mason arrives in Sambuco he "captures" Cass and

Cass pictures his relationship to Mason as one of servitude: "at last 73

I was tied to him, bound to him for reasons of pure survival, and not

just my own either, but of all those around me that I in turn had com­

mitted myself to save" (U02). Cass had undertaken to treat the desti­

tute father of Francesca, Michele, for extensive disorders including

tuberculosis. It is only through Mason and his contact with the mili­

tary PX that Cass could obtain the drugs. The bondage that existed was

quite real for Cass because Mason had "the hungry look of a man who knew

he could own you, if you'd only let him" (i+02).

The most dramatic exploitation of Cass by Mason is the episode

around which the whole story turns: the grotesque, drunken debauchery

at Hotel Bella Vista in Sambuco, where Cass, Mason and later Peter stay,

along with an inferior Hollywood movie crew, dubbed by Cass the "flicker

creeps." The climax of this orgy is in the form of a self-debasing

dance before virtually the whole of the Bella Vista clientele. It begins

with foolish parodies and idiotic gestures and culminates in an obscene

imitative act. At Mason's command Cass

leered up drunkenly at the bemused guests, amber disks of light glinting from his glasses. As big and as hulking as he was, hunched over like a great desolate animal in this ignoble posture, his voice with its flawless accent was a simper, a prissy obscene lilt as once high-pitched and vacuous and dripping over with apathy—a perfect imitation of a Paris whore. "In Norway, the way they do it . . ." And then, stupidly licking his lips, adjusting his feet, his long maniac's hair dangling down over his face, he poised him­ self to duplicate in parody that act which even the Paphian gods above—had they had the eyes—would have mourned to see brought to such degradation. (191)

This act symbolizes the puppet or the dangling man who responds on com- 29 mand. And Peter notes: "Mason had Cass, had him securely in hand. . . ."

29Mason had even extended his control to Peter. The above quota­ tion ends, "just as in an entirely different but no less impregnable 7h

A third experience of victimization is in loss of culture, the

rootlessness of the exiled wanderer. America had come to be no longer

a home to Cass, yet his time in Europe was fruitless and frustrating.

Two incidents with Americans, one in Paris and the other during Easter in Rome, dramatically illustrate exile from America. In a cafe in

Paris one afternoon Cass is seated near two Americans, one of whom "in the purest accents of America's hinterland" loudly complains of an over­ charge. Cass looks up:

"Mother of God . . . I'm in a Howard Johnson's." He was hemmed round by a sea of camera lenses and sport shirts; the noise of his compatriots assailed his ears like the fractious harangue of starlings on a fence. "Willard!" the voice persisted. "Tell him off! In French, I mean!"

Later Cass cries to Poppy, his wife, "'it's the land where the soul gets poisoned out of pure ugliness. It's because in the U.S.A. everything looks like a side street in Poughkeepsie, New York!'" (281-282). In Rome, shortly before wandering to Sambuco, Poppy and Cass meet an American couple—Grace and Willard McCabe—and the party that follows that evening has all the markings of the cornfed but empty American experience. In

Cass' studio, strewn with paint and canvas

McCabe, blind to the litter of paint and canvas strewn about the room, asked Cass what his "line" was. When told, he grimaced, grinned, but said nothing. In the Eternal City even the Pharisee cannot be unkind to art. (300)

The evening degenerates to a level not unlike the one later reached with

Mason: debauchery. The McCabes have two solid American virtues: black­ jack and bourbon. Willard not only roundly defeats and humiliates Cass way ... he had had me." Mason's strange and unconventional attitudes had captivated Peter until he observed what Mason had done to Cass in Sambuco. 75

in the evening long card game but out-drinks him as well. It ends in a

raucous fight with Cass stumbling into the night blind drunk. The

McCabes of Mineola, New York, are experienced practitioners of the two

American arts.

Cass' attitude toward America is echoed in Peter's talk with

his father shortly before Peter visits Cass in Charleston. The father

damns the culture: "'These are miserable times . . . Empty times.

Mediocre times. You can almost sniff the rot in the air. And what is

more they are going to get worse'" (12). The corrective can come only

from damnation and redemption:

"what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain—something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hell­ fire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they'll be men again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented hogs rooting at the trough. Ciphers without mind or soul or heart. Soap peddlers!" (15)

It is Mason, however, who symbolizes much of what is shoddy in

American culture. Mason stumbled on to Cass accidentally, thinking him

to be a famous American painter. In their first meeting Mason praises

every scribble Cass has done and Cass quickly observes in Mason the

American philistine. (Something that Peter discovered much less quick­ ly. ) When they meet in Charleston several years later, Cass says to

Peter, "there wasn't no more space or humanity in those drawings than you could stuff up the back end of a flea. ..." (386). But in that initial meeting between Cass and Mason, Mason generated bits and pieces of pseudo-avant-garde conversation and Cass saw in him "the bleeding shallow and insincere epitome of a bleeding neo-yahoo snakepit of a 76

fifth-rate juvenile culture that only a moron could live in, or a luna­

tic. He burnt my ass" (393). Logically enough, a large contingent of

Mason's friends at the party the time Cass debased himself were the

"flicker creeps."

There is defiance of these levels of victimization in STHF. It

is symbolized in a striking episode, but one which is incidental to the

plot. Cass returns one day from a glen near Sambuco and as he approaches

the gates of the town he sees a number of people crowded around a dog

that has been run over by a bus "with such weight and impact that his

entire lower parts from belly to tail had been mashed flat against the

asphalt pavement." But the dog's upper regions are undamaged and it

struggles to lift itself. Someone tries to put the dog out of its agony by pounding it on the head, "knocking the beast's head to the road and

bringing forth from his nostrils a gush of scarlet blood. The dog once

more raised his bloody head and commenced to struggle" (3^3). The animal

refuses to die and defies, instinctively, the oppressor of injury and

club. Later Cass dreams that this situation occurs again but he is

called upon to destroy the dog; however, during the beating the dog

turns into one of the poor, down-trodden women of Sambuco who carries

faggots in from the surrounding valleys. Though she wants to be delivered

from the pain and suffering, the flesh wouldn't die—"I realized that

this was only He who in His capricious error had created suffering mortal

flesh which refused to die, even in its own extremity" (338). Like

Mannix, the old woman and the animal doggedly resist their tormented con­ dition.

The first genuine indication of Cass' revoit is his action toward 77

Michele, Francesca's father. Cass saw in the weak and terminally ill man the opportunity to expiate the guilt he acquired in the wanton act of destruction of the Negro's cabin years earlier as well as the guilt he experiences in the dissolute life he has known until Sambuco—"those

Negroes and that ruined cabin so long ago, which seemed to be the symbol of the no-count bastard I'd been all my life" (398). Because he had no money he resorted to stealing drugs from Mason, drugs which Mason had used all along to control Cass, knowing Cass had a special interest in

Michele. To Mason, Michele was just another pathetic Italian peasant sponging from foolish Americans. If part of Cass' servitude to Mason derived from this need to aid Michele, he saw rebellion in that servi­ tude: "the paradox is that this slavish contact with Mason that I had to preserve in order to save Michele freed me to come into that knowledge of selflessness I had thirsted for like a dying man" (Ui3). Like that of Mannix, Cass' rebellion succeeds by enduring—enduring the insuffer­ able Mason and completing an action that would be the exact opposite of the debased act with Lonnie years earlier.

When Mason's oppression takes another turn, in the form of the rape of Francesca, whom he has employed as a maid, Cass' rebellion also takes another turn: murder—the final destruction of an external op­ pressor. In the early hours of the morning, after the debauchery at the

^^This revolt against the debased self continues for Cass because Cass ultimately rejects his servitude to alcohol and self-imposed debil­ itation. Urang observes: "At the time Peter makes contact with him again, he has not had a drop of beer, even, in nearly two years. This represents, of course, not some 'moral' about the evils of drinking; it is set forth as a symbol of Cass' liberation from bondage to self and from his inability to face others and himself" (Urang, p. 6l). 78

Bella Vista, Cass stumbles into the courtyard and learns of Francesca's murder. Believing Mason is responsible for this outrage—Cass had

learned earlier of Mason's rape of her—he begins a relentless pursuit

of Mason. He searches for him first in his room, then in the court­ yard and finally tracks him down near a bluff overlooking the sea. When

Cass strikes at Mason it echoes Milton Loftis' attack on Helen. In fury 31 Cass strikes at the man who has corrupted all that he touched. It is evident that Cass' attack on Mason was a fuiy motivated by the ugliness which Cass had experienced throughout his life: the ugliness he remem­ bered in the redneck cousin who pervertedly reduced the Negro's cabin to shambles; the ugliness he saw in himself as he participated in it; the ugliness he saw in the perverted and philistine Mason; the ugliness he saw in himself as a broken artist. All of these crystallized in an act of murder as rebellion.

Luigi Migliori, one of the two policemen in Sambuco, sensed Cass pathetic condition. He knows Cass murdered Mason but closes the case as a murder-suicide, allowing it to be believed that Mason killed Francesca and then took his own life. It is Luigi who speaks of existence as a jail and we the jailed who no longer can speak to the Jailer, for He has gone away. If we are lost and confined in a metaphysical jail, "to con­ fine any but the mad dogs among us is to compound that knowledge of in­ sufferable loss with a blackness like the blackness of eternal night"

(497). In his last conversation he pleads with Cass,

^1The insidious irony of the situation is that Francesca was murdered by an idiot-man, Saverio, who had met her as she was returning late the previous evening to her sick father. 79

"Ask yourself whether it is not better to go free now, if only so that you may be able to strike down this other guilt of yours and learn to enjoy whatever there is left in life to en­ joy. Because if by now, through what you have endured, you have not learned something, then five years, ten years, fifty years in jail will teach you nothing. . . . For the love of God, Cass, . . . Consider the good in yourself! Consider hope! Consider joy! . . . That is all I have to say. Now I am going to strike off that manacle." (U99)

It is Luigi who gives to Cass a sense of direction for his rebellion.

Later Cass reflects on meaningful rebellion: "to choose being, not for

the sake of being, or even the love of being, much less the desire to be forever—but in the hope of being what I could be for a time. This would be an ecstasy" (300-301).Unlike Peyton, Cass finds choice,

significant choice, not destructive choice, can emerge from chaos. And so he does choose significantly.

Values for Cass are rooted in individual acts of suffering and striving rather than abstract principles they illustrate or define.

Biyant correctly observes, "Only man gives experience meaning, and he does so through his own powers of endurance, his capacity to survive the suffering flesh is heir to."^ Senselessness continues to exist in the world and provide its own kind of brutal absurdity: "The half-wit's crime was irrational, just as fate or destiny or suffering is irrational.

Discernible causes and related effects do not figure into the fabric of 3

32Styron (or Cass) does not explain this statement and Aldridge observes a defect: "Kinsolving's last-minute choice of 'being' over 'nothingness' seems mechanical, trite, and imposed from the outside rather than prepared for by the facts as they have been given from the begin­ ning" (Time to Murder and Create, p. i|8). Though this might appear as a last minute conversion by Cass, its justification is in rebellion as sig­ nificant action even if the sources of rebellion and the causes of vic­ timization are not clearly understood. -^Bryant, "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," p. 330. 80 experience, and it is folly for men to think they do."^ Even Cass' ac­

tions toward Michele are futile, for Michele dies a grotesque death, a lonely, sick and pathetic peasant.

Who will remember Michele, anyhow? he thought. Slowly he opened his eyes and gazed at the softly brightening sea, thinking: No, unless dust can feel suffering, there will be no one to remember his death. No one. But if dust can feel suffering maybe he will be blown about a while on the air and maybe this suffering dust will get in the eyes of men who feed too well, and maybe they will weep without know­ ing why, and maybe this dust will tell them how this man dies. A lousy sack of pus . . . (453)

But this sense of futility does not preclude revolt, however, though it does profoundly mark the conditions under which a man labors. It is the constant threat of this futility that gives rebellion much of its importance, for without rebellion there is nothing.

Peter Leverett was also involved in a senseless act. On the way to Sambuco his car.struck Luciano di Lieto, a young boy on a motor­ bike who had come onto the shoreline highway from a sideroad. Luciano had been years earlier almost mutilated in a World War II bombing episode.

As the car collides with the motorbike the mutilation begins all over again.

34sryant, "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," p. 550.

-^Galloway misses an exceptional point when he suggests that Cass is the nearest thing to an old fashioned tragic figure because such figures experience a tragedy that "demands for its full implementation a belief in a moral order superior to the individual." But Cass ex­ plicitly discovers no moral order. Absurd reasoning according to Camus, who functions as the intellectual guide for Galloway, discovers that there is no transcendent order but it derives value for man in the re­ sulting tension created by this discovery. Man's isolation accentuates his values and points up his need to create, as nothing is guaranteed beyond his solitary efforts (David Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction [University of Texas, 1966], p. 74). 81

Clawing at space, he seemed to suspend there for a moment in midair, before gliding with white floundering legs and arms across the hood of the car toward me, shattering the windshield in an icy explosion of glass. Like a collapsed puppet dangling on strings, he floated away past me and was gone. (29)

But months later Peter receives a letter from Sister Marie-Joseph in the hospital where Luciano is being treated, to the effect that he has sur­ vived and returned home. Yet within a short time he returns to the hos­ pital with a broken collar bone, incurred when he fell down a flight of stairs in his home. But he recovers. "The durability of this young man is truly remarkable!" writes Sister Veronique to Peter. Luciano, like the mortally wounded dog, like the disoriented Cass, like the philosophically pessimistic Luigi, refuses to give up. He continues to defy.

Indeed, the novel does end on an affirmation but a peculiarly contemporaiy affirmation, one deriving courage to be from defiance.

Luigi, who has "saved" Cass physically and spiritually, makes this ex­ plicit. Though the Jailer listens no more to the cries of the jailed, man still can make some choices. And his rebellion (or defiance) is his choice of what he believes are values that can be salvaged, at least for a while. Rebellion is a necessity for the victim; without it he is held rigid in his cell. As Sisyphus is imprisoned but refuses total surrender, so Peter imputes as much to his father at the beginning before Peter goes to Charleston to meet Cass.

"Son, life is a search for justice," this old draftsman told me once, betraying not a flicker of self-consciousness at the immeasurable phrase. I know now that he never found it, but perhaps that matters less than that he moved through dooms of love, through griefs of joy, in his lonely seeking. (13) 82

Ihab Hassan briefly discusses STHF in Radical Innocence and casually in

an essay, "The Novel of Outrage: A Minority Voice in Postwar American Fiction."36 He suggests, somewhat vaguely and imprecisely in the former

study, that such a work (as STHF) is a "qualified encounter with neces­

sity" and "hovers between comedy and tragedy." But the novel yields a

much more precise idea of tragedy (and comedy in the sense of reconcil­

iation). The protagonist does suffer a sense of "outrage," arising from

the internal threat of an uncontrolled guilt-ridden self and from an ex­

ternal threat of another person (Mason) as well as the alienation from

his native culture. The tragic mode is rebellion, and with Cass rebel­

lion is more than a futile gesture. It is directed toward creation.

This is the first of Styron's characters to possess a more optimistic

defiance. Mannix defiantly endures the oppressor to the very end; Milton

and Peyton choose the extreme measures of attempted murder and successful

suicide; Cass chooses murder but later bitterly regrets it and makes a

final choice for creation. But all of the choices and actions stand as

defiance or rebellion against a victimization each character experiences.

The description, then, of many of Styron's "heroes" is rather

less despairing than Hassan's analysis of the ironic mode suggests, a

mode which he feels characterizes much contemporary fiction and certain­

ly Lie Down in Darkness. The problem Styron's characters face is indeed

the exercise of their freedom (which is central to Hassan's position,

though he is imprecise about "real" freedom), but an even more important problem is the nature of their rebellion when exercising what freedom

^American Scholar, XXXIV (Spring, 1963) 83

they possess. (And genuine rebellion in Hassan's ironic modes appears

to have as little reality as freedom.) With STHF rebellion has taken quite specific forms and certainly in some respects is more purposeful than the virtually futile rebellion of LDP. But the causes of rebellion for all of Styron*s central characters—Peyton, Milton, Mannix, Cass— are quite specific forms of victimization. Each experiences a force or forces that deprives him of meaningful human action, that makes of him a suffering object rather than a meaningful actor. And in this respect they are quite similar to one another.

Because of what we know of the world described in terms of rad­ ical intellectual conditions and the manifold forms of victimization oc­ curring in this world, rebellion cannot be looked upon as necessarily accomplishing its end. It is more an assertion of dignity than a path to fulfillment. Months after their conversation in Charleston, Cass writes Peter that indeed Charleston is not Florence and he walks around the city "like a wounded elephant, staggering with the usual pride and despair." Marcus Klein's idea of accommodation is relevant to Cass' con­ dition. Cass achieves no perfect union with his world after his rebel­ lion. At best he achieves an accommodation such that "he exercises his wits and thereby lives with his dilemma, and managing to live within it, he proposes the possibility of living."^37

Luigi's remark, however, cuts away a bit of Klein's optimistic position and points up a metaphysical master in STHF. "Once we were able to talk with our Jailer, but now even he has gone away, leaving us alone

3?Klein, p. 30- 84

with the knowledge of insufferable loss." We remain confined in a world

that cannot be fully understood but even this could be more easily ad­

justed to if we but could talk with God. But God has gone away and we

remain locked in our world without even an authority beyond our confine­

ment to turn to for consolation. Such a condition is suggestive of the

shackled prisoner, the "chain-gang convict" of The Long March. But re­

bellion against such harsh conditions is even more important than it

would be under less trying circumstances; it is the last hope of the

genuine human response. Rebellion may come to naught or accomplish

only the least of ends, but its assertion is proof of a human spirit.

IV

I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet I would have spared one.78

A slave is the total victim. He is an object with value but

solely within another man's context. If he is not directly physically

and mentally abused, his condition is not lessened, for he soon learns

he is totally without personal value. What value he does have is that

of property and as property he remains. In the Confessions of Nat

Turner Styron not only presents this type of victim but reveals his total

and calculated rebellion as well. Yet calculated and systematic destrue­ co tion, which is at the heart of this revolt, is the extreme act of the

3®William Styron, Confessions of Nat Turner (New York, 1967), p. 428.

>39zMilton's attempted murder of Helen and Cass' murder of Mason are less calculated acts and more acts of passion, ignited moments or hours before the acts themselves. Turner's actions are carefully planned years earlier. 83

slave. It is the slave rejecting the oppressor in the only remaining

way he sees to assert his dignity as person and not property. But his

choice of such actions remains critical and dangerous because he denies

to others what he wishes for himself: the future. Such an action's

practical consequences are unusually limited, for the same technique

might well be used on him, the slave. Cass Kinsolving in STHF regrets

his action.

"But to kill a man, even in hatred, even in revenge, is like an amputation. Though this man may have done you the foulest injustice in the world, when you have killed him you have removed a part of yourself forever. . . . What, if you had let him live, would he have become? Would he have stayed a swine, unregenerate to the end?" (STHF, p. Uh6)hO

But the bondage Nat experiences convinces him that he and other Negroes

will indeed remain enslaved men. Therefore Nat resorts to that final

act in total and calculated fury.

There are striking parallels between this work and The Long

March. Mannix is "bound" to an institution, the military, as Nat is

bound to a Southern institution, slavery; Mannix undergoes extraordinary

pain and suffering during his ordeal, and Nat suffers most of the indig­

nities of literal servitude; Mannix rejects a higher authority and is to

be courtmartialed, and Nat is executed after the abortive revolt; Mannix's

rebellion appears futile and senseless, and Turner's rebellion culminates

in a retaliatory slaughter by whites of innocent Negroes; and so on.

The present action of Confessions of Nat Turner is a few days

^The thought echoes John Donne's Meditation XVII: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . Any man's death diminishes me because I am in­ volved in mankind. ..." 86

in late October and early November, 1831, just as that of LDP is a few

hours during the day of Peyton's funeral, and STHF a few days in Charles­

ton, South Carolina. From those vantage points the novels look back in­

to earlier periods to weave thematically, though not chronologically,

plot and character. In CNT Nat is in jail in Jerusalem, Virginia, await­

ing trial and execution for his leadership of the Southampton revolt,

which destroyed some fifty-odd whites in that county. He is persuaded

by a Thomas Gray to "confess" the particulars of the rebellion as well

as his exact part in the murders. Styron has used an historical confes­

sion given to an historical Thomas Gray but enlarged upon it to construct theme and character.^ Puring his confinement Nat also reflects upon

his motives and his past life. These recollections go far beyond but

artistically interconnect with the original confessions to Gray. Nat's

^Many black writers (see William Styron's Nat Turner, ed. John Henrik Clarke, Boston, 1968) have reacted adversely to Styron's "medita­ tion on history," principally because they believe that Styron's Turner is historically inaccurate, that he is not presented as the black and perfect militant that he probably was, that his involvement with Margaret Whitehead, a young white girl, is a vicious stereotype of the black man's desire, and that Styron implies slavery was far less odious than bloody revolt. In response to the first point, very little is known of the his­ torical Nat save through his "recorded confession" and Styron has cre­ ated a character which is, indeed, an obligation of the true writer. To * the fourth point, that Styron implicitly justifies slavery, one must respond that it is Styron's Turner who articulates the subtle horror of being well-cared for property (as well as mistreated property), thus es­ tablishing motivation for the rebellion against this most excruciating form of victimization. To the second point, that Turner is not sufficient ly established as a black militant, one must say that Styron's Turner is substantially perceptive and heroic, and rather than presenting a stereo­ type school boy's black George Washington (thus creating a black mythol­ ogy as unrelated to history as most white mythology), Styron has at­ tempted the creation of an introspective consciousness who not only comes into full awareness of both subtle and overt victimization but who rebels against it. The following discussion should illuminate the depth and scope of Turner's perceptions and convictions. To the second criticism, that of Turner's involvement with Margaret Whitehead, see pages 98-100. 87

recollections include all of his masters, beginning with Benjamin

Turner (through Nat’s eighth or ninth year); Samuel Turner, his brother

(through his twentieth year); Reverend Alexander Eppes (a master for a

few months, until, standing in a "nigger pen" in the village of Sussex

Courthouse, Virginia, he was sold for $460); Thomas Moore (through Nat's twenty-ninth year); and ending with Moore's fifteen year old son, Putnam, and indirectly Joseph Travis who married Sarah Moore, Thomas' widow.

("For although under law I was Putnam's by title, I belonged to Travis, who had the right to exercise full control over me until Putnam reached his majority" [p. 44]). Nat notes with irony that he was turned into two-fold property, "not an unheard-of-arrangement but additionally un­ satisfying to property already half-deranged at being owned even once"

(41). The revolt itself, which is a central recollection, began at the

Travis', circled outward to include the adjoining homes and farms, and ended three days later, short of its immediate objective: the armory in

Jerusalem, the county seat of Southampton. At the time of his execution, several weeks after the abortive revolt, Nat was just under thirty-two years old.

Literal bondage is thematically effective for the novel because it includes far more than restricting and directing the body; when it is successful it is total and absolute control of person, a depersonaliza tion which could be called the ultimate outrage. Literal bondage in nineteenth century America was racial bondage and much of the novel points up the depersonalization that occurred under it. The depth of the outrage is vividly apparent in Gray's "benevolent" talk with Nat on the nature of chattel. Animate chattel "poses a particularly tricky 88 and subtle jurisprudential problem when it comes to adjudicating damages for loss of life and destruction of property" (20). Or more directly, how does one punish "animate chattel" when such chattel violates the law?

"You ain’t a wagon . . . but chattel that possesses moral choice and spiritual volition. Remember that well. Because that's how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that's how you're goin' to be tried next Sattidy." (21-22)

This legal nicety spares the slave punishment on human grounds; he is more properly regarded as a self-motivating wagon. Like Mannix, the literal slave is also subject to the arbitrary definitions and terms of the master and is denied the dignity of seeing his deprivations reflected beyond his own awareness of them.

The literal slave's bondage has all the earmarks of Hassan's ex­ istential pattern, for there is no secular or external standard for the slave to turn to which will guarantee the cause of human dignity as well as measure the depth of his outrage. When told by Gray that "nigger slavery's going to last a thousand years," Nat ponders at that moment the plight of a fly in his cell, a form of existence

in which there was no act of will, no choice, but a blind and automatic obedience to instinct which caused him to feast end­ lessly and gluttonously and revoltingly upon the guts of a rot­ ting fox or a bucket of prisoner's slops. Surely then, that would be the ultimate damnation: to exist in the world of a fly, eating thus, without will or choice and against all desire. (26-27)

But this is the condition of the Negro: "It seemed rather that my black shit-eating people were surely like flies, God's mindless outcasts, lack­ ing even that will to destroy by their own hand their unending anguish"

^The purpose of the image is strikingly similar to Frederick Henry's observation as he sits before the fireplace in his and Catherine's 89

Gray even berates Nat for his religious piety and denounces

Christianity.

"Christianity is finished and done with. Don't you know that, Reverend? And don't you realize further that it was the mes­ sage contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the prime mover, of this entire miserable catastrophe? Don't you see the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?" (Ill)

This comment is particularly painful to Nat because Nat's incredibly

thorough biblical education gave him clear motivation for his revolt.

After learning to read, which in itself was near miraculous for a slave

(as well as for some whites: Thomas Moore, who owned Nat for several years, was illiterate), Nat virtually memorized the Old Testament. He felt nearest the prophet Ezekiel, who felt a divine fury.

Go through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof . . . Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark. . . . (52) [Ezekiel 9:4-6]

Nat ultimately obeys this injunction.

More painful to Nat than his confinement in Jerusalem is the separation from God. While in the Jerusalem jail he is under something of a metaphysical isolation because his religious visions and convictions are no longer steadfast and he is plagued by doubt. This is a particular­ ly grave situation for Nat because it was not private conviction that motivated him but prophetic insight. A purely secular orientation would have left him less convinced of his mission. His isolation is made even

Swiss retreat. Ants are in the middle of a log burning at both ends. The ants' bondage is absolute: they can suffocate in the middle or burn to death by falling off. Frederick looks on as a master but declines to become a messiah (Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms [New York: Charles Scribner's], pp. 327-328). 90 more profound because the revolt wrought more suffering than ever ex­ isted before. Those he hoped to lead out of bondage were the victims of white vigilante groups which roamed Southampton county after the revolt and were responsible for the indiscriminate murder of more than one hun­ dred and thirty Negroes. Repressive measures against the surviving

Negroes were far greater than those known earlier, at least in Virginia.

The full impact of this religious isolation comes to Nat when Gray leaves with the completed confession.

Then what I done was wrong. Lord? . . . And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption? I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusa­ lem. (115)

Metaphysical or theological anguish is a cruel irony. Hassan speaks of it in the existential pattern: "intention and fulfillment, dream and fact, engage in a perpetual debate which can be both ludicrous and grind­ ing.-"^ Though Nat never loses his faith, he dies thinking more of that one person he would have spared than of the God that he felt had directed his earlier actions.

Nat Turner's isolation in the Jerusalem jail has its roots in the special feeling that arises in a slave, at least those who have not been totally depersonalized. In the Negro, this feeling is called by Nat's friend, Hark, "blackassed." It is noticed rather early: "dating from the age of twelve or ten or even earlier, he becomes aware that he is only merchandise, goods, in the eyes of all white people [he is] devoid of character or moral sense or soul" (53). Nat experienced this condition

^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 116. 91

one evening while he was serving as a "house nigger" at the Turners'.

Samuel Turner had retained some measure of ambivalency toward slavery

but not his brother Benjamin nor their Episcopalina guests of that

evening: slavery was to them as natural as the church. In the course

of the conversation Benjamin refers to Nat as a slave and the effect on

Nat is instantaneous:

Nigger, Negro, darky, yes—but I had never heard nyself called a slave before. I remember moving uneasily beneath their si­ lent, contemplative gaze and I felt awkward and naked, stripped down to bare black flesh, and a wicked chill like cold water filled the hollow of my gut as the thought crashed in upon me: Yes, I am a slave. (l6U)

Nat's awakening to this state of servitude took precise turns under the

benevolence of Samuel Turner ("Marse Samuel" to Nat), whose benevolence

was extensive, not imaginary. As a young "house nigger" Nat's precocious­

ness caught the fancy of the women in the Turner household and they in

turn taught him such essentials as reading in order that he should become

a truly exceptional "darky." He developed an extraordinary biblical

learning but, ironically, his motivations for the blood-bath that follows years later evolved from this biblical mastery. And Samuel's benevolence

did not necessarily breed thankfulness for morsels: "what sorrow he was

guilty of creating by feeding me that half-loaf of learning: far more bearable no loaf at all" (l£6). Rather than decreasing, Samuel Turner's benevolence increased the experience of being "blackassed."

Without an understanding of this peculiar servitude—man as property—a judgment similar to that of Richard Gilman's unfortunate evaluation of CNT occurs. He contends that

there is nothing in Turner's Negroness that accounts for his religious fanaticism or even provides it with a basis, unless 92

that might be the clichéd notion that oppressed and enslaved people might naturally turn to God. And there is a great deal in Styron's character being Negro that works against any successful imaginative appropriation of what being Negro is.

Furthermore, "Styron hasn't made a reading of Negro or slave mentality

but only of a religious fanatic who happens to be a Negro.It is

evident, however, that carefully structured in the novel is the Negro

as property and his awareness as property that prompts his violent re­

volt. Even the "benevolence" of the master underscores this because it is nothing more than a continuation under less harsh conditions of

"otherness" the slave feels. What many Caucasian Americans feel today

toward the Negro repeats this "otherness"—e.g., "what else do they want?" Marse Samuel's benevolence toward Nat created a deep feeling between the two.

Yet still the unhappy fact remains: despite warmth and friend­ ship, despite a kind of love, I began as surely an experiment as a lesson in pig-breeding or the broadcasting of a-new type of manure. (155)

This is a crucial point in the novel because the revolt ultimately de­ stroys innocent whites as well as bestial masters (but rather unsuc­ cessful in this latter respect). The depravity of the master, whether direct or subtle, infects the whole culture; therefore, a rebellion to destroy this enormity is Nat's logic. Shaun O'Connell in his review senses the full scope of oppression when he considers that Nat's basic humanity far exceeds that of the "oppressor whose lack of human charac­ teristics justifies ary retributive horror" and Nat's religious persuasion

^■Richard Gilman, "Nat Turner Revisited," New Republic, April 27, 1968, pp. 25-26. 93 in face of this horror demonstrates the need to lead in vengeance "a majestic black army of the Lord."^

The idea of a revolt began for Nat during his days with Moore but, indirectly, much earlier with Samuel Turner. At Moore's, three events occurred that crystallized the urgency of a revolt: a vision following a fast (an observance wholly consonant with Nat's religious fervor) and two natural occurrences involving the shattering effects of servitude. The vision is an encounter between two black angels and a white one and a voice speaking through the black angels the prophetic words from Revelations. The first black angel warns:

"If any man worship the beast and his image and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the Lamb, and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever." (291) [Revelations lb:9-11]

The second engages the white angel in mortal combat but the white enemy of God is vanquished and the victorious black angel cries:

b5 Shaun O'Connell, "Styron's Nat Turner . . .," The Nation, October 16, 196?, pp. 373-7U. The enormity of the oppression can be seen in Nat's friends. Hark: sold by "people or monsters" named Barnett to finance a move to Mississippi though his mother and sisters remained with the Barnetts. Willis: sold by Turner to a "nigger-trader" under the pretext that he was to be "hired out" for two weeks. Will: owned by a "nigger-breaker," Nathaniel Francis, who has "beaten him into some kind of stunned and temporary submission." Nelson: sold at least six times, and whose children were "scattered to the winds." Henry: deafened in childhood by a blow on the skull by a drunken overseer. And it should be remembered that Tidewater Virginia was a garden paradise for slaves when compared to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi. Numerous black critics are disturbed that many of the Negroes appear less than sterling examples of virtuous manhood. That some of the Negroes appear bestial, especially during the brief revolt, is entirely logical in view of the enormity of their enforced degradation. It would be most unfortunate to overlook Styron's subtlety: the thinly veneered bestiality of the owners of human property is a far greater corruption than the Negroes' bestiality because it has produced and perpetuated the latter's condition. 9b

"These shall make war with the Lamb and the Lamb shall overcome them, for he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful." [Revelations 1? :ll|]

Thus, the rebellion was cast in a theological mold.

The natural occurrences were equally vivid. Some days after this

vision, while riding with Moore into Jerusalem, Nat and Moore come upon

a "free" Negro, Isham, his wife and child.The three are near starva­

tion, the child "a limp, shapeless tiny thing like a bundle of twigs."

Isham halts Moore’s team of mules and unleashes a chain of obscenities

upon Moore. Nat recalls: "Nor had I ever heard raw hatred like this

on a Negro's lips . . . ." Isham had never received the pittance owed

him by Moore for a few hours' work, and his fury crystallizes in a verbal

onslaught against Moore. Isham's only overt act is the pathetic defiance

of spitting on the master and this fails: "his mouth made a frustrated

smacking noise and again he tried in vain, smacking—a defeated effort

awful to watch" (297). Isham echoes the crippled and stunned Mannix who has endured all the master has demanded. Mannix's obscene "fuck you

and your information" directed to Templeton parallels Isham's verbal at­

tack against Moore. In both instances, defiance guaranteed no hopeful

consequent, but only the probability of further punishment. But the de­

fiance remains and the event is burnt into Nat's memory.

Yet I had seen Moore's terror and his startled insect-twitch, a pockmarked white runt flayed into panic by a famished Negro so drained of life's juices that he lacked even the spittle

k^Nat's mother remarked to him as a child: "Druther be a low cornfield nigger or dead than a free nigger. Dey sets a nigger free and only thing dat po* soul gits to eat is what's left over of de garbage after the skunks an' dogs has et. . . ." (19U") 95

to spit. This terror was from that instant memorialized in ny brain as unshakably as there was engrafted upon my heart the hopeless and proud and unrelenting fury of Isham—he who as the wagon fled him through the haze shouted at Moore in an ever-dimming voice, "Pig shit! Someday nigger eat meat, white man eat pig shit!" and seemed in his receding gaunt contour as majestic as a foul-tongued John the Baptist howling in the wilderness. (298)

The third confirmation for the revolt occurs the next day, on yet another trip to Jerusalem.^7 Nat witnesses a second act of human

degradation, one in which two Negroes are made to fight each other for

the amusement of white degenerates. The combatants are Will and Sam, property of the nigger-breaker, Nathaniel Francis. This scene, perhaps more than the earlier one with Isham, is horrifying to Nat because it pits servant against servant destroying the last vestige of self-respect.

It is a form of depersonalization that for a moment substitutes bestial actions by one slave toward another for the bestial demands of the op­ pressor. After observing this perversion Nat comes into full awareness of what is to be done:

it was at this instant that I knew beyond doubt or danger that— whatever the place, whatever the appointed time, whoever the gentle young girl now serenely plucking blossoms within a bower or the mistress knitting in the coolness of a country parlor or the innocent lad seated contemplating the cobwebbed walls of an outhouse in a summery field—the whole world of white flesh would someday founder and split apart upon ny retribution, would perish by my design and at ny hands. My stomach heaved and I restrained the urge to vomit on the boards where I sat. (306-7)

The examples in the quotation are critical. When the slave faces radical conditions of servitude, selective or programmatic revolt is less

^7The Christian symbolism is pointed by now; however, historical­ ly the county seat of Southampton was indeed Jerusalem and later changed to Courtland. But the historical coincidence makes the Christian motif even more appealing. 96

emotionally probable than annihilation of the oppressor. The depth of

white depravity has made the oppressor congeal into one undifferentiated

form.

Thomas Moore's and Joseph Travis' farms adjoined and Moore's

widow, Sarah (Moore dies in a "bizarre and fatal accident") married

Travis. The last two years of Nat's life were spent on the Travis farm,

where he practiced his trade, carpentry, with great skill. Ironically

Nat's life with Travis was more comfortable and free than at any other

time since his years with Samuel Turner.

Yet inside I was burning. Burning! Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of ny life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them? (3^2)

For Nat benevolence only altered the hardship of being property, not the

fact of it. For example, at the Travis' "a well-liked nigger" ate well:

"we ate well from the leavings of the house"; the master comported "him­

self like the slave's ideal master;" and Marse Travis was "owner of the

smartest nigger in Southanpton County." (3U3, my italics) Servitude

might well be softened by an absence of cruelty but its demeaning charac­

ter is not obscured.

k^There is subtle depravity in unctuous piety, including that secular piety which appears as a regional brotherhood. In "This Quiet Dust" Styron speaks of memories and recollections of Southampton county before the actual writing of CNT. A cousin of Styron's in-laws took him on a detailed exploration of the county, but the cousin ultimately reveals more of himself than the county. "You take your average person from up North, he just doesn't know the Negro like we do. Now for instance I have a Negro who's worked for me for years, name of Ernest. He knows if he breaks his arm—like he did a while ago, fell off a tractor— he knows he can come to me and I'll see that he's taken care of, hospital expenses and all, and I'll take care of him and his 97

Nat received prophetic directions about the revolt at the Moore's

but specific information at the Travis'. It was at the Travis' in the

late winter of 1831 that the Lord "spoke" to Nat and removed the "seal"

from Nat's lips. "The Spirit had appeared to me in the form of the

eclipse of the sun" and "had informed me that the Serpent was loosened

and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men. . . .

the time was fast approaching when 'the first shall be last and the last

shall be first'" (3h9). The exact date appeared almost providential: a

Baptist camp meeting was to be held in Gates county, North Carolina from

August 19 to the 23rd.

What an unforeseen bountyI Deprived of several hundred Baptist sinners—half of its population—Jerusalem should be child's play to capture and destroy. Silently I of­ fered a prayer of thanks. It was my very last sign. (336)

The plan for the attack included striking first at Travis' on

Sunday night, the 21st; and to weave an "S" path by the next day to the

Whiteheads', a home with an ample supply of guns, ammunition and horses.

The ultimate goal of the plan was the county seat of Jerusalem and its armory and from there to Dismal Swamp, some thirty-five miles from

family while he's unable to work, right on down the line. I don't ask him to pay back a cent, either, that's for sure. We have a wonderful relationship, that Negro and myself. By God, I'd die for that Negro and he knows it, and he'd do the same for me. But Ernest doesn't want to sit down at my table, here in this house, and have supper with me—and he wouldn't want me in his house. And Ernest's got kids like I do, and he doesn't want them to go to school with my Bobby, any more than Bobby wants to go to school with his kids. It works both ways. People up North don't seem to be able to understand a simple fact like that." Intimate contact, benevolence, compassion, its all here. But most of what is here is an asymmetrical relationship between cousin Dan and "good ole Ernest" who would "die for him" ("This Quiet Dust," Harper's, April, 1963, p. 1)|2). 98

Jerusalem.. This foreboding area of five hundred square miles would be

the refuge for all of the slaves who joined in separate revolts as word

spread of Nat’s successful one. With extraordinary good fortune and

large amounts of discipline, Nat hoped to sweep the county and arrive

in Jerusalem the second day of the revolt. But Dismal Swamp was an even

more dismal objective than simply a swamp because the revolt disintegrated

within hours. The ranks of the discontented and despairing did not swell

with hundreds of fleeing slaves (indeed some fought alongside their

masters); some got pitifully drunk; and they collectively failed in their

objective to destroy those who might warn the remainder of the county.

The revolt failed but as Nat reminds Gray

what else could you expect from most young men deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, shackled, and hamstrung from the moment of their first baby-squall on a bare clay floor? It was pro­ digious that we come as far as we did, that we nearly took Jerusalem. . . . C396T”

Revolt against servitude of this degree has little chance to succeed be­

cause of the conditions under which it originates. The dignity must be in the act of revolt rather than solely in its consequences.

The least effective part of the novel is the relationship of

Margaret Whitehead and Nat. Nat had come to know Margaret from the time he was loaned by Moore and later Travis to the Whiteheads (i.e., Nat,

"a smart nigger," could be temporarily swapped for a good yoke of oxen), but the eighteen year old Margaret sensed something bestial in slavery and specifically in the hypocritical cant of her brother, a Methodist minister. Nat is interesting to her because of his apparent intelligence and extraordinary biblical learning. Ironically, she is the only one

Nat kills and, more ironically, the least deserving to die. Much is 99

made of the fact that Nat found it excruciatingly difficult to kill dur­

ing the hours of the revolt and ultimately killed no one but Margaret.

The irony is forced, however, because it originates from a cliche and

stock situation. Nat's attraction to her before the murder as well as his later remorse repeats an unexamined commonplace, that a Negro's ultimate vision of feminine involvement is white. The dying gasps of forgiveness from Margaret before she succumbs to Nat's club echo the worst of sentimental stock situations—a sort of, "I forgive you darling li9 as I swoon on to death."47

In the Plimpton interview (noted below) Styron justifies Nat's reluctance to kill by arguing that Nat was "overtaken by his own human­ ity" in his failure to kill as the others killed. Or, on philosophical grounds, murder is dangerous because it "perpetuates the silent hostil­ ity that separates the oppressor from the oppressed."^ But the fact remains, Nat's fury was religiously motivated (visions, voices, biblical learning, a prophet for the victimized blacks) and believing in that he

^In a recent interview Styron spoke of the relationship between Margaret and Nat. "I was trying to suggest that—insofar as the phrase signifies anything—she was a white Southern liberal, meaning that she deeply sympathized with the plight of the Negro, which was not at all unusual for certain young ladies of the time, oddly enough. True, she might have had a buried passion for Nat be­ cause he was so much smarter than the white people she was associating with. Nat's feelings for her were just as I de­ scribed them in the book: he was smitten by her, this paragon of the unobtainable, in some obscure and perilous way so that the killing of her was not only a matter of working out his frustration but possessing her soul and body as well." (George Plimpton, "William Styron: A Shared Ordeal," New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1967, pp. 32, 3h.) -^Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York, 1957), p. 283. 100

readily accepted divine fury rather than existential humanism. Though

he failed to kill as the others did, though he experienced the anguish

of losing God during the peak of the slaughter, he reflects to himself

while going to his death: "I would have done it all again. I would

have destroyed them all." Yet he would have spared one—she who saw

him as person and not property. In her he saw that revolt need not be

absolute destruction. Margaret Whitehead saw a bit of humanity. The

others did not.

Confessions of Nat Turner is the most thoroughgoing statement

about victimization Styron has written. Nat faced a condition which

threatened him with and reduced others to depersonalization. Further­ more, though victimization is present in its most extreme form, rebel­ lion is present too. Nat's rebellion, however, changes nothing and harms ultimately those he would have saved, other Negroes. But the re­ bellion is a real and powerful assertion of freedom—freedom for the right to have an identity. But tragedy doesn't end in total accomplish ment; it ends with a protagonist asserting himself against those condi­ tions which threaten to engulf and destroy him. And Nat's tragic mode is his rebellion and the consequences of that rebellion.

V

In many respects the central problem for the writer today is the problem of victimization. The victim is usually thought to be he who ceases to be man and becomes manipulated object. Victimization is, however, a radical extension of tragic man's suffering condition. In view of this, it should be understood that the final values for the 101

victim as tragic man are not in the goals he reaches but in the percep­

tion of his condition and the nature of his actions. But victimized man today, it would appear, has little hope of developing perception and even less hope for significant actions. William Styron's characters are strikingly interesting because they do evince this victimized condition but, more importantly, they reveal a very vivid perception of that con­ dition and a determination to react to it. The actions are in the form of rebellions, rejections of those forces which threaten them with total victimization. But it remains, however, that the scope and depth of vic­ timization they experience suggest probable limitations on the scope and success of rebellion. This does not mean, however, tragedy is necessarily absent; it only suggests that one must understand accurately what indeed does occur under such extraordinary conditions rather than summarily as­ sume nothing occurs save bleak gestures. What Styron has written recently of Thomas Wolfe is true of Styron's work: "the clear glimpses he had at certain moments of man as a strange, suffering animal alone beneath the cP blazing and indifferent stars would suffice to earn him honor."-' If rebellion can exist under the circumstances described by these phrases, then man has earned tragic grandeur.

Arthur Miller once said that "the thrust for freedom is the qual­ ity in tragedy which exalts."^ Rebellion is a thirst for freedom—freedom from oppressive conditions that originate in one's self, another person,

-’■’william Styron, "The Shade of Thomas Wolfe," Harper's, April, 1968, p. 104. ^"Tragecty- and the Common Man," Aspects of the Drama, ed. Sylvan Barnet, et al. (Boston, 1962), p. 66. Originally appearing in New York Times, February 27, 1949« 102 society, or freedom from the oppressive despair of a surrounding void.

But this assertion (or rebellion in the terms of this study) adopts many forms, some of which challenge the basic notions of what is a moral action. The rebellion of Peyton and Milton Loftis is negation of the complicated condition which envelops them; Captain A1 Mannix's de­ fiance is a determined endurance of an absurd demand; Cass Kinsolving's rebellion is the murder of a tyrant but more significantly a choice for

"being" in spite of the void that lurks behind all actions; Nat Turner's rebellion is the clear and decisive rejection of the oppressor at any cost to himself and others. It is in Turner, however, that one observes the near complete victim. Victimization reaches its profoundest limits in Turner's existence, hence his condition is not only representative of the nineteenth century slave but is virtually symbolic of modem man's condition as well. Rebellion under such circumstances, though extraor­ dinarily difficult, is not distantly removed from tragic action, because both involve perception and assertion yet culminate in some specific sense of defeat. Indeed, the identifying mark of tragic action is irony, action leading toward frustration and destruction rather than the harmony and creation a protagonist seeks. Because man today lives under radical in­ tellectual conditions, it is most probable his rebellion will have a sim­ ilar end. But the mark of twentieth century man must be rebellion against that which victimizes him, though he must live with the haunting possibil­ ity of nothing whatsoever coming of that rebellion save the act of rebel­ lion itself. Nat Turner's words can be symbolic of man today: I would have done it all again. /a 3

CHAPTER IV

JOSEPH HELLER: ABSURD COMEDY AND CATCH 22

There just doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of re­ wards and punishment . . . Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this univ erse. 3-

1

2 Black humor and absurd comedy are phrases often repeated today

to describe a mode of dramatic and fictional writing new to literature

in the past two decades. As with most literary forms which appear as

original, however, there exists a tradition that exerts quite specific

influences on absurd comedy. Situations similar to contemporary absurd

situations can be found in earlier literature, from Aristophanes or

Sophocles (particularly in the latter because of the unresolved tension between destiny and personal freedom) to Erasmus to Cervantes to Melville.

But what appears as "new" in absurd literature today is the scope, depth,

and dehumanization that are characteristic of disproportion and incongru­ ity. The latter are not things ultimately to be corrected, but are

^Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York, l?6l), p. 169.

Because black has achieved substantially different connotations in the late 196O's, particularly as the new and honorific identification of the Negro, it would be to greater advantage to identify the comedy under discussion as absurd comedy or humor. Absurd should then be taken not in the perjorative sense of something ill-conceived but rather as an unusual state of incongruity or disproportion. Such a state is not only comic but also frightening and despairing because of the scope and depth of danger and destruction which await the comic figure. io4 profound disturbances that not only must be lived with but that are quite often looked upon by "normal" people in strange and perverse ways as ultimate goods. But in its broadest usage absurd comedy does suggest a similarity to traditional comedy; in either one a character is an ob­ ject of laughter, perhaps scorn, presumably because he is in violation of a moral or social order. In narrower usage, however, absurd comedy is more at odds with traditional comedy, where, in the latter, "a new order of society crystallizes around the hero." Such comedy "predicts the ritual expulsion of death and disorder.But in absurd comedy the absence of order (or resolution of the comic situation) persists and the comic hero is left with his knowledge of the pervading illogic (i.e., disproportion, incongruity) of things. An example of such knowledge is that of the warrant officer in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 who remarks that there "doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of rewards and punish­ ment. In this remark his awareness or knowledge is a resolution of his predicament only insofar as it is knowledge he can use if he is to live in his world to avoid becoming a total (rather than a partial) victim of the comic situation.

This "illogic of things" is a characteristic of "modern" trag­ edy, with it emphasis on disproportion and incongruity, as it is of ab­ surd comedy. This is really to say that contemporary tragedy and comedy

^Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 201.

^■Herman Melville's famous lines echo the same point: "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange, mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own" (Moby Dick, Chapter XLIX, "The Hyena"). 103

have remarkably similar material with which to work and are not differ­

ent in terms of the reality they portray nor in the seriousness with

which they approach it. For example, it was suggested in the study of

Styron that tragedy includes some form of victimization—and rebellion

on the part of the protagonist is a revolt against that victimization.

Victimization in absurd comedy is quite real and threatening; the comic

figure can be readily taken advantage of and exploited and quite often

is. (Many a current anti-hero, comic or not, is "on the run" because

someone or some institution is determined to control or destroy him.)

Furthermore, the errors in and evils of his world are not temporary or

ephemeral as they are in traditional comedy but permanent and deadly as

they are in tragedy.

Yet the tragic figure succumbs to the burdens of the world, and

the absurd comic figure attempts some mode of adjustment to what he be­

lieves to be a ludicrous though deadly world. The world is ludicrous because of the extraordinary gap between appearance and reality, a gap

found on all levels of experience—cosmic, social, private—and such a

ludicrous world often borders on the world of burlesque or low comedy.

But contained in the situations of absurd comecfy are matters of life and

^Melville's "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno" are in part examples of nineteenth century American absurd humor. The comic character and condition of the lawyer in "Bartleby" and Captain Delano in "Benito Cereno" are obvious but the stories involve "deadly" serious themes of identity and blurred perception, where basic human values are at stake. In each instance there is no return to traditional comic resolution: the lawyer accepts that Bartleby was a dead letter clerk, thus finding an "explanation" for Bartleby's condition; Captain Delano is little dis­ turbed by his woefully inadequate grasp of the happenings aboard the San Dominick and dismisses the whole thing: "Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves." 106

death, matters of ultimate values, and the reader both weeps and laughs

at the extraordinary predicament of the character. Living in such a

world demands great agility of the comic figure; the way he exercises

this agility, both verbally and physically, creates much of the comic

condition. This agility is, as Marcus Klein puts it, "a simultaneous

engagement and disengagement" and is "at best a lesson on the perpetual

necessity of killing adjustments." Absurd comedy doesn't achieve a har­

monious view of the world; it continues to see the world as permanently

illogical or in its better moments only "provisionally" rational and

the basic act of staying alive is a test of the imagination.

Though there is, then, substantial similarity between tragedy

and absurd comedy today, the mode of response by the absurd comic figure

usually leads to different consequences than the mode of response by

the tragic figure and this has historical precedent. The latter's mode

of response usually leads to some form of defeat and subsequent demise;

the former's toward some form of adjustment and continued life as in tra

ditional comefy. But that continued life of the absurd comic figure is often blurred and filled with error and blunted purpose, and he never really reaches a resting place. And it is reasonably clear why he does not.

In traditional literature, the ideal is juxtaposed to the real in order to demonstrate the falling away of the real from the ideal. In the paradox of absurd literature the real and the ideal are radically incompatible; hence the ideal is large­ ly irrelevant and even destructive.6

^Vance Ramsey, "From Here to Absurdity: Heller's Catch 22," Seven Contemporary Authors, ed. Thomas B. Whitbread (University of Texas 19S57, p . 118. 107

The ideal, to carry it a bit further, is destructive because of the way it is defined and upheld by "sane" people. The keeping of human chat­ tels was as much an ideal in nineteenth century Virginia as are the ab­ surd demands by the officer corps on Pianosa in Catch-22, though from other vantage points these hardly seem ideals. In absurd literature ideals often contradict one another and when reason attempts some mode of correction or resolution, its power is temporary and provisional, subject to the whims of circumstance and multiple points of view. Ab­ surd comedy lives with this condition by viewing it for what it is, comic situations fraught with danger and futility, and the protagonist finds he must exercise his wits to avoid his destruction. What Martin 7 Esslin says about theatre of the absurd is true of absurd comedy, that absurd comedy goes beyond categories of comedy and tragedy to combine laughter and horror. Ramsey makes a similar observation about Catch-22:

"the combination of laughter and horror occurs throughout Catch-22 and has caused it to be placed with other works in recent fiction called o , ’black humor.'" In most respects Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a para­ digm of absurd comedy. Its world is replete with situations which are grossly different from what they appear to be and its central character

(as well as the reader) experiences a central preoccupation: how to stay alive. This is the first concern. All other concerns, significant values and viable choices, are contingent on survival. In Catch-22,

Yossarian flees to Sweden in search of values and choices, but this

^Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961).

®Ramsey, p. 10£. 108 flight is first a flight from death in varying forms and second a flight to something better. Absurd comedy lives with a haunting fear of death in its myriad forms and the haunting possibility there will be no reso­ lution to the destructive predicaments it encounters.

II

o Catch-22 was widely and, in general, favorably reviewed at the time of its publication in 1961. Its original title was to have been

Catch-18 but was numerically altered to avoid confusion with the concur­ rent publication of Leon Uris' Mila 18. Heller's work has received wide critical attention since that date and articles continue to appear, each successive one finding greater unity and subtlety in the novel than was suggested by previous studies. Mary of the studies are content to point out the welter of "absurd" characters and events and then classify the novel as a specimen of black or absurd humor. But if Catch-22 truly de­ serves the praise it has received it should be discussed in terms more substantial than those involving a loosely integrated collection of bizarre episodes that function as an indictment of chaotic life. Frederick

Karl senses this when he writes that

wartime life on Pianosa [the location of Catch-22] is a replica of life within any organization. Whether one is a lawyer, teacher, doctor, judge, union member, white collar worker, or writer attached to a magazine, advertising agency, newspaper,

9ln addition to Catch-22 Heller is expected to publish shortly a second novel, Something Happened, of which an excerpt appeared in Esquire, September, I96Ó. His recently produced play, We Bombed in New Haven, treating the inherent lunacies of war, was unfavorably reviewed by New York critics at its premier performance in New Haven, Connecticut. 109

or television station, he finds himself in a similar kind of world.

The force of the novel is indeed in its direct relationship to many non- fictional human experiences—the military is only one—and how these ex­ periences are revealed to have characteristics and features not readily apparent without intervention by the comic writer.

The novel has as its ostensible purpose the presentation of the mad desires of a wing commander of a bomber group based on a fictional

Mediterranean island during World War II. Catch-22 records the commander's mania for personal recognition and the lengths to which he goes in achiev­ ing that recognition. But the novel attacks at least four basic human activities: the military, business and finance, religious attitudes and beliefs, and conventional political and philosophical wisdom. Its exag­ gerated characters and episodes magnify actual conditions in everyday existence which are generally hidden by layers of custom, insensitivity, and, often, plain stupidity. Everyone Yossarian, the central character, encounters is an exaggeration but also an extension of the faulty per­ sonal interrelationships one often experiences in a normal routine. Most individuals are aware that everyday activities can and often do become absurd, in the main because of their great distance from truly rational or fitting actions. In Catch-22 it is Yossarian who accentuates this predicament by questioning and acting in such a way as to make the illog­ ical and unfitting reveal itself. Yossarian himself is an exaggerated

"everyman" who learns that irrationality is not just "out there" but

^Frederick R. Karl, "Joseph Heller's Catch 22: Only Fools Walk in Darkness," Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Harry T. Moore (University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, 196b), p. 135. no

quite possibly near at hand.

To a large extent Yossarian is the archetypal American innocent

facing a hostile and unknown world. Sanford Pinsker calls him a Puer

Eternis who "not only refuses the traditional learning of manhood, but

adopts the attitude of a perennial innocent. Ramsey goes a bit

further but in the same direction when he sees Yossarian as "a picaro 12 ... at odds with the role which society would thrust upon him" and

agrees with R. W. B. Lewis' observation that such figures are less than

heroic yet still defiant and perceptive. As Lewis notes

the picaresque characters themselves are not crusaders, they are not tragic or self-sacrificial heroes, they are not re­ formers; they are much rather Charlie Chaplain types, come­ dians on the move, at once ridiculous and touching in their defiant roguishness. They emerge ... as pilgrims . . . journeying through a mysterious and hostile world, a world both chaotic and conformist. . . .3-3

The "nysterious and hostile" world described in this study is subject to

radical intellectual conditions, conditions which abort man's desire to

grasp and live within his world in a rationally complete and satisfying way. It is these conditions that parallel what was called victimization

in the tragic situations in William Styron's novels and are equally parallel to the situations in absurd comecy. It is a world of profound but diabolically comic ironies and paradoxes which entrap Yossarian. He

finds his "sane" world embracing what are really insanities and unlike

■’••’•Sanford Pinsker, "Heller's Catch-22: The Protest of a Puer Eternis, " Critique, VII, 2 (Winter, 1964-19^5), l£L. -I p -^Ramsey, p. 113.

3-3r. W. B. Lewis, "Recent Fiction: Picaro and Pilgrim," A Time of Harvest, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York, 1962), p. 11+9. Ill

the traditional comic figure he returns not to the community which has been a threat to him but flees like his friend, Orr, from his community— in search of another.

Most of the earlier commentators saw the novel as discontinuous and disorganized, but later critics saw method in Heller's madness. For example, when Heller avoids straight-line narrative, it is supposedly to create a randomness structurally equivalent to the experiences of every­ day life. Jan Solomon was the first critic to give a detailed account of the chronological arrangement of the novel, and he suggests that the chronological contradictions (events occurring where they logically could not occur or are logically improbable when related to antecedent events) do not detract and (in a way which appears rather vague) support the basic sense of absurdity of the events themselves. For example,

Heller has Milo Minderbinder, a mess officer turned entrepreneur, discuss chocolate covered cotton as a dietary supplement with Yossarian while

Yossarian is perched naked in a tree watching the burial of Snowden, a fellow airman, irrespective of the possibility that Milo's cotton ventures occurred earlier or possibly much later than Snowden's funeral. Of the above example he writes: "Nevertheless, the logic is inescapable, the symbolic juxtaposition of death and business."}^ Of course it could be argued that this "symbolic juxtaposition" could have been created just as well in a standard time structure.

If a reader is determined to maintain chronological time he has only the bomber mission-count to go on; Colonel Cathcart, the group

}-\jan Solomon, "The Structure of Catch-22," Critique, IX, 2, 36. 112

commander on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa, increases the required

missions of his combat pilots just as they reach the current maximum

number and are to be relieved by fresh pilots. Even here Heller avoids

straight line narrative, for the mission-count is at fifty at the open­

ing of the novel and drops to forty some sixty pages later, Heller ob­

viously dropping back in time. The important emphasis is, however, not

in the absence of a straight line narrative nor in the subtle structural

value of a jumbled time sequence, but rather in the events themselves as

the narrator sweeps across them again and again, emphasizing their gro­

tesqueness in a way that removes any damaging effects of direct chronol­

ogy. But many critics are more satisfied in believing that a "juggled”

time structure aids the over-all purpose, e.g., "the irreconcilability 15 of the . . . chronologies serves the effect of absurdity. . . ." The

essential point remains, however, that Heller refuses to allow the read­

er to lapse into a neat chronological framework; the events themselves

are made to stand out severely by breaking them from a prefigured, order­ ly time sequence.'*'6

But the real strength of the novel rests in the comically exag­

gerated events which are really logical extensions of non-fictional re- 17 ality. ("Logical" is the proper word, for the logic of the novel is

"^Solomon, p. 55•

"I h x Heller has suggested much the same thing: "I had in mind Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. I wanted the feeling of simultaneous sweep. Experience reproduces itself. Snowden [a gunner aboard Yossarian's aircraft] didn't just die once. He died before the novel began, and he died all the way through it." An interview, Mademoiselle, August, 1963, p. 23U. 17 ’Included in this study of Catch-22 are a number of parallel situations from non-fictional reality which are intended to illustrate 113

indeed in the similarity of the events to many in our own lives.) The

point is sensed by John Greenfield in his quotation from Bernard Wien-

raub, a New York Times correspondent in Saigon, Viet Nam.

At a Wednesday briefing a few months ago—one of those "deep background" sessions—a brigadier general said with a smile: "Well I'm happy to say that the Army's casualties final­ ly caught up with the Marines last week." There was a gasp. A civilian United States mission officer, sitting next to the general, turned and said incredulously: "You don't mean you're happy." The general was adamant. "Well the Arny should be doing their job too," he said. Jim Pringle, the bureau chief of Reuters, turned to me and whispered: "My God, this is straight out of Catch-22."3-8

Apparently what Weinraub had in mind was Colonel Cathcart's conversation with the wing chaplain about the value of prayer and related rituals for achieving recognition by the Saturday Evening Post. Cathcart feels ex­ ceptional casualties might accomplish this more rapidly than other means:

"The sooner we get some casualties, the sooner we can make some progress

... I'd like to get in the Christmas issue if we can. I imagine the circulation is higher then" (277). In this instance as in that of the brigadier general's concern for higher casualties, the point is the same: maintenance of a "good image" at the expense of human life and suffering.

Weinraub's observation underscores the grim humor of the novel.

Interservice rivalry, for example, long a problem for former Secretary much of Heller's comic intent. Comecy generally and satire specifically, as Northrop Frye points out, speak to an understood "norm" that is missing but to which the fictional work strives. But this norm and the distance from the norm are intimately reflective of the "real" world. Indeed, much of what motivates the satirist, for example, is his direct perception of the violation of the norm in his own society. ■’■^Quoted from Josh Greenfield, "22 Was Funnier Than 14," New York Times Book Review, March 3, 1968, p. 1. lili

of Defense Robert MacNamara, is crystallized in Generals Peckem and

Dreedle, the former head of Special Services (USO entertainment) and

the latter wing commander of the Pianosa force. This petty rivalry in

effect becomes a "second" front and is described in military terms by

Peckem.

"General Dreedle commands four bomb groups that we simply must capture in order to continue our offensive. Conquering General Dreedle will give us the aircraft and vital bases we need to carry our operations into other areas. And that battle, by the way, is just about won. . . . General Dreedle simply doesn’t know how to cope with me. . . .1 keep invading his jurisdic­ tion with comments and criticisms that are really none of ny business, and he doesn't know what to do about it. When he accuses me of seeking to undermine him, I merely answer that my only purpose in calling attention to his errors is to strength­ en our war effort by eliminating inefficiency. Then I ask him innocently if he's opposed to improving our war effort. Oh, he grumbles and he bristles and he bellows, but he's really quite helpless. He's simply out of style. He's turning into quite a souse, you know. The poor blockhead shouldn't even be a general. He has no tone, no tone at all." (316-17)

But pettiness can become destructive when basic human values are at

stake. General Peckem and Colonel Cathcart, echoing the fanatical deter­ mination of Colonel Tenpleton in Styron's The Long March, are in the long tradition of military figures who thrive on ordered and neat ap­ pearance, irrespective of the disordered reality beneath the appearance.

A portion of their well-being derives from a senseless phrase: "bomb patterns."

"Bomb patterns?" General Peckem repeated, twinkling -with self-satisfied good humor. "A bomb pattern is a term I dreamed up just several weeks ago. It means nothing, but you'd be surprised at how rapidly its caught on. Why, I've got all sorts of people convinced I think it's important for the bombs to explode close together and make a neat aerial photograph." (318)

During a briefing for a pointless bombing run the truth emerges: bomb patterns have no real utility save in the creation of an aerial photograph ii5

with all the explosions geometrically arranged—and in the slaughter of

pilots ungeometrically arranged.

The absurdity of an ordered appearance obscuring reality is

pointedly suggested in a figure promoted through Peckem's Special Serv­

ices, Lieutenant, Colonel and finally General Scheisskopf, whose sole

military distinction is a fanaticism for parades. Under Peckem this ac­

complishment is temporarily blunted but Scheisskopf's dogged persistence

with the empty ritual endures. Though he cannot schedule parades in Rome

(headquarters location for Special Services) as often as he would wish,

Scheisskopf can "send out weekly announcements postponing the parades.

"Don't even bother to schedule them," Peckem suggests. Scheisskopf, how­

ever, had brilliantly prepared for parades during his training days at

Santa Ana Air Force Base. There he

longed desperately to win parades and sat up half the night working on it. . . .He read books on marching. He manipulated boxes of chocolate soldiers until they melted in his hands and then maneuvered in ranks of twelve a set of plastic cowboys he had bought from a mail-order house under an assumed name and kept locked away for everyone's eyes during the day. (71)

But Scheisskopf historically existed some few generations ago. In a re­

cent military study of the Crimean War, Cecil Woodham-Smith pointedly examined the welter of lunacies in one of the more senseless encounters of that futile campaign, memorialized by Tennyson as the "Charge of the

Light Brigade." Lords Lucan and Cardigan, leaders in the brigade assault, were not too distant from Generals Peckem and Dreedle in their rivalry with one another and Lord Cardigan's fanatical desire for order hardly exceeded Scheisskopf's desire for precise parades or Cathcart's for neat bomb patterns. It was he who led the Light Brigade down North Valley 116 with Russian artillery and riflemen on the Fedioukine Hills and the slopes of Causeway Heights at Balaclava. Woodham-Smith observes,

when advancing cavalry are caught in a withering fire and are too courageous to think of retreat, it is their instinct to quicken their pace, to gallop forward as fast as individual horses will carry them and get to grips with the enemy as soon as possible. But Lord Cardigan tightly restrained the pace of the Light Brigade: the line was to advance with parade-ground perfection.19 (ny italics)

Like Scheisskopf's plastic cowboys

the watchers on the heights saw that the lines of horsemen, like toys down on the plain, were expanding and contracting with strange mechanical precision. Death was coming fast, and the Light Brigade was meeting death in perfect order; as a man or horse dropped, the riders on each side of him opened out; as soon as they had ridden clear, the ranks closed again. Orderly, as if on the parade ground, the Light Brigade rode on, but its numbers grew every moment smaller and smaller as they moved down ’the valley.

The Russian riflemen and artillery must have been astonished with such perfection as they devastated the brigade.

Lord Cardigan, looking up the valley over the scene of the charge, could see no sign of his brigade. The valley was strewn with dead and eying. . . . The idea of trying to find out what had happened to his men or of rallying the survivors never crossed his mind. With extraordinary indifference to danger he had led the Light Brigade down the valley as if he were leading a charge in a review in tyde Park, and he now continued to behave as if he were in a review in Hyde Park.21

This Hyde Park maneuver involving seven hundred horsemen destroyed five hundred men and an equal number of animals.

If there are comic horrors in the military experience—at vir­ tually everyone's expense save those who initiate them—so business and

^Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why (New York, I960), p. 237.

2QIbid., p. 238..

21Ibid., p. 245. 117 finance is equally responsible for its own dubious values. Milo Minder- binder, the Pianosa mess officer whose name echoes a mental facility capable of crumbling granite, is nothing more (or less) than the entre­ preneur who manipulates a small sum into a large one, given a workable environment: war or peace, cotton or scotch markets, or mercenary air forces. His activities on Pianosa are comic extensions of much non-fic­ tional business behavior. Operating from the wing command mess hall,

Milo constructs a syndicate for buying, selling and distributing virtual­ ly ary product ary place. The syndicate claims to aid everyone and harm no one by virtue of the large number of syndicate stockholders; what is good for the syndicate is bound to be good for Pianosa, echoing former

President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense who suggested that what is good for General Motors is good for the country. Milo's extraordinarily complicated manipulations of products have excellent parallels in the everyday world of gold speculators who create sudden demands on gold re­ serves only to sell their own supplies before the market falls as .well as a parallel in stock and fund manipulators who have the respect of patriotic Americans by doing nothing more than buying and selling cer- 22 tificates in the open market as it fluctuates day by day. Milo's ac­ tivities are interesting because they also reflect the depth and scope the human mind can reach and embrace in pursuit of financial gain. His fanciful exploits have an excellent correlative in a business transac­ tion noted by Robert Heilbroner. William Rockefeller and Henry Rogers

22 Some months ago (1967) William McChesney Martain of the Federal Reserve Board warned of manipulators of "performance" mutual funds whose sole function appears to be profit at the expense of market safety. Such manipulators appear capable of pursuing profit irrespective of the potential self-destructiveness of their actions. 118

years ago acquired Anaconda Copper Company without spending a dollar of

their own.

1. Rogers and Rockefeller gave a check for $39 millions to Marcus Daly for the Anaconda properties, on the condition that he would deposit it in the National City Bank and leave it untouched for a specified period.

2. They then set up a paper organization known as the Amal­ gamated Copper Company, with their own clerks as dummy directors, and caused Amalgamated to buy Anaconda—not for cash, but for $73 millions in Amalgamated stock which was conveniently printed for the purpose.

3. From the National City Bank, Rogers and Rockefeller now borrowed $39 millions to cover the check they had given to Marcus Daley, and as collateral for this loan they used the $73 millions in Amalgamated stock.

I;. They now sold the Amalgamated stock on the market, (first having touted it through their brokers) for $73 millions.

3. With the proceeds, they retired the $39 million loan from the National City Bank, and pocketed $36 millions as their own profit on the deal.23

Milo's business ventures are probably closer to than distant from the norm of general business behavior than many individuals would think on first reflection.

Failure to view the novel as comic exaggerations of non-fictional realities results in Pinster's error about Orr—Yossarian's tentmate on

Pianosa. "The deus ex machina character of Orr's miraculous journey [he rowed to Sweden from Pianosa] is unacceptable to modern sensibilities which demand a greater sense of 'reality.'"^ Quite the contrary, the whole book is "unreal" on these grounds. Far more unreal than Orr's journey is Milo's contract with the German command to bomb Milo's base—

^^The Worldly Philosophers (New York, 1933), pp. 202-203.

2^Pinsker, p. 162. 119

Pianosa! While Colonel Cathcart looks on, moreover! This venture of

Milo into what amounts to self-destruction is good business because it earns a profit for his syndicate. Destruction of one's own people—

hence one's self—has been documented by William Shirer in The Rise and

Fall of the Third Reich. German businessmen bid on and constructed, with full knowledge of their purpose, gas chambers for the infamous concentra­ tion camps of World War II. It was good business for Milo to contract with German officials to bomb himself and other Americans on Pianosa; it was good business to help eliminate Jews in the Reich. Of course history is replete with instances of property rights supported over human rights but its philosophical framework was briefly but pointedly stated by

Machiavelli in his discussion of a prince's behavior. Machiavelli per­ ceived certain virtues could be dangerous for the state and certain vices helpful, and one traditional vice, homicide, could well be much less haimful than another vice, that of taking another's property. Far better to kill a man's father than take that man's property; the former he will forget, the latter he will never forgive. If good business involves de­ stroying others, including one's own, it is probable that this act will be more readily forgotten—hence forgiven—than destroying or failing in 25 a business venture which could be unsatisfying to all.

Yossarian's flight to Rome to look for the young sister of a prostitute he and other officers had shared is a genuine mercy mission for Yossarian, and Milo generously offers his aid. One of Mio's many

25 -^Recently Gene Roberts of the New York Times quoted a Special Forces (Green Beret) commander on the nature of good business practices: "People don’t realize it, but we have the highest kill ratio per dollar spent of any unit in Viet Nam." With no reflection on the ebullient commander, it is grim humor to know human lives can be "cost accounted" like so many nuts and bolts. 120

contacts—the police commissioner in this instance—tells him that he

can be of little use because all of his men are "busy trying to break

up the traffic in illegal tobacco." This fact is the undoing of Milo's

generous and humanistic impulse.

!'Is there really that much profit in illegal tobacco?" Milo inquired with keen interest, his rust-colored eyebrows arching avidly and his nostrils sniffing. "Milo," Yossarian called to him. "Pay attention to me, will you?" "Si, Marchese," Luigi answered. "The profit in illegal tobacco is very high. The smuggling is a national scandal, Marchese, truly a national disgrace." "Is that a fact?" Milo observed with a preoccupied smile and started toward the door as though in a spell. "Milo!" Yossarian yelled, and bounded forward impulsively to intercept him. "Milo, you've got to help me." "Illegal tobacco," Milo explained to him with a look of epileptic lust, struggling doggedly to get by. "Let me go. I've got to smuggle illegal tobacco." (4-02)

Ironically, this is the first event in that chapter—"The Eternal City"— a city which is a microcosm of the evil, not good, Yossarian experiences all around him. Noble impulses are easily adjusted or ignored when more interesting financial rewards appear, e.g., natural landscapes all of us claim to value but we so easily sell to the lumberman and the strip 26 miner. The comic exaggeration of Milo's ventures reveals the grotesque inner realities of the non-fictional world, and Heller methodically peels away the surface of this non-fictional world through Milo Minderbinder.

It has been suggested throughout this study of Styron and Heller that the contenporary world has little in the way of external or absolute

standards to turn toward or believe in and what standards it does accept

are hardly conducive to metaphysical optimism. Accordingly, in such a

world religious values are often more the expression of attitudes and

feelings rather than dogmatic certainties. Styron's religious characters,

it will be remembered, included the ineffectual Carey Carr in Lie Down

in Darkness; the quasi-degenerate ministers in Confessions of Nat Turner

and the aloof and indifferent symbolic Colonel Templeton in The Long

March. Catch-22 systematically reveals an ineffectual religious wisdom

in the frightened wing chaplain, Captain Tappman, who is not only phys­

ically isolated from the officers and men, living in a wooded area with

an acid and insubordinate aide, but feels "normal" only when he is so

isolated. He is either studiously ignored or irreverently addressed by

all; his aide, Corporal Whitcomb, considers himself Tappman's superior

and the chaplain stands in mortal fear of the corporal. The chaplain’s

isolation is pronounced.

It was already some time since the chaplain had first begun wondering what everything was all about. Was there a God? How could he be sure? Being an Anabaptist minister in the American Army was difficult enough under the best of circum­ stances; without dogma, it was almost intolerable. (262)

Tappman's most singular encounter with Pianosa life is a moment of terror experienced when he musters courage to talk to Cathcart about the increase in required missions for all surviving pilots. But the subject never really comes up and the chaplain finds himself a sounding board for Cath­ cart's project for elevating himself to wing commander and a general's rank. Cathcart believes proper coverage by the Saturday Evening Post will aid in this quest and suggests to Tappman that prayer sessions in­ volving supplication for tight bomb patterns which make for nice aerial 122

photographs—something General Peckem admires—will place him in the

forthcoming Christmas issue. Tappman listens in stunned silence as the

Colonel demands a prayer that will be "something humorous that stays

away from waters and valleys and God . . .I'd like to stay away from

the subject of religion altogether if we can" (190). But the whole idea

collapses when Cathcart learns that enlisted men and officers pray to 27 the same God and that atheism is not against the law, thus making it

difficult for Cathcart to punish those who don't share his persuasions.

Later that afternoon the second confrontation with Cathcart in­

volves form letters to be sent to relatives of missing, wounded, or de­

ceased airmen. The letters will run, "'Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr.

and Mrs.: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or re­

ported missing in action'" (273). But like the ineffectual encounter

that morning with Cathcart, Tappman is unable to respond to this mimeo­

graphed mockery of human loss. The final portion of this scene is the beginning of the humiliation of the chaplain; Cathcart's gift of two plum tomatoes to the chaplain later is used as evidence of the chaplain's bad character; he must have stolen them for why would Cathcart give

Tappman two plum tomatoes?

The ineffectuality of the chaplain parallels the ineffectuality

^Cathcart's sudden revulsion when learning that enlisted men and officers have a common humanity echoes the embarrassing racial re­ pression today. Cathcart's "liberality" is unmistakably suggestive when he says to the chaplain: "Some of my very best friends are enlisted men, you understand, but that's about as close as I care to let them come. Honestly now, Chaplain, you wouldn't want your sister to marry an enlisted man, would you?" (192) 123

of the conventional political and philosophical wisdom of Nately and

Clevinger, friends of Yossarian who die senselessly. Clevinger as a

literature major at Harvard was a joiner, petitioner, group leader, who

petitioned, joined, led, picketed for and against everything. "In

short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and

no brains ... he knew everything about literature except how to enjoy

it" (67-68). But is is with Nately and an old man loosely managing a

Roman whore house where one sees Heller totally debunk conventional wis­

dom but only to reveal a deeper, more disorganized and comic reality than

conventional truths might reveal. Nately, Yossarian, and friends congre­

gate in Rome (on leave) in a place that "was a fertile, seething cornu­

copia of female nipples and navels . . . there was bare flesh everywhere, most of it plump. ..." The old Roman pimp "watched . . . with victor­

ious merriment, sitting in his musty blue armchair like some satanic and

hedonistic deity on a throne. ..." (236-37). In this setting Nately,

the aristocratic, wealthy, young American debates the old, unnamed,

spindly-legged Roman on the historical role of great nations and the nature of a well-lived life. Nately proposes all the conventional

truths: strong nations with powerful armies and lofty purposes survive with trandeur; infinity can be counted in a life time; noble death is valued over less noble life. The old man systematically reduces Nately's positions to the less than profound utterances they appear to be. At one point he replies to Nately's patriotic assertion about America's strength:

"All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? For­ ever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so." 124

Nately squirmed uncomfortably. "Well, forever is a long time, I guess." "A million years?" persisted the jeering old man with keen, sadistic zest. "A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and pros­ perity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as . . . the frog?" (238)

Undaunted, Nately trumpets the value of power and success in war. The

old man cuts to the deeper reality.

"You put so much stock in winning wars. . . . The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated." (240)

Finally Nately concludes that win or lose, "it is better to die on one's

feet than live on one's knees." The old man says he has indeed heard

this but suggests Nately has misstated it. "'But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's 28 knees. That is the way the saying goes'" (242). Rather than remain content with surface realities, the old Roman has lived long enough to see beneath surface commonplaces.

The comic reduction of Nately, or perhaps his humanization by

removing him from "lofty verities," is completed in this same setting.

An indifferent whore and her young sister become the sole objects of

concern for this aristocratic young man who was placed in the air corps

by parents who were convinced the German and Russian forces were near

immediate collapse. After his futile talk with the presiding old Roman.,

He asked his girl to get dressed and took her downstairs for breakfast. The kid sister tagged along, and Nately felt like the proud head of a family as the three of them ate respectably in a nearby open-air cafe. But Nately's whore was already bored by the time they started back, and she decided to go streetwalking with two other girls rather than spend more time with him. Nately and the kid sister followed meekly a block behind, the ambitious youngster to pick up valuable pointers, Nately to eat his liver in mooning frustration, and both were saddened when the girls were stopped by soldiers in a staff car and driven away. (2UU)

This reality of solitude and tenderness is far more substantive than con­ ventional verities. Like the military, business and finance, religious security, conventional wisdom is stripped of its surface pretentions; what is revealed are truths that are both grotesque in their disturbing and disquieting manner, and humorous in their marked difference from con­ ventional wisdom. This is the world of absurd comedy. 29 The scope of the satire z is not restricted to the areas just dis cussed. Indeed scores of experiences and episodes are ironic. The

29one commentator more precisely identifies the genre as romance- parody, generalizing from Frye's description of this form as the subjec­ tion of "mythic properties" of romance to everyday experience. "Not only has the hero become unheroic; all other conventions of the romance are also made to achieve an opposite effect through irony. . . . parody of romance . . . shows life to be more hideous and less meaningful than the experiences of ordinary men" (Constance Denniston, "The American Romance- Parody: A Study of Purdy's Malcolm and Heller's Catch 22," Emporia State Research Studies, XIV [December, 19631, U6). But Frye also suggests that comic heroes in the romance-parody are debased figures. Yet Yossarian possesses, as do many current "anti-heroes," an accurate vision of the 126

"soldier in white," a patient in the base hospital, is encased in a plaster cast from head to toe but rather than treat him as a person who would create an automatic (and probably unfelt) sympathy, Heller presents him as a vanishing identity. No one really knows for certain if anyone is inside; the plaster shroud, save for the telltale drip of liquid in­ to a bottle, is the only indication of human form. The soldier in white is, as his name indicates, more an object than an individual and the plaster shroud is only the illusion of identity. The full horror of a vanishing person is thus concealed. Like the officer viciously named by his father Major Major Major and who is promoted to Major by faulty electronic equipment, the soldier in white is another victim of a mechan­ ized society. Yet there is really no other way to treat him.

They brushed his bandages often with a whiskbroom and scrubbed the plaster casts on his arms, legs, shoulders, chest and pelvis with soapy water. Working with a round tin of metal polish, they waxed a dim gloss on the dull zinc pipe rising from the cement on his groin. With damp dish towels they wiped the dust several times a day from the slim black rubber tubes leading in and out of him to the two large stoppered jars, one of them, hanging on a post beside his bed, dripping fluid into his arm constantly through a slit in the bandages while the other, almost out of sight on the floor, drained the fluid away through the zinc pipe rising from his groin. Both young nurses polished the glass jars unceasingly. They were proud of their housework. (167)

Milo's bizarre financial dealings, Cathcart's Saturday Evening Post mania, the chaplain's pathetic ineffectuality, Nately's aristocratic stupidity parallel the soldier in white: beneath the surface of the world he lives in, hence he comes to at least partial terms with it rather than being subjected to total victimization by it, which would include subjection to illusion and commitment to the very values from which he flees. He simply admits to less power than a romance hero but this does not make him less human. 12?

human condition is a reality which is often lunatic, dangerous or death-

ridden, and because it is so distant from surface "normality" it pos­

sesses a comic point of view. 30 Heller's title is descriptive of the entire book. "Catch" is

fittingly part of absurd comedy, for the informal definition of the word

suggests discord and disharmony amid apparent harmony and order, e.g.,

pilots would fly a reasonable number of missions but for a "catch"; Milo

would generously aid Yossarian but for a "catch"; strength and success

would be virtues but for a "catch." It is the catch that flaws the sys­

tem, that punctures the ideal, and mocks man in the various acts of liv­

ing. Recently Heller explored the "catch" in Tudor England, the "catch"

then known as "Morton's Fork."

Morton was a minister of King Henry VII, and would raise money by going to some nobleman's house for dinner. If the nobleman put out a big spread, Morton would compliment him on his generosity and say he expected him to be generous also in his donation to the king. If the nobleman skimped on the food, Morton would praise him for his frugality, because that would make possible a larger donation to the king. There was no way out. In Tudor England, this technique came to be known as Morton's Fork. . . .31

Obviously, the "catch" has a long and honorable tradition. But it is

language itself that reveals the full scope of the catch, because contra­

diction and paradox, two essential features of the catch, are readily re­

vealed in language. When language reinforces, however, destructive and

3°The catch as an English seventeenth and eighteenth century musical device is worth noting here because it too played upon surprise or irregu­ larity ("resulting from the interlacing arrangement of the words and phrases"—Harvard Dictionary of Music) to make a point, usually an indecent one. The philosophical "catch" or other forms of the catch is oftentimes an indecent attack on human values.

31■Joseph Heller, "How I Found James Bond," Holiday, June, 1967, p. 128 128

diabolical paradox and contradiction in an attempt to make them palat­ able, then language as one of man's final hopes for bringing order to his world collapses. Yossarian first experiences this collapse when questioning Doc Daneeka, the flight physician on Pianosa. Yossarian suggests that his friend, Orr, should be sent home if he is mentally un­ stable, and if Daneeka agrees that Orr is unstable then he would be quite naturally released from further missions—he would but for the catch:

Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22, and let out a respectful whistle. (U6)

Language itself forcefully frames the contradictions the spirit is heir to. Another professional man on Pianosa, Major Sanderson, a psychiatrist who "ministers" to the pilots' emotional problems, robs words of their last vestige of hope—common definitions. Speaking with Yossarian he ex­ claims,

"You're antagonistic to the idea, of being robbed, ex­ ploited, degraded, humiliated or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Slums depress you. Greed depresses you. Crime depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a maniac-depressive!" "Yes, sir. Perhaps I am." "Don't try to deny it." "I'm not denying it, sir," said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. I agree with all you've said." "Then you admit you're crazy, do you?" "Crazy?" Yossarian was shocked. "What are you talking about? Why am I crazy? you're the one who's crazy!" (297-98) 129

The anti-hero, the man on the run, the absurd-comic hero is fully aware

of the way men think, men who use language to mask and perpetuate lunacy 32 and death. When men can discourse, for example, on the subtle differ­

ences between human and inanimate chattel, as they do in Styron's Nat

Turner, or define sanity as insanity, as does Major Sanderson, then it

is apparent the absurd permeates to the core of man's last contact with

coherence: language.

Interlocking the many areas of satire in Catch-22 is Yossarian's

flight from death, a flight made necessary because Snowden "spilled" his

secret. The death of Snowden is told and hinted at in fragments and re­

vealed in detail in the last few pages. And it is Snowden's death as a

brute reality for Yossarian that transcends all other human concerns:

loyalty, patriotism, verities of all shapes and descriptions. Snowden,

a gunner on Yossarian's B-25, was mortally wounded over Avignon before

the missions demanded by Cathcart reached astronomical proportions. It

was there he spilled his secret. As Yossarian tended the wounded Snow­

den, he discovered a second injury.

Yossarian bent forward to peer and saw a strangely colored stain seeping through the coveralls just above the armhole of Snowden's flak suit. Yossarian felt his heart stop, then pound so violently he found it difficult to breathe. Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out. A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into his other side just underneath the arm and blasted all the way through, drawing whole mottled

32doC Daneeka himself becomes a victim of words. He is listed as being aboard a plane which crashes with no survivors. A flight record has recorded him as being there, therefore he is dead, and no amount of explanation by Daneeka will change that verbal fact. Language refines Daneeka out of existence. 130

quarts of Snowden along with it through the gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes. His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God's plenty, all right, he thought bitter­ ly as he stared—liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes and turned away diz­ zily and began to vomit, clutching his burning throat. (429)

The secret Snowden spills is a reality far more important than the half-

truths, lunacies and lies of daily intercourse.

Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all. (429-430)

It is this reality that lies at the base of all human activities. Al­

though many human actions ignore this reality or diabolically pursue it, the comic horror is that indeed man is matter—bone and breakfast—and this is an awful truth. Shortly after Snowden's mortal wound, Yossarian refused to dress, and observed Snowden's funeral naked in a tree. The act is less a symbolic gesture of disaffiliating himself from war but one more literal in its intent. Snowden's "matter" spilled on Yossarian he spilled his life which turned to death as it ran down Yossarian's uni form. At that moment Yossarian learned the full magnitude of mortal man and death; he ran naked from the literal death of Snowden and later he ran from the various forms of death pursuing him everywhere on Pianosa.

Death in Catch-22 is a master chasing a wayward servant; this Yossarian knows and this knowledge dominates his actions. "That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of cir­ cumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance" (67). Yet man often is a victim of circumstance, and on 131 many occasions his life hinges on the peculiar circumstances surrounding him. So it is that Yossarian fanatically tries to avoid death, the enemy that is everywhere.

Yossarian is surrounded on all sides by hostile forces: his enemies are distinguished less by their nationality than by their ability to get him killed. Thus, Yossarian feels a blind, electric rage against the Germans whenever they hurl flak at his easily penetrated plane; but he feels an equally profound hatred for those of his own countrymen who exercise an arbitrary power over his life and well-being.33 Death is in many forms in Catch-22. There is much literal death^^ and symbolic death, the latter including insane desires and paradoxical purposes of one's friends and enemies. Dunbar, a bombardier friend of

Yossarian, accentuates life and repulses death by cultivating boredom, an experience that prolongs psychological time. And it is the awareness of death in spite of the myriad actions of men which obscure it that mo­ tivates Yossarian to seek his salvation in Sweden. For men not only ig­ nore the reality of death but, and this is the diabolically comic point, actively pursue it under other names: perhaps Cathcart's lunatic demands and quests; perhaps Nately's superficial beliefs which ignore graver real­ ities; perhaps Clevinger's great intelligence but absence of wisdom; per­ haps Milo's financial wizardry for buying and selling death. But

33jRobert Brustein, "The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World," New Republic, November 13, 1961, p. 12. 3^-"An incredible number of people 'die' in Catch 22. Some, like Snowden and Kid Sampson, die in scenes of tremendous horror; others, like Clevinger, simply 'fly into a cloud' and never come out. Some die in ab­ surd situations, like the 'soldier in white,' whose temperature finally gives him away one afternoon; some 'die,' like Doc Daneeka, because of an official technicality. In the midst of these varieties of death, Yossarian (who 'rooms' with a dead man) wants to survive" (Pinsker, p. 139). 132

Yossarian is aware of these realities and so on to Sweden. After all,

Orr rowed there from Pianosa. Couldn't Yossarian make it through the

Alps? /33

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

This study began with a phrase, "radical intellectual condi­

tions," in order to describe a current understanding of the relation­

ship of individual to the world. These conditions are radical for two

reasons: they appear to be basic influences on our lives today and

extreme in asserting that man's knowledge of himself, society, and uni­ verse is "permanently tentative" and fragmentary. In such a world there is little reason to accept or try to make sense out of things spoken of in absolute terms, be it absolute values or absolute knowledge. These conditions are extreme in a second sense: man's values are his alone and cannot be projected beyond himself. Man's knowledge of his world does not suggest that he himself, his society or his universe is moving toward any end that could suggest some positive eschatology, religious or secular, involving himself or his world. If optimism or pessimism must be advanced to characterize man's condition, what is believed is decidedly pessimistic in the long run. Examples of these radical intel­ lectual conditions include, from science the concept of entropy which describes the behavior of a system in terms of its movement from order to randomness, "an unstructured state of equilibrium;from history that

■^Bertrand Russell vividly describes this process and its broader implications: that all the labours of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably 134

telos or purposeful end is a fiction and that progress has a diabolical

irony in taking from man as much as it gives; from social analysis that

social engagement, even in the sympathetic words of Marcus Klein, is maintenance of "a tricky distance between one's self and society" and

is a lesson in the "perpetual necessity of killing adjustments." The

list of examples could be amplified and of course argued against, but it is fair to say that if there is an intellectual temper in the twen­

tieth century, this characterizes it in a meaningful way. Or, in a less dogmatic way, if there are intellectual tempers in the twentieth century, this describes one of them in a meaningful way. A leading his­ torian has said,

for good or ill we must regard the world as a continuous flux, a ceaseless and infinitely complicated process of waste and repair, so that "all things and principles of things" are to be regarded as no more than "inconstant modes or fashions," as the "concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their way.'"2

Radical intellectual beliefs in the twentieth century are extreme in divorcing man from the eternal and the absolute. His purposefulness is of his own making and the world he lives in is either neutral to it or destructive of it, or both, depending on historical circumstance of time and place. Most discussions about absurd comedy and contemporaiy tragedy have them meeting on common ground. The experience of profound discontinuity between means and ends, the belief that the universe is a

be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Mysticism and Logic, p. 47. Quoted from Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Centuiy Philosophers (New Haven, I960), p.Í4.

2Becker, p. 12. 135 dying organism or at best a cyclic machine pointing to no eschatological end, the skepticism of man's social perfectibility, the haunting fear of an anti-utopian nightmare characterizes absurd comedy as much as con­ temporary tragedy. As Douglas Davis writes of the absurd humorist,

there may be in this author or that author, this passage or that passage, a groping for system like the groping of a Spinoza or a Dreiser. But if there is, the search shall fail. We have gone too far in science, in technology, in philosophy, and in political theory for any new synthesis remotely like the old. It is not absolute meaning we seek anymore, but how to live at peace with ourselves and with the universe.3

Absurd comedy cannot return to a rationally and benevolently ordered world. It does not exist. Even Yossarian's flight to Sweden in Catch-22 is at best a veiled hope. There is no guarantee Sweden will be markedly different from Pianosa. It simply will be no worse.

There are striking similarities in character, plot and theme shared by Heller and Styron. There is absurd humor in the character of

Thomas Gray, who records Nat Turner's confession, when Gray digresses to expound upon and illuminate for Nat the subtle differences between in­ animate and human chattel; in Cass Kinsolving's "puddle of self" that floats around France and Italy in search of salvation; in The Long March where death in a lunch line has all the earmarks of a burlesque of human potentiality. But on the other hand, much of the reality of Catch-22 is decidedly not humorousit is, rather, deadly and destructive. Men kill

3Douglas M. Davis, The World of Black Humor (New York, 196?), p. 26. ^"1 tried consciously for a comic effect juxtaposed with the tragic, working the frivolous in with the catastrophic. I wanted people to laugh and then look back with horror at what they were laughing at." An interview with Heller in Mademoiselle, August, 1963, p. 23U. 136 each other and make a profit while doing so; superficial and inadequate­ ly reasoned attitudes perpetuate the gross horrors men want, or say they want, to escape; lunatic desires in the garb of prestige and power pass for patriotism and brotherhood. And worst of all, as Yossarian learns, language itself has no real contact with the external world because mean­ ing derives from the user of the language, and not from common and stable concepts. But reality in absurd comedy is not simply evil but diabolical­ ly evil, because many individuals either fail to recognize the full scope of the evil or deny that it exists at all. George Orwell has noted how easily individuals disguise evil and accept it as a good. This is notably true in the propensities of the political right or left.

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhab­ itants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine- gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.?

Language "changes" reality and therefore what was thought to exist ceases to exist.There are, then, tears in absurd comedy and laughter, "absurd" laughter, in contemporary tragedy. And they are not there for relief or

-’George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," A Collection of Essays (New York, 193b), p. 173- ^In a contemporary context Bruce Friedman makes much the same point that Orwell makes: A news magazine says what's all the fuss about anyhow and de­ scribes one of our Vietnam gases as "fragrant-smelling," the implication being that if the little Red bastards weren't so sneaky, hiding in caves, we would not have to use gas in the first place. ... It may be said that the Black Humorist is a kind of literary Paul Revere, a fellow who unfreezes his mind, if only for a moment and says, "For Christ's sake, what in hell is going on here? What do you mean, 33»000 Vietnam 'advisers'?" Bruce Jay Friedman, Black Humor (New York, 1963), p. X. 137 diversion; they are basic to both modes.

Many commentators on contemporary literature and drama agree that there exists in many novels and dramas a tragic "tone and atmos­ phere," though not necessarily tragic action or tragic characterization.

The reason for this, Robert Brustein believes, is that man in the exis­ tential world is a victim, "usually a tramp, a proletarian, a criminal, an old man, a prisoner, confined in body and spirit, and deteriorating 7 in his confinement." But if action as rebellion, significant rebel­ lion, is absent "the rebel can still express his outrage verbally. To o the nothingness of life he responds with the dry mock. ..." At best, however, this sort of "tragedy" is a tragedy of perceptions. "It lacks o a tragic hero, but it evokes a tragic sense of life. . . Hassan's observations concerning the novel and Brustein's comments concerning the drama state what indeed many believe to exist in much contemporary fic­ tional and dramatic writing: perhaps a tragic atmosphere, but no tragic hero or action.

But the question remains and it has been the question of this study: given the radical conditions under which man lives today, con­ ditions which present him as a victim, is it possible to observe sig­ nificant characters and significant action, comic or tragic? It is dif­ ficult to answer yes because the contenporary condition seems so overlaid with that which would destroy it. But contained in the worse sort of

^Brustein, Theatre of Revolt, p. 32.

®Ibid., p. 31.

Ibid., p. 30. 138

victimization is the seed of rebellion. "Terror and torment are too

much with us today to make us choose to dwell upon them; but in our

sometime capacity to face these feelings lies the hope for our spiritual regeneration."10 But there exists in the central characters of Styron’s

novels and in Yossarian of Heller's Catch-22, as this study has tried

to reveal, not only an accurate perception, an insight into the harsh

reality of human existence, but the ability to rebel against the victim­

ization they experience.-, Contemporary man can face the "terror and tor

ment" but we need to learn to distinguish between his significant be­

havior and immobile or destructive behavior. The differences are more

subtle than pronounced. But failing to make the distinctions blurs im­ portant experiences emerging in twentieth century writing, and reduces

our critical perception of our own period to a narrow judgment that we indeed would not impose on another literaiy period. Significant be­ havior is evident in the works of Styron and Heller, though it is be­ havior that might appear unorthodox and unacceptable on first glance.

But it is the second and third glance that we need.

It is not in character behavior that one notes sharp dramatic differences between contemporary characters and past ones,'*'■*' but in the

l^Brustein, Theatre of Revolt, pp. U16-U17.

^Davis' point in The World of Black Humor is well taken: Black Humor, we are told in review after review, dwells on "anti-heroes," spurning the ideal qualities of the Aristotelian hero, that it dwells on mindless, inconsequential men, driven by passion rather than ideals, flawed not in one way, but in many, many ways. This is pure bosh. ... A historical list of "pro­ hero" writers working within the Western tradition would be a small one, indeed, if we were to define our "hero"—in the manner of so many traditional critics—as an exemplar of middle-class virtue. Hamlet, Tom Jones, Frankenstein, Heathcliffe, the Snopes 139 startling perception by contemporary characters of their fragmented re­ ality. But the intellectual temper or climate of opinion, described in

Chapter II as radical intellectual beliefs, is an outgrowth of intellec­ tual trends beginning in the Renaissance. Such trends, many believe, have reached a point where there has noxv come to exist in much contempo­ rary literature an understanding of the human personality as thoroughly defeated. But in the work of Styron and Heller, two well-established

"moderns," we see that in spite of the prevailing radical intellectual beliefs, beliefs certainly perceivable in the background of their work, characters are created of remarkable vision and resiliency. Their modes of response are an assertion of the human desire for reasonable freedom and the possibility of authentic human experience.

family, and Augie March all rank quite as low on the scales of YMCA virtue as Yossarian or Dangerfield, and lower than Stern, say, or Peter De Vries’s Don Wanderhope. (p. 2h) A Selected Bibliography

Aldridge, John W. "William Styron and the Derivative Imagination," Time to Murder and Create. New York: David McKay Company, 1966.

Aptheker, Herbert. Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion. New York: Humanities Press, 1966.

______. ". . .A Note on the History," The Nation, October 16, 1967, PP. 375-376. A comment on Styron's use of the historical Nat Turner.

. "Styron's Turner Vs. Nat Turner," The New South, V (May, 1968), 3-7.

Baumbach, Jonathan. "Paradise Lost: The Novels of William Styron," South Atlantic Quarterly, LXIII (Spring, 1964), 207-217.

Becker, Carl. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. New Haven: Yale University, i960.

Bellow, Saul. Recent American Fiction. A Lecture Presented Under the Auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund, Reference Department, The Library of Congress, 1963.

Brandriff, Welles T. "The Role of Order and Disorder in The Long March, English Journal, LVI (January, 1967), 54-59*

Brustein, Robert. "The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World," The New Republic, November 13, 1961, pp. 11-13.

• The Theatre of Revolt. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962.

Bryant, Jerry H. "The Hopeful Stoicism of William Styron," South Atlantic Quarterly, LXII (Autumn, 1963), 539-550.

Buckeye, Robert. "The Anatomy of the Psychic Novel," Critique, IX, 2, 33-45.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1958•

Canzoneri, Robert and Page Stegner. "An Interview with William Styron," Per/Se, I (Summer, 1966), 37-44«

Carver, Wayne. "The Grand Inquisitor's Long March," Denver Quarterly, I (Spring, 1966), 37-64. lU

Clarke, John Henrik, ed. William Styron1s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. New York: Beacon Press, 1960.

Cooke, Michael. "Nat Turner's Revolt," The Yale Review, LVII (Winter, 1968), 273-278.

Cowley, Malcolm, ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. New York: Viking Press, 19387 An interview with Styron by Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, originally appearing in Paris Review, no. 3 (Spring, 193h).

Davis, Douglas M., ed. with introduction. The World of Black Humor. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., I967.

Davis, Robert Gorham. "The American Individualist's Tradition: Bellow and Styron," The Creative Present, ed. Norma Balakian and Charles Simmons. New York: Doubleday, 1963.

Denniston, Constance. "The American Romance Parody: A Study of Purely's Malcolm and Heller's Catch-22,11 Emporia State Research Studies, XIV (December, 1963), 14.2-39.

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Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Doubleday, 1961.

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Friedman, Bruce Jay, ed. with introduction. Black Humor. New York: Bantam Books, 1963.

Friedman, Melvin. "The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Convergence of 'Nonfiction Novel' and 'Mediation on History,'" The Journal of Popular Culture, I (Fall, 1967), 166-173-

Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. New Jersey: Princeton University, 1937•

Galloway, David D. The Absurd Hero in American Fiction. Austin: University of Texas, 1966. Contains a William Styron checklist through I96I4 and a portion of 1963.

Gassner, John. "Tragic Perspectives: A Sequence of Queries," Tulane Drama Review, II (May, 1938), 7-22.

Gilman, Richard. "Nat Turner Revisited," The New Republic, April 27, 1968, pp. 23-26, 28, 32.

Gordon, Caroline and Jeanne Richardson. "Flies in Their Eyes? A Note on Joseph Heller's Catch-22," Southern Review, 3-new series (January, 1967), 96-103. li|2

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Gossett, Louise Y. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1965.

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______. Radical Innocence. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

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Heilbroner, Robert L. The Worldly Philosophers. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1953«

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______. Mademoiselle, August, 1963, pp. 23U-235• A brief interview.

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. The Long March. New York: Vintage Books, 1932.

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______. "This Quiet Dust," Harper's, April, 196£, pp. 135-1U6.

______. "Virginia: I83I," Paris Review, IX (Winter, 1966), 13-U^. An excerpt from The Confessions of Nat Turner.

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