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Home , Angela Atwood, Bernard Diederich, Jorge Pasquel, Lily Tuck, Luis Olmo, Mark Winegardner

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:August 27, 2007

I, Stephen Francis Criniti, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of:

Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in:

English and Comparative Literature

It is entitled:

Navigating the Torrent: Documentary in the Age of Mass Media

This work and its defense approved by: Chair:Dr. Tom LeClair Dr. Stan Corkin Dr. Brock Clarke

Navigating the Torrent: Documentary Fiction in the Age of Mass Media

A dissertation submitted to

The Graduate School Division of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences

2007

by Stephen F. Criniti

B.S. Wheeling Jesuit University, 2000 M.A. University of Dayton, 2002

Committee Chair: Thomas LeClair, Ph.D.

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines the role of documentary fiction within contemporary media culture.

Through the authors’ inclusion of documented historical events/personages and their critical mediation of these documents, the writers show an awareness of the mediated nature of historical knowledge—including a consciousness of their own of novelistic mediation. As a result, I argue that contemporary documentary fiction, through its recognition of the inevitability of mediation and the challenges it brings to entrenched cultural notions, is best equipped to thrive in the media-saturated marketplace. In order to explore the variety of ways contemporary documentary “navigate the media torrent,” I have paired the texts according to similarities in form and of mediation. Each chapter examines the authors’ novelistic renderings of history against dominant nonfictional accounts in order to analyze the authors’ mediations of and challenges to hegemonic conceptions of that history. Before moving to the pairs, however, I briefly examine the methodology of E.L. Doctorow’s The March, ultimately dismissing it as outdated. The first dyad, then, includes Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and Julia

Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, which emphasize the imaginative nature of memory in order to influence and even alter their communities’ collective memory. In the second pairing,

René Steinke’s Holy Skirts and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer utilize a fictional biography form to revise popular conceptions of their biographical subjects, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and

Martin Luther King, Jr. respectively. ’s John Henry Days and Mark

Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues challenge American mythology by representing their iv characters’ searches for—and inability to find—Truth. The final pairing includes Christopher

Sorrentino’s Trance and William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt. Sorrentino takes media distortion as his critical target, and Vollmann, with a grand encyclopedic scope, encompasses all the modes explored here. For this reason, I argue for Vollmann’s as a kind of ur-contemporary documentary novel, encapsulating in a novel the myriad forms of mediation. Because of these responses to the “media torrent,” I contend that documentary fictions are our best contemporary fictions and are ultimately our best hope for the continuance of a potentially endangered genre: literary fiction.

v vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I certainly would not have been able to navigate the torrent that is a dissertation project without the help of a significant number of colleagues, mentors, and friends. I would first like to thank

Tom LeClair for being exactly the advisor and mentor I needed. He has been equal parts encouraging and challenging, and always at the exact right moments. Ultimately, this project would not be what it is without his encouragement, practical advice, and seemingly innumerable careful readings. Because of Tom, the completion of this project has been a rewarding and, dare

I say, enjoyable experience.

I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Stan Corkin and

Brock Clarke. Stan was instrumental in helping me to build the theoretical and historical knowledge that serves as the necessary scaffolding for the critical readings I offer here.

Throughout this project, Stan managed to “keep me honest” in terms of my historical understanding. Any depth to that understanding is the result of Stan’s influence. Thanks also to

Brock for his careful reading and helpful suggestions during the late stages of this project.

I am also grateful to the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati.

The Taft Center’s generous award of a year-long fellowship afforded me the chance to produce the first draft of this manuscript.

Many of my University of Cincinnati colleagues also played important roles in my completion of this project and my development as a scholar. Thanks to the English department’s graduate faculty—most especially Lee Person, Amy Elder, and Beth Ash—for helping to lay the vii scholarly foundation upon which this dissertation was eventually built. To Siusan Durst of the

Modern Languages Department, thanks for training me in the reading and translation of Spanish, a skill which was invaluable in researching the Julia Alvarez section of this manuscript. And to my fellow graduate students, thanks for creating both a challenging and convivial environment in which to grow as a thinker and a person. Special thanks to Kelcey Parker, Alex DeBonis, and

Julie Gerk-Hernandez for your companionship and camaraderie as we all worked to navigate this torrent together. Also, thanks to Kristin Czarnecki for recommending Alvaerz’s In the Time of the Butterflies and for providing a polished and professional example of what a UC graduate student could be.

Aside from simply introducing me to ’s The Veracruz Blues and Lewis

Nordan’s Wolf Whistle, John Whitehead, of Wheeling Jesuit University’s Fine Arts department, has also been a constant mentor whose opinion and advice I deeply respect and cherish. John has always been, and continues to be, both an amazing mentor and a great friend.

Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to my family. I owe so much of who I am—not only as a scholar, but more importantly, as a person—to all of you. I cannot thank you enough for all the love and support you have given me throughout this process. To my, as yet, unborn baby: eight and a half months ago, you set for me the firmest nine-month deadline possible. You have been an inspiration, and I cannot wait to meet you, little one. Lastly, and most importantly, to my wife Mary Beth: there is no way to categorize the impact you have had on this project and on my life. Your patience has been boundless, and you always seemed to know when I needed support, encouragement, or a little (or sometimes not-so-little) push. Overall, I learn more from you every day than any Ph.D. program could ever teach me. My life is better every day because you are a part of it. I could not have done it without you. viii

The Julia Alvarez portion of Chapter 2 and the Mark Winegardner portion of Chapter 4 appeared in slightly different form in Modern Language Studies and Critique: Studies in Contemporary

Fiction respectively. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE 2

INTRODUCTION Contemporary Documentary Fiction and the Manipulation of Mediation 5

CHAPTER 1 “It’s Always Now”: History as Analogy in E.L. Doctorow’s The March 45

CHAPTER 2 Re-Collections: The Revision of Collective Memory in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies 68

CHAPTER 3 Using the Fusion: The Role of Fictional Biography in René Steinke’s Holy Skirts and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer 137

CHAPTER 4 Unnatural History: and Historical Discourse in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues 194

CHAPTER 5 A of Contradictions: Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance, William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, and “The New Nonfiction Novel” 246

WORKS CITED 310 2

PREFACE

Any author who sets out to consider “contemporary ” is going to into some necessary definitional and categorical decisions. A brief note is in order to clarify my process of selecting the texts for this study. First, it should be noted that the “oldest” novel considered here,

William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, was published in 1990. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, the term “contemporary” can be taken to mean “written after 1990.” As a result, important documentary of the ‘70s and ‘80s by Robert Coover, Joan Didion, Norman

Mailer, Toni Morrison, and others have been excluded. In an effort to discover and comment upon new and worthy “contemporary” writers, I have also chosen to leave out post-1990 novels that have already received a large body of criticism such as Don DeLillo’s Libra and

Underworld, ’s Mason & Dixon, and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods.

It should be noted that the writers I have selected also range in reputation from the well respected to the largely unknown. In the case of the more established authors, I have, again, chosen to comment on texts that have not yet received an overabundance of scholarly attention (such as

Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt or Johnson’s Dreamer).

In the forthcoming pages, much attention is devoted to the term “historical” and the idea of what constitutes what I call “documentary fiction.” At this point, suffice it to say that I have considered only texts that include specific documented historical people or events. Thus, novels that may be more broadly considered “historical fiction” because of a strong connection to an historical era or a larger cultural history (like the history of slavery or imperialism) have also 3 been excluded from this study. As a result, excellent recent texts like Edward P. Jones’s The

Known World, ’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and Toni

Morrison’s Jazz do not fit within the purview of this study. Obviously, in regard to a study of historical fiction, we must also take into account “whose history” is under consideration. First, it is worth noting that all of the authors included here can be classified as “American Writers.” As a result, interesting texts from authors like Caryl Phillips, Jeanette Winterson, Julian Barnes, and

David Malouf among others are excluded from this study. Even within the category of

“American Writers,” I have chosen only American writers writing about the history in/of the

Americas. Aside from the need to narrow the glutted field of documentary novels through somewhat artificial means, this designation also brings another level of coherence to the project, as many of the historical issues and concerns overlap due to their shared American heritage. As a result of this choice, however, this study does not include analyses of works like William

Vollmann’s winning Europe Central or Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle series, set in 16th and 17th century Europe (most notably London).

What remains, then, is a collection of lesser known texts from roughly the last decade and a

half, by American writers, about the history of/around the Americas, which include specific,

documented historical personages and events. With these texts, I have tried not only to forward

an argument about the present state and direction of literary fiction, but also to “discover”

and introduce some writers/texts that are deserving of further scholarly attention. Though these

texts present a wide range of difficulty and accessibility, upon close examination, they are all

inventive, artful, and ultimately significant to the direction of contemporary literary fiction. As I will argue in the coming pages, these texts both represent some of the best in contemporary literary writing and are also more widely important to contemporary culture for what they 4 demonstrate about that culture and the ways we apprehend and mediate not only our past, but also our present experiences. 5

INTRODUCTION

Contemporary Documentary Fiction and the Manipulation of Mediation

The serious historical novel is back. After a brief hiatus through much of the 1980s and ‘90s—

among other factors, it seems minimalism was simply unable to bear the load of history—the

historical novel of high seriousness, which thrived in the ‘60s and ‘70s with the likes of Thomas

Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, Ishmael Reed, and E.L. Doctorow, has returned. A brief survey of the major American book award winners and finalists over the last six years bears out, at least circumstantially, my opening claim. Two of the five finalists for the 2006 National Book

Award, Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions and Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, are

historical novels. The 2006 crop also included two post-9/11 novels with serious historical

groundings. Four out of five finalists in 2005 were historical novels (Doctorow’s The March,

Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance, Renè Steinke’s Holy Skirts, and William Vollmann’s Europe

Central). The previous two National Book Award Winners (’s News From Paraguay in

2004 and ’s The Great Fire in 2003) could also be considered historical novels.

Other recent historical National Book Award finalists include Edward P. Jones’s The Known

World (2003), Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), and

Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde (2000). Doctorow’s The March also earned a spot as a finalist for

the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. All the three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize (’s War Trash,

Ward Just’s An Unfinished Season, and winner Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead) are historical

novels. Jones’s The Known World won the Pulitzer in 2004, and Colson Whitehead’s John

Henry Days (2002), Oates’s Blonde (2001), and Jin’s (2000) have all been recent 6

Pulitzer finalists. Doctorow’s The March garnered the 2005 National Book Critics Circle award, and Robinson’s Gilead won the same award in 2004, a year which also featured ’s

The Against America as a finalist. Jones’s The Known World won the award in 2003 beating out ’s The Time of Our Singing and Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, and William Kennedy’s Roscoe was a National Book Critics Circle finalist in 2002. I have included this somewhat clunky list of books and awards to ground my claim that history has never been more present in literary writing than it is right now, but even more importantly, to pose the obvious question: Why have our best contemporary writers become obsessed with history? I aim to use this study to consider possible reasons for the boom in historical fiction and to investigate the importance of contemporary documentary fiction for contemporary culture as well as for the future of literary fiction. In doing so, I will be analyzing all of the following texts and arguing for their literary and cultural significance: Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the

Butterflies (1994), Charles Johnson’s Dreamer (1998), Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (1993),

Christopher Sorrentio’s Trance (2005), René Steinke’s Holy Skirts (2005), William Vollmann’s

The Ice-Shirt (1990), Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), and Mark Winegardner’s

The Veracruz Blues (1996). However, before moving on to the reasons for the recent boom in this genre, it is first necessary to look briefly at the history of historical fiction and its relation to historiography proper and to define more narrowly my conception of this vague and variously defined category.

It is also necessary, before proceeding, to provide a brief note on terminology. My project centers on what I am calling contemporary documentary fiction. I borrow the phrase from

Barbara Foley who defines documentary fiction as that which seeks extratextual corroboration in its creation of a fictional historical world. In short, documentary fiction appropriates actual 7 historical personages, documents, and events for fictional purposes. I have elected to use Foley’s

“documentary fiction” as opposed to Amy Elias’s “metahistorical romance” or Linda Hutcheon’s oft-cited “historiographic metafiction” for several reasons.1 First, I wish not to emphasize the

connection between contemporary fiction and its generic roots in the romance of Scott (as does

Elias); nor do I wish to highlight the postmodern, metafictive elements of the fictions (an

emphasis in both Elias and Hutcheon). Like Foley, I am interested primarily in novels that

utilize extratextual documentary evidence and the ways in which they do so. Furthermore,

“documentary fiction” retains the essential paradox that, as Elias argues of the title

“metahistorical romance,” allows for multiple ways of seeing these texts without subordinating

fiction to history or vice versa (“Metahistorical Romance” 164). I also distinguish between

documentary fiction and the broader designation “historical fiction.” When I refer to “historical

fiction” throughout this study I am thinking of fiction that uses an overall socio-historical sense,

as opposed to documented historical figures/situations, to contextualize and order the

construction of the fictional world. In my formulation, the larger category “historical fiction”

includes as a subset “documentary fiction.”

Perhaps an example will cement the distinction. Historian Mark Carnes recently compiled a

lively and intriguing text called Novel History in which historians’ brief analyses of historical

fictions are followed by the authors’ responses to the historians’ comments. A brief glance

through Carnes’s table of contents reveals just how broad a category “historical fiction” can be.2

1 I have framed my choice as a choice between Foley, Elias, and Hutcheon, as theirs are the most helpful and most reasonable possibilities. There are certainly other less palatable choices, including the overly general “historical fiction,” Micheal Orlofsky’s “historiografiction,” and Mark Conroy’s “facsimile” (which he claims he has selected because “Faction has always seemed to me an ungainly term”) (46). 2 Carnes does not explicitly address his selection criteria in his introduction. However, the introduction does include much talk about the “feel” and “style” of history that can be found in what he calls novel history. From this we can conclude that Carnes thinks of historical fiction as that which illuminates the details and minutiae of an historical moment or period (though not necessarily a specific, documented moment, as the forthcoming list will show). For 8

Carnes does include documentary novels such as Gore Vidal’s Burr, ’s The

Confessions of Nat Turner, Don DeLillo’s Libra, and Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising.

However, Carnes also includes novels such as Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, F. Scott

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The latter novels are distinctively situated in particular historical moments, but they do not explicitly employ documentary evidence or specific historical personages in their fictional constructions. A strong sense of history guides the construction of their fictional worlds allowing them to fall (however loosely) under the umbrella of “historical fiction.” One could argue for pages about Carnes’s table of contents, over whether or not The Scarlet Letter should be considered an historical novel, or whether it is more or less an historical novel than, say, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, another entry in Carnes’s text. The general term “historical novel” is very difficult to apply with any consistency, but for the purposes of this study it will be applied to historically minded texts that do not explicitly utilize extratextual documentary evidence.

Making it Up as We Go Along: Fiction, Historiography, and

I.

It is customary when talking about modern historical novels to begin with Sir Walter Scott and the Waverly novels. Neither this statement nor the thumbnail sketch of literary history to follow is intended to deny the complex history of fiction’s and historiography’s shared roots in myth; however, when dealing explicitly with the historical novel, critics generally hail Scott as the father of the historical novel. That said, in Telling the Truth, Barbara Foley places the genesis of

this reason, I take Carnes to be an example of the utter breadth and boundlessness of the more general term “historical novel.” 9 documentary fiction with Defoe and what she calls “the pseudofactual novel.” Nonetheless,

Scott seems to be, in general, a consensus pick as the father of the genre.3 It is generally

accepted that the historical romances of Scott and the writers of his generation and persuasion

were employing historical personages in their novels to ground their romantic heroes, thus

increasing their mimetic authority. In this way, their descriptions of the inner lives of their

characters gain false authority owing to their characters’ being situated adjacent to “real”

historical characters. Scott and his ilk also impose their own current value judgments on

previous generations, and ultimately show how their current cultures and discourses were

directly forged on the anvil of recent history.

Modernist historical novelists, on the other hand, were much more skeptical of the powers of

mimetic , and therefore used history in their texts to question the stability and totality of

the previous century’s concept of “reality” and the narrative modes used to capture that reality.

Modernist historical novels are thus marked by skepticism and toward totalizing histories

and static conceptions of the real, as well as a turn toward internal personal consciousness

(microhistories) that is characteristic of the entire modernist period. Certainly John Dos Passos,

and especially in the U.S.A. trilogy, emerges as the most prominent modernist practitioner of

historical fiction. In fact, it would be easy to trace many of the formal characteristics of

contemporary documentary fiction directly to Dos Passos’s “Newsreel” and “Camera Eye”

techniques.4 Perhaps even more than Dos Passos, however, it is E.L. Doctorow who may be seen as the father of contemporary historical fiction. In using Ragtime essentially to rewrite

3 Indeed, Foley does label the generation of documentary writing highlighted by Scott and Cooper as “the historical novel,” which is consonant with the general consensus that modern historical fiction began with Scott. However, she is keen to include Defoe and his parodic imitations of nonfictional discourse as a part of the genealogy of documentary novels. 4 One easy example is Mark Winegardner’s recent novel Crooked River Burning, which is essentially a fictionalized recuperative history of the city of Cleveland. In the book, prominent Clevelanders drop in intermittently, in sections entitled “Local Heroes,” to tell their stories—much like the occasional appearances of prominent early twentieth- century Americans (such as Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison) throughout the U.S.A. trilogy. 10

U.S.A. with a heightened sense of postmodern irony and play—not to mention a greater visibility and popularity—Doctorow ushers the historical novel into the poststructuralist age, an age which, as will be explored in more depth in the forthcoming section, was primed to challenge the

Enlightenment truths on which so much knowledge—historical and otherwise—had been based.

This challenge, perhaps best represented in literature by Doctorow’s rewriting of Dos Passos, begot a booming generation of postmodernist historical novelists (Barth, Pynchon, Coover,

Reed, et. al.). These postmodernists push the modernist skepticism to proportions, exploding notions of mimetic referentiality and the stability of historical discourse (or any discourse, for that matter). This is the legacy the contemporary documentary novel is left with: the use of history for the purpose of deconstructing history. This brief cursory look at the history of the historical novel form is in no way meant to be complete or even necessarily complex. I am merely attempting to provide a brief but necessary backdrop against which to forward my own analyses of contemporary documentary fiction.5

II.

In order to situate the documentary novels included in this study in their contemporary

historical and literary contexts—and, therefore, argue for their significance to both historical and

literary thought—it is first necessary to outline briefly the current state of those contexts and,

thus, the intellectual culture into which these documentary fictions enter. In Elisabeth

Wesseling’s discussion of the shift from older forms of the historical novel to modern forms, she

argues that the classical historical novel, as she chooses to label Scott-era historical fiction,

displayed a complementary relationship to historiography whereas modern historical novels

5 For more complete histories of the historical novel genre, see Barbara Foley’s Telling the Truth and Elisabeth Wesseling’s Writing History as a Prophet. For a more detailed analysis of contemporary historical writing’s roots in Scott and the importance of that ancestry, see Amy Elias’s Sublime Desire. 11 relate to historiography in a more critical, metahistorical way (73). For Wesseling, classical historical fiction sought to “[enliven] available historical information in the interests of entertainment and instruction,” while modern and contemporary historical novelists seek to

“[investigate] the nature and function of historical knowledge” (193). This relationship between fiction and historiography has become a popular topic of scrutiny in the wake of the recent

“linguistic turn” in historiography and the concomitant paranoia about the still-young professional discipline, as we know it, becoming a kind of endangered species.

The epistemology of historiography in the nineteenth century is perhaps best summarized by the universally-cited statement by German historian Leopold von Ranke characterizing the function of historiography as the capturing of life “wie es eigentlich gewesen [as it actually happened].” Following the lead of Ranke, nineteenth-century historians, in laying the groundwork for the incipient professional discipline and therefore highlighting the classical

Thucydidean break from its mutual shared roots with literature in the grandparent that is myth, sought to emulate a kind of empirical science. As is implied in Ranke’s famous declaration, the question of objectivity was of the utmost concern to those comprising the budding young professional discipline.6 In attempting to remove value judgments from historical writing and to

remain as objective as possible and emulate the structure of scientific thought—the epitome of

objectivity by nineteenth-century standards—early historians sought to establish a kind of

consensus-driven set of methodologies to guide their research. This move was similar to the process that, as they perceived it, had allowed science to transcend “natural philosophy” and begin to produce objective “scientific” results. Some of the assumptions guiding the work of nineteenth-century professional historians include a prerequisite that those people and events

6 Certainly historical writing has much earlier roots than the nineteenth century; however, it is with Ranke that we tend to place the genesis of the “professional historian,” of history as a discipline peopled by uniformly trained professionals. 12 portrayed in historiography correspond to actual people and events (i.e., a strong distinction between fiction and history), a teleological sense of the development of history, and a belief that the duty of the historian was to observe the “actual people and events” and impose upon that raw material a kind of coherency that would allow readers to comprehend not only the data, but the significance of what “actually happened.”

As this last assumption implies, despite its scientific aspirations, history continued to rely on narrative forms for the delivery of its findings. In this way, history sought to be a science in its overall disciplinary construction and its methodological consensus; however, nineteenth-century historians clung to the classical notion of historical writing as primarily narrative. The scientific aspirations of historical study increased by the end of the nineteenth century as Rankean history gave way to what is often called “Social Science History.” Practitioners of this approach to historical material, obviously influenced by the methodology and philosophical viewpoint of the social sciences, objected to the “Great Men” approach to history (an obvious compromising of objectivity) that dominated Rankean-era historiography and sought to extend historiography beyond simply politics and the movements of so-called “great men.” Instead, social science historians shifted the focus of historiography to a larger sector of the population—to society at large—and to the social implications of political, economic, industrial, and technological progress. In so doing, the social science historians clung even more tightly to the process of scientific inquiry. For them, Rankean history was not objective or scientific enough; thus,

“historical science” reached its zenith with the generation of social science historians.

Perhaps the most prominent movement within social science history is that which arose out of

France in the first part of the twentieth century. The Annales school of historiography rose up around the journal of that name founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in 1929, although the 13 ideas which begot the journal had been explored in print by Febvre and Bloch for several decades leading up to the journal’s founding.7 Because Bloch and Febvre viewed history as a

“human science” much like economics, anthropology, or sociology, the Annales historians often viewed their historical subject as a part of a culture rather than within the flow and progress of linear time. Clearly, the abandonment of an assumption of a teleological linearity marked not only a break with the earlier traditions of professional historical study, but also a challenge to the conception of historical findings as relatable via narrative. No longer could historiography claim as its task the kind of totalizing “grand ” that resulted from earlier generations’

attempts to impose a coherency on their data and place their findings into the overall “stream of

history.” As a result, the work of the Annales school gave way to other social historical

movements like the Italian microstoria movement which sought to record the “history of

everyday life.” These microhistories more fully abandoned the idea of a coherent, unified, and

centered historical stream and instead concentrated on centering the marginal or, perhaps better

put, recognizing a multiplicity of centers. Perhaps analogous to the modernist movement in

literature, with which it temporally coexisted, the Annales school challenged the assumptions of

grand narrative and the power structures that center that narrative without, however, entirely

abandoning referentiality or the overall idea that a kind of historical truth could be attained.

However, again similar to literary modernism, the social science history of the first half of the

twentieth century gave way to new ideas wrought on the anvil of structuralism and,

subsequently, poststructuralism.

7 The Annales School has, over time, been referred to as a “school”; however, the “members” themselves rejected the notion of a school on the grounds that their journal was the site of a variety of perspectives and approaches that were not necessarily unified as a school proper. However, there are some shared assumptions that have allowed commentators to identify the movement as a “school.” 14

As a result of structuralist work on sign systems and poststructuralist notions of reality’s contingency on and even creation by the language used to apprehend it, historiography took what has popularly been called a “linguistic turn.” The “linguistic turn” ushered in questions about referentiality and the historiographer’s role in creating (more than merely recording) history.

The role of interpretation and, even more so, invention on the part of the historiographer was more closely examined. Historiographers as far back as Ranke recognized that historiography required some imagination from its practitioners; however, the “linguistic turn” began seriously to doubt historiography’s possibility of ever representing more than the mind of the historiographer, of ever representing a real past. Ranke’s “as it actually happened” died at the hands of poststructuralist theory; historiographers began to awaken from “the noble dream” of objectivity, as the title of Peter Novick’s influential study labels it. Most importantly, as a context for this present study, the once seemingly stable line separating factual history from fiction was at least questioned, and in the minds of some, entirely obliterated.

Historian Hayden White—with his epic 1973 work Metahistory—is often viewed as the primary progenitor of this position.8 Basing his theory of historiography on the archetypal

criticism of literary theorist Northrop Frye, White began to view the writing of history as a poetic

act requiring a choice of emplotment on the part of the historian. Depending on the selective

preferences of the historian, a certain body of “factual evidence” could be emplotted as tragedy,

comedy, romance, or some other archetypal plot form. For White, the meaning of the historical

8 In many ways, Hayden White has become the favorite champion—or whipping boy, depending on one’s perspective—for scholars pondering the fact-fiction/referentiality question from the literary side of the not-so-stable disciplinary boundary line. This is perhaps due to his theory’s roots in literary study. However, it should be noted that the discipline of history considers White as just another in a long line of historians and philosophers of history (i.e., Nietzsche, Paul Ricoeur, Oswald Spengler, Lawrence Stone, Frank Ankersmit, Dominick La Capra, Simon Schama, and others) who have raised this question (with varying degrees of seriousness) throughout the course of professional history’s short life. In short, White has been assigned a more prominent place in relation to this question by literary theorists than by his fellow historians. It is for this reason I present his ideas in a bit more depth in the following paragraphs. 15 piece is more a matter of the historian’s choice of emplotment than of the way “it really was,” to paraphrase the Rankean sentiment. As in literary creation, the form of the historical writing became an integral component of the content and meaning of that writing. For White, “histories, then, are not only about events but also about the possible sets of relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure. These relationships are not, however, immanent in the events themselves; they exist only in the mind of the historian reflecting on them.” (“Historical Text”

55). The historiographer’s purpose, according to White, is to make familiar to readers content that is either unknown or somehow mystifying, and this familiarization is done primarily through emplotment using archetypal narrative forms readily familiar to readers. In short, history “is made sense of in the same way that the poet or novelist tries to make sense of it, i.e., by endowing what originally appears as problematical and mysterious with the aspect of a recognizable, because it is familiar, form” (“Historical Text” 61).

As a result of the “linguistic turn” and the work of White and his contemporaries, the discipline of history is currently in flux. Again, an analogy to literary studies seems appropriate.

For some critics and practitioners of fiction, the heyday of postmodernism is far from over (think of Mark Danielewski’s recent attempts to push the proverbial postmodern envelope in his

“novels” House of Leaves and Only Revolutions). Others have deemed postmodernism to have been a necessary (but perhaps empty) experiment but not a fitting direction for the future of literature (think of fictionist-critic Robert Rebein’s impassioned plea for a return to realism in

Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists). Even others, like theorist Dorrit Cohn, attack White’s formulations on their very terms in an attempt to redraw the fiction-history line. In the same way, historiography has its share of theorists who continue to push the poststructurlist, anti- referentiality program. The perhaps even more prominent move in the 1990s and forward has 16 been to defend history from what has been perceived as the poststructuralist slings and arrows that attack the very existence of the historical discipline. One particularly defensive tract, Keith

Windschuttle’s The Killing of History, bears an overly dramatic subtitle representative of this position: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. Windschuttle and other historians of his ilk believe their discipline to be in grave danger of extinction or, worse yet, total irrelevance.

These historians, perhaps most notably Georg Iggers, are calling for a return to Ranke’s original project of understanding our world, our past, and the real human beings who have peopled it through an Enlightenment-based rationality—though not with the kind of naïveté that allowed for grand narratives, but with a full understanding of the contributions of the social and cultural historical movements that followed Ranke and of the historiographer’s own mediation.

These historians essentially cling to the idea that their research/methodologies, the ontology of their subjects, and their overall intentions are fundamentally different from that of the novelist.

In response to White’s idea of the indistinguishability of historian from novelist, Michael

Stanford half-seriously argues that historians, then, are seriously undervalued as creative talents

(135). Stanford, slightly less paranoid than someone like Windschuttle, succinctly criticizes

White by simply saying, “he has opened a number of serious questions, but has not closed them”

(137). Marc Colavincenzo advocates the use of Stanford’s concept of a “tissue of mutually supporting possibilities” as a corrective to the alleged arbitrariness of White’s theory. For

Stanford and Colavincenzo, invention may be present in historiography, but it must follow a strict system of rules to which no fiction writer would be bound. As Colavincenzo playfully puts it: “The novelist may happily continue to pull historical rabbits from his hat—the historian must still raise his rabbits according to certain principles” (12). It is of no use for me to quibble over 17 the intricacies of figurative rabbit rearing here in this brief survey of historiography; suffice it to note that the concept of invention has become a fixture in the discourse of historiography, and it is as yet unclear how large a role invention plays versus empirical examination of evidence under the direction of a distinct system of evidentiary rules. One thing is certain: a fierce battle is currently being waged over the direction and constitution of the historical discipline.

As a result of this brief, and far from comprehensive, sketch of changing views of historiography and the discipline of history, we can clearly see that the fiction-history divide, despite having been at least a latent concern all along, has become one of the central issues (if not the issue) for contemporary historians. Thus the relationship between history and literary studies, while once complementary as Wesseling noted above, finds itself in an undecidable state. Some, like White and his followers, view the relationship as fertile ground for interdisciplinary study and new scholarly directions; others have begun to view fiction as a kind of unwanted, destabilizing intruder. Thus, when Wesseling argues that fiction’s current relationship to historiography involves a questioning of the nature of historical thought, she perhaps even understates the case. This historiographical context, then, makes it easy to see why contemporary historical fiction poses the questions and challenges that it does. This context perhaps even begins to explain why historical fiction is currently enjoying a kind of boom—a boom at the expense of a discipline in flux. Essentially, these novelists enter an intellectual culture where: skepticism about the stability of referents is rampant, fiction takes as its duty to criticize historical discourse, and historical discourse may (or, indeed, may not) have more in common with fictional discourse than many previously thought or are comfortable with.

However, the culture of literary studies is itself far from stable. As a result, we are left to ponder several key questions: Why, in the face of the historical discipline’s identity crisis, have 18 contemporary fictionists returned in such mass to the problematic genre of the historical novel to make sense of this contemporary literary and cultural situation? And what, then, can this current abundant crop of contemporary documentary novels hope to accomplish in this culture of referential instability and collapsed boundaries?

III.

Although the discipline of literary study may not find itself in the midst of quite the battle that history does, the study of literature is far from sitting comfortably and naïvely with its own stable grand narrative. Categories are clearly in flux in our contemporary literary culture, as we academics continue to search for yet another inadequate but far-too-tempting-to-resist label for the current literary and cultural age. Some have suggested “post-theory,” “post-traumatic,” the paradoxical “post-apocalyptic,” the all-encompassing “post-al,” the clunky “post- postmodernism,” or as Jeremy Green’s new book asserts, “late postmodernism.” I make no claim to having the next great label; rather, I would like to return to a recent influential paradigm about postmodernism to help explain the current literary and cultural situation. In his widely used and highly functional study Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale argues that the shift from modernism to postmodernism is best characterized by a shift in the cultural dominant. The cultural dominant of the modernist moment was epistemology. In this formulation, obviously highly influenced by Jameson, modernist thinkers were most concerned with questions about knowledge: What can be known? Who knows it? How are we to interpret what can be known?

With what certainty do we know what we know? With postmodernism, this cultural dominant shifted to concerns about ontology: What is this world and how is it constituted? How do I participate in the construction of this world? Which of my selves is to be doing what kinds of 19 things in this world? What happens when this world is conflicted or unstable? Perhaps the most important aspect of McHale’s formulation is that he places both kinds of inquiries in a symbiotic relationship—when ontology becomes dominant, epistemology does not disappear; it merely recedes into a less highlighted role. Or as McHale puts it, “literary discourse only specifies which ought to be asked first of a particular text. . . . This in a nutshell is the function of the dominant: it specifies the order in which different aspects are to be attended to” (11).9

Laying aside for a moment the problematic nature of so seemingly simple a formulation, we can see that the importance of McHale’s idea is the recognition of a shift in novelists’

relationship to “the real.” Epistemologically dominated concerns allow for a certain level of mimesis, a modicum of stability for the real. Epistemology is concerned with how we apprehend the real, not with the actual constitution or even existence of the real. A shift to ontologically dominated concerns reflects a changing, and overall more antagonistic, relationship between fiction writers and the real. By its very nature, ontology challenges the stability of the real, and

mimesis becomes less and less possible. Thus I use McHale here to raise the possibility that

“The Mimesis Question” for literary studies works as a kind of analog to what Peter Novick calls

“The Objectivity Question,” which in many ways incited the abovementioned changes in the field of historiography. One formulation that addresses the mimesis question and is more useful

to the present study is found in John Johnston’s Information Multiplicity, which treats high

postmodern texts (i.e., those by Pynchon, Gaddis, McElroy, and DeLillo) as addressing the

9 Many have taken issue with McHale’s formulation as too oversimplified. They often do so by referencing exceptions to the formulation (i.e., Gertrude Stein as ontologically dominant, or Toni Morrison as epistemologically dominant). As much as these attempts to mitigate McHale’s system are warranted—as are any challenges to seemingly totalizing schemes—these critics are perhaps underplaying the importance of the symbiotic relationship between epistemology and ontology. McHale is, after all, only describing a shift in cultural dominant (not a wholesale shift). Any single writer or group of writers may, at any time, move against the grain of the culture, and unless they are or become the majority, their doing so does not change the dominant culture. Any concept of a dominant necessarily implies a secondary. 20 problem of mimesis in epistemologically dominated ways.10 For Johnston, the primary concern

for postmodern writers of what he calls the “novel of information multiplicity” is information: its

transmission, reception, reliability, and technologization among others. He argues:

[I]n a culture in which events are created or usurped in advance by their mass-media

simulations, contemporary writers can no longer rely upon strategies defined by a stable

opposition between the fictional and the real. Furthermore, the wholly probabilistic (as

opposed to veridical) of both information and mass-media simulations renders

the reality of social structures highly uncertain and the experience of the individual

consciousness not only transient and arbitrary but also fragmentary and incomplete. (12)

In light of the above-outlined trajectory of historiography, in which linguistics played the role of hostile intruder, we may read Johnston as identifying mass media as playing that same role for fiction in the twentieth century. Whereas linguistics helped to shatter the beautiful naïveté of objectivity, mass media play a large role in finishing off an already slowly declining faith in mimesis on the part of literary authors. Throughout his study, Johnston characterizes the high postmodernist writers who are his subjects as essentially utilizing and embracing the

“information multiplicities” begotten by the onslaught of mass media in the hope of finding alternative methods (alternatives to mimesis) of apprehending our world and culture.

In moving beyond the high postmodern age, in which the focus on information and the

systems used to sort, collect, and understand it is somewhat obvious, contemporary literary

fiction is experiencing a phenomenon much like that of historiography. Some writers and

scholars continue to forward the destabilizing project of the previous generation; others,

recognizing the advancements and challenges of the postmodern era, are prepared to return to a

kind of revised mimetic realism. As I will be arguing in the forthcoming sections, contemporary

10 This is precisely why McHale’s popular formulation is a fine starting place but is easily dismissible thereafter. 21 documentary fictions find themselves best positioned to address, and sometimes even synthesize, these disparate concerns of both contemporary literary fiction and contemporary historiography.

Naturally, documentary fictionists reflect the concerns about information, as their very form and, oftentimes, subjects are centered around the collection, dissemination, representation, and/or invention of information from and about the past. At the same time, these novels directly engage with both the mimesis question and the objectivity question in their treatment of “actual” characters and situations. While some of the novelists in this study may be intentionally molding, altering, or confounding their historical subjects, others seem to want to “get it right” or

“set the story straight,” the supposed original intention of both literary and historical writing, though not in the same naïve ways as past generations of novelists and historiographers. Thus, we can perhaps attribute the recent boom in historical as growing from and responding to the key questions currently facing the fields of literary study and historiography.

These novels do not purport to bear the answers to this complex set of disciplinary questions; nonetheless, they do find fertile ground in this current scholarly landscape and moment in which to grow and prosper, perhaps giving them the best chance of carrying forward the seemingly dying genre of literary fiction.

IV.

This explosion of historical interest on the part of fiction writers, then, has been highly influenced by the uncertainty surrounding both the “Objectivity Question” in historiography and the “Mimesis Question” in literary studies. What, then, do these contemporary documentary novels have to say about contemporary culture’s attitude toward historical renderings, mimetic reflections, and the dissemination of such knowledge? What sorts of inquiries and challenges are 22 these novels equipped to make? What, in short, can these novels hope to accomplish in their context as outlined in the preceding sections? The first, and perhaps most obvious, task of the contemporary documentary novel is to provide counternarratives. In a postmodern age where we recognize that historical writing includes authorial invention and therefore clouds the direct encounter with “what actually happened,” we also become very aware of the power that comes to be associated with the ability to “tell the story.” The questions of whose stories get told, by whom, and for what purposes are inevitably raised by any admission of invention’s presence in historical discourse. Certainly, historical novelists, alongside multicultural and postcolonial historians, philosophers, and sociologists, have taken to telling the stories that have gone untold or have been distorted by power structures; thus, counternarrating is a primary concern of contemporary historical novelists. It should be noted at this point that counternarratives are not exclusive to historical or documentary fiction. Fantastic, utopian, allegorical, or other

“ahistorical” experimental fictions may counternarrate just as well. One has only to think of the genre for an abundance of examples of counternarratives that would not necessarily be construed as historical or documentary.11 Though not exclusive to documentary

fiction, counternarratives are, nonetheless, a major product of the genre I am analyzing here.

In analyzing the counternarrativity of contemporary documentary fiction, I want to build from

the work of Barbara Foley and Amy Elias. First, Foley argues that the modernist metahistorical novel “sets out to refute the empiricist illusion of neutral subjectivity and the positivist illusion of

neutral objectivity, as well as the complacent liberal progressivisim that these illusions sustain.

It brings in documentary ‘facts’ only to question their ontological status rather than to assume a

11 For an example outside of science fiction, see Christopher Donovan’s recent book Postmodern Counternarratives. In it, Donovan examines this phenomenon not only in documentary works by Don DeLillo, Tim O’Brien, and Charles Johnson, but also in non-documentary works by DeLillo and Paul Auster. Similarly, Mark Conroy reads the works of Nathanael West, Pynchon, and DeLillo as counternarratives “erected to compete with the official version” of “the implied world projected by the public relations apparatus” (64). 23 priori their value as registers of truth” (Telling the Truth 200). She attributes this rather obvious function of confronting the self-evident nature of empirical evidence to the modernist documentary novel in general. Later, in a chapter about African American documentary fiction, she argues that the socio-political situation of African American writers in this country gives these writers the ability to use documentation in their works as a way of subverting rather than reinforcing dominant ideology (233-234). The implication of Foley’s entire chapter is that black writers can subvert; other modernist writers are condemned to reinforce dominant ideology. For

Foley, marginality becomes a kind of privileged position in the subversion trade.

I see inherent problems in assuming that white writers have no choice but to corroborate hegemony. This is complicated by the fact that, in her study, Foley elects to stop at modernism.

Yes, she “stretches” modernism to reach up to 1945, but outside of a very brief look at Ishmael

Reed, she elects not to take postmodernism as her subject. So, if Reed is the only postmodernist considered, it is possible to believe that only black writers can subvert. However, if we consider the work of postmodernist writers, we glimpse the possibilities of white subversion (one has only to think of Gravity’s Rainbow here). I do not mean to suggest that any purported act of ideological subversion is completely free from unconscious (or not) substantiation of dominant ideology. After all, any act of subverting an ideology is itself a blatantly ideological act.

Nonetheless, it seems worthwhile to extend some of Foley’s insights to postmodern writers’ attempts to subvert dominant ideology.

Furthermore, if we do accept the notion that marginality becomes a kind of privilege in the game of subversion, then Jeremy Green offers a helpful way to broaden our thinking about how to define marginality. Green agrees with Foley that “the margin can be seen as a place of transgression, a vantage from which the writer works to dismantle dominant languages”; 24 however, he reads all postmodern and contemporary literary writers as marginalized (9). For

Green, the age of television, technoculture, and mass consumerism has ushered literary writers to the margins en masse. Literary writers, then, form a kind of minority, and that marginal position

“may be redeemed as a position of resistance to a hegemonic structure of power” (9). It is possible that Green goes too far in the opposite direction, but the fact remains that postmodern and contemporary literary writers often perceive of themselves as resisting and subverting dominant ideology. The extent to which individual writers do or don’t succeed can be determined only by analyses of those individuals and their texts.

In her book Sublime Desire and since, Amy Elias has argued that metahistorical romance (her chosen label for contemporary historical fiction) signals a postmodernist’s desire to grasp a sublime History while recognizing that very goal as thoroughly unattainable. Obviously drawing on Jameson, Elias posits History as the unattainable Lacanian Real that can only ever be approached via our simulacra, our textual mediations. In a follow-up essay to Sublime Desire, in which she further elaborates her theory about the metahistorical romance, Elias calls for a

Bakhtinian dialogue between contemporary texts and historical texts (as it is impossible to participate in a dialogue with an unattainable History itself), arguing that writers “return to the past again and again, seeking perhaps not closure but creative openness,” seeking “to dialogue with the past, to reconstruct its own . . . relation to the world” (“Metahistorical Romance” 169,

170). This notion of returning to the past as a way of opening up that past is a valuable concept, but what is perhaps most important here is the idea of a dialogic relationship between current and previous historical discourse (whether “fictional” or “nonfictional”). In appropriating Elias’s notion of this dialogic relationship, however, I want to move beyond the idea that postmodern documentary fiction desires an unattainable History. Contemporary documentary novelists are 25 too well aware of the mediated nature of all historical discourse to desire a kind of totalized

History (regardless of its attainability). The entire program of contemporary documentary writers, in fact, centers on a view of historical discourse that leaves room for hybridity, multiplicity, and openness rather than an imagined totality of any kind. These writers are wise to the idea that the Symbolic must mediate the Real; therefore, they tend to use the symbolic (their texts) to mediate and simply engage with other symbols (previous historical texts and discourses).

Synthesizing important insights from Foley and Elias, I argue that contemporary documentary fiction seeks to dialogue with and ultimately complicate historical discourse via an engagement with the existing historical record and its component texts. By creating texts that refute, undermine, or simply question the validity of existing historical texts, accepted historical knowledge, or seeming historical certainties, contemporary documentary fiction reveals the ideologies behind the creation of the historical record and in so doing hybridizes the content of that record. It may be true, as Foley would assert, that these fictions constitute their own kind of ideology; however, the fact remains that the ideologies undergirding the historical record will be set beside/attached to the ideologies spurring these documentary fictions, thereby rendering the historical record hybrid in content and ultimately more open.

Aside from this counternarrativity and the inherent resistance to dominant ideology assumed by the act of counternarrating, there is another—and perhaps even more important— accomplishment of contemporary documentary fiction: the manipulation of mediation. In recognizing the mediated nature of all historical knowledge—including a full consciousness of their own act of mediation in novelizing history—these documentary texts also respond directly to the demands of the image/reality breakdown associated with our media-saturated culture. It is 26 this self-conscious play with documented “reality” that most directly mirrors the dominant TV culture and allows these novels to compete in this multi-media-dominated market and thus continue to resuscitate the genre of literary fiction—the subject of many a recent scholarly obituary.

Navigating the Torrent: A Manipluation of Mediation

I.

Television sitcoms allow viewers to live a day (or at least a half hour) in the life of a “real

American family”; reality TV allows its to be the fly on the wall of a house full of

“real” people engaged in “real-life” situations and issues; a “virtual reality” World War II video game allows young people to feel what it would “really” be like to hunt down Nazis; stats-based, simulated internet sports leagues allow fans to find out if the “real-life” Babe Ruth could have taken the “real-life” deep—in short, the “media torrent” has rendered the image-reality border increasingly blurry.12 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s highly

serious (and slightly paranoid) suggestion that “real life is becoming indistinguishable from the

movies” is perhaps truer now than ever, and due to contemporary culture’s having been washed

in the media torrent, Americans, in particular, seem to have gladly accepted this fact, making

Reality TV shows some of the highest rated in recent history—and making Horkheimer and

Adorno’s greatest fear come to fruition (126).

12 There have been numerous attempts to label the phenomenon described here—the onrush of media under which we find ourselves buried. Some recent labels include Raymond Williams’s famous “flow,” Douglas Kellner’s “media spectacle” (derived from Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle”) and “infotainment society,” Mark Poster’s businesslike “second media age,” Neal Gabler’s life-movies he calls “lifies,” and the list goes on. I have chosen to describe the situation using pop-sociologist Todd Gitlin’s descriptive “media torrent.” Though his formulation in the book Media Unlimited carries somewhat less weight than those of the abovementioned authors, his label is the richest in that it takes Williams’s important and image-laden idea of flow and pushes it to a logical twenty-first-century extreme: an overwhelming, uncontrollable torrent. Furthermore, I have also borrowed Gitlin’s navigation image/language, as in the rest of his book when he provides a taxonomy of attitudes that allow humans to “navigate the torrent.” 27

Built on the back of Adorno’s life-as-movie lament—and here I say Adorno alone, as he continued (absent Horkheimer) to explore the idea for years after Dialectic of Enlightenment, notably in Minima Moralia—an entire strain of Media Studies has arisen to respond to the notion that humans are somehow removed from their own subjectivity and experiences as a result of the rapid growth of media technology, of the Culture Industry. The most famous of these responses—and perhaps the most important and influential discussion of television yet to be written—is Raymond Williams’s chapter “Programming: Distribution and Flow.” In an idea directly descended from Adorno, Williams discusses television programming as having been organized by those in control in order to “encourage” viewers seemingly mindlessly to stay tuned, despite desires to do otherwise. For Williams, TV viewers become passive consumers not of particular programs but of television in general and are thereby captivated—indeed held captive by—the continuous flow of sounds and images washing over them. Jean Baudrillard, in a move also directly traceable to Adorno, argues that media actually “fabricate noncommunication” in that they remove the possibility of meaningful exchange and render the human consumer powerless (60). This is, of course, related to Baudrillard’s now famous concept of simulacra in which humans no longer apprehend or respond to the real but only reproductions and representations thereof.

Based on these influential ideas regarding an uncontrollable, captivating flow, the impotence of the media consumer, and the overall unreality of media representations and the consumer’s experience thereof, an entire body of media theory has emerged in an attempt to comprehend further the meanings and effects of the contemporary media torrent. In a 1960s study, Daniel

Boorstin (similar to Baudrillard but without Baudrillard’s strong Marxist theoretical groundings) argued that Americans have “[created] a thicket of unreality which stands between us and the 28 facts of life,” and that Americans suffer from and are haunted by the illusions (or perhaps delusions) they have created (3, 6). Boorstin calls contemporary human experiences mere

“pseudo-events.” In a kind of twenty-first-century rereading of this concept, Neal Gabler extends Boorstin’s treatment of the image-reality breakdown to an almost absurd postmodern end, calling life itself a medium in which we are all actors and performance artists in our own little life-movies, or “lifies” (Adorno’s nightmare all over again) (4-5). Similarly, in a 1960s formulation, Guy Debord asserts that “the real world becomes real images [and] mere images are transformed into real beings,” thus rendering it impossible for humans to perceive the real at all

(17). In his twenty-first-century update of Debord, Douglas Kellner argues, in an almost

Freudian turn, that we create these spectacles—the images that have become our only real—in order to manifest our contemporary concerns, obsessions, desires, and all manner of latent feelings, and he uses the bulk of his book to diagnose said concerns through detailed critiques of our most prominent media spectacles. Finally, Mark Poster analyzes the twenty-first-century shift from the original broadcast media model (one distributor for multiple consumers) to a

“second media age” dominated by interactive media (i.e., the internet), which constitute “a system of multiple producers/distributors/consumers, an entirely new configuration of communication relations in which the boundaries between those terms collapse” (3). For Poster, this second media age is a “simulational culture” in which the realistic linguistic paradigm is no longer relevant (i.e., signifiers and signifieds no longer have referents) and our rampant mediations radically alter the things mediated thereby (30, 62).

Perhaps a few examples from Kellner’s “media spectacles” will more clearly demonstrate contemporary culture’s thicket of unreality and transformation of images into realities.

Megaspectacles, like the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Bill Clinton sex scandals, or the death of 29

Princess Diana, ultimately dominate all media outlets (TV, radio, internet, etc.) for long periods of time. The result is that media consumers are directed away from the “real” issues and concerns in their own lives to become captivated by media presentations packaged as dramas similar to dramatic cinema or daily soap opera programs. The consumers are therefore removed from the site of their own experiences, their own “realities,” because of their captivation by some spectacular “reality” that ultimately ceases to be “real” at all. Instead, it is the packaging, the images and sound bites—like the image of Simpson attempting to squeeze his hand into a bloody glove, or Clinton’s measured refrain, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”—that captivate . These media-created and media-exploited images come to replace the

“reality” of both the event being mediated and the present experiences of those consumers who have become consumed by these images. As a result, “reality” is reduced to a collection of dominant images and sound bites that are ultimately more a product of media than of the supposedly “real” events mediated.

In Deep Surfaces, a study in which he applies these theoretical media studies formulations specifically to history and postmodern fiction, Philip Simmons argues that “we [Americans] have actually become our images: when we see ourselves as though seen on TV, the old distinctions between inside and outside, self and society no longer hold, and the self merges with its image environment” (41). He goes on to say:

As television programmers sell our attention to advertisers, we are removed from the

scene of history in two ways: first, we are removed from a relationship to our immediate

surroundings by our focus on the screen, increasing our physical and social isolation;

second, we begin to view television images not as re-presentations of events that have

taken place elsewhere (and which can at least in principle be experienced directly or in 30

forms other than the televisual) but as first-order phenomena, as events themselves. The

referent of the images becomes unnecessary, redundant, and finally lost to consciousness.

(46-47)

In these passages, Simmons captures a sense of isolation and confusion resulting from the breakdown of the image-reality and self-environment boundaries of contemporary media culture.

As a result, the contemporary concept of what is “real” is clearly skewed, as everyday experience continues to be more highly and more sophisticatedly mediated.

I introduce these representative studies of contemporary media culture in order not only to survey briefly the cultural landscape into which contemporary documentary novels insert themselves, but also to explore what these media studies share in common, as it is clear that they overlap in a variety of ways. Obviously, faith in any kind of objective and therefore apprehensible and representable “reality” has wavered, and images and representations have taken its place as that which people apprehend and to which people respond. For many media consumers, images and simulations become the real, become events in themselves; therefore, images no longer require referents. This destabilization of reality has resulted in a kind of separation and distance between human beings and experiences. Because of this kind of separation, consumers become passive receptacles of rather than active participants in their life- turned-media culture. Furthermore, any concept of a stable construction of subjecthood or identity—a hallmark of modernist thought—has been rendered unstable and multiple, leaving contemporary humans somewhat powerless at the hands of a variety of forces political and/or economic. In short, media consumers—and perhaps, by extension, all members of this contemporary media culture—become victims of the media torrent. Ultimately then, it is my contention that the recent turn to history on the part of contemporary fictionists constitutes an 31 important literary response to the onrush of the media torrent and that this response works in two key ways: contextualization and mediation.

II.

In his attempts to raise the profile of serious historical-fictional films in Visions of the Past and even more so in his new book History on Film/Film on History, Robert Rosenstone continually reiterates, almost as a refrain of sorts, that written history is merely words on a page, not “actual history,” which doesn’t really exist at all. His purpose is to the arbitrary nature of scholars’ privileging written over visual historical texts, and he ultimately attempts to bring serious consideration to the work of historically based fiction films. His refrain, however simple, is just as important to remember in the present context. Arguably the most influential iteration of this concept (especially as applied to historical fiction in particular) in the poststructuralist era comes from Frederic Jameson. Using Doctorow as his example, Jameson argues, “This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about the past (which thereby at once becomes ‘pop history’)” (25). He goes on to describe our contemporary historical situation as one “in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (25). Jameson seems to characterize this situation as a dire one, one to which we are condemned to our own pop simulacra and stereotypes. I do not read this as a condemnation at all; rather, it strikes me as a productive removing of an illusion that was previously thought to be a reality. Barbara Foley approaches this problem a bit differently (and with a bit less nihilistic sentiment), but retains the notion that the extratextual referent is not involved in a one-to-one relationship with its fictional representation. She argues that all 32 extratextual referents undergo a process of abstraction in the consciousness of the author of the fictional text: “the concrete particulars of the referent are abstracted and then reconcretized in the particulars of the fictional text” (Telling the Truth 99). In the case of the documentary novel,

Foley notes, the author would have us believe that the referent comes to us unmediated; however, the process of abstraction remains intact, and it behooves us to recognize that fact.

Regardless of how one frames it—contemporary humans can only apprehend simulacra of their referents, authors abstract referents and reconcretize them with their own ideological attachments, or referents are unnecessary in contemporary mass media culture anyway—it seems reasonable to say that one can no longer place faith (if one ever could) in an unmediated one-to- one correlation between referent and linguistic or visual representation. Or perhaps better put:

Humans can no longer deceive themselves with the comforting illusion of such a correlation.

However, if we believe that history is a collection of narratives derived from documentary texts—words on a page, as Rosenstone reminds—these narratives do not have a “real” referent themselves outside of other texts/narratives. In this case, we can at least argue that documentary fictions do have a referent: other documents, other texts, other words on other pages.

Documentary fictions induce a return of the referent in that one can fairly easily—and, indeed, is compelled to by textual suggestions—track down the documents and research the documented

(but still mediated) events to which these documentary fictions refer. These other texts are an apprehensible part of readers’ ontological world in a way that “History,” “The Real,” or “truth” can never be; therefore, when documentary fictions compel us to seek out sources, they move us outside the bounds of the text and back into our ontological world For instance, while we may have come to think of Survivor as an event in itself rather than a representation of “real-life” human group behavior, we cannot help but think of, say, Libra as representing, at the very least, 33 documentation of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life. DeLillo’s novel compels us seek documentary research either to corroborate or debunk DeLillo’s version of Oswald, thus moving us back into our own ontological world of historically based texts. It may be true that the Libra Oswald and

“real-life” Oswald become as indistinguishable in the minds of readers as the Survivor Richard

Hatch is from the “real-life” Richard Hatch; nonetheless, the source documents referenced by

DeLillo in the making of Libra are available for our perusal. This is especially the case when novelists provide us exact directions for finding their sources—think of Tim O’Brien’s footnotes in In the Lake of the Woods or William Vollmann’s extensive/obsessive list of bibliographic sources at the end of The Ice Shirt.13 The referent of History may indeed be as absent (as

Jameson notes) as that of contemporary television series (as Simmons notes), but the documentary referents and the documentary process do exist, and in using tangible documents, documentary fictions generate a return of the referent. In short, a documentary fiction is, obviously, a documentary text, and a documentary text that takes other documentary texts as its

referents does not suffer from an absent, abstracted, or unnecessary referent.

Stepping away from Freudian/Jamesonian wordplay for the moment, this “return of the

referent” is really a symptom of the larger process that I call recontextualization, inherent to

documentary fictions. Returning to Simmons momentarily, he laments that in the face of the

media torrent, “we are removed from a relationship to our immediate surroundings by our focus

on the screen, increasing our physical and social isolation” (46). Because we live in what

13 The obvious exception here is Ishmael Reed, who in Mumbo Jumbo is not nearly as earnest about his bibliography as, say, Vollmann is in his Seven Dreams series (of which The Ice Shirt is the first). Reed baits readers into attempts at tracking down bogus references, and alleges certain texts to assert claims that the referenced texts simply do not assert. Reed’s play with not only the “real world” referent but also the document referent is certainly evidence of the argument I am making about documentary fiction’s counternarrating and challenging of traditional notions of referentiality. One might argue that there is no return of the referent via documents in Mumbo Jumbo, but one referent does remain intact: the documentary process. The process of finding, interpreting, and referencing documents—which appears to be the very thing Reed is figuring in Mumbo Jumbo—is the returning referent. Even if the documents are false or misread, the process remains as the referent of Reed’s novel. 34

Simmons calls “the filmed century,” “our past takes on a teasing visibility that both stimulates and frustrates our desire for connection and coherence,” and we end up, like DeLillo’s Oswald, watching ourselves as we are watched by others, as though seeing ourselves on TV (81). It may be true that mass media culture renders contemporary humans isolated and separated from their surroundings as though cordoned off from the world by the framing box and screen of a television set, but this is precisely the condition to which contemporary documentary novelists are responding in their turn to history—history as collection of texts, as words on a page. These writers are framing contemporary experience, not with the walls of a 64-inch flat-screen, high- density television set, but with written historical documents; they are recontextualizing contemporary experience.

In creating a document based on other documents and documentary evidence, these novelists plant the reader firmly within this web of historical documentation. In our reading a document of documents, we become yet another link in this documentary chain; we become participants in the process of constructing a history (at least a microhistory, not necessarily a totalized History).

We may follow the trail of documents—say, by following some of O’Brien’s footnotes to their sources, or by tracking down one of Vollmann’s obscure Icelandic source texts—and actively place the documentary novel in line as simply another document to consider in our own construction of our reality and history. Our active participation (as opposed to the passive wash of the blue light emanating from a TV screen) in this construction of context can work as a deterrent to the disconnectedness from “reality” that contemporary Americans may feel as a result of the onslaught of media. Of course, we might also choose to take the novelists’ word for it and buy into his/her ideological abstraction, to borrow a phrase from Foley. We may simply accept, rather than actively construct, the context offered by the text, and this would certainly be 35 a more passive relationship with the documentary novel; however, the documentary novel still serves a contextualizing function by virtue of the “reality” and tangible locatability of the documents which act as its referents (regardless of our level of desire to actually locate them).

Either way, documentary fictions serve to recontextualize contemporary experience by placing the contemporary in an undecidable, constantly shifting, and always mediated relationship with historical documents and discourse. This relationship is by no means simple or direct; nonetheless, it is clearly a less abstract, more tangible—dare I say, more “real”—relationship than that which stood between, say, ’s early novels and the citizens of Washington

Square at the turn of the century. Ahistorical fictional experimentation seems yet another small flash in the larger media explosion, and realistic or minimalistic texts seem as referent-barren as another TV sitcom, family drama, or even nineteenth-century drawing-room novel. The recontextualization inherent in documentary fiction, then, is an obvious and highly effective way to navigate the media torrent and the dislocation that follows from it.

III.

The other way that contemporary documentary fictions navigate and respond to the media torrent is through their self-aware mediation. In our contemporary media culture—where Simmons argues self and image are merged, and seemingly nothing, not even our selves, comes to us unmediated—it is nothing short of naïve to believe in the possibility of an unmediated presentation of history, society, contemporary people, [insert your referent of choice here].

Some recent proponents of new literary realism have argued, for example, that “we [should] simply accept the mimetic limitations of realism, as suggests today’s writers have, as obvious and move on from there to build what Tom Wolfe insists will be a bigger, better 36 realism,” and that Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres proves that “not only may the forms of previous literature be used, but they may be used without irony” (Rebein 19, 172). While there have been some fine contemporary novels and collections that take realism as their primary mode, the best recent novels are those that are not simply aware of the limits of mimetic realism, but are aware of and perhaps even critical of their own use of mimetic materials and their own act of mediation. It is not enough for novels simply to join the parade of market- driven or even oblivious media images/narratives; the best contemporary novels are those that are aware of their mediations and utilize those mediations to provide inside knowledge and challenge the media torrent. Choosing not to navigate the torrent is to choose ignorance and naïveté; to navigate is to mediate.

Paul de Man famously believed (and certainly he is not the only one to think so) that literature is the only honest discourse, as it recognizes that it is a fiction. By that logic, contemporary documentary fiction is perhaps the most honest fiction, as it confesses that it is nothing more than a mediation of other texts. Not only does the documentary novel know that it is a fiction, but it is fully aware that, in our media-saturated culture, it is nothing more than yet another medium mediating past and present media. Therefore, we can read contemporary documentary fiction as a kind of manipulation of mediation. Rather than attempting to tell the story of a person or persons, to represent the contemporary world, or to offer the next great challenge to the vapid array of current media offerings, the contemporary documentary novel is merely hoping to tell a story about a world it chooses to mediate, thus becoming just another medium. By calling a documentary novel just another medium, I do not mean to downplay the importance of these fictions; I merely hope to play up the necessary multiplicity implied by the presentation of just one more mediation emerging from an assortment of possibilities. These contemporary novels, 37 as Amy Elias has suggested, open up the field of history and our present discourses about history to a multiplicity of viewpoints, to a dialogic mode of thinking about our past and our present.

These novels simply seek to become a part of the dialogue with/about this country’s complex history, therefore rendering that history with full recognition of its complexity.

Furthermore, what can literature, in general, really hope to accomplish? We are long past the moment when literature can be viewed as a kind of cultural authority or ethical guide. In analyzing the passing of the literary author’s cultural authority and ability to shape national tastes, Jeremy Green argues that “the dollar is now the yardstick of cultural authority” (93).

Green goes on to lament that “the novel . . . can do no more than register the divergent forces that make the present so hard to comprehend,” and he ultimately, and hopefully, concludes that in order to avoid the exhaustion apocalyptically prophesied by John Barth in 1967, the literary novel has responded to cultural changes and has transformed itself to ensure survival (215-16).

Wresting this notion away from Green, I argue that the contemporary novel’s turn toward history is the very change which is accounting for literary survival. It is true that the novel can do no more than register the complexity of the current age; however, that is something. The contemporary documentary novel, moreover, is best equipped to do so.

In a cultural age where media reign, a form that mediates media while recognizing its own status as a medium, such as the documentary novel, can thrive. Not only is the contemporary documentary novel’s self-recognition as a medium—and a medium about media—important for its ability to counternarrate, but it constitutes what I am calling a manipulation of mediation. I do not mean to suggest, in using the term manipulation, that these novels constitute nothing more than brilliant Nabokovian literary games or puzzles. Indeed, the coming chapters will reveal highly serious ideological stances and concerns in these novels. Furthermore, I do not wish to 38 equate these novels’ manipulation of mediation with metafiction. It is true that some of these novels would perfectly adhere to the traditional concept of metafiction coined by William Gass and taxonomized and analyzed by Patricia Waugh, Brian McHale, and other such scholars.

However, most contemporary documentary novels are more than fiction about fiction; they are fiction about the larger act of cultural mediation and representation.

The second reason for attributing to these novels a manipulation of mediation is their representation of, interaction with, and mimicking of the other media which constitute the torrent in which we currently wade (or sink as the case may be). Philip Simmons refers to this phenomenon as a kind of performative spectacle arguing, “the text’s success is measured by its performativity rather than by its truth, by its ability to stimulate the construction of other narratives rather than by its ability to achieve closure for its own” (94).14 I am not thinking

specifically of performativity in my own formulation here; nonetheless, the documentary novel’s

focus on mediation does ensure its ability to stimulate other texts and render discourse more

open and multiple. Even more than stimulating other texts, however, I argue that the focus on

mediation allows the contemporary documentary novel, in some ways, to simulate other media

as well. These novels’ self-referential manipulation of mediation and the concomitant play with the concept of “reality” most directly mirror dominant contemporary televisual culture. In this televisual culture, people want so badly to see their “reality” played out on their television sets, all the while watching on their television sets rather than experiencing the little bit of reality they have access to in their immediate surroundings. People too often forego the immediate for the televisually mediated, believing the mediated to be the real, and contemporary documentary

14 Simmons makes this claim about Mumbo Jumbo in particular and in a chapter about Reed and Doctorow; however, I think it is reasonable to extend the claim on the part of Simmons to the bulk of the postmodern texts he analyzes. Surely one could argue that the works of Pynchon, DeLillo, and Nicholson Baker are equally as “spectacular” as those of Reed and Doctorow. 39 fiction works from a similar principle in its critiques. The manipulation of mediation espoused by contemporary documentary fiction will not allow readers to equate, comfortably and involuntarily, the mediated and the real. These novels, symbolically speaking, lift the veil of the

“Reality TV” model of experience and reveal such experiences for the mediations they are.

Short of calling this fiction “Reality TV Fiction”—I promised earlier not to offer any labels— the point still stands that, as a result of this manipulation of mediation, contemporary documentary fiction is perhaps best equipped to respond to the demands of the image/reality breakdown associated with our current media-saturated culture, and for this reason it will survive. Both Simmons and Green conclude in favor of a kind of literary survival that flies in the face of apocalyptic scholarly death notices posted in regard to the literary novel. I join them in celebrating a survival; however, I argue that contemporary documentary fiction in particular, through its recognition of the inevitability of mediation and the accompanying challenges it brings to entrenched cultural notions, is best equipped not only to survive but to thrive.

Contemporary literary authors—and many popular writers as well—have turned to the expanse of history not only to navigate and survive the media torrent that has become our way of life, but also to give themselves a new literary life as we wander the new millennium awaiting the next cultural torrent to flood our sensibilities.

IV.

The novels discussed in this study represent a wide range of mediation manipulations. This manipulation finds itself played out in a variety of forms in the novels included here; therefore, the chapters that follow are arranged according to formal characteristics. Each novel is paired with another that utilizes a similar form but in a slightly different (and sometimes quite opposite) 40 way. This two-book system for each chapter, like the novels themselves, allows for multiple perspectives, multiple angles of vision, on the formal territory explored in each chapter.

Furthermore, the chapters—and even the books within the chapters—are arranged as a kind of continuum moving from the most fictional, story-oriented novels to the most documentary, historiographically oriented novels. This continuum is not meant to represent a hierarchy; it is a lateral rather than pyramidal continuum. I could just as easily have begun with the more historiographic novels and finished with the more traditional fictional novels; however, my rationale for arranging the study as it is will become clearer as I begin to synopsize the chapters below. It is also necessary to note that I do not intend for the chapter arrangements to constitute closed categories; taxonomy is not my primary mode here. In fact, some of the novels in the study could easily inhabit chapters other than their own quite comfortably (one obvious example would be that Alvarez’s novel would fit as well in the Steinke-Johnson chapter is it does in its own chapter). The appearance of taxonomy is incidental, as my overall focus in organizing the study is the continuum—the demonstration of variety, not the sealing off of fixed categories.

Before beginning the continuum, however, there is a short chapter addressing E.L.

Doctorow’s recent novel The March. Doctorow has historically acted as a kind of bridge between the modern documentary novel, as represented by Dos Passos, and the contemporary documentary novels of this study. In this way, we might think of Doctorow as a kind of father of the contemporary documentary novel. As a result, it is necessary, especially in light of the weakness of The March, to dismiss the father in an effort to clear space for the figurative sons and daughters I am championing in this study. The March essentially attempts to comment on the present—both analogously and satirically—by reducing the past to cliché cardboard cutouts.

The ultimate result is that the novel finds itself resting comfortably on surfaces, unable to 41 penetrate those surfaces into any kind of depth. Like the media torrent to which the novels in this study respond, Doctorow in The March is full of flash and pyrotechnics but short on the kind of depth that would constitute any kind of meaningful navigation of the media torrent.

The first chapter of the continuum examines Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (1993) and Julia

Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). These are the most traditionally novelistic, story-oriented of the contemporary documentary fictions here. In the chapter, I argue that

Nordan’s and Alvarez’s use of both the documentary and traditional fictional strategies constitutes their attempts to alter their communities’ collective memory. Memory in general and a community’s collective memory in particular are the products of complex combinations of documented fact, testimony, biases, and pure imagination. As a result, Nordan and Alvarez pattern their texts as similar combinations while emphasizing the fictional and imaginative nature of memory in order to influence and even potentially alter their target communities’ collective memory.

In the following chapter, I argue for René Steinke’s Holy Skirts (2005) and Charles Johnson’s

Dreamer (1998) as fictional biographies. The fictional biography form is, once again, one that utilizes many traditional fictional techniques; hence, the chapter’s nearness to the fiction end of the fiction-history continuum. However, the fictional biography form is also perhaps the most hybridized of the forms explored here, as it allows readers to inhabit simultaneously the internal world of the fictional biography’s subject and the external world of history. The form also allows for the relatively seamless conflation of fiction and history, as the free indirect discourse characterizing the fictional biography form allows the narrator to utilize historical or biographical material without differentiating that material from his/her own discourse. The result is the appearance of a purely fictional, somewhat traditional novelistic narrative; however, 42 a closer look at relevant historical materials reveals that the mediation thereof is rampant but disguised by the narrator’s discourse. Steinke and Johnson use this form to push forward revised conceptions of their subjects—in the case of Steinke, she attempts to introduce her unknown and unconventional subject, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, in such a way that she becomes more than a two-dimensional historical footnote, and Johnson works to reverse the hagiographic oversimplified image of Martin Luther King, Jr. by rendering him with more human complexity than hagiography allows.

The historical material, or at least the process of discovering it, is far from disguised in the novels comprising the next chapter. Despite the fact that Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues do contain adequately developed characters, the books are much more focused on the historical process than on history’s treatment and image of the characters. Both novels deal with mythic figures—the myth of John Henry outworking a machine and all of the mythology that accompanies American baseball—and both take as their primary subject the process of collecting, sorting, and selecting evidentiary information to determine the truth or falsehood of a given historical event/period/personage. Because the historical process figures as something of a in these novels, Whitehead’s and

Winegardner’s novels are more metafictive and more overtly critical of older historiographic paradigms. In this sense, these novels, while retaining some aspects of traditional plotting and , begin to move closer to the history end of the fiction-history continuum.

The most historiographic of the novels included here are those in the final chapter,

Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance and William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt. Sorrentino and

Vollmann focus heavily on documents and historiography—so much so that they ultimately do so at the expense of traditional novelistic concerns such as plot, , and character. In fact, 43 these two novels, at times, seem impenetrable; however, readers who manage to “stick with” these novels will be rewarded by the insights and criticisms they offer. Sorrentino, in narrating the events surrounding the kidnapping, takes the rampant mediation of our media saturated culture as his critical target, and as such, his novel would potentially serve as a fine capstone to this entire project. However, I have chosen to end the project with William

Vollmann and his novel of the discovery of North America, The Ice-Shirt, because of its grand encyclopedic scope. In his encyclopedic documentary novel—which belongs in its chapter due to its almost overemphasis on the documentary and historiographic—Vollmann manages at various times to focus on fiction and traditional fictional concerns, alteration of North American collective memory regarding the continent’s discovery, fictional biography and the role of history on a character’s image, and figuring and critiquing the process of collecting and arranging historical materials. For this reason, I argue for Vollmann’s novel as a kind of ur- contemporary documentary novel encapsulating the variety of forms of mediation explored in this study in a single novel. Therefore, I have chosen to bring the project to a close with

Vollmann.

Ultimately, in up this continuum I attempt to show the variety of ways that contemporary documentary fictions navigate the media torrent. Regardless of each author’s chosen method, what remains most important is each author’s commitment to self-aware, critical mediation of other texts/media. Unselfconscious returns to some sort of new mimetic realism amount to standing pat in the face of the rampant mediation of “reality” in contemporary culture.

Such literary responses to this culture, therefore, become complicit with or even victims of the torrent. Thus, the recent turn, in literary fiction, toward history and the documentary represents the best and most significant response to this media torrent. As a result, contemporary 44 documentary fictions are our best contemporary fictions and are ultimately our best hope for the continuance of a potentially endangered but ultimately necessary genre: literary fiction. 45

CHAPTER 1

“It’s Always Now”: History as Analogy in E.L. Doctorow’s The March

I.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, many critics tend to think of Sir Walter Scott as something of a template for traditional historical novelists, as a measuring stick for critics, as well as the starting point for derivations by revisionist historical novelists. If we limit the historical novel’s genealogy to American historical novelists, though, the proud patriarch is surely James Fennimore Cooper. Following Cooper’s line into the twentieth century, we find

John Dos Passos as the parent of the twentieth-century American historical novel. Moving into the second half of the twentieth century, E.L. Doctorow stands out, arguably, as the father of the contemporary historical novel (and certainly of the documentary fictionists I am analyzing in this study). I present this thumbnail genealogical sketch not as a definitive or critical statement on the development of the American historical novel, but merely as an attempt at connecting the most obvious and talked-about figures in the tradition leading up to the novels I argue for in the succeeding chapters. In this way, it seems reasonable that I first deal with Doctorow in order to establish his link to contemporary documentary novelists and to demonstrate how the authors in the forthcoming chapters extend the genealogical branch past Doctorow, into the literary future—this especially in light of the fact that Doctorow is not fading quietly into the background, as he has recently published yet another documentary novel. 46

In The March, Doctorow details General William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating march through the South beginning with Atlanta and taking us through the Civil War’s end and

Lincoln’s assassination. The form of the novel is familiar to Doctorow’s readers. As in his critical and popular success Ragtime, in The March Doctorow weaves together a variety of separate narrative strands, each following a different set of characters and most often, though not always, overlapping. Some of these plotlines include: Pearl the freed slave girl posing as Union drummer boy and latching onto Sherman’s army in order to find her place and ultimately becoming reunited in a love-match ending with soldier Stephen Walsh; Emily Thompson, daughter of a Southern judge, volunteering to work as a nurse in the Union army and taking up with medical researcher/mad scientist Wrede Sartorius; two clowning soldiers, Arly and Will, donning a variety of uniforms and even posing as government-hired photographers in order to escape their fate as imprisoned turncoats; and, of course, Sherman actually marching through

Georgia and the Carolinas.

Most of these narrative strands are narrated in the third-person; however, there are also moments when a) the third-person narrator shifts from an objective point of view and, via free indirect discourse, taps into the innermost thoughts of the characters and b) the third-person narrator gives way to passages of first-person narration. Furthermore, those granted the right to narrate briefly their own story and those whose internal realities the shifty third-person narrator inhabits are not always the focal characters. Readers spend time, for instance, experiencing the internal reality of not only Sherman and Sartorius, two of the major characters, but also of characters as minor as “right-hand man” General “Kil” Kilpatrick and vegetative injured soldier

Albion Simms. The result is a sprawling, disparate cast of characters, many of whom get a chance to occupy center stage for at least a brief time in the novel. Again as in his earlier work, 47 some of these characters are historical personages (Sherman, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S.

Grant, and Kilpatrick among others), while others are wholly fictional (such as Pearl, Emily,

Arly, and Sartorius—reprising his role of mad scientist that originated in Doctorow’s 1994 novel

The Waterworks). Not all of these characters span the duration of the novel. Some disappear from the narrative rather early, such as the Union soldier Clarke (who at first appears to be a major character but is killed off by page 50). Some major characters enter the story relatively late: Stephen Walsh, who makes his first appearance as late as page 150, and British journalist

Hugh Pryce, the last to arrive, appears for the first time on page 213. General Sherman, the ostensible protagonist, does not even surface as a character until page 74.

This motley collection of narrative voices, characters, and plot strains is soaked in and therefore unified by the sentimental novel mode. This is yet another typical Doctorow technique—the appropriation of a popular fictional genre to which he brings a contemporary sensibility. Doctorow’s canon contains other novels modeled after popular forms, such as his western novel Welcome to Hard Times and his science fiction novel Big as Life. Aside from these obvious appropriations of popular fictional forms, Doctorow has always planted his fiction firmly on the line between popular and more serious literary endeavors.1 In The March, the

sentimental is accompanied by his use of many of the tropes of the nineteenth-century

sentimental tradition: the tragic mulatto, the “Passing” plot (in regard to both race and gender),

the reuniting of lost family members, the esteemed soldier/statesman falling in love with the

commoner, the education of the gauche young female protagonist, and a love-match ending. It

seems, then, that Doctorow intends his nineteenth-century tale to mimic and make use of tropes

and plots that were culturally dominant at that time.

1 Doctorow has always inspired debate about just how serious his “literary” endeavors can be deemed. Some judge his work to be quintessentially postmodern and highly important in the scope of twentieth-century literature, while others view Doctorow as merely a popular novelist unworthy of the critical attention he has so far received. 48

In The March, Doctorow seems to be reprising many of the formal strategies that brought enormous success to his most effective early novels like The Book of Daniel and Ragtime. Put colloquially, Doctorow is up to his old tricks again. However, we must consider how well suited those tricks are to contemporary culture and the contemporary literary landscape. After considering his newest release, The March, in a contemporary context, I argue that it may be time to begin turning our eyes to the next generation of historical novelists.

II.

Whenever discussing Doctorow’s fiction and its intersections with history, it is customary to

begin with his most famous statement on fiction and history: the 1977 essay “False Documents.”

In this widely cited critical piece, Doctorow argues for the truth power of fiction by eliminating

the once-thought indelible line separating fact from fiction. For Doctorow, “there is no fiction or

nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative” (231). If all is

narrative, then, Doctorow reasons that “all history is contemporary history”—any narrative text

about the past necessarily refers to the present in which it is written, which, as Doctorow argues,

“is why history has to be written and rewritten from one generation to another” (228).

Ultimately, then, Doctorow uses these ideas to conclude in favor of the fiction’s truth power:

[W]e have it in us to compose false documents more valid, more real, more truthful than

the ‘true’ documents of the politicians or the journalists or the psychologists. Novelists

know explicitly that the world in which we live is still to be formed and that reality is

amenable to any construction that is placed upon it. It is a world made for liars and we

are born liars. But we are to be trusted because ours is the only profession forced to

admit that it lies—and that bestows upon us the mantle of honesty. (232) 49

These highly quotable statements about fiction and history have become a staple feature of

Doctorow criticism and have even become common in more general discussions of history and historical fiction.

However, Doctorow’s theory of fiction as “false documents” is hardly original. Obviously,

Doctorow’s theory represents a cobbling together of many of the postmodern, poststructuralist, and, more specifically, deconstructionist ideas that were at the height of fashion in 1977.

Furthermore, Doctorow, too, was at the height of his power in the 1970s with the 1971 publication of The Book of Daniel and the 1975 appearance of his breakthrough hit Ragtime. As a result, Doctorow’s critics have relied quite heavily on the false documents theory, as it essentially provides a kind of guide to his approach in what we can now recognize as some of his best work. In novels like The Book of Daniel and Ragtime—which, arguably along with City of

God and, to some, Billy Bathgate, have come to be recognized as his finest novels—Doctorow collapses both the past-present and fiction-history boundaries through his exploration of historical eras/events that are analogous to present social realities and through his use of fictional devices like anachronism, absurdist caricature, and indeterminacy. Ultimately, he does all of this to deconstruct previously accepted notions of truth and to reduce all narrative—fictional and nonfictional—to mere text.

In Naomi Jacobs’s exploration of the different uses of actual historical figures in fiction throughout literary history, she uses the descriptor “fiction history” to characterize this satirical, deconstructive use of history in fiction that we see in Doctorow’s best work. In fact, she calls upon Ragtime in particular to exemplify her “fiction history” subgenre. As a result, her depictions of this ostensible subgenre capture not only the functional features of Ragtime but also what is most powerful about this, the most popular, most successful, and most representative 50 of Doctorow’s novels. Like Doctorow, Jacobs reads the “fiction history” as working primarily by analogy, utilizing actual historical characters in a symbolic way—as opposed to presenting them as complex, historically accurate figures—to analyze and critique large contemporary issues. As a result, Jacobs’s fiction historians work against the Walter Scott school of historical- figures-as-link-to-verisimilitude; instead, in “violating our expectations of such characters, they ignore, trivialize, or transform their political and cultural significance, reducing them to comic cutouts or simply to common citizens” (73). Put another way, “the historical figures, dehumanized or generalized in order to establish their conceptual significance, find their importance as ideas rather than individuals” (77). As this discussion of historical figures as cardboard cutouts and symbolic ideas belies, fiction historians view history as “essentially static, a realm of endless and absurd recurrence that is more appropriately a subject of black humor than of sober consideration” (73). For Jacobs’s fiction history genre, like Doctorow’s own theory, history becomes more about the present than the past, and this analogous use necessarily requires some oversimplification and almost always comes with a satirical edge of the sort critics have been noticing in Doctorow’s work for decades.

With its larger-than-life figures like Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, and Emma Goldman appearing in overblown, comical , Ragtime obviously follows the above-cited formulation in its satiric and critical use of historical figures as cardboard cutouts. Furthermore,

Doctorow’s use of anachronism and absurdism in regard to historical figures—Coalhouse

Walker’s (acting as proto-Black Panther) hostile takeover of Morgan’s library or Houdini the illusionist taking flight—bear obvious criticisms of the age in which it was written. As Jacobs argues in her formulation of the fiction history subgenre, these qualities are precisely what make

Ragtime not only an ideal example of the subgenre but, more important, a powerful and effective 51 novel especially considering its 1975 context. The March, too, returns to many of the same conventions that made Doctorow’s early novels so successful. Larger-than-life figures like

Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and the book’s centerpiece William Tecumseh Sherman populate the pages alongside fictional creations like the slave girl Pearl and Wrede Sartorius

(who, like Coalhouse Walker the proto-Black Panther, is a bit of an anachronism, acting as centuries-ahead-of-his-time medical researcher). Furthermore, these characters are often presented as clichés for analogic use (as will be discussed further in the forthcoming pages).

Ultimately, The March is patterned much the same way as Doctorow’s earlier critically acclaimed novels; however, one must question the effectiveness of this technique in contemporary culture.

III.

Reviewer Daniel Green, in one of the few negative reviews garnered by The March, remarks,

“this novel at best rehearses platitudes but otherwise does very little to alter our understanding either of the Civil War or of the lingering issues whose lack of resolution has plagued American life since then” (D. Green).2 Quite simply, there is very good reason for Green to lament the lack of insight about the Civil War: this book is not primarily about the Civil War. Doctorow is not necessarily interested in altering our understanding of the Civil War. Like much of

Doctorow’s historically minded fiction and the theory behind those novels, The March works analogously, using the Civil War as a kind of symbolic conceit to comment on and raise consciousness about contemporary issues. Knowing Doctorow’s preferred method, it should

2 Though Green’s review appears on his personal blog as opposed to a respectable literary journal or reviewing publication, I take his review to be of scholarly worth given his background. Green alleges to have an academic background in contemporary American fiction, and some of his previous publications support that fact. Some of his prior work has appeared in College English, the Georgia Review, and Dalkey Archive’s online journal CONTEXT. 52 come as no surprise—in light of the contemporary foreign war championed by those on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Doctorow—that Doctorow has released a novel about war, its atrocities, and the devastation it has caused on our very own soil. Doctorow is likely hoping to raise awareness (perhaps especially in the more conservative sectors of his audience) about meaningless, selfishly driven atrocities presently perpetrated by this country by asking readers to consider these same atrocities at more than a century’s remove. Furthermore, any Civil War narrative necessarily requires readers to consider the current state of race relations in this country and how far we have left to progress in light of the appalling origin of such relations. In short, Doctorow’s newest novel is not a “Civil War novel” proper; rather, as

Doctorow’s novels so often are, this book is about who we are as a people and about the cultural blind spots (racism, neo-imperialism, and all-around jingoism) we continue to overlook.

“There is no remembering. It’s always now,” announces Albion Simms, the fictional soldier whose memory has been erased due to a head injury (274). Sartorius’s mental, hypothetical reply to Simms’s quite literal statement represents the ideal expression of Doctorow’s own approach to history: “My poor fellow, it’s always now for all of us” (275). Doctorow even allows Stephen Walsh, later in the novel, to expand upon this idea. After sentimentally brushing the tears away from his love’s face, Walsh proclaims, “Nothing stays the same, he said. Not

David, not Sartorius, not the army on the march, not the land it trods, not the living, and not even the dead. It’s always now, Stephen said with a sad smile for poor Albion Simms” (356). This statement, uttered by three separates characters, becomes a kind of refrain or motto for the novel.

Thus Doctorow has planted within his novel an expression of the very approach used to write the novel: history cannot remain the same; thus, we must continue to rewrite and reshape history in the present. Written history, for Doctorow, tells us more about the present than the past. Thus, 53 this novel is not primarily about the Civil War, but about “the right now.” As a result, readers of the novel should be prepared to seek out analogous statements that say more about contemporary

America than nineteenth-century America.

However, Doctorow’s analogy in The March, is not a perfect one—A is not completely and meticulously likened to B in all its various aspects. There is no precise one-to-one correlation between past and present in the novel. The analogic work of The March—much like Ragtime’s commentaries on everything from race, class, and religion to psychology and cinema—is spread among a variety of smaller points and observations that may be applied to the present. In an interview with Janet Maslin, Doctorow has recently described this method: “‘Among other things, a novel is a system of opinions,’ he said, sounding pleased with that formulation” (E8).

Thus, Doctorow’s analogic method does not yield a single, dominant message about contemporary America, but rather a collection of contemporary opinions as motley as his cast of characters. We are not to seek out a single, sound analogy; instead, we are to read the novel as a

“system of opinions” which uses the past to express “the now.” For instance, we may read

Sherman’s mock-imperial “acquisition” of one state after another throughout his march as an indictment of the U.S.’s seemingly justified (or so our leadership would have us think) attempts to gain political control of several Middle Eastern nation-states. Doctorow may also be asking us to take in the destruction of the “loser’s” territory, people, and culture during war—with the added sting attached to the fact that the Civil War’s “losers” were equally as American as the ostensible winners—as a way of reconsidering the consequences of contemporary American military . Even moving beyond war, we might read Sartorius’s hubristic medical experimentation as a commentary on the “playing God” associated with current stem cell research and cloning attempts. Sartorius is, in fact, described at separate times as “like a god” 54

(57) and as “a magus bent on tampering with the created universe” (190). Doctorow also imbeds into the narrative commentaries which suggest that race relations are not so different now than in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. He even ends the novel with a brief but telling exchange in which Pearl is contemplating her level of freedom. Walsh tells her, “You will have to let the world catch up to you,” and when she asks, “When’s that,” Walsh evocatively answers

“It may take some time” (363). This dialogue seems to suggest that it may yet take even more time from where we stand in the twenty-first century. Within Doctorow’s self-proclaimed system of opinions, such individual analogous commentaries clearly abound, and readers could easily locate many more like those above.

Aside from these examples of the analogic content of the novel, Doctorow may also be using a kind of analogy in his choice of form. As mentioned earlier, Doctorow has appropriated the nineteenth-century sentimental form for his twenty-first century novel. Not only is the overall mode of the novel mimicking the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition, but Doctorow also calls upon many of the specific tropes utilized by that tradition. In short, much of both the content and the form of The March are essentially straight out of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Even the very fact that there are myriad plot strands centered around one gigantic cultural event/social ill smacks of Stowe. Furthermore, like Stowe, Doctorow also intends his novel to be a kind of protest (though an analogous protest regarding the present), or at least a stinging critique. In this way, Doctorow is certainly doing more than simply dressing a nineteenth-century narrative in nineteenth-century garb. Instead, it is possible to read Doctorow’s invocation of the sentimental tradition analogously. It may be that he is ironically referencing the kind of overt sentimentality with which the pro-war segment of the contemporary American population argues for the current . The over-the-top, sometimes seemingly force-fed patriotism and saccharine “think of 55 the troops” that have characterized much of the popular media coverage are dripping with the same kind of sentimentality we might be wont to disdain when reading Stowe in the twenty-first century. Doctorow, of course, ironically flips this sentimentalism, putting it to use in the service of his analogous, critical look at the contemporary behavior of the American government, media, and people.

For Doctorow, sentimentalism becomes not an argumentative rhetorical device, but rather a part of his overall, historically disguised, hold-a-mirror-up-to-contemporary-America technique.

As a result, we get a variety of sentimentally soaked, virtually boldfaced maxims throughout the novel like the following: “The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self regard. What a scant, foolish pretense was a family, a culture, a place in history, when it was all so easily defamed” (54); “When the war is over it will not be over. . . . their war will never be over” (234); “This was not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause, it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or principle” (298); “[Grant] knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war” (359). Despite these statements obviously emanating from a variety of characters and contexts within the novel, the fact remains that the great majority of characters and contexts in the novel are accompanied by these sentimental aphorisms. Indeed, each quotation bears an important insight; although, because of Doctorow’s sentimental form, they come off overwrought—these become the rehearsed platitudes that Green laments in his earlier-cited review. Thus, Doctorow has draped his own analogous critiques in the same kind of over-the-top sentimentalism that we see with much contemporary pro-war rhetoric and even much of the contemporary media in general. 56

While it may be obvious that the form and overall plot content of The March are used for

Doctorow’s patented critique-by-analogy, we can also see in The March evidence of Jacobs’s assertion (uttered in reference to Ragtime) that “Like any analogy, the analogy between the past and the present must be oversimplified in order to be illuminating” (83). Thus, in order for

Doctorow to use the past to speak about the present, it becomes necessary for Doctorow, at some points, to reduce these characters to cliché cutouts: Pearl the tragic mulatta, Walsh the noble abolitionist, and Sherman the general with the stoic exterior and vulnerable, pensive interior, among others. Two reviewers—positive reviewers, at that—have made similar observations in regard to The March. John Wray points out, “The abundance of players and events and the extreme economy required by the novel’s architecture inevitably reduce much of the supporting cast to little more than sketches, often to clichés” (7). Wray then goes on to suggest that

Doctorow’s method is similar to that of Tolstoy in War and Peace; however, he also mentions that “War and Peace is more than a thousand pages long,” as if to suggest that Doctorow has simply not done enough to support his ambitious project (7).3 Walter Kirn justifies Doctorow’s

sentimental clichés saying, “When the subject is as large and old as war, the pursuit of pristine

originality can thin a story down to nothing. To get through such tales aesthetically unscathed is

a finicky, slightly cowardly objective that works against basic honesty and passion” (14). These

reviewers have recognized the sentimental clichés Doctorow has appropriated for his novel as

well as the larger-than-life historical figures (like Lincoln or Sherman himself) who, according to

Jacobs, are “already simplified [so that] the novelist can play with those simplifications,

3 Strange as it sounds, it is actually quite reasonable to compare The March to War and Peace considering Doctorow’s own admission: “I realized with great joy one day that I was writing a 19th-century Russian novel. There are no Russians in it, but in terms of the territory covered and the characters, it was kind of this expansive idea of what a novel should be” (E. Taylor 3). Doctorow himself intimates that he began to view his own novel as somehow Tolstoyan; however, the fact remains that there is simply not enough weight and density to The March to bear such comparisons. 57 emphasizing the qualities that best serve the analogy being established” (84). In short, readers are able to recognize that Doctorow has returned to many of his “false documents” theories in the creation of this newest novel.

Furthermore, in The March, Doctorow also returns to his preference for interpolating fictional characters into documented scenes (think of his turning Freud’s documented visit to into Freud and Jung sailing through the Tunnel of Love). In The March, he inserts his now- recurring fictional character Wrede Sartorius into several key historical scenes. Sartorius is present at the final meeting between Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln (Doctorow 331-33). During that meeting, shortly after which Lincoln would be assassinated, Mrs. Lincoln was allegedly feeling ill (Sherman 681); however, there was no Sartorius there to aid her and to become the

President’s new personal physician (Doctorow 333-34). Later, Doctorow has his Lincoln invite

Sartorius to Ford’s Theatre for a show; fortunately for Satorius, he declines the invitation (350).

Also, in a key fictionalized scene, Arly, the Confederate soldier posing as the photographer

Josiah Culp, makes an attempt on Sherman’s life. Doctorow’s description of the posing of the generals appears to be patterned after a famous photograph for which Sherman did pose with his generals (Glatthaar 8). That photo, however, features only eight generals. Doctorow numbers the generals at eleven, so that he can include historically based characters who were not truly present (such as General Kilpatrick) and characters who do not appear to be historically based at all (such as General Teack) (Doctorow 322). Of course, the historical photo was taken without an assassination attempt and without the wounding of the fictional General Teack. These interpolations of Sartorius and Arly into otherwise documentary scenes—not to mention the intertextual linking of The March to others of Doctorow’s novels via the inclusions of Sartorius and the brief cameo (beginning on page 92) of a descendent of Coalhouse Walker—demonstrate 58 that Doctorow is primarily concerned with fiction and imagination, and, ultimately, their powers of analogy and possibilities for revealing truths.

Despite his primary concern with the truth power of fiction and his assertion that “there is only narrative,” Doctorow has clearly “done his homework” in crafting this novel. He has undoubtedly looked at prior narratives—most specifically Sherman’s own memoirs—in the construction of this one. For instance, many of the documents cited in Doctorow’s text are verbatim (or close to it) from orders and correspondences given and received by Sherman; therefore, it is clear that Doctorow is participating in a kind of mediation of history (more on the exact character of that mediation later in this section). One example is the telegram in which

Sherman offers the capture of Savannah in December of 1864 as a Christmas gift to President

Lincoln. Doctorow presents this telegram verbatim with only a small grammatical change; he deletes an “and” and instead begins a new sentence in the final line of the telegram (Doctorow

114, Simpson 772). Doctorow also shows Sherman in the act of “composing” Special Field

Order No. 15—the famous “Forty Acres and a Mule” order. In the novel, the fictional Sherman calls his assistant Major Morrison (most likely a wholly fictional character) to “Get this down.

Field Order whatever it is” (120). Sherman then rambles through his concessions for black resettlement and asks Morrison to “tidy it up for my signature” (120). A one paragraph dictation to Morrison in Doctorow’s novel ostensibly becomes the two-page order—tidied up by someone like Morrison, Doctorow would have us believe—reprinted on pages 610-11 of Sherman’s memoirs. Doctorow maneuvers it so that several phrases from the actual published document can be found in the fictional Sherman’s “rough draft.” Later, the fictional Sherman wishes to brag in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton about his successes in the Carolinas. In presenting this scene, Doctorow quotes the following line directly from the actual letter (with his 59 use of the semicolon and de-capitalization of “Country” as the only alterations): “Let Lee hold on to Richmond . . . and we will destroy his country; and then of what use is Richmond?”

(Doctorow 245, Simpson 825). Finally, in the scene in which the fictional Sherman announces the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to his troops, Doctorow quotes directly the first four lines of Special Field Order No. 56 (again with comma usage as the only alteration) (Doctorow 349,

Sherman 706).4

There are also moments in the novel where Doctorow seamlessly places phrases lifted directly from Sherman’s own words into the mouths of his narrator and other characters. One example of this practice occurs when the narrator discusses the numbers of newly freed slaves who have attached themselves to Sherman’s march. According to the narrator, “He [Sherman] wanted nothing to encumber the campaign. The freed slaves who had followed along since Savannah now numbered more than twenty-five thousand useless mouths” (247-48). This distinctive phraseology can also be found in a letter Sherman sent to General Terry on March 12, 1865: “I must rid my army of from 20 to 30,000 useless mouths” (Simpson 826). Doctorow appropriates both Sherman’s numerical estimate and unsympathetic, businesslike phrasing for use by his narrator. Furthermore, this is another example of Doctorow’s attempt to mediate written history.

He allows his narrator free reign to borrow snippets of published documentation without any distinction between the narrator’s own and the borrowed discourses.

Along with his direct use of published field orders and correspondences, as well as his subtle

borrowing of Sherman’s own language for his narrator’s use, Doctorow also bases details and

events in the novel on Sherman’s own account of his march in his memoir. Certainly, the major

4 It should also be noted that Doctorow also takes great pride in inventing seemingly historical documents. Citing one of the more powerful letters written by Sherman (the one in which he comforts a comrade who has also lost a son), Janet Maslin asks Doctorow where he found such an obscure passage. His response: “‘I don’t know if I should tell you.’ . . . He paused slyly, considered, then relented, ‘O.k., that’s mine,’ he said. ‘I wrote that letter.’” (E1). 60 events—the overall path of the march to the sea, the Generals who participated in particular battles, the assassination of Lincoln—scarcely needed researching, as they are relatively well- known; however, Doctorow also includes more minor events and anecdotes as they are related in

Sherman’s memoir. For instance, Doctorow narrates a somewhat intimate moment in which

Sherman sits reflectively on a log outside of Columbia, South Carolina, describing the scene of the city in great detail and waiting for his men to lay a pontoon bridge which would allow them access to the key Confederate city (175). Doctorow extrapolates this little moment from its slightly less reflective and more businesslike source passage in Sherman’s memoir (636-37).

Once inside Columbia, according to Doctorow’s novel, Sherman makes several promises: he promises the mayor of Columbia that his army will not stay long and has no intent to injure the citizens or their property, and he promises a nun that her convent will be protected from Union destruction (176-77). However, at that very instant Sherman notices smoke rising from nearby cotton bales, and the nun’s convent is eventually consumed by the flames, allegedly started by

Confederate troops as they left the city (176-78). This small scene, too, has a basis in “fact,” as

Sherman—again, far less dramatically and empathically—relates the anecdote of his empty promises to Dr. Goodwin, the mayor of Columbia, and to the Sister of Charity in charge of a local abbey (637, 643). Also, after Lee’s surrender to Grant, Sherman arranges a meeting with

Confederate General Joe Johnston to arrange for his surrender. Doctorow includes the detail that

Sherman, “full of the generosity of the victor,” was “not quite aware, in his exhilaration, of giving more to Johnston than Grant had given to Lee” (347-48). Furthermore, in relating this scene, Doctorow quotes Johnston as saying that any continuance of fighting in light of Lee’s surrender “would be not war but murder” (347). Sherman, through a series of letters and some brief commentary thereon, relates this same turn of events in his memoir—Grant had vetoed the 61 too-generous terms of surrender negotiated by Sherman and Johnston, and Grant himself had to amend the terms (715-17). Sherman also quotes Johnston as saying that “any further fighting would be ‘murder’” (705).

All of these examples demonstrate that Doctorow has indeed researched and mediated historical documents in this novel, despite his stated penchant for fiction over fact. Furthermore, these examples seem to share one primary characteristic: they all seem designed to enhance “the human angle” of the war (to borrow a phrase from John Freeman’s Seattle Times review). In each case, Doctorow finds a small detail or minor event in Sherman’s memoir and “enlarges it to its sentiments,” to paraphrase Doctorow’s own character Emily Thompson’s memorable quote:

“I do not reduce life to its sentiments, Dr. Sartorius. I enlarge life to its sentiments” (210).

Sherman himself relates the experiences of looking on Columbia, promising to protect a Sister of

Charity, and giving up too much to Johnston in very spare, straightforward, businesslike prose.

For Sherman, it appears, these are not opportunities for humanization; they are simply moments that occurred. Of course, one must question Sherman’s process of historiographic selection; he could very well have left the more minor items out altogether. However, despite unfeeling manner of presentation, the fact remains that Sherman does point out his attempted charity to the mayor, the citizens of Columbia, and the Sister of Charity as well as his leniency with Johnston.

It is possible, then, that Sherman included such moments in his memoir because he knew that they might represent his more human side; however, regardless of the (conscious or unconscious) motive behind Sherman’s process of selection, Doctorow represents these anecdotes with full attention to their humanizing possibilities, increasing their dramatic effect significantly. In

“playing up” the historical, all-business Sherman as a more profound, pensive, and dramatic character, Doctorow is able to make Sherman larger than life (think Houdini and Emma 62

Goldman in Ragtime). In this way, even Doctorow’s use of historical documents appears designed to enhance the fictional qualities of the novel. Again, it becomes clear that Doctorow’s main concern lies not with the constitution of documentary history but with the truth-power of fiction.

Echoing the above point in his New Yorker review, comments, “Reading historical fiction, we often itch, our curiosity piqued, to consult a book of straight history, to get the facts without the fiction. But The March stimulates little such itch” (98). Not only does

Doctorow fail to stimulate such an itch, he blatantly suppresses what little itch there might be. I refer to the fact that, for his historical information, Doctorow appears to rely on Sherman’s own memoirs and letters. However, he does not cite Sherman as one of his primary sources. In fact, he includes only three names in his list of acknowledgements, and he offers only their names and current job titles as opposed to the titles of any of their books he might have referenced. Two of these sources are surgeons, Daniel Roses and Marc Siegel, most likely used as resources regarding the fictional Sartorius sections. The only historical source he lists is Joseph Glatthaar, whose name, incidentally, is misspelled in the acknowledgements list. Glatthaar is a prolific

Civil War historian whose book The March to the Sea and Beyond Doctorow admits was the original impetus for his project (E. Taylor 3). It is a bit curious that Doctorow is not more forthcoming with his sources, as all of the other novelists discussed in this study include detailed and extensive information about their sources (i.e., which books they used and for what purposes). It is as though the other authors want readers to follow the trail of sources and become even more aware of the authorial mediations; whereas Doctorow is more protective of 63 his use of sources, as though suppressing those historical mediations in favor of a more purely traditional novelistic experience for readers.5

Ultimately, as demonstrated above, Doctorow seems to be most interested in fictionalizing

history, in speculating on the thoughts of historical personages and interpolating fictional

characters into key historical scenes—as opposed to, say, an explicit engagement with and

challenge to the process of collecting, selecting, and composing written history. It is true that the

Josiah Culp/Arly plotline, focused on the photographing of the war, does include some

commentary on the “making of history” with several comments similar to the following:

“Making photographs is sacred work. It is fixing time in its moments and making memory for

the future” (308). However, these brief moments are, nonetheless, overshadowed by the kinds of

fictionalizing mentioned above (i.e., Arly, posed as a photographer, intruding on a documented

historical moment by making an attempt at Sherman’s life). Overall, it seems reasonable to

conclude that, in The March, Doctorow has once again attempted to create a “false document.”

He has once again attempted to simplify historical figures into cutouts for satiric use in a text

designed analogously to offer a “system of opinions” about contemporary America by “playing

with history.” Therefore, Doctorow is most likely once again interested in challenging the very

nature of “truth” by mapping a “fictional truth” onto a “factual” framework and proving that

“there is only narrative” (Doctorow, “False Documents” 231).

IV.

Using the above analysis, we might conclude that The March is yet another typical Doctorow

production; it could be placed in line with Doctorow’s other “false documents” including The

Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate. Several reviewers have briefly made similar

5 Perhaps, as his former character Houdini would say, a magician never reveals his tricks. 64 comparisons. Vince Passaro sees a unity of approach among The March, The Book of Daniel, and Ragtime (32), and Richard Eder places the novel in line with Ragtime and Billy Bathgate proclaiming, “He does it again in The March” (3). Indeed, as I have attempted to show above, he has done it again. However, that fact, I argue is precisely the problem with The March. There is no denying that Doctorow’s false documents method was powerful, important, and highly effective in the poststructuralist 1970s, when he conceived of it and executed it to perfection in two of his most successful novels. However, Doctorow’s method was best suited for that earlier time: a time when many still held out hope for a stable Truth; a time when most “nonfiction” and

“fact” may have been regarded with hard and fast definitions; and a time when deconstructive thinking was in need of fictional support and demonstration. “Playing with history” and calling into question the concept of “truth” were important exercises and Doctorow was certainly one of the foremost practitioners. The poststructuralist era needed novels like The Book of Daniel and

Ragtime to raise questions about the contingency of truth for literary and popular audience alike.

However, the contemporary literary and cultural era does not need novels like The March.

Needless to say, in our twenty-first century media age, poststructuralism and deconstructed truths have become part of the furniture. These once revolutionary and ultimately world- changing ideas can now be much more easily accepted and perhaps even, at times, taken for granted. As I have argued in the previous chapter, the most valuable attributes of contemporary documentary fiction are its mediations of “reality” (past and present) and, even more important, its awareness of those mediations. Certainly, Doctorow’s false documents method and its application in The March participate in such mediations; however, Doctorow’s reluctance to reveal those mediations taints any gesture toward awareness. Obviously, his suppressing of his source texts is one major way that Doctorow stifles this kind of necessary awareness. 65

Furthermore, despite the earlier-granted potential associated with his form, Doctorow’s heavy-handed, often unselfconscious use of the sentimental tradition can also cause readers to become unduly “sucked in” to the story, further hiding any key mediations. I do not doubt that

Doctorow himself is aware of the mediations he performs in the creation of his novel. The problem lies in that the novel itself does not display that awareness; rather, it may, at times, be seen as attempting to hide that awareness.

This fact renders Doctorow’s mediations as what I might call “media manipulations”— perhaps even on par with the kind of manipulations of “reality” perpetrated by the contemporary phenomenon of “Reality TV.” Many of the hallmarks of Doctorow’s false documents method— utilizing larger-than-life characters; rendering them as symbols, as cutouts, rather than complex, multifaceted human beings; emptying and flattening the past so as to more easily draw an analogy with the present—have also been employed (albeit for hopefully different ends) by

“Reality TV.” Just as Doctorow does with historical characters, “Reality TV” also selects larger- than-life individuals and transforms them into stereotypical, cardboard cutouts as opposed to complex, conflicted human beings. Furthermore, in its earliest forms, “Reality TV” may have helped viewers to question the very nature of “reality” and its contingency on perspective, just as

Doctorow’s earlier, better work was better suited to an prior time when it could help readers to question the nature of Truth. However, “Reality TV” has become nothing more than obvious commercial manipulation in its most recent outcroppings. I hesitate to push this admittedly imperfect analogy to the point of labeling Doctorow blatantly commercial. Nonetheless, the fact remains that his primary method, executed once again with The March, ceases to make readers aware of mediation and contemporary media manipulations—a must in this age—but rather participates in its own kind of, perhaps unintentional, media manipulation, in which it seeks to 66 hide its mediations in the hope of unselfconsciously conflating fact and fiction (after all, for

Doctorow, it’s all just narrative). Thus, Doctorow becomes complicit with a kind of “Reality

TV” sensibility. Ultimately, Doctorow gives readers what they want in an historical novel— wars, generals, “great men,” love stories, happy endings—as opposed to the kind of challenge, complexity, ambiguity, and resistance offered by the other writers included in this project.

All in all, The March may simply be a novel not suited to its time. It is a product of an earlier, and once highly successful and important, form that is simply no longer adequate in contemporary culture. As such, the novel unwittingly becomes a victim of the media torrent and, in that way, is perhaps guilty of that which the other novels in this study work to critique, reveal, and counteract. In light of this argument, it may be instructive to return to a few of the positive reviews of The March. Some of these reviewers have inexplicably and offhandedly referenced cinema in considering this novel. There is indeed something of a tradition of viewing

Doctorow’s works cinematically—especially in light of the success of Ragtime and its characterization of the inception of cinema—and it is widely known that Doctorow once worked as a script reader in Hollywood; however, these reviewers’ references seem to arise as if from nowhere. For example, in Book Review, Walter Kirn muses, seemingly out of the blue, “The March, if it were a movie, might be said to have a cast of thousands (and war, it’s true, makes bit players of us all), but it also has a star” (14). Kirn gives us no indication as to what has drawn him suddenly to imagine The March as a movie. In the Chicago Tribune,

Art Winslow makes an offhanded reference to film as well. In commenting on Doctorow’s tweaking of the historical record for dramatic effect, Winslow curiously quips, “It makes a better movie, after all” (1). What he seems to mean is that Doctorow’s altering of the historical record is not so much critical as narrative—it makes a juicier story or smoother plot is ostensibly what 67

Winslow suggests. His mention of the movies is again completely out of the blue and not productively connected to any commentary on Doctorow’s method. In a final and admittedly more tangential example, John Wray of The Washington Post’s Book World, while not explicitly invoking film in this instance, does strangely label Doctorow “a writer and an entertainer” (7). It is almost as if these reviewers have simply returned (perhaps unknowingly) to ideas about the success of Ragtime and that novel’s appropriation of cinematic sensibility. These reviewers’ return to earlier readings of Doctorow’s work parallels Doctorow’s own return to his earlier successful method. In both cases, what once worked so well—critics viewing Doctorow’s work through a cinematic camera’s eye and Doctorow’s use of the false documents method—is not so easily translatable to the contemporary moment. After all, it is hardly flattering to describe the recent work of a serious and highly respected literary author with the too-true phrase “it makes a better movie after all.” 68

CHAPTER 2

Re-collections: The Revision of Collective Memory in Lewis Nordan’s

Wolf Whistle and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies

It may seem odd to some that I have introduced this project by invoking history and historical theory and yet have chosen to take on memory as the concept binding this first major chapter.

History and memory, clearly, cannot be comfortably conflated. In fact, in his landmark essay

“Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Pierre Nora argues that “memory and

history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition” (8). He

describes a “conquest and eradication of memory” on the part of history (8). For Nora, memory

is a perpetual, living, organic, habitual, social entity; history, on the other hand, is a fraught,

political, mechanical, incomplete, artificial reconstruction. Viewing this conception, it is easy to

see how Nora might perceive of the problematic discipline of history as doing violence to the

purity of memory. Nora’s formulation, while a bit dramatic in its presentation, is representative

of the kind of distinctions between memory and historical consciousness commonly drawn both

by historians and memory theorists in the second half of the twentieth century.

However, by the close of the twentieth century, historians—having grown perhaps more self-

aware and ultimately more comfortable with the postmodern notion of history’s constructedness

and their own inherently subjective role in recreating the past—problematize the notion of

historical consciousness as an objective, external, and merely critical voice speaking for those no

longer present to speak for themselves (and violently ambushing unsuspecting memory, as Nora 69 would have it). For example, in the essay “Writing the Individual Back into Collective

Memory,” Susan Crane argues that each historical utterance emanates from an individual—an individual with her own subjectivities and who is herself a member of a social collective. In this way, Crane asks us to consider that historical consciousness may indeed be viewed as an element of collective memory rather than a forceful intruder thereon (1383). In her article, Crane wonders aloud: if historical consciousness begins to see itself as a voice in a collective and therefore refuses to speak externally on behalf of others, “what would historical discourse lose— nationalism, cultural imperialism, revisionism?” (1384). Granted, both arguments I have presented to open this chapter take somewhat extreme positions in the debate over the relationship of history and memory; however, I argue that the documentary novels examined in this chapter inhabit the space between these positions. Before moving on to the fiction, though, it will first be necessary to establish some background regarding the study of collective memory.

Whenever one considers collective memory, it is customary to begin with Maurice

Halbwachs. Halbwachs was a French sociologist—originally of a Bergsonian persuasion but eventually shifting his allegiance to Durkheim—who became involved with Lucien Febvre and

Marc Bloch just as they were laying groundwork for the Annales school. It was in this context— the confluence of history and sociology in the budding social-science history movement—that

Halbwachs began his groundbreaking work on collective memory. For Halbwachs, “collective memory” does not describe a sort of telepathic groupthink in which all members of a group remember the same happenings in the same way at the same time. Rather, Halbwachs thought of all individuals as a part of any number of collectives, and “while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember” (The Collective Memory 48, emphasis added). In short, individuals use the 70 context of the collective to aid their own individual remembrances. Halbwachs, in his uniquely circuitous style, further describes how this process works:

What makes recent memories hang together is not that they are contiguous in time: it is

rather that they are part of a totality of thoughts common to a group. . . . To recall them it

is hence sufficient that we place ourselves in the perspective of this group, that we adopt

its interests and follow the slant of its reflections. (On Collective Memory 52)

In other words, our shared contemporary symbols and images give our individual memories staying power. It is only because they are associated with our present cultural context that our memories can be remembered at all. In fact, James Fentress and Chris Wickham, whose work is heavily influenced by Halbwachs, go so far as to assert that events constituting collective memory “tend to be remembered in the first place because of their power to legitimize the present, and tend to be interpreted in ways that very closely parallel (often competing) present conceptions of the world” (88). For Fentress and Wickham, our notion of the present not only acts as a context within which to remember our past, but the present also leads us to shape the past in ways that legitimize what we have become, in ways that justify our present conception of ourselves.

Furthermore, this process described by Halbwachs is necessarily an active one, and one not without a kind of motive as we might infer from the aforementioned insight from Fentress and

Wickham. Halbwachs’s forumulation is directly contrary to Freud’s notion that we reach back into the recesses of our minds and pull out fully realized memories. For Halbwachs, recollection equals reconstruction: our memories of the past are actively reconstructed in the present under the influence of the clues we gather from our contemporary collective context. In this way, our memories often say more about our present positioning than about the past that constitutes their 71 content. Drawing on these formulations, an entire subset of theorists who study the politics of commemoration has emerged. These theorists approach the study of memory from the perspective of analyzing the external commemorative clues that various collectives use to guide the memories of their people (i.e., archives, museums, commemorative anniversaries, public sculptures, symbolic images, etc.) and the obvious political implications of the selection and creation of such commemorative pieces. Perhaps foremost among this group is the aforementioned Pierre Nora. Nora coined the idea of lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, as a lament for the loss of the communal, habitual environments that allowed memory to live freely.

For Nora, these sites of memory, “the exterior scaffolding and outward signs” of what was formerly a lived experience, bear the responsibility of remembering; thus, humans record rather than remember (13).

It is easy to see, then, why a scholar like Susan Crane might respond to Nora and other politics-of-commemoration theorists by attempting to “write the individual back into collective memory,” as her article’s title asserts. Someone like James Wertsch, then, manages to split the difference, so to speak, between the positions of Nora and Crane using what he calls a “mediated action” model of memory analysis. Wertsch’s first move is to convert Nora’s abstract notion of

“sites of memory”—which tends to be interpreted most often as referring to physical sites, such as museums and statues—into “texts,” in the open, postmodern sense of the term. He then posits memory as a symbiotic, cooperative activity requiring “an irreducible tension between active agent and cultural tool [i.e., text]” (11). For Wertsch, this use of cultural tools inherently situates the rememberer within a collective context in which those tools are created and shared. Put a bit more metaphorically, “it is no more possible to remember without invoking cultural tools that reflect a social heritage than it is possible to speak without employing language” (Wertsch 172). 72

Wertsch, therefore, synthesizes in memory all of the following: the active, participatory individual; the external, “textual” cue; and the social collective responsible for the creation and sharing of that “text.”

Using these theoretical foundations, I believe Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and Julia

Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies can best be understood as sites of memory, as textual collective memory tools. Both Nordan and Alvarez, I argue, intend their novels to become adopted as the kinds of tools described by Wertsch in order to aid the memories of those who may have “forgotten” the tales and the perspectives provided by these authors. Once their novels are published, read, and ultimately entered into public domain, they have the opportunity to become fully integrated into the aggregate body of “texts” serving as collective cultural memory- aids. As a result, the “memories” that individuals in the groups adopting these texts may have of these events will “hang together” in ways not possible before Nordan and Alvarez provide the scaffolding for those memories.

While we may see these authors providing external sites of memory, we can also see them attempting to write the individual back into collective memory. Within the overall spectrum of documentary novels, Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies are clearly the most traditionally narrative documentary novels included here. In fact, some might argue that they do not even belong in the category of documentary fiction, that they are more similar to the “as-based-on” book.1 In an essay entitled “Growing up White in the South” (now

1 Take for example Bebe Moore Campbell’s 1992 novel Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine. Campbell’s novel is clearly an “as-based-on” novel that is loosely patterned after the Emmett Till lynching. Campbell’s Till is named Armstrong Todd. However, instead of perpetrating his perceived crime against the gentility of a Southern white lady in a country store, Campbell has Todd commit his offense—speaking French to a white lady—in a black pool hall. Some of the other details are also entirely fabricated such as Todd leaving behind a mother and a father in Chicago, Todd working for a liberal white man for the summer in Mississippi, a local conjure woman killing off the crooked sheriff, etc. Campbell’s book is indeed loosely based on the events surrounding Emmett Till; however, it is far from documentary in nature. Some might be tempted to argue that Nordan’s novel falls into the same category; however, 73 appended to the novel but originally appearing separately), Nordan admits, “The novel I wrote,

Wolf Whistle, is pure invention, because when I began my memory of the events surrounding the murder [of Emmett Till] and the trial was very limited” (295). The novel is so invented, in fact, that if it were not for the blatant Emmett Till reference on the book’s jacket, younger readers less familiar with the Till case might not even realize that there is an historical correlate. Alvarez’s novel, though clearly more recognizably historical, contains a postscript in which the author makes a similar admission: “what you find in these pages are not the Mirabal sisters of fact, or even the Mirabal sisters of . . . . [W]hat you will find here are the Mirabals of my creation, made up but, I hope, true to the spirit of the Mirabals” (324). Both authors are seemingly admitting to having written “as-based-on” books rather than documentary novels. However, a closer examination reveals this to be untrue. While Nordan and Alvarez do not admit to doing the kind of exhaustive research that, say, William Vollmann has become noted for, and although they do not overtly display any of the research they have done, it nonetheless becomes apparent to curious and astute readers that Nordan and Alvarez have completed documentary novels.

They just happen to be documentary novels that are more highly fictionalized than those of

Vollmann and others; these novels simply fall closer to the fiction end of the fiction- documentation continuum that characterizes the range of documentary fiction.

It is significant that these two authors select a more highly fictionalized mode for their respective documentary novels, as they are, I argue, more concerned with memory than with historical discourse proper. Both Nordan in Wolf Whistle and Alvarez in In the Time of the

Butterflies are representing collective memory in their documentary fictions; hence, they use documented materials more sparingly and concentrate more attention on filling in the gaps in

a closer look (such as the one I provide in this chapter) will reveal that Nordan’s novel is more documentary than one might at first perceive. 74 documentation with applicable, poignant fictional material. They more seamlessly weave fact and fiction together as representative of what most of us do when we remember. In short,

Nordan and Alvarez, as opposed to modeling the construction of historical discourse (as we will see in later chapters with Whitehead, Winegardner, Sorrentino, and Vollmann), instead choose to mimic the habitual, organic orality and memory, the loss of which Nora laments so forcefully in his work. Obviously, when constructing any type of textual lieux de mémoire, it is impossible to recover that kind of organic, tribal collective memory more characteristic of a bygone era. Even so, in placing their focus on narrative and character—as opposed to the documented history that is nonetheless latent in the narratives they have constructed—Nordan and Alvarez have done more to write the individual back into collective memory (in a late twentieth-century kind of way) than other sites of memory, such as archives, annals, or museums, which tend to focus more on the production of historical discourse that has, as Nora argues, taken the place of memory.

Furthermore, as the politics-of-commemoration theorists have argued, Nordan and Alverez do not construct these lieux de mémoire without some underlying socio-political agendas. In their choices of subject, perspective, and intended collective audience, these authors are essentially advocating for those groups mistreated by or entirely shut out of national collective memory and official historical discourse (African Americans in the American South and Dominican women).

In this way, these novels work to raise awareness of differing perspectives or complicate the accepted collective memory by adding new, complex, problematizing texts to the extant scaffolding bearing the weight of collective memory in the . To paraphrase Crane’s earlier-cited rhetorical question: In opening up history and collective memory, providing new lieux de mémoire, and “jogging the memories” of forgetful Americans, what do the institution of 75 history and collective memory of the United States stand to lose—nationalism, racism, and cultural imperialism? I suspect that both Alvarez and Nordan would answer with a resounding

“yes.” Wolf Whistle and In the Time of the Butterflies constitute those very yeses.

“Nothing’s Simple”: Lewis Nordan and the Complication of Collective Memory

I.

In Lewis Nordan’s 1991 book, Music of the Swamp, the title story which opens the book contains a scene in which two young characters, Sugar Mecklin (the protagonist of the story cycle) and Sweet Austin, discover a set of feet, belonging to a dead body, sticking out of a local lake. The knowing narrator confidently explains, “the body was an old man, it turned out, who may have had a seizure of some kind before he went into the water. Later on, his boat was found with a fishing rod and baited hooks in the floorboards. . . . Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin did not know all this yet” (12). Sugar and Sweet did not know who was floating in the water, and neither, it turns out, did the overconfident narrator. At the time, Lewis Nordan himself was not ready to admit who was really floating in that water. Two years later, in the essay “Growing up

White in the South,” Nordan admits, “I knew it was not [an old man]. Though I had not given a thought to any future book I might write, I knew when I wrote the chapter that this dead person was none other than Emmett Till” (295). It seems that Nordan has been haunted all his life by the death of Emmett Till just a few miles away from Nordan’s boyhood home—so much so that in a dreamlike repression, Till surfaces, literally, in Music of the Swamp. In that book, Till implicitly becomes one of the many dead who haunt the novel. The most memorable line in

Music of the Swamp appears when Sugar Mecklin’s alcoholic father warns his boy, “The Delta is filled up with death” (53). The boy ponders all the death that he might possibly dredge up in 76 the land he calls home: Confederate soldiers, plantation slaves, and apparently lynched youths as well. Throughout the story cycle, Sugar continually places the blame for all this death on “the geography”; however, the implication is that everyone living in the Delta is somehow responsible for filling it up with death.

This sense of responsibility, repressed by Nordan in Music of the Swamp, drives him to write

Wolf Whistle, the relatively undisguised story of Emmett Till. Nordan again admits, “my racial identification with the murderers of Emmett Till still troubles me,” and Wolf Whistle is the result of his facing that guilt (“Growing up White” 297). The Emmett Till case to which Nordan refers is, obviously, the event that occurred in Sumner County, Mississippi on August 28, 1955, that is thought to have sparked, even more than the Rosa Parks incident, the Civil Rights movement as we know it. On August 24, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black Chicago boy visiting some of his mother’s family in Mississippi, entered a grocery store in the town of Money. He allegedly spoke inappropriately to the white female cashier, Carolyn Bryant, in addition to “wolf whistling” at her. Several days later, the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother,

J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till from his Uncle’s home and relentlessly pistol-whipped him before shooting him dead and sinking him in the nearby Tallahatchie River by tying a heavy gin fan to his neck with barbed wire. The following day, Bryant and Milam were arrested on kidnapping and murder charges. Roughly one month later, after a farce of a trial, Bryant and Milam were exonerated after the all-white, all-male jury deliberated for a mere sixty-seven minutes. Mamie

Till-Bradley, Emmett’s mother, insisted on an open casket funeral, and the picture of Emmett’s battered face, barely recognizable as human, became iconic for early Civil Rights leaders.

This is the story which haunted Nordan, who was fifteen years old (just one year older than the slain boy) at the time and living in nearby Itta Bena, Mississippi. Despite the well-known 77 story that serves as the novel’s basis, Wolf Whistle is not a typical historical novel. It is not the straightforward animation of the historical detail surrounding the Till case, nor is it even very recognizably historical in the same way as other novels examined in this study. Nordan, instead, chooses to weave the Till story into his tightly constructed body of work. All of Nordan’s novels and story cycles take place in and around the fictional town of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, his own Yoknapatawpha if you will. As in Faulkner’s canon, centered largely around several families in his fictional county, Nordan’s characters recur and the details remain, for the most part, consistent—with the notable exception of the dead fisherman in Music of the Swamp who ultimately reveals himself to be Emmett Till in Wolf Whistle.2 Thus, in Wolf Whistle, this real

historical event intrudes on the otherwise tight-knit, self-contained fictional community of Arrow

Catcher, Mississippi.

The novel is narrated in a fairly unconventional manner. Wolf Whistle utilizes a multiplicity

of narrative consciousnesses; however, Nordan does not systematically order or even overtly

signal those changes in consciousness, as we will later see with Alvarez. Instead, the narrator

slithers unannounced in and out of a variety of consciousnesses. The narrator almost always

remains in third person—though not strictly so—and it is not always a straightforward third-

person narration. Sometimes the “third-person narrator” injects himself into the narrative and is

also seemingly omniscient as in the following mocking commentary which displays a knowledge of both the present and the future: “Probably nobody in Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro. knew

2 In fact, there is even some overlap between Wolf Whistle and Music of the Swamp that might not necessarily make sense without a familiarity with the earlier book. In Wolf Whistle, the dead Bobo sings out to Sugar Mecklin, “I am the mermaid, I am the lake angel, I am the darkness you have been looking for all your sad lives” (184). This quizzical mermaid reference is a direct response to a dream Sugar Mecklin has in Music of the Swamp. Sugar dreams of a creature calling out to him from Roebuck lake, and he perceives the creature to be a mermaid of some kind and that she would hold some important knowledge and power (4). Certainly Wolf Whistle becomes the story of the power of the Till case to affect the lives of those in the Delta; however, without a familiarity with Sugar’s dream at the opening of Music of the Swamp, readers are likely puzzled by the odd mermaid reference appearing in Wolf Whistle. 78 that history was about to be made, well, I mean, how could they?” (36). However, the mostly third-person narrator will sometimes limit himself to a particular character’s consciousness and will even mimic the speech patterns of that character. When tapping into the thoughts of Solon

Gregg, the so-called “white trash” murderer, the narrator adopts Gregg’s accent. For example,

Solon ponders the notion that all things are possible in Jesus, and the narrator remarks, “and looked like to Solon it mought be right, sho did” (125). Then, of course, the narrator also taps into the thoughts of beings/objects that do not ordinarily have thoughts: the pigeons on the rafters of Red’s Goodlookin, the buzzards atop Arrow Catcher’s lightposts, and the eye hanging out of

Bobo’s lifeless head.3

As with the varied narrative consciousness, the novel also lacks a protagonist proper.

Depending on the chapter, all of the following characters briefly play the protagonist role: Alice

Conroy, Solon Gregg, Runt Conroy, and Roy Dale Conroy. Noticably absent from the list is, of

course, Bobo, the Emmett Till character. Certainly this story is not possible without Bobo;

however, the narrative never truly focuses on him—with the possible exception of Chapter 9 in

which his dead, dislodged eye plays the role of protagonist. Even in the moments most

important to the story—the alleged wolf whistle scene in the grocery, the murder, and the trial—

Bobo is not the center of narrative focus. Solon Gregg is the focus of both the grocery store incident and the murder scene, and Alice Conroy plays that role during the trial. The fact is that this novel is not really about Bobo/Emmett Till. Nordan’s novel is truly about the white people who, directly or indirectly (whether by actively pulling a trigger or by remaining silently complicit in a blatantly racist culture), are implicated in the murder by their racial identification

3 Bobo is the Till character in the novel. And lest one argue that Nordan’s “changing” of Till’s name renders this more of an as-based-on novel than a documentary novel, it should be noted that Bobo was the real-life nickname given to Till by his mother. He was widely called that by family and friends. In “Growing up White in the South,” Nordan even admits that it was only in the final draft of the book that the character, whom he had been calling Emmett, was renamed Bobo (though Nordan does not suggest the reason for the switch) (298). 79 and who now have to deal with the aftermath of this realization (or in some cases, the lack thereof). In placing the focus, and consequently the blame, on the white characters in the novel and by disallowing a single narrative voice or single character’s story to dominate, Nordan has made the white Mississippi community the collective protagonist. And in composing a documentary fiction that nonetheless veers from the documentary in many and sometimes absurd ways (i.e., talking birds and talking eyes, prophetic water droplets, and a high school arrow catching team, to name a few), Nordan is representing this collective protagonist’s collective memory. More than just figuring and thus inherently critiquing the problems of collective memory, Nordan also takes aim at the absurdly created “official story” of the Till case. The story that was concocted at trial to explain this case and ultimately absolve the murderers is both flawed and slightly absurd in itself. In critiquing the official story, those in control of it, and the absurdity of its result (freedom for two men who admit to feeling justified in committing murder), Nordan, from his position of power within the community of white Mississippians who were in control of the story, is also advocating for those who had no power to alter the story.

Overall, Wolf Whistle adds a text to the cultural scaffolding supporting United States collective memory, and in so doing, Nordan ultimately reshapes that collective memory, thereby changing the way that future generations, future members of the collective, envision our shared past.

II.

The primary achievement of Wolf Whistle is the novel’s ability to analyze, critique, and ultimately revise the collective memory of an historic, life-altering, culture-altering event. The form of the novel accomplishes these effects in several key ways. First, the form mimics memory in its treatment of documentary history. There are very few people whose memories are 80 able to capture and hold large chunks of research and documentation. Rather, human memories tend to function via the creation of narrative—narratives that are not always “factually” accurate and that are prone to embellishment. In this way, Nordan’s focus on narrative as opposed to documentation in his documentary novel becomes more purposeful than simply spinning a good yarn; it can be read as representative of the workings of the human memory. This is evidenced by Nordan’s skillful weaving of documentary evidence and narrative embellishments and misremembrances. Incidentally, in the text, Nordan does not signal when he is using documentation or moving from one side of the fiction-history boundary to the other. This becomes another way in which Nordan’s form mimics memory—there are rarely blatant signals in one’s own mind when the memory is inventing or embellishing. That transition, both in the human memory as well as in Nordan’s text, is seamless. In fact, in the case of the novel, one can really only locate the moments of documentation after having been compelled (by the text’s resemblance to a familiar historical event) to conduct a bit of research.

Take, for instance, Nordan’s treatment of the two most contentious “scenes” in the historical

Till case: the grocery store incident and the trial. At the grocery—and here Nordan renames

Bryant’s Grocery “Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro.”—the following of Nordan’s details “match up” with the official historical record4: There was a group of black youths talking and goofing

around on the porch of the store; one of them entered the store on a dare, bought two pieces of

bubble gum, and proceeded to engage a beautiful young white woman; the youth may or may not

have whistled (some say they heard it while others did not). These are the details that Nordan

ostensibly “gets right” in his recreation of the grocery store scene. However, there are several

4 Nordan also changes the name of the Bar from his earlier work to better “match up” with the documented historical details. In Music of the Swamp, Red’s establishment is called “Red’s All Night Bar” (106). However, because Till’s alleged “wolf whistle” occurred in a grocery, Nordan changes the name of Red’s bar to “Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro.” in order to include the grocery business and to keep that historical detail intact. 81 key details that are misremembered in this scene. Whereas the historical Carolyn Bryant was married to the store owner and was working at the counter at the time of the incident, Lady

Montberclair, the Carolyn Bryant figure in the novel, is of no relation to Red, and she is present in the store as a customer not an employee. In Nordan’s version, Lady Montberclair enters the store, “acting modern,” to buy tampons, something only the men of Arrow Catcher did, and only in code according to Red’s recollection (34). Nordan also has the “modern” Lady Montberclair offer Bobo a ride home after his “offense.”

These alterations are significant for several reasons. For Solon Gregg, from whose perspective we largely view the aforementioned events, the audacity Sally Anne displays in walking right up to the counter to ask for tampons and driving away with a black boy is disturbing. For Gregg, these acts are affronts to his notion of the gentility of Southern ladies, and of course Gregg immediately blames the black boy for shattering his image of the purity and innocence of this high-class Southern Lady. While no one really knows whether or not Till whistled or what exactly he said to Carolyn Bryant, it is fairly certain that she was not boldly asking for tampons or driving off with Till that August day in 1955.5 Furthermore, J.W.

Milam—the role of whom is played by Solon Gregg in the novel—was not even present at the

store to witness the boy’s perceived transgression against Southern womanhood. He and Roy

Bryant were allegedly informed days later by one of the local African American workers present

at the store. Noting that Nordan’s grocery scene is filtered largely through the consciousness of

Gregg (with moments of interjection from Red and a swift switch to Runt Conroy’s perspective

after Bobo is driven off), the key section of this scene, then, is largely the product of Gregg’s

5 Though no one is sure what Till said in the grocery that day, Juan Williams’s account in Eyes on the Prize, the book accompanying the PBS documentary, claims that Till said, “Bye Baby” to Carolyn Bryant as he was leaving the store (42). However, despite the fact that Williams prints this very matter-of-factly, he offers no documentation on how he knows this to be the phrase uttered by Till. 82 memory of the events. It is reasonable, therefore, to ascribe the exaggeration of the affront to

Gregg’s own need to fully justify his later actions. Rather than a mere prank or the harmless settling of a bet (as the real-life Till’s actions were said to be), the event, as Gregg’s memory recreates it, becomes an immense and punishable offense against the sanctity of all Southern white ladies, and all Southern whites in general for that matter. It becomes more than a whistle—it is an all-out smearing of the purity of Southern womanhood. Nordan’s departures from the historical record, then, exaggerate the offense as a kind of justification for Gregg’s homicidal actions. For readers, this seeming misremembrance on the part of the author and justification on the part of the murderer serve to highlight the way in which individual’s memories can skew an historical event for the purpose of legitimizing the individual’s present concerns and world view.

This interaction of “fact” with (sometimes purposeful) misrembrances is also figured in

Nordan’s trial scene. The trial scene, in fact, is virtually the only part of the novel in which

Nordan incorporates actual historical documents (the few exceptions will be noted below); however, these snippets of documentation are so interwoven with the fictional that they simply become a part of the story, they become swallowed up and fully integrated by the collective memory of the trial. In fact, the integration of documentary material and fiction is so seamless that readers are unlikely, without having done research, even to be aware of the presence of documentary material at all. The most obvious example, because of the italics, occurs on pages

213-14 of the novel. From the bevy of reporters comes a description of the scenery as

“oppressive as the moss that hangs from the cypress trees,” as well as the palpable silence which

“is like taut skin” and is broken by the crack and hiss of an opened Coke (213). These comments are lifted directly (almost verbatim) from reporter Dan Wakefield’s (working for the Nation at 83 the time) 1966 recollection of his time in Sumner, Mississippi (Wakefield 144-45). Also, the sardonic comment that Nordan places in the mouth of a newspaperman, “Faulkner was only a reporter,” was indeed uttered by a reporter from one of the New York dailies (Nordan 214,

Wakefield 145, Whitfield 34). Also, on page 219, Nordan has a Greenwood Commonwealth reporter proclaim about the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, “For the

Negro vote in such places as Harlem, these Men of Expediency on the court have been willing to put into serious jeopardy the peace of the Southland” (219). This, too, is a documented statement (Whitfield 36). Although Stephen Whitfield’s history has it appearing in the Yazoo

City Herald, it appears that Nordan has conflated all xenophobic Southern sentiment into one representative location in the Greenwood Commonwealth to eliminate confusion. When Nordan has a white man respond to Mose Wright’s (Till’s Uncle) appearance in court and recognition of the black press, “Ninety-five percent of them’s not even ours. Our niggers is out picking cotton and tending to they own bidness,” Nordan is again quoting from Dan Wakefield who attributes the statement to a “red-necked deputy” (Nordan 233, Wakefield 149). Also, when Nordan has his Sheriff stride confidently into the courtroom and glance over to the black press table exclaiming, “Mawnin’ niggers!” he is basing this incident on a documented entrance that the historical Sheriff Strider made into the courtroom following a lunch break on one of the days of the trial (Nordan 236, Whitfield 37). Finally, in his historical rendering, Whitfield notes that while on the witness stand, Mose Wright “stuck to his story, even dropping ‘Sir’ and substituting an undeferential, ‘That’s right,’ instead” (39). Nordan appropriates this detail and has his Uncle character repeatedly answer questions with that same phrase (beginning on 243 and continuing to the end of the chapter). And of course, Nordan cannot avoid using the now famous “Thar he” 84 that Mose Wright uttered as he pointed a bony finger at J.W. Milam, thus marking the first time in almost a century that a black man accused a white man of a crime in a court of law.

A few other examples of Nordan’s use of documentary evidence exist outside the trial scene as well. The sentiment, attributed in the novel to Lord Poindexter Montberclair (the Roy Bryant character), that the entire purpose of the white trash element of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi is “to help keep our niggers in line” is drawn directly from one of the lawyers for the real-life Bryant and Milam (Nordan 118). According to Whitfield, defense attorney J.J. Breland “explained the usefulness of lower-class whites whom he called ‘peckerwoods’: ‘Hell, we’ve got to have our

Milams and Bryants to fight our wars and keep the niggahs in line’” (54).6 Even a moment in

the novel seemingly serving as , the moment on page 145 when Poindexter points out

to a bumbling Solon Gregg that the photo in Bobo’s wallet is really a photo of Hedy Lamarr, is

based on documentary evidence. In an interview with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Mamie Till-

Mobley (then Mamie Till-Bradley) claims that she had recently bought Emmett a new wallet

and, “when you buy a wallet, a picture of a movie star was always in it. That was Hedy Lamarr”

(Whitfield 53). Whitfield doubts the mother’s story on the grounds that no one—Milam, Bryant,

or the boys on the grocery porch—would have been duped or threatened by Emmett’s boasts had

the picture been that of a recognizable movie star; nonetheless, this truth-stranger-than-fiction

detail alleged by Till’s mother makes ideal documentary fodder for a book like Wolf Whistle.

Likewise, the seemingly too-ironic-to-be-true sign proclaiming Arrow Catcher, Mississippi as “A

6 Whitfield gathers this information from the personal papers of William Bradford Huie. Huie was the Look magazine reporter who paid Milam and Bryant to give a full accounting of the murder a few months after their exoneration and therefore protection under the jeopardy law. Huie apparently also conducted a host of unpublished interviews in and around Sumner, Mississippi. It should also be noted here that Roy Bryant was considered to be a white trash “peckerwood” by the Princeton educated Breland; however, Nordan elevates Bryant, in the form of Lord Montberclair, to the class status of the likes of Breland. Nordan likely does so in an effort to avoid the necessity of making the lawyers into main characters. Therefore, he is able to represent their classist notions of subgroups of whites—the educated vs. the “peckerwoods”—through his high-class murderer Poindexter. Furthermore, he is able to more directly implicate the upper class whites rather than allowing them to stand pat and ascribe all the hatred to the white trash. More on this class conflict later in the chapter. 85

GOOD PLACE TO RAISE A BOY” did indeed sit outside the town of Sumner, the site of the trial, though the bullet holes obscuring the message are Nordan’s own handiwork (Nordan 215,

Wakefield 140, Whitfield 33). Again, the bumper stickers proclaiming Mississippi as “THE MOST

LIED ABOUT STATE IN THE UNION” are also documented by Whitfield (Nordan 219, Whitfield 36).

I present this extensive list of Nordan’s appropriation and integration of documentary sources

in order to show that this seemingly wildly fictional retelling of the Emmett Till case is more

rooted in documentary evidence than it might at first appear.7 Rather, we can see how the

documents—largely newspaper articles—influence the creation of and even become subsumed

by collective memory as represented by the novel’s form. These documented details and

statements become so fully a part of the memory that they become virtually undifferentiated

from other “remembered” material that is less documented. Readers of Nordan who have not,

for instance, read Whitfield’s historical rendering of the Till story may remain largely unaware

of these documentary appropriations and may continue to believe that Nordan’s is a wholly

fictional, because sometimes absurd, rendering. Once again, it is clear that Nordan has

seamlessly interwoven fact and fabrication—so much so that one is virtually indistinguishable

from the other—in a way that is fully representative of the creation of memory. In compiling a

collection of primary source materials on the Till case, a documentary narrative as he calls it,

Christopher Metress makes an observation relevant to the creation of collective memory. There

had been speculation that a local black worker by the name of Willie Reed heard screams and

other sounds associated with a beating coming from a nearby shed (incidentally owned by one of

Milam’s brothers) followed by the emergence of Milam holding a gun. Also, Leroy “Too Tight”

7 It should be noted—and it may already be obvious—that Nordan takes most of his documentary evidence from Stephen J. Whitfield’s book A Death in the Delta and Dan Wakefield’s book Between the Lines. In an appendix to the paperback reprinting of the novel in 1995, Nordan provides a list of books for further reading. Among them, of course, are Wakefield’s book and Whitfield’s book, which Nordan calls “the definitive work on the story of the murder and the trial” (307). 86

Collins, another local black worker, claimed to have been on the truck with Milam and Bryant that night. These stories were tracked extensively by Jimmy Hicks, a reporter from the

Cleveland (Mississippi) Call and Post, but were not widely accepted as truth. In regard to these speculations and suppressed stories, Metress reflects: “Had [Collins’s] story been widely circulated during the trial or immediately afterwards, it would have undoubtedly influenced our collective memory of the murder. Whether true or false, it would have appeared in memoirs and oral histories, poems and songs, plays and novels” (8). Then, in further contemplating the corroboration of Hicks’s story by some friends of Collins, Metress notes, “One memory standing alone looked absurd. But add to that another memory and it looked less absurd. Toss in a few more memories and it might begin to look like history” (9). Metress ultimately concludes that history and memory are not diametrically opposed but that memory is a constitutive part of any history.

What is significant in Metress’s realization is that wide dissemination, rather than documented proof, becomes the necessary condition for a story’s incorporation into collective memory. Collective memory, though not requiring the rigorous proof that accompanies history proper, can begin to look quite a lot like history, provided that the memory is indeed not an absurd single memory standing alone, but is corroborated by some external cultural “text” recognized (and perhaps even authorized) by the aggregate. Several individuals, most notably reporter Jimmy Hicks, believe the “facts” of the case to be compromised by the exclusion of key evidence: the unheard Collins testimony that he witnessed the entire act and that the hole in Till’s head was made by a drill rather than a gun, the unheard testimony of Henry Lee Loggins claiming he and Collins were on the truck that night, Reed’s claim to having overheard the sounds of the beating and recognizing Milam there, Mose Wright’s claim placing two additional 87 white people (one a woman—ostensibly Carolyn Bryant herself) on the truck that took Till away on that fateful night, and reporter Jimmy Hicks’s claim that several of these key witnesses

(Loggins and Collins) were sequestered in a Charleston jail and therefore denied the right to tell their stories in the court of law. The confusion about the number of people on the truck, alone, is evidence of the power of collective memory. According to collective memory, and corroborated by the highly publicized trial testimonies, it is widely believed that only two men, Milam and

Bryant, perpetrated the crime; however, the accounts referenced above place anywhere from two to six possible perpetrators (potentially both whites and blacks) on that truck. In the end, these evidentiary exclusions are almost completely erased from the historical record because they were never disseminated widely enough to be incorporated into the collective memory of the case.8

This confluence of history and memory—the documentary and the

recollected/reconstructed—accurately characterizes the form of Nordan’s novel. He not only

interweaves “facts” and documentary evidence with the fabrications and embellishments

associated with memory, but he also slides in and out of a variety of consciousnesses with his

narration in order to accurately represent collective memory. But even more than just using the

novel’s form to demonstrate the unreliable and communal aspects of collective memory, Nordan also works to illustrate the flaws intrinsic to the creation of collective memory. In using his

novel to rewrite a portion of the collective memory of the Emmett Till lynching, Nordan is

challenging the power structures responsible for “official history” and for the selection of sites of

8 For the most concise and complete description of this “lost” evidence, see Jimmy Hicks’s letter to J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Herbert Brownell which was originally printed in the Washington Afro-American in November 1955 but reprinted on pages 194-99 of Metress’s collection. In the letter, Hicks calls for FBI intervention in the case due to this additional evidence, and he describes in detail to whom he spoke and how he acquired the evidence. The letter is derived from a series of articles Hicks wrote for the Cleveland Call and Post providing what he called “The ‘Inside Story’ of the Emmett Till Trial” (these can also be found in Metress’s collection). 88 memory for the collective, and is thereby advocating on behalf of those voices excluded or erased from the collective memory of the event.

III.

In reconfiguring collective memory, Nordan is attempting to shift the power relation that exists between those who have been in control of the creation and dissemination of the particular historical discourse and sites of memory—in this case, those in control were the educated, upper class Southern whites—and opening up that history to the voices that were previously excluded.

In order to accomplish this challenge to the powerful and advocate on the part of the excluded,

Nordan acquires a kind of critical distance via his use of magical realism. From that distance, he is then able to shift the focus from race to class and to complicate essentialist notions of both race and class on which the crimes themselves and the historical representations thereof have been based.

It might seem a contradiction for a white Southern male born and bred in Mississippi to attempt to advocate on behalf of the black community that he and his family members were complicit in subjugating.9 In fact, more than simply artificial or hollow, such an attempt risks

being downright patronizing. However, Nordan’s advocacy does not valorize blackness. Rather

than lift the black community onto a pedestal—a gesture that could be dangerously patronizing—Nordan pulls whiteness off its own self-constructed pedestal. In fact, the book rarely focuses on the African American characters at all; as Nordan himself proclaims in the interview appended to the novel’s paperback reprint: “This is the white story of the murder of

9 When I mention Nordan’s family here, I am not necessarily speaking of some vague notion of distant ancestry, of people who may have sometime owned slaves generations ago. Rather, Nordan’s family’s connection to this crime is a bit more concrete than that. Nordan has made it known in interviews that members of his family have been friends with members of the Milam family living in Itta Bena, Mississippi. 89

Emmett Till” (Wolf Whistle 304). In that same interview, Nordan says, “the story I wanted to tell was what happened to the people in a community where a murder was committed and they suddenly realized it might be their fault” (303-04). This focus on implicating the white community, as opposed to elevating the black community, nonetheless amounts to a kind of second-hand advocacy on behalf of the black community.

In “Growing up White in the South,” Nordan explains his intentions with regard to form: “to render the natural world as itself and, at the same time, as unearthly” (296). In essence, he describes the form of his novel using essentially the textbook definition of magical realism. We know that magical realism originated in South America and is still most prevalent throughout

Latin American writing. We also know that, in general, magical realism explores the mysteries of the natural world by combining realistic narration with fantastic elements and occurrences.

The bigger question, however, is what exactly contemporary authors hope to accomplish in employing magical realist methods. In his article on the role of magical realism in postmodernism, Theo D’haen offers an answer to this question based on currently popular theories of postcolonialism. He argues for magical realism as a displacement of dominant discourse, regardless of who is executing the magical realism; therefore, it can be a “means for writers coming from the privileged centers of literature to dissociate themselves from their own discourse of power, and to speak on behalf of the ex-centric and un-privileged” (195). Applying this formulation to Nordan’s fiction, Art Taylor contends:

[F]or Nordan, magical realism provides a way—and perhaps the only way—for a white

Southerner in his circumstances to confront the amazements of his own region and the

injustice of his own people, to transform a past and even to rewrite history without 90

denying the brutality of known facts, and to glean from a despair both personal and

persistently historical some glimmer of hope ahead. (445)10

What Taylor seems to be suggesting here, among other things, is that Nordan utilizes magical

realist methods at times throughout the novel in order to distance himself from a reality to which

he is all too close.

Furthermore, we can see that Nordan is at his most magical during the most important scenes of the novel. Certainly, the entire novel is doused in an absurd kind of humor: buzzards named after Mississippi politicians, a high school arrow catching team, Smokey Viner’s bizarre tendency to ram his head into walls, a father explaining to his son on the courthouse steps the significance of the expression “somebody’s breath is so bad it can back shit up a hill,” and so on.

There is no denying Nordan’s impulse toward black humor, toward the grotesque. However, the truly magical occurrences appear in the novel at the moments of highest tension. Perhaps the tensest moment in the entire book occurs during Uncle’s courtroom testimony. When Uncle is asked to identify the men who kidnapped Bobo from his home, it isn’t until almost eight pages later that he actually utters the now famous “Thar he!” In those eight pages, as tension continues to rise, so too does Runt Conroy’s parrot. The African parrot performs a “wild and magical” flight around the courtroom before landing squarely on Solon Gregg’s head (250). The parrot comes to symbolize different things for different viewers: for the African American reporters in

the room, it symbolizes their African roots; for the schoolchildren, it symbolizes their teacher

and intellectual/moral guide; and for Alice, who had connected with Bobo via a prophetic

10 I realize that, as this is the thesis of Taylor’s paper, he wishes to argue that Nordan rewrites the past in order to reshape the future for which that past is the basis. However, I do not necessarily see how the novel’s potentially hopeful ending is in any way directly related to Nordan’s use of magical realism. Rather, I read the magical realism in Wolf Whistle as a means of representing and critiquing collective memory as opposed to a method for extracting hope from the despair of the Till case (as Taylor seems to suggest in the quotation I am citing here). While it is reasonable to read the ending of the novel as relatively hopeful, I would not necessarily ascribe that glint of hopefulness to the magical realist method. 91 raindrop, it symbolizes the dead child, “it was Bobo himself—the magic of good and evil both”

(254). Once the parrot is perched on Gregg’s head, the continues: “it shit down

Solon’s back, great farting blobs of liquid white bird dooky. White! it seemed to say, White, white, white!” (255). After its almost eight page pageant, the magical bird marks Gregg as not only the murderer (beating Uncle to the punch), but also as, literally and figuratively, white and dirty.11 Here Gregg’s whiteness, the very characteristic which he believes justifies his

murderous act, becomes literally soiled. His whiteness is dirtied, and, as will be discussed later

in this chapter, it is significant that Nordan complicates the perceived purity of whiteness in this

and other ways. But for now, suffice it to say that this magical flight on the part of the parrot

offers Nordan—a man born and raised in virtually the same town and culture as Solon Gregg—a

vehicle through which he can unpatronizingly embody the Other (the parrot is African, after all)

and literally shit on Solon Gregg and all that he stands for.

Birds figure in another important magical realist moment which also breaks a tension-filled

scene. This moment includes the talking pigeons in the rafters of Red’s Goodlookin Bar and

Gro. The pigeons’ conversation takes place immediately after the narrator has informed us that

“history was about to be made” (36). According to the narrator, everyone in the store heard what

Bobo allegedly said to Lady Montberclair; however, we readers are never privy to that

information. They all hear the “offense,” and Solon leaps into action, or rather reaction, thus

causing “history to be made.” However, none of the human witnesses to the actual “crime” that

sets off the rest of the novel’s events is willing to interpret or mediate the event. The only

commentary to which we have access comes from the pigeon who proclaims, and shortly after

11 In his article, “Poor White Trash, Great White Hope: Race, Class, and the (De)Construction of Whiteness in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle,” Brannon Costello argues for “bird dooky” as “a distinctive marker for white trash in this text” citing the two obvious occurrences of bird dooky (in the grocery and in the courtroom) as well as the more minor incident in which a young black girl tells Runt Conroy that he smells like bird dooky (215). 92 emptying his bowels leaving a mark similar to that of the courtroom parrot, “That boy, now he’s surprised, he surprised he-ownself. . . . That boy he thank he most be talking to he-ownself, just loud enough, you know, to satisfy the dare. . . . Look like to that little spote somebody be reading his mind” (36).

From the pigeon we get a characterization of Bobo as a rather innocent young boy who does not even know what he has done. Rather than some kind of boastful loudmouth willfully insulting all of white humanity, Bobo is figured as a gentle youth simply trying to satisfy a bet and doing so in the most harmless way he knows how—virtually under his breath. The utterance that becomes the spark igniting the entire community is so quiet, in fact, that Bobo himself apparently thinks that those responding to his “offense” must have been reading his mind. This is significant for several reasons. First, this is one of only two times when Bobo’s inner consciousness is referenced. Obviously, there is an entire chapter narrated by Bobo’s “demon eye” in which we are privy to Bobo’s inner life (more on this chapter in the paragraphs to come); however, the only other time in the novel when Bobo’s inner thoughts are communicated to readers is in this pigeon’s ironic assumption that Bobo must feel like someone is reading his mind (indeed, the pigeon is doing just that). The only beings, then, with the ability to enter into

Bobo’s consciousness and empathize with his inner thoughts are magical entities—a demon eye and a talking pigeon, and perhaps we might even add Alice’s crystal-ball raindrop (in which she sees a vision of a dead youth presumed to be Bobo) to this list as well. It is significant that

Nordan does not even trust his narrator, whom we likely (rightly or wrongly) assume to be a

Southern white male, to deliver impartially Bobo’s point of view. Only the magical—a talking pigeon and lifeless dislodged eye—are equipped with the proper neutrality to relay the victim’s side of the story. Interesting, too, is the fact that while we likely assume Nordan’s narrator to be 93 white, we might also come to associate the pigeon’s dialect with blackness. Once again, as with the African parrot in the courtroom scene, the privileged consciousness in this scene of high tension is that of a magical Other who is also associated with blackness.

When the victim is finally asked to tell his own story, he does not have the opportunity to tell it in his own voice. Instead, his de-socketed eye—a rather obvious symbol of an unbiased vision—narrates his perspective. As a result, we receive this perspective “without fear or anger, or even a sense of injustice, but only with an appreciation of the dark and magical and evil world in which he had been killed” (178). All of the feelings that would inevitably accompany Bobo’s human perspective are filtered out, and the unearthly “demon eye” delivers the information about the disposal of Bobo’s body in a calm, matter-of-fact, and almost reverent tone. Once again, in a moment of peak tension, Nordan uses magical realism to establish a kind of distance from the base and human thoughts, emotions, and biases that caused these tragic events in the first place.

Art Taylor goes so far as to posit:

Rewriting Bobo’s death in the moment of his dying, Nordan imbues it with the

importance that it would ultimately achieve only in years to come. His essential

beatification of Bobo—both granting Bobo inner peace and elevating his status to one

deserving veneration—suggests all the good that came from the horrible episode in

Southern history. (451)

Taylor reads Nordan as venerating Bobo in a way that only someone with a knowledge of the civil rights movement and the importance of the Till case in igniting that movement could. It is only through the use of the all-seeing eye-as-narrator (as well as the other magical realist moments) that Nordan is able to lift his “history” out of the trenches of human prejudice to a height—quite literally in the case of the two bird examples—where he can critically examine the 94 mystery of a world in which a fourteen-year-old boy must die in order for a group of people to rise up and claim the human dignity that was always rightfully theirs. Nordan achieves this critical distance by creating a magical realist world that seems strangely familiar to readers while at the same time seeming utterly alien. This simultaneous act of drawing near but keeping at arms’ length—the trademark of magical realism—defamiliarizes readers’ own world allowing them, almost comfortably, to critique that world and their own participation in it.

IV.

The final facet of Nordan’s critique and ultimate rewriting of the collective memory of the Till case takes the shape of a deconstruction of essentialist notions of race. Ultimately, this critique works in two ways. First, Nordan deconstructs “race” by placing the emphasis on class differentials within a single “race,” thus showing the arbitrariness of drawing categorical boundary lines. He accomplishes this through his extensive concentration on the distinction and conflict between “white” and “white trash.” The most obvious and poignant example of this division occurs in Solon Gregg’s relationship to Lord Montberclair as co-conspirators. Gregg believes that his actions—both his standing up for Lady Montberclair in the grocery and his informing of her husband shortly thereafter—represent a defense of whiteness and its sanctity.

He believes that not only Lady Montberclair’s but also his very own whiteness has been challenged by the out-of-line Northern black boy. However, his perception of himself as level with the likes of the Montberclairs, due solely to their shared whiteness, is shattered by

Poindexter’s characterization of the act the two are planning to commit. When Montberclair asks Solon to kill Bobo for him, he presents the proposition in this way:

Poindexter said, “Decent whitefolks have always needed the likes of you.” 95

Solon said, “They have?”

Poindexter said, “we need people like you to help keep our niggers in line.”

Solon said, “Well—”

Poindexter said, “It gives you lower classes, you whitetrash boys, some raison

d’être, wouldn’t you say so?” (118)

Montberclair’s assumption that he and Gregg are not at all on equal footing takes Gregg utterly by surprise. Gregg assumed whiteness to be the categorical marker of all markers, thus rendering he and Montberclair (and all other whites for that matter) equal; however,

Montberclair’s introduction of class as a marker destroys Gregg’s essentialist notion of whiteness. As Brannon Costello has pointed out, “Because of economic depravity and social marginalization, white trash people cling fervently to their identities as white, but their classification as ‘trash,’ as the white Other, complicates that whiteness” (210). Costello goes on to point out the irony of Gregg’s position: “It is ironic that Solon’s attempts to use Bobo to cement his whiteness—protecting Sally Anne, informing on him, ultimately killing him—serve only to reaffirm his role as trash; he acts in exactly the way Dexter thinks he should” (213).

Solon’s attempts to protect and preserve whiteness and to solidify his position in the fraternity of whites end up identifying him all the more firmly with his class status and alienating him from the privileged, upper class whiteness he so longs to claim.

Solon’s immediate response to Dexter’s relegating him to the status of white trash is very brash and defensive. First he lashes out at Montberclair and spews obscenities at him, and then

Gregg fantasizes for several pages about killing his own family. This is perhaps yet another attempt on the part of Gregg to justify his privilege. If killing a black boy does not carry with it the superiority he desires, perhaps killing his own white trash family will. In a later response, 96 after Solon has had some time to ponder his recently challenged construction of his identity, he further recognizes and angers at his subject position:

If Solon his ownself had to bow and scrape and call a blond-headed slut in a raincoat

“Lady this” and her drunken husband “Lord that,” well why should a little nigger in a felt

fedora be allowed to wolf-whistle her and call her “baby.” It wont fair. Solon wondered

what kind of pistol-whipping he his ownself would have took in a similar situation. (139-

40)

Here Solon begins to recognize that he likely has more in common with Bobo and his family than with the Montberclairs. He finds he is as subordinated to the Montberclairs as is Bobo, having to call them Lady and Lord, and he devastatingly realizes that had he “talked dirty” to

Lady Montberclair, he too would likely be subject to the same punishment that he was being asked to dole out to Bobo. In an instance such as this, we see Nordan giving class difference more power than the more arbitrarily designated racial difference. As a result, Solon Gregg’s essentialist racial identification is challenged by his recognition of a kind of class fraternity existing across racial lines. Despite Gregg’s attempts to redraw the racial line erased by this recognition via killing Bobo and reaffirming his whiteness, Nordan will not allow either race or class designations to remain simple.

This introduction of class as a way of challenging racial essentialism—as exemplified in the abovementioned scenes but also as consistently invoked throughout the novel via copious references to white trash culture—is also complicated by the variety of responses to the murder and acquittal among the upper class white and white trash communities. Obviously in his implication in the murder and concomitant association with Solon Gregg, Poindexter

Montberclair’s upper class status and superiority to the likes of Gregg comes into question. In 97 short, Lord Montberclair is leveled with Solon Gregg through their homicidal collaboration.

This is clearly articulated in the narrator’s (presently in the consciousness of the townspeople) response to the fact that the two would be tried together: “It didn’t look like Lord Montberclair would want his name attached to the Gregg name in this public way, people said. Even if they did do the killing together, those people said. White trash like Gregg and a fine man like Lord

Montberclair, well, my gracious, what won’t they think of next” (216-17). Furthermore, it should be noted that this is a move made possible only because of Nordan’s departure from documented history. Roy Bryant was poor and generally thought to be a member of the lower class—white trash as Nordan has taken to calling them. However, Nordan raises him up (in the figure of the “fine man” Lord Montberclair) only to make a point of knocking him down.

This leveling of the aristocratic Montberclair is contrasted with the post-trial elevation of the

Conroy family. Keep in mind that throughout the novel, the Conroys—Runt Conroy, his son

Roy Dale, and his niece Alice—are considered to be white trash despite Alice’s education and position as teacher. This is further evidenced by Runt having been associated with bird dooky— the white trash marker according to Costello—on page 47. However, after the trial, the white trash Conroys show that one does not have to be a member of the upper classes to display class and try to live a respectable life. First, Runt informs the crowd at Red’s Goodlookin Bar and

Gro. that he intends to be called Cyrus from this point forward—a sure novelistic sign that the character has made some internal change. Then, after this pronouncement, the narrator relays

Runt’s thoughts about some of the new boys hanging around Red’s: “There was a little too much of Solon Gregg in every one of these new boys, young men, for Runt’s taste. . . . That’s why he didn’t like these boys. He didn’t trust a man who was not changed by a local horror” (261, 262).

In fact, Runt himself is so changed that he even begins to accept some personal responsibility for 98 the horrible events in Arrow Catcher. In thinking back on the moment when he considered seeking out Bobo’s family to warn them of the danger of the happenings at Red’s, “Runt wished he’d followed up on his hunch and found a way out to Runnymede that day, to Uncle’s house, it might have changed things. He regretted he hadn’t tried harder to find the boy’s people” (260).

The fact that Runt now has the perspective to stand back and critique his own actions and passive acceptance—as well as critiquing these members of his own community, his own race and class—signals the complexity of racial and class distinctions. We cannot assume that everyone lumped under a single categorical designation will think and act accordingly in a singular, unified manner. Furthermore, Runt’s ability to critique himself by accepting personal responsibility and by gaining some perspective on those with whom he is most closely associated mirrors Nordan’s own novelistic act of critiquing “his people” (himself included) as well as his intention for the reader to do likewise.12

Runt’s son, Roy Dale, finds himself in a similar situation in the locker room at school before

arrow catching practice. In this scene, the boys on the arrow catching team are, in usual locker room fashion, engaging in some less-than-respectable groupthink regarding the murder. The narrator, ostensibly donning the consciousness of Roy Dale, describes the situation as such: “The same jokes started up again now, and they were still funny, too, vacation days for finding a dead one, one who stole a gin fan and tried to swim across the lake with it” (204). This goes on until

Smokey Viner, the team’s pariah who has a predilection for ramming his head into things, stands up for Bobo, proclaiming, “Y’all ought to be shamed of yourself, laughing about a boy got killed” (205). Roy Dale’s first response is to continue laughing and ignore Smokey’s stand;

12 Perhaps the most telling example of the complication of Runt Conroy’s class status and, therefore, the most accurate description of him appears in one of the stories in Music of the Swamp. The story, “The Cellar of Runt Conroy,” is focused almost entirely on demonstrating and exploring the white trash status of the Conroy family, and in that story Sugar Mecklin describes Runt as “a white-trash gentleman” (89). 99 however, secretly, Roy Dale is wondering “why he hadn’t known enough to say what crazy

Smokey Viner said” (206).13 Finally, when Smokey is then felled by an arrow—this a boy who

is unfazed by plaster or concrete walls—the boys on the arrow catching field “saw only a

miracle. . . . They saw a boy with courage to speak words they had not had courage even to

think. They saw hope. For themselves, for the Delta, for Mississippi, maybe the world” (210).

This almost magical, redemptive scene—reminiscent of a kind of twisted crucifixion scene—

offers these white trash boys, especially Roy Dale Conroy whose consciousness we are tuned in to at the time, the ability to transcend race and class boundaries and embrace both this white trash, head-banging pariah and the dead black boy for whom he speaks. Here again, race and

class become blurred. Roy Dale crosses those boundaries to empathize simultaneously with both

a white Other and a black Other. His racial and class identities are shattered like the arrow he

breaks across his knee as he proclaims to the coach, to Smokey, perhaps to all the world, “I’m

sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” (210). Like his father, Runt, Roy Dale begins to accept some

responsibility for his complicity in the white supremecist culture of Arrow Catcher, and he also

begins to rethink his cozy, boxed-in identity construction. He complicates notions of race and

class through his newfound empathy for Bobo and the necessarily concomitant disdain for the

upper class whites responsible for killing him, setting his murderers free, and even upholding a

culture where such a thing is acceptable and justifiable.

However, it is Roy Dale’s cousin Alice who poses the most poignant challenge to these social

constructions. Alice is perhaps the closest thing to a protagonist that Nordan gives us in this

novel (though I would hesitate to give her that label outrightly). She both opens and closes the

13 This locker room scene is relatively autobiographical, as Nordan has admitted that he laughed at that very joke about the one who tried to steal a gin fan and swim away with it. Only in retrospect did Nordan begin to wonder why he hadn’t had the courage himself to say something similar to what he allows Smokey Viner to say in his novel. In many ways, Smokey, then, becomes Nordan’s vehicle for revising his own personal memory based on what he now knows. 100 novel: the first chapter tells (from Alice’s point of view) the story of Glenn Gregg’s attempt to burn his father Solon, and the novel ends with Alice and Sally Anne Montberclair peering into a crystal ball in Swami Don’s junk store. She is a simple and sympathetic character who always seems to mean well, even when she plans field trips for her fourth graders to the Prince of

Darkness Funeral Parlor and to Bobo’s murder trial. Alice’s greatest characteristic is her ability to see; she is a visionary. Several times in the novel she receives prophetic visions: in the first chapter when she has a vision of the turmoil and pain associated with the twentieth-century civil rights movement, and, of course, when she sees a dead Bobo in a raindrop.14 That Alice is

established as a visionary despite her simplicity is key to the important role she plays at the trial.

Alice attends the trial with her fourth grade class, and they are seated in the front row of the

balcony. They are the only whites in the balcony, which has been reserved for black spectators.

When Uncle is brought into the courtroom and he begins to look around, Alice empathizes with

him, understanding that it must seem to him as though he is surrounded by white—this compounded by the fact that Alice’s white fourth graders form a sort of barrier blocking from

Uncle’s view all the black spectators in the rows behind them. In this sense of empathy Alice

finds hatred for her own whiteness and the fact that it connects her to the people in the courtroom

below who murdered a young boy and who will eventually free those murderers. This hatred is

expressed in one of the more poignant bits of narration in the entire novel:

Alice hated the whiteness of her own skin, she ached in her heart for the white children

sitting along the balcony rail with her, with their dear name tags attached to a washed-out

shirt or a limp cotton print dress, the whiteness whose history they had never asked to

14 During the long paragraph in which Alice sees the pain of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, some of the following are mentioned: “She saw a church bombed in Montgomery, dead children, marchers in Selma, freedom riders in Jackson. She saw bombs flying over the miraculous desert, Baghdad burning, Emmett Till dead, Medgar Evers dead,” etc. (17). Interestingly, this is the only moment in the entire novel where Emmett Till is specifically called by name, as opposed to being called Bobo. 101

participate in, to be infected by, whose racial genes they shared with Shakespeare, and

with men in sheets holding crosses engulfed in flames. The whitehess hit Uncle the same

way it hit Alice, like a deafening noise, as elemental as oceanic geography, glacial,

straight in the face. (228)

Suggested in this passage, once again, is the notion that the entire white community is implicated in the murder of the young black boy, something that we see Runt, Roy Dale, and Smokey Viner already willing to accept. Alice ponders the way that her innocent fourth graders are also unwittingly connected to these Southern white hate crimes simply due to their racial identification. However, rather than merely accept her personal complicity, Alice decides to do something about it—she shatters traditional racial constructions by shunning her whiteness and adopting blackness. As Uncle looks one more time up to the balcony before offering his testimony, Alice blurts out, “We are here! We colored people are behind you!” (231). Without fully understanding and only because they love their teacher Alice so much, the fourth graders wave to Uncle as well and collectively think, “we are waving our arms as our teacher waves hers, we are saying in loud voices that we are colored people when we know we are not, we are wearing our name tags though we have forgotten our names or any innocence out of which nametags are originally born” (232). Furthermore, Uncle’s response ultimately dignifies Alice’s claim. He thinks, “Well, that was all right. Didn’t make no difference to Uncle where they sat, the other colored people. Didn’t make no difference to Uncle if some of them was white, and only children” (232). Both Uncle and the children are willing to accept Alice’s gesture; however, they continue to cling to traditional notions of race. Even in recognizing what Alice is trying to do, both the children and Uncle essentially correct her by noting that she and the children are really still white, but that their whiteness is unimportant. In thinking about her own 102 proclamation of blackness, Alice herself is hesitant to give up traditional racial categories, “Of course Alice was white herself, and not colored—nothing’s simple” (227).

Not simple, indeed. That is the point of Nordan’s entire critique of racial and class constructions. By introducing class as a mitigating factor in what has often been thought of as a very black-and-white—quite literally—racial relationship and by placing the constructedness of race on display in the character of Alice Conroy, Nordan creates a picture of the Emmett Till lynching that is anything but simple. In fact, not only through this boundary-busting but also through his use of magical realism, Nordan hopes to make his Mississippi world—his American world—just strange and different enough for readers to feel comfortable critiquing that world, just as the Conroy family has done in the novel. Ultimately, Nordan also critiques the creation of collective memory. This, too, is not as simple as those with power over information media would have us believe. Nordan rolls documentary history, pure fiction (especially in light of the fact that even Nordan’s “historical novel” is set alongside his other novels in fictional Arrow

Catcher, Mississippi), and outlandish fabulation together into one multi-vocal, multi-perspective fictional collective memory. This fictional collective memory of the people of Arrow Catcher, however, also serves as a site of memory on which readers in the ontological world can draw to contextualize their own remembrances of both the Emmett Till murder and the overall civil rights atrocities of which it is representative. Nordan’s is a memory that leaves room for both fact and fiction, racism and anti-racism, South and North, aristocracy and white trash, turmoil and hope. In the end, Nordan is attempting to rewrite a collective memory that originally stirred hatred from both sides of the historical trial. In his rewriting, Nordan is trying to steer this same memory from hatred to hope. Armed with the retrospective knowledge that the Till case sparked perhaps the most important social movement in American history, Nordan attempts not to erase 103 the hate and evil that is associated with those fateful days in Mississippi in late 1955; rather, he works to steer the contemporary and future social response to that evil toward a kind of hope.

The novel ends with the “raceless” Alice and “classless” Sally Anne (no longer referred to as

Lady Montberclair at this point) talking and peering into a crystal ball at Swami Don’s junk store:

They spoke, finally, from their hearts. Maybe, finally, they did weep together, and

maybe held each other tight. Nobody but Bobo knows for sure what happened next, but

maybe, behind Alice and Sally Anne, the crystal ball in Swami Don’s Elegant Junk shone

with the bright blue light of empty interiors and of faraway and friendly stars and all their

hopeful planets and golden moons. (290)

Here Nordan is not concerned with documentary, factual truth—only Bobo, only Till himself, can truly know that—rather, Nordan is concerned with the personal truths and collective memory we all form as a response to such a horrific event. That is ultimately what we, contemporary

Americans, can control. In a conversation at Red’s between Runt Conroy and the arrow catching team’s Coach, Runt laments, “It’s a bad world, Coach, it’s an evil world we live in” (276).

Nordan’s somewhat hopeful ending is in no way denying that evil; Nordan is instead most concerned with Coach’s answer: “I know. We’ll just have to make do” (276). Wolf Whistle is

Nordan’s making do.

Collecting Butterflies: Julia Alvarez’s Revision of North American Collective Memory

I.

Late in the summer of 1960, the Alvarez family arrived in New York from the Dominican

Republic. A young Julia, ten years old at the time, could not understand the reasons for the 104 move and, naturally, wanted to return home. What she did not know at the time was that her father had been involved in an underground resistance movement that vocally opposed the

Dominican dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Her father fled, with his family, to the United

States because his life and the lives of his family were in grave danger. Just four months after the Alvarez family’s arrival in New York, the news broke—Alvarez remembers her father holding a Time magazine containing the story—of a terrible injustice back home in the

Dominican Republic. Three beautiful young women, who had been members of the same revolutionary movement as Alvarez’s father, and their driver had been brutally murdered.

According to many, this incident—the horror of what a now seemingly cowardly Trujillo would do to these girls—incited more national anger than Trujillo’s other crimes. As Bernard

Diederich puts it, “It did something to their machismo. They could never forgive Trujillo for this crime” (71-72). As many Dominicans likely remember it, the killing of the Mirabal sisters, on

November 25, 1960, marked the beginning of the end for Trujillo, who would himself be assassinated less than a year later.

It is this story—the story of Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa Mirabal, the legendary revolutionary sisters also called Las Mariposas (the butterflies), their underground code name— that Alvarez tells in In the Time of the Butterflies. The story is told from the sisters’ points of view. Each of the murdered sisters tells three chapters (María Teresa’s chapters are “narrated” in the form of a journal she has been keeping), and Dedé, the lone surviving sister, tells four. The book is framed by Dedé and her conversation with a visiting American writer of Dominican ancestry, a thinly veiled stand-in for Alvarez herself. The novel begins with the gringa dominicana, as Dedé calls her, finding Dedé at the Mirabals’ childhood home, now a museum 105 dedicated to their memory which is overseen by Dedé herself.15 Then, through the conversation

of the two women, Dedé’s memories, and the artifacts in the house/museum, the three deceased

sisters are called forth, as though through a medium, to speak their own memories. Thus the

form of the novel is comprised of alternating remembrances by the sisters. The chapters build on

one another moving largely chronologically from 1943 to 1960, with only Dedé’s chapters

briefly flashing forward to 1994.

In general, Alvarez’s novel is more obviously historical than Nordan’s, in which he uses a nickname for the key historical figure, thus disguising him ever so slightly. The murdered

Mirabal sisters, on the other hand, are the stuff of legend in the , and in fact

November 25, the day of their murder, has been celebrated as the International Day Against

Violence Toward Women. However, despite the novel’s grounding in history, it is initially

unclear as to how much documentary evidence Alvarez actually incorporates. Like Nordan,

Alvarez’s juxtaposition of fact and fiction is so seamless as to render the two indistinguishable.

Obviously, she could not know the inner thoughts of the characters, which comprise a large

portion of the novel, but outside of that, her level of “accuracy” is difficult to verify. The fact is

that despite their status as legend (and therefore we must assume that the story is largely passed

on via oral ) not much documented material is available regarding the Mirabals,

especially not in English.16 There are two Spanish-language texts about the Mirabals that

Alvarez acknowledges as sources: William Galván’s biography of Minerva Mirabal and Ramón

15 In fact, Alvarez even refers to herself as a “gringa dominicana” in one of the essays collected in Something to Declare (175). 16 In a short essay entitled “Chasing the Butterflies” (now collected in her essay collection Something to Declare), Alvarez tells of her trip to the Mirabals’ home and her visit with Dedé Mirabal, which likely serves as the basis for the gringa dominicana scenes in the novel. We know, therefore, that she amassed some historical evidence via the interviews and oral stories she collected there. 106

Alberto Ferreras’s historical novel Las Mirabal.17 Another book, Miguel Aquino García’s Tres

Heroínas y un Tirano, was published just two years after Alvarez’s novel, and acts as something of a response to Alvarez’s novel and other imaginative renderings of the Mirabals’ story.

Although Alvarez could not have referenced it, Tres Heroínas also clearly contains information about the Mirabals. However, for English speakers there remains essentially no way to access any documentary information regarding the lives and actions of the Mirabal sisters. Therefore, it is difficult for English-speaking readers immediately to judge Alvaerz’s level of engagement with documentary sources.

Other than these few Spanish-language texts, we have only Alvarez’s own “Postscript,” constituting the last three pages of the text, as evidence of her level of historical “accuracy.” In that Postscript, she mentions this very issue:

But as happens with any story, the characters took over, beyond polemics and facts.

They became real to my imagination. I began to invent them. And so it is that what you

find in these pages are not the Mirabal sisters of fact, or even the Mirabal sisters of

legend. . . . So what you will find here are the Mirabal sisters of my creation, made up

but, I hope, true to the spirit of the Mirabals. (323-24)

17 There is some question as to the classification of Ferreras’s text. I choose to call it an historical novel for two primary reasons. First, the form of the book would be odd for a strictly historical text, as the “characters” in it speak in first person at times rather than the typical descriptive third person explanation that we are accustomed to seeing in historical monographs. The second, and much more obvious, reason is the notation on the book’s jacket. The jacket text proclaims Las Mirabal to be “una historia novelada de primer orden [a first-rate historical novel]”. This jacket text also refers to the fact that Ferreras produced this text while at the height of his creative potential (“Ferreras, quien produjo LAS MIRABAL en el momento en que se hallaba en el , al tope de su potencialidad creative”). Certainly it is possible that the phrase “historia novelada” (as opposed to say, “historia ficticia”) is referring to a kind of “” as opposed to an historical novel proper; nonetheless, this jacket text makes it very clear that the element of invention is prevalent in this rendering of the Mirabal sisters, and that the author is not striving for the kind of historical “accuracy” that accompanies biography proper. This classification of Ferreras’s text as a work of imagination would seem to be relatively unproblematic except that Las Mirabal is referred to as a biography in an article by Isabel Zakrzewski Brown, a seemingly more fluently bilingual critic than I. Despite Brown’s classification of the book as biography, for the purposes of this study, I will treat Ferreras’s Las Mirabal as a work of historical fiction and, therefore, more a source of imaginative inspiration for Alvarez than of historical data. 107

Alvarez then moves on to outline her objectives in writing the book—something of a taboo for serious authors. The first of two primary objectives is to humanize the legendary sisters, because

“by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women” (324). Her second major objective is to

“bring acquaintance of these famous sisters to English-speaking readers” (324). She finishes by addressing her Dominican readers saying, “I hope this book deepens North Americans’ understanding of the nightmare you endured and the heavy losses you suffered—of which this story tells only a few” (324).

This controversial declaration—uttered not in an interview but appended directly to the book itself—has fueled desire on the part of the first wave of critics to judge, fairly or unfairly, the book’s success on whether or not she fulfills these objectives. For example, Roberto González

Echevarría, reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review, after a long line of abrasive criticisms, attacks Alvarez’s stated lack of accuracy:

But the actual history in In the Time of the Butterflies is very blurry. I find no

connection between the specific dates Ms. Alvarez gives to mark periods in the Mirabals’

lives and either Dominican or broader Latin American history. Serious historical fiction

establishes links between individual destiny and pivotal political events. (28)18

Also addressing Alvarez’s stated attempt to humanize the mythic sisters, Echevarría remarks, “In

fictionalizing their story she has availed herself of the liberties of the creative writer, to be sure,

but alas, I am afraid she did not escape the temptation to monumentalize” (28).19 In a positive

18 It should also be noted here that I am unsure on what Echevarría bases this judgment. Certainly, Alvarez rearranges a few scenes, as will be discussed in more detail later; however, the overall shape of the narrative is relatively consistent with the dates provided for these events by Galván in his text Minerva Mirabal. 19 I use Echevarría’s review here as an example of these criticisms for two reasons: 1) it appeared in the highest profile reviewing publication, and 2) it is certainly the loudest and boldest and, therefore, the most quotable. For other reviews that register similar complaints about the Postscript see the following: Barbara Mujica’s review in The 108 full-length article, Isabel Zakrzewski Brown nonetheless admits that Alvarez “is unable to avoid the mythification process she had professed to elude” (110). In her article on identity construction in the novel, Lynn Chun Ink levels a similar criticism but goes even farther: “The story assumes mythic proportions because of its rendering of the women into larger-than-life ideals. Rather than humanizing them, the text succeeds in making them more abstract” (795, my emphasis). As a final example, Ignacio López-Calvo debunks the entire Postscript: “In [writing the Postscript], however, she forestalls the hermeneutics of her novel: although unintentionally, by ‘explaining’ the novel in her disclaimer, she is, in a sense degrading the readers, placing them in a position of inferiority that disallows them to reach those conclusions by themselves” (102).

Certainly, not every criticism or praise of the novel stems from the Postscript, but, clearly, the

Postscript has been problematic for a good number of readers. However, there is one major element of that pesky Postscript that most critics fail to consider fully in their caveats about or dismantling of the book: the fact that the novel is written for English speakers, presumably in the

United States. It is telling that even in her address directly to Dominican readers in the

Postscript, Alvarez continues to keep English-speaking North Americans as the primary focus of her purpose. In short, she is outrightly telling Dominican readers, not in so many words, “this book is not for you.” Therefore, the criticisms of Alvarez as complicit in patriarchal Dominican nation building, as inaccurately representing the Dominican collective, or as reifying Dominican women’s domestic identities, though not to be disregarded altogether, should at least be tempered by the fact that Alvarez is not necessarily even writing for Dominicans.20

In fact, it is my argument that she is not even attempting to represent or challenge Dominican

society or collective memory at all; rather, she is leveling her novelistic critiques of collective

World & I, Joanne Omang’s review in the Times Book Review, and Elsa Walsh’s review in The Washington Post Book World. 20 I will be addressing some of these criticisms in later portions of this chapter. 109 memory and its creation at the United States’ collective memory of the Dominican Republic, or the lack thereof. However, more than just filling in a hole in our memory, she is critiquing our reliance on documents via her privileging of oral history, and this critique carries with it an advocacy on behalf of those, mostly women and minorities, who are excluded from the process of creating and shaping our document-dependent collective memory.

II.

In the third section of James Fentress and Chris Wickham’s text Social Memory, the authors explore specifically, via a kind of Halbwachs-based taxonomy, what types of memories are remembered by particular collectives and why. As aforementioned, their answer is that events and details can be more easily remembered if they fit into existing social narratives and therefore serve to legitimize that particular society’s present. Perhaps a brief example would be the resonance of any rags-to-riches story in the U.S. The United States’ overarching narrative of independence and the self-made person allows such tales about Ben Franklin and Andrew

Carnegie to resonate soundly and thus continue to be remembered. Furthermore, such tales microcosmically represent America’s collective view of its present—we are rich and powerful, but we began in a modest, hardscrabble state and earned our successes with hard work. Within this larger social narrative, smaller narratives of the small-time American making it big tend to be easily adopted as sites of our collective memory. Due to this formulation, it makes sense, then, that the peasant-class campesinos of the Dominican Republic would turn the Mirabal sisters into legendary figures. Las Mariposas become not only a symbol of the kind of resistance that freed the campesinos from the oppressive regime of Trujillo, but also a representation of their present conception of their social identity as a people always battling the establishment for a 110 sense of worth and, at times, even for their lives. Thus, the legendary stories of the Mirabals fit with the campesinos’ overarching social narrative.

By the same turn, it makes sense that the U.S. upper and middle classes do not form their sense of identity around small, underground resistance movements, nor do events such as those appear to be worth remembering. The result is that North American collective memory—driven largely by the upper and middle classes of the United States—does not include an event like the martyrdom of the Mirabal sisters, an event so seminal to Dominican campesinos. In fact, U.S. collective memory rarely chooses to remember much of anything about the Dominican Republic.

If anything stands out in North American minds in regard to the mid-twentieth century Caribbean region it would likely be the events surrounding Cuba (Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, etc.). The

United States’ occupation of the Dominican Republic ended in 1924, and the country chose not to intervene much in Trujillo’s subsequent rise to power and establishment of his despotism.21

In fact, most have questioned whether or not the United States’ 1916-1924 occupation of the

Dominican Republic, designed to prepare the country for its post-colonial democracy, made it possible, via the establishment of a national police force, for Trujillo forcefully to gain power in the first place. Perhaps our lack of overt, publicized involvement in Trujillo’s bloody dictatorial reign has resulted in the Dominican Republic’s erasure from U.S. collective memory, as it does not fit with our present national collective identity as international cowboy lawman, an identity that does not include paving the way for foreign despots.

Furthermore, when the United States did finally become involved in Dominican affairs during

the trujillato (the local descriptor for the years spanning Trujillo’s regime) we did so through the

backdoor, through secret underground means—it is widely speculated that the CIA provided the

21 For an overview of the United States’ relationship with the mid-twentieth-century Dominican Republic, see Pope Atkins and Larman Wilson’s The United States and the Trujillo Regime. 111 weapons that Dominican conspirators used to assassinate their dictator. Once again, this does not fit with the present mainstream national identity. Ultimately, then, the United States collective has had no reason whatsoever to adopt stories regarding the mid-twentieth-century

Dominican Republic as sites of collective memory.

Even academic historians ignore the Mirabal sisters’ role in that country. There has accumulated quite a collection of English-language biographies of Trujillo and texts about North

American relations with the Trujillo regime; however, I have located only two of them that even mention Las Mariposas. The definitive English-language Trujillo biography, by Robert

Crassweller, includes a very brief (not even two full pages out of the almost 450 pages comprising the book) mention of the sisters’ role in Dominican history. Bernard Diederich, in his less scholarly, more sensational account of Trujillo’s assassination, provides a little over three pages of discussion on the Mirabals’ legendary lives. Furthermore, both Crassweller and

Diederich seem to mention the sisters not because they find their actions important or noteworthy but because of what their death says about Trujillo. In short, they seem to mention the sisters only as an excuse to quote one of Trujillo’s better lines of newspaper copy. The dictator’s feigned surprise at the horrific “accident” that killed the sisters caused him to remark, “Such good women, and so defenseless!” (Crasweller 403, Diederich 71). In short, the symbolic but small-time resistance posed by Las Mariposas and their husbands and cohorts does not even register with North Americans enough to warrant more than a few vague pages of text in a few books gathering dust on library shelves. We simply have no reason to remember, let alone celebrate, the Mirabals’ contribution to the takedown of the Trujillo regime.

This is precisely where Julia Alvarez enters. She is looking to “jog our memory” (or rather create a “memory” where none ever existed) about the lives and work of Las Mariposas, and she 112 does so by creating a text that clearly mimics collective memory. Obviously, the novel’s form— each of the sisters telling her own memories of their story as channeled through Dedé’s conversation with the gringa dominicana and the artifacts in their home-museum—is conducive to Alvarez’s representing collective memory. The entire book is told as a memory, and it is, of course, collective in that multiple voices participate in its construction. In fact, in the opening of the epilogue, Dedé experiences an embodiment of the creation of collective memory. As she sits at the house-museum receiving visitors—visitors not interested in learning about the Mirabals’ tragic end via the museum, but visitors who have come to contribute—Dedé explains, “Each visitor would break my heart all over again, but I would sit on this very rocker and listen for as long as they had something to say. It was the least I could do being the one saved. And as they spoke, I was composing in my head how that last afternoon went” (301). Dedé becomes a kind of crucible into which the community members deposit their contributions to the collective memory and in which the variety of those memories is transformed into a relatable story. That story becomes essential to the community’s sense of itself; it becomes a legitimization of their present. Dedé captures this essentiality and connection to identity when she claims, “After the fighting was over and we were a broken people . . . that’s when I opened my doors, and instead of listening, I started talking. We had lost hope, and we needed a story to understand what had happened to us” (313). Dedé becomes a representative of the collective, then, when she tells the story, the story that is the novel we hold. Her final thought of the novel adequately sums up this process: “And I see them there in my memory, as still as statues, Mamá and Papá, and Minerva and Mate and Patria, and I’m thinking something is missing now. And I count them all twice before I realize—it’s me, Dedé, it’s me, the one who survived to tell the story” (321).22

22 It is worth noting here that Dedé presides over a museum that has been constructed in the Mirabals’ childhood home, and in this passage, she imagines her family as statues. In short, she has turned her living, communally 113

This notion of passing on the collective memory orally is also important for the novel. Any collective memory must be passed from generation to generation, and, of course, these memories shift and mutate to fit the individuals who are remembering and telling them and their community’s present social identity construction. Thus this written narrative imitating an oral relating of a collective memory mixed with some documented fact is, necessarily, hybrid.

Alvarez’s choice of a hybrid form, then, undermines our tendency to rely upon written, documented history and to use media sources (TV, movies, newspapers, the internet) to transmit collective memory. Alvarez unsettles this preference by offering a novel that balances the written and oral, the factual and fictional, the historical and legendary, the political and romantic, the domestic and national, and so on.23 Kelli Lyon Johnson reads Alvarez as “privileging family over nation, literature over history, and memory over material and archival evidence,” and in so doing, “Alvarez inverts traditional hierarchies of value” (85). While I agree that Alvarez is in the business of challenging North American hierarchies of value (and on this point, Johnson is unclear as to whose hierarchies of value she refers), I do not read Alvarez as privileging opposing values.24 Rather, I argue that she is offering equal space to the sides of those

aforementioned dichotomies in order that her novel ring both utterly familiar to English-speaking

North American readers as well as simultaneously strange in light of our documentary

constructed collective memories into sites of memory in a process reminiscent of that detailed and lamented by Pierre Nora. 23 Certainly, it is impossible to represent accurately the oral in a novel, an essentially written form. Therefore, any critique Alvarez offers of our reliance on documents is necessarily compromised by the fact that she herself is doing so in a document. Nonetheless, we can accept that the hybrid form of her novel will, at least, call to mind orality and open up to readers the possibility of reading such a critique as I have described. 24 Furthermore, Johnson would take issue with my earlier use of the term “hybrid” to describe Alvarez’s form. Based on her reading of Alvarez’s personal essays, Johnson believes that Alvarez would reject the term “hybrid” for its connotation of the erasure of two halves in order to create something wholly mixed. Instead, Johnson prefers to call Alvarez’s form, structure, and approach asymptotic, drawing on a geometric term referring to “lines that approach each other without meeting” (K. Johnson xvii). While this neologism might, indeed, be more descriptive, I am not, at this writing, interested in wrestling with new coinages and the subtleties of connotation. Rather, I am simply aiming to show, at this stage, that Alvarez’s novel represents collective memory and does so in a way that is challenging to North American notions of historical discourse and collective memory while at the same time seeming all too familiar. 114 preferences. Alvarez is therefore allowing us to reconsider those preferences and reshape our construction of collective memory with a newly carved space for orally passed, small-time resistance stories that we might otherwise have no reason to remember. In short, Alvarez is attempting to give us a reason to remember these extraordinary women, and she does so by appealing to national U.S. narratives of identity construction.

III.

In her article “Historiographic Metafiction in In the Time of the Butterflies,” Isabel Zakrzewski

Brown concludes, “Alvarez invents the adolescence and early adulthood of the . It is

Alvarez’s intention to construct a biographical context for the myth that the legendary sisters eventually embody” (98, my emphasis). It would appear that not much is known—or, at least, not much has been documented—about the Mirabals’ early life. In his biography of Minerva,

William Galván spends the majority of his chapter on Minerva’s childhood, “La Infancia de

Minerva (1926-1938),” providing social and familial context (i.e., Trujillo’s status at the time, the economic situation of the Mirabal family, etc.) rather than specific anecdotes about Minerva herself. The only personal information provided in the chapter regards the birth dates of the sisters and their schooling. Otherwise, readers have to wait until Galván’s following chapter, about the high school-aged Minerva, for more specific personal information. Once Minerva has gone away to the Immaculate Conception boarding school, Alvarez begins to demonstrate how her experience there essentially ignites the antitrujillist rebelliousness in Minerva that would change the way she conducted the remainder of her life. There are several key historical scenes and details during this period of Minerva’s life that Alvarez both appropriates and alters for her purposes in In the Time of the Butterflies. 115

Alvarez’s first major appropriation and consequent departure from historical evidence lies in her creation of the character Sinita. In the novel, Sinita is the igniter of Minerva’s revolutionary passion. A boarding school classmate of Minerva, Sinita is characterized as having endured a tumultuous family life; she tells Minerva, “‘People who opened their big mouths didn’t live very long,’ Sinita said. ‘Like my uncles I told you about. Then, two more uncles, and then my father.’ Sinita began crying again. ‘Then this summer, they killed my brother’” (18). The real- life analog of the Sinita character is Tomasina Cabral, whom friends called Sina. According to

Galván, Sina was not a boarding school classmate of Minerva; rather, she attended the university, as an architectural engineering student, at the same time as Minerva (216).25 The historical Sina was involved in underground revolutionary activity and was incarcerated alongside Minerva and Mate in 1960; however, Galván provides no evidence that her family was wiped out by Trujillo and his henchmen (Galván 300). Indeed, Alvarez also places the adult

Sina in that jail cell (232); however, the fact remains that Alvarez converts the older engineering student Sina into an ahead-of-her-time revolutionary Sinita at Immaculate Conception boarding school and allows Sinita to play a greater role in the political development of the fictional

Minerva.

The fictional Sinita is not an exact analog of her historical counterpart. We learn on page 68 of Alvarez’s novel that the fictional Sinita’s surname is Perozo. According to Galván, the real- life Perozo family was severely victimized by Trujillo. Three Perozo brothers—César, Andrés, and Faustino—were assassinated, and Faustino’s son Taberé was tortured and imprisoned. As a result, other members of the Perozo family were forced to live in exile (Galván 96). In assigning the fictional Sinita the Perozo surname, Alvarez is subtly linking her to an historical family that

25 Incidentally, page 216 is Galván’s first introduction of Tomasina Cabral, implying that it was not until much later that Sina entered Minerva’s life. 116 was a target of Trujillo’s tyranny, thus strengthening Sinita’s claims about a tumultuous family life and lending further credibility to her antitrujillist beliefs and influence. Furthermore, it is

Emma Rodríguez’s (a real-life boarding school classmate of Minerva) grandfather Don Rafael who, according to Galván, “fue una persona importante en la orientación política de Minerva

[was a very important person for Minerva’s political direction]” (94).26 This scene, depicting the

schoolgirls visiting with Emma’s (called Elsa Sánchez in the novel) grandfather (renamed Don

Horacio) is included in the novel; however, it is merely mentioned, as opposed to figuring

prominently in Minerva’s political development (Alvarez 39).27 Instead, in the novel, it is Sinita

who stands as the figure most influential to Minerva’s political awakening and development.

The fictional Sinita is thus something of a synthesis of all of the early political influences on

Minerva—Minerva’s boarding school friends Emma and Violeta, Don Rafael, the plight of the

Perozo family, and the real-life Sina herself. Alvarez collects all of these influences into one

political guru, Sinita, who in the novel is most responsible for the birth of Minerva as a political being. In fact, one final departure from documentary evidence on the part of Alvarez cements this political birth. After first hearing Sinita’s traumatic family history, Minerva remarks,

“Sinita’s story spilled out like blood from a cut” (18). Sure enough, one page later, Minerva experiences her first menstruation. Galván, on the other hand, places this event—which he

euphemistically refers to as “los cambios bioquímicos y psicosociales que marcan el paso de la

niñez a la adultez [the biochemical and psycho-social changes that mark the passage from

childhood to adulthood]”—as coincident with her initial trip to boarding school (86). Alvarez,

then, briefly delays this event in the life of the fictional Minerva in order to utilize this important

physiological life change symbolically to represent the mental-political change that was

26 All translations in this chapter are my own. 27 There is some discrepancy about “Emma Rodriguez’s” name. In Miguel Aquino García’s account, he spells Rodriguez’s given name “Enma” as opposed to Galván’s “Emma.” 117 occurring in the fictional Minerva as a result of her encounters with Sinita Perozo.28 Alvarez

uses these historical appropriations not only as filler for the largely undocumented early life of

the Mirabal sisters (especially Minerva), but she also utilizes their political implications to

establish a sort of causal chain representing Minerva’s development as a political being.

If the revolutionary activities of the adult Mirabal sisters constitute the part of the story most

tied to the campesinos’ identity construction and, therefore, this is what they choose to preserve

in their collective memory, why, then, does Alvarez spend so much time offering intimate

details—whether they be appropriated from later-life details or outrightly invented—of the

“” of the sisters’ adolescence and young adulthood? Brown speculates that Alvarez’s

filling in of the early lives of Las Mariposas serves figuratively to enflesh the otherwise mythical

figures that the Mirabals have become in the Dominican Republic. While this may be true, and I will discuss the mythifyication of the sisters later in this study, there is another key reason why

Alvarez would feel the need to provide readers a glimpse of the girls’ modest beginnings.

Alvarez’s providing the fictionalized backstory of the Mirabal sisters ultimately links her

story to the United States’ formative narratives and thus increases the likelihood that the story can become incorporated into North American collective memory. She presents the sisters as having been born into a kind of peasant life in the Dominican countryside. Even when giving directions to the gringa dominicana in 1994, Dedé characterizes the continued “backwardness”

(at least by North American standards) of the area when she explains, “You see, most of the campesinos around here can’t read, so it wouldn’t do us any good to put names on the roads” (4).

This sort of detail gives contemporary North American readers the notion that the girls “came from nothing,” so to speak. This is, however, not entirely true. In both the novel and the

28 It should be noted that Alvarez performs a similar type of historical appropriation and alteration in regard to the more minor character Lina Lovatón. 118 historical texts, the Mirabal family is described as something akin to middle class by mid- twentieth-century standards. While it is true that the family did not live in one of the Dominican

Republic’s larger cities, Enrique Mirabal did own his own business as well as his own car, thus setting the family on slightly higher economic footing than neighboring peasant-class campesinos. In fact, in response to the family’s business and therefore contribution to the country’s economic system, Galván argues, “es possible plantear que Minerva pertenecía obviamente a la burguesía [it is possible to establish Minerva as clearly belonging to the middle class]” (178). Galván goes on to point out that the battle between Minerva and Trujillo was not actually an inter-class conflict but an intra-class clash between differing political sectors among the bourgeoisie (178).

Regardless of the class status of the Mirabal family—both in the novel and in historical texts—Alvarez is counting on contemporary North American readers to view the family’s status as modest and even lacking. In fact, at one point, Alvarez poignantly exemplifies this North

American viewpoint via her gringa dominicana character. After their interview, Dedé offers to get into her car and lead the interviewer out to the main road. When the gringa dominicana responds with surprise that Dedé knows how to drive, Dedé thinks, “They are always so surprised. And not just the American women who think of this as an ‘underdeveloped’ country where Dedé should still be riding around in a carriage with a mantilla over her hair, but her own nieces and nephews and even her sons tease her about her little Subaru” (172). While using

Dedé’s point of view to ironically critique the North American view of the Dominican Republic,

Alvarez is also counting on North American readers to be equally as surprised as the gringa dominicana, who, after all, is an analog for Alvarez herself. 119

This is the modest, again by contemporary North American standards, life into which the girls are born, and they, as would we readers, feel penned in by that life. In two instances, almost immediately after she takes over the narration for the first time, Minerva describes the girls’ adolescent life as one lived in a cage:29

Sometimes, watching the rabbits in their pens, I’d think, I’m no different from you, poor

things. One time, I opened a cage to set a half-grown doe free. I even gave her a slap to

get her going. But she wouldn’t budge! She was used to her little pen. . . . I was the one

hurting her, insisting she be free. Silly bunny, I thought. You’re nothing at all like me.

(11).

Again, two pages later, Minerva describes her leaving for boarding school as “how I got free”

and only then does she realize, “that I’d just left a small cage to go into a bigger one, the size of

our whole country” (13). Minerva’s descriptions of the confinement of the girls’ modest

beginnings and the need to “get free” are intended not only to set up the revolutionary activities

narrated later in the novel, but also to appeal to the value North American readers are likely to

perceive in transcending one’s modest roots. What we see in Alvarez’s invented adolescence for

Las Mariposas, as represented by Minerva’s memory of their childhood, is that they are perfectly

positioned for the ideal self-made-person, “American Dream” story. They are born into a

situation in which formal education is undervalued, economic stability is hard to come by

(despite the fact that the Mirabals possessed that stability), and life is just plain hard. However,

in Minerva’s narration of these early years, we come to find out that they, and especially

Minerva, are unhappy with their situation, so they take it upon themselves to better that situation.

29 In this case, we are forced to take Minerva’s perspective on the girls’ early life as representative, because of the novel’s form. The sisters’ narratives alternate and move chronologically. Therefore, because Alvarez allows Minerva to speak first (after the “intro” by Dedé in which she converses with the gringa dominicana), she has the responsibility of narrating the earliest part of the story, the girls’ adolescence. 120

In this way, Alvarez’s fabricated narrative of the Mirabals’ beginnings mirrors one of the foundational narratives of North American collective identity.

What is more, the freedoms sought by the sisters in the novel, while most certainly national, are also characterized as fundamentally individual. Take again the example Minerva provides in her analysis of leaving for boarding school. In that passage, she does envision the entire country as a cage, a frighteningly national concern; however, she also sees her “escape” to boarding school as an internal, personal freedom: “And that’s how I got free. I don’t mean just going to sleepaway school on a train with a trunkful of new things. I mean in my head after I got to

Inmaculada and met Sinita and saw what happened to Lina” (13, my emphasis). In going to boarding school, she is not only freed from her father’s patriarchal household, but she also experiences a kind of intellectual freedom that results from having seen governmental oppression first hand (as in Trujillo’s claiming classmate Lina Lovatón as one of “his girls”). Minerva grows into an individual, with her own mind, and a revolutionary mind at that.

Similarly, in one of her final reflections in the Epilogue, Dedé is lamenting what she has lost.

In the aftermath of her sisters’ murder, the passing of her parents, and the husbands having abandoned Dedé to care for the house-museum alone, she reflects:

And it helps, I’ve found, if I can count [these losses] off, so to speak. And sometimes

when I’m doing that, I think, Maybe these aren’t losses. Maybe that’s a wrong way to

think of them. The men, the children, me. We went our own ways, we became

ourselves. Just that. And maybe that’s what it means to be a free people, and I should be

glad? (317)

This passage is brimming with images calling to mind U.S. identity narratives: turning losses into gains (or making lemonade from life’s lemons, as the American cliché would have it), 121 rugged individualism (everyone goes her own way), the ability to “be yourself,” and the idea that becoming oneself is the true foundation of freedom. One page after Dedé’s above-cited reflection, in a conversation with Lío, he asks her to “Look at what the girls have done” (318).

Dedé’s response, a mental inventory of the contemporary (as of 1994) Dominican Republic, reads something like a description of the contemporary United States (complete with a kind of

Democratic cynicism):

He means the free elections, bad presidents now put in power properly, not by army

tanks. He means our country beginning to prosper, Free Zones going up everywhere, the

coast a clutter of clubs and resorts. We are now the playground of the Caribbean, who

were once its killing fields. The cemetery is beginning to flower. (318)

Again, these images—free elections, commerce, turning loss into gain, free speech—are images associated very closely with North American identity, even including the freedom to voice objection to the government (represented powerfully by Dedé’s poignant cynical line, “Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies?”) (318). Overall, in highlighting Alvarez’s linkage of the story of Las Mariposas to North American narratives of collective identity, I am essentially arguing that Alvarez rewrites a legendary Dominican tale using an utterly North American structure.

This formula, which I consider to be a positive attribute of the novel, has drawn the ire of some critics, most fervently Lynn Chun Ink. In her article on identity and nation in novels by

Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat, Ink ultimately concludes, “[P]erhaps what is needed in addition to the destabilization of history and the terms of peoplehood is the undermining of the very idea of collectivity” (805). As for Alvarez, Ink has very little to say that is positive. Ink’s major problem with In the Time of the Butterflies is what she perceives to be Alvarez’s 122 reification of the very patriarchy and imperialism she is attempting to subvert. For Ink,

“Alvarez’s text puts forth an ideal of a collectivity that crosses gender, race, and class lines, one that counters and critiques masculinized imagined communities; however, her revision of community tends to utilize the very masculinist imperialist discourse it seeks to undermine”

(790). She believes this to be the case due to a reliance on gendered dichotomies—the men scatter at the end leaving Dedé to care for the house, the women are forced to sacrifice the domestic in order to participate in the national (thus reifying the gendered private/public divide), and Alvarez ultimately settles for placing women in the established national community rather than reordering that community altogether. Rephrasing her point later in the essay, Ink asserts,

“In the Time of the Butterflies ultimately reaffirms imperialist notions of the Dominican

Republic by responding to the United States presence in the same terms that it attempts to contest it” (791).

Where Ink points out that the collectivity established by Alvarez that crosses race, class, and gender utilizes imperialist discourse, I would argue that in establishing such a “melting pot” collectivity Alvarez is utilizing precisely the discourse necessary for her to map the Mirabals’ story onto the North American collective memory, a memory that is tied to a mythic “melting pot” narrative. Again, where Ink sees the women sacrificing their homes and families for revolution as a reification of gendered spaces, I argue that this is further evidence of Alvarez’s linking her story to the North American myth of the self-made woman, the rugged individualist striking out on her own, away from home and family, in order to be true to herself and make a positive contribution in the national landscape that ultimately benefits the home and family she had to sacrifice in the first place. And it may be true that Alvarez simply settles for placing the women in the established national community rather than reconfiguring that community; 123 however, as I have been arguing in this section, Alvarez is indeed interested in placing these women in the United States’ national collective memory, and that very act would work, albeit on a small-scale, to reconfigure that particular collective. Finally, where Ink views Alvaerz’s use of the United States’ terms against it as a reaffirmation of imperialism, I view Alvarez’s savvy (if conscious) appropriation of the terms and structure of the United States’ identity narratives as a productive way to embed the story of three martyred Dominican sisters into North American collective memory.

At this point I should point out that I am not advocating some kind of colonization of the

Dominican legend on the part of the “American” author Alvarez. Such a notion would seem absurd considering Alvarez’s own characterization of herself. She is not an “American writer” any more than she is a “Dominican writer”; she possesses a unique interest in preserving both identities. In her collection of personal essays, Alvarez admits to describing herself as a

Dominican American writer, and “that’s not just a term. I’m mapping a country that’s not on the map,” she asserts (Something 173). She goes on to conclude that the “tension and richness” of that contradiction are what most interest her: “Being in and out of both worlds, looking at one side from the other side” (Something 173). Therefore, Alvarez’s desire to relate a Dominican legend in a North American structure, so as to jog the North American “memory” of the historical event, does not constitute a North American colonization; rather, it is a result of

Alvarez’s writerly situation, her unique capacity for “looking at one side from the other side.”

I am not wholly debunking Ink’s argument (or that of any critic of the novel, for that matter), as this is not a flawless novel. The novel is, at times, slightly over-sentimentalized—or as

Echevarría more crassly puts it, “There is indeed too much crying in this novel” (28)—and a bit less complex than it could be. This lack of narrative complexity is partly because it is narrated 124 by participants in the historical happenings who cannot possibly possess the critical distance necessary for complex meta-commentary.30 This is also partly because, as I will argue in the

next section, Alvarez is remythifying the Mirabals for an English-speaking audience, and myth,

by its very nature, is more simple, straightforward, and symbolic than other more critical types of

narratives. This occasional lack of complexity most certainly accounts for critiques such as

Ink’s; it is reasonable for Alvarez’s mythifying to be read, within a Dominican context, as a reifying form. However, I return to the idea that Alvarez is writing for a North American

English-speaking audience, whose collective memory she is attempting to reshape with the introduction of a forgotten yet powerful and necessary memory of governmental atrocities and peasant heroism in the Dominican Republic. From her unique straddling position—“looking at one side from the other side”—Alvarez is, on a personal level, attempting to merge her two identities, and in the process, on a cultural level, she is subtly challenging and reconfiguring a too-often jingoistic North American collective memory and identity. Her challenge is not leveled via a blatantly metafictive, highly critical, politically charged—essentially loudmouthed—approach that might easily be dismissed by detractors. Rather, she is subtly embedding a disruptive memory into North American collective memory with the hope of ultimately altering that memory’s shape and constitution.

30 In her review of the novel, Ruth Behar laments this lack of meta-commentary. She reasons, “Had Alvarez developed the voice of her alias, the gringa dominicana who returns to her abandoned homeland to learn about The Butterflies from the history-weary Dedé, she might have been able to offer a more nuanced view of what revolutions look like the morning after” (7). Echevarría makes a similar speculation in his review; however, on par with his overall tone, his claim is worded a bit more abrasively than Behar’s. In the coming section, I will address some of these concerns. 125

IV.

Critics (such as Brown, Echevarría, and Ink) have consistently pointed out that Alvarez reneges on her vow to humanize the often monumentalized, legendary Mirabal sisters. She professes an attempt to make them “living breathing women,” and this sentiment is embodied by Dedé who makes this her objective in telling the story to the martyred sisters’ children (64). Like Dedé, who worries that she has told the children of the martyrs too much, Alvarez attempts to bring these mythic women to life by offering us extensive (fictionalized) backstory and the

(speculated) intimate thoughts of the sisters themselves. However, just as Dedé ends up turning her sisters’ lives into a kind of literal and figurative museum, Alvarez also generally fails to avoid mythifying the Mirabals. Nonetheless, Alvarez’s failure to uphold one of her objectives by monumentalizing the Mirabal sisters ends up strengthening her execution of her other, more primary objective.

In regard to Alvarez’s mythification of the sisters, Isabel Zakrzewski Brown argues:

Alvarez, informed by social constructs characteristic of conventional occidental

perceptions of ideal women, fashions stereotypes, rather than real people. These include:

the pious one, Patria; the pragmatic one, Dedé; the rebellious one, Minerva; and the

innocent one, Mate. The four come together to form a perfect whole: the now legendary

Mirabal sisters. (110)

The implication here seems to be that, taken together, the four sisters embody all the qualities that the ideal Western woman would possess. While I do not wish to go that far, I do agree with

Brown that Alvarez ultimately crafts mythical, stereotypical characters and that her doing so is influenced by Western, and even North American, values and constructed identities. She does so in order to “make the myth American,” so to speak. 126

Brown’s identification of the sisters’ stereotypes is quite accurate. Minerva is, obviously, presented as the rebellious one. She is the catalyst for all of the sisters’ revolutionary activity in the novel. After she has gone away to boarding school, grown into a free thinker (see lines quoted earlier), and witnessed first-hand the work of Trujillo (via his appropriation of the young

Lina Lovatón as lover), she strikes the first blow, literally, when she slaps Trujillo as he begins to make sexual advances toward her while dancing at a ball. This scene is an iconic one in both the novel and the legend on which it is based. There is much speculation as to what actually happened and what was said at that Columbus Day party. Alvarez’s version of the party’s events, for the most part, accurately follows the account provided by William Galván in his biography of Minerva: The Mirabals being granted a table in a prime location in the ballroom,

Manuel de Moya dancing with Minerva first and handing her off to Trujillo, the rain beginning to fall, and the Mirabals making a quick but unauthorized escape from the party. Alvarez utilizes the overall structure of the historical accounting of this fateful party.

The exchange between Minerva and Trujillo while dancing, however, is more a matter of question and speculation. As the two participants were deceased not long after the event, there is no truly definitive account of that exchange. Galván’s account, based on the testimony of Dedé and her husband Jaimito, includes the following: a) Trujillo began to openly flirt with Minerva, and she denied his advances by citing his marital status and her religious convictions; b) there was an exchange in which Trujillo threatened to “conquer” Minerva, a threat from which

Minerva did not back down; c) the two discussed Minerva’s exiled revolutionary friend Pericles

Franco; d) and on the subject of communism, Minerva wittily turned the tables on Trujillo implying that he himself was a communist (Galván 155-57).31 Alvarez’s account follows the

31 Dedé and Jaimito claim to know the content of the exchange on account of Minerva’s returning to the family’s table and sharing these details directly after the musical set has been completed. Alvarez does not include this 127 same general line of discussion: flirting advances by Trujillo, an exchange about “conquest,” a discussion of Pericles Franco (represented in the novel by the character Lío Morales), and the mention of communist agitators.

After this, however, Alvarez departs from the historical renderings in two important ways.

First, as Trujillo pulls Minerva even closer, tightening his grip in an almost violent manner,

Minerva complains that his sash full of medals is hurting her and asks him to remove it, forgetting about “his attachment to those chapitas”; nonetheless, Trujillo complies (100). This gesture presents an array of significant symbolic possibilities. First of all, Minerva disdainfully characterizes Trujillo’s medals as chapitas. The term chapa can be translated as a metal badge; however, Minerva’s addition of the suffix –ita, meaning little, displays her contempt for these insignificant little medals and the authority for which they stand. Furthermore, in requiring

Trujillo to remove his medals, the fictional Minerva is essentially stripping him of his power; she is refusing to acknowledge his self-imposed authority over her and the other citizens of the

Dominican Republic. This gesture symbolically levels the dictator, setting him on equal ground with Minerva and signaling that she is neither fearful of nor inclined to show deference to

Trujillo.

The second major departure during the party scene is, obviously, the slap itself. The fictional

Minerva boldly slaps Trujillo across the face in front of hundreds of guests at the man’s own party. This gesture is the stuff of myth, and that indeed seems to be Alvarez’s source for this detail. Galván biography makes no mention of such a slap, and Miguel Aquino García mentions it only to dismiss it as myth. In Aquino García’s book Tres Heroínas y un Tirano, the author states as his purpose, “recoger la esencia de los hechos verídicos que dieron forma a esta

detail, and skipping directly to the family fleeing, most likely because readers are already privy to the information due to Minerva’s first-hand narration of the event. 128 extraordinaria historia [to discover the true meaning of the verifiable facts that give form to this extraordinary story]” (xiv). He attempts to uncover this “truth” because, he argues, this incredible story “ha sido fuente de mitos, leyendas y ficciones que han venido a llenar el vácio provocado por la falta de una fuente de información fidedigna de los hechos tal como en verdad acontecieron [has been the subject of , and fictions that have come to occupy the void that results from the absence of a reliable source of information about the facts as they truly happened]” (xiv).32 Furthermore, with the stated purpose of presenting the truth and debunking the fictions, provides this very example:

Así por ejemplo, el lector aprenderá que aunque no es cierto que Minerva abofeteara

públicamente a Trujillo como cuenta una de estas leyendas, ella sí le infligió al dictador

inauditas humillaciones a través de una bien estudiada actitud de rechazo a su persona,

incluyendo valientes e inteligentes respuestas a preguntas directas que el dictador le

hiciera en medio de una fiesta.

[For example, the reader will see that although it is not certain that Minerva publicly

slapped Trujillo as told in the legends, she did visit upon the dictator shocking

humiliations via witty personal rejections, including courageous and intelligent responses

to direct questions posed by the dictator during a party.] (xv)

In his attempt to “set the record straight” in light of all the myths and fictions regarding the

Mirabals, Aquino García cites the slap as one such detail that has had a long run in the realm of

legend but seems to bear no factual basis. In this way, Alvarez has intentionally embraced an

32 It should be noted that Aquino García continues to use such strong language—true facts, real story, true essence— throughout his introduction and purpose statement. As a result, it does seem as though he is unaware of the notion that there is no “true story,” only a variety of versions as perceived by a variety of different scholars and storytellers. In this way, his understanding of his purpose is perhaps a bit simplistic, as it denies any kind of “truth” that may arise from myth, legend, or fiction. For Aquino García, first hand testimony—which in itself is hardly reliable—is the only source of truth. 129 important mythic and symbolic detail despite its apparent lack of factual basis. Here we see, on the part of Alvarez, not only a departure from historical evidence, but also a kind of purposeful mythification in her presentation of the legendary slap.

From the moment of the slap forward, the fictional Minerva becomes the stereotypical rebel.

This is perhaps best exemplified when her mother accuses Minerva of trying to fight everyone’s fight, and Minerva responds with the line, “It’s all the same fight, Mamá” (108). Even Alvarez’s intermittent attempts to humanize Minerva by “lifting the veil” of rebelliousness results in a kind of stereotype. After her release from prison, Minerva herself recognizes the rebel role she has been asked to play. She recognizes that “my months in prison had elevated me to superhuman status,” and she responds accordingly: “I hid my anxieties and gave everyone a bright smile. If they had only known how frail was their iron-will heroine. How much it took to put on that hardest of all performances, being my old self again” (259). However, despite these doubts, the old rebellious Minerva returns rather promptly: “Adversity was like a key in a lock for me. As I began to work to get our men out of prison, it was the old Minerva I set free” (269). There are several items of note here. First, the latter quoted passage reveals that Minerva thinks of her rebellious self as her true self, as the self she must free from all other human anxieties. Here we see Minerva actually monumentalizing herself. She essentially denies that there is more to her than the rebel; that is her true self, and she feels she must “rebel” against her inclination to be anything else. For Alvarez, the implication here is that even in attempting to add some humanity to her character, she winds up presenting even more of a stereotype. We get the stereotype of the exhausted heroine who, despite thinking she cannot carry on, summons the courage to continue the fight. Alvarez’s attempt to humanize Minerva ends up feeling like a kind of tokenism (the 130 token moment of weakness that only serves to drive the heroine further toward her goal) that ultimately reinforces the rebellious stereotype in the end.

We can see a similar pattern when analyzing María Teresa. She is the innocent one, the youngest sister, who initially enters the revolutionary movement out of a sense of romance. She joins the movement primarily because she idolizes her older sister Minerva and would do anything to impress her, not to mention the fact that she ends up falling in love with one of the revolutionaries. Mate’s innocence and naïveté are apparent from the moment we begin to look into her journal. Amid playful pictures of shoes and jewelry, she also records conversations such as: “I asked Minerva why she was doing such a dangerous thing. And then, she said the strangest thing. She wanted me to grow up in a free country. ‘And it isn’t that already?’ I asked” (39). Even as Mate grows older, her naïveté does not lessen. Now amid pictures of bombs and escape routes—a rather effective and jarring juxtaposition, “the innocent one” illustrating bombs—Mate reflects, “If we made up the perfect country Minerva keeps planning, I would fit in perfectly. The only problem for me would be if self-serving ones were allowed in.

Then I believe I’d turn into one of them in self-defense” (245-46). Passages such as these display Mate’s role as “the innocent.” Even after she has entered the antitrujillist fight, she idealizes every move her older sister makes, fails to recognize the governmental oppression of her people, and seems to believe a is possible (as long as the self-serving ones are kept out, of course). While it is interesting that Alvarez chooses Mate to narrate the prison scene, a selection that highlights the role of an individual’s perceptions in shaping her memory, this choice only serves to deny the sisters a complex kind of humanity and ultimately further mythify them. A scene whose cruelty and brutality would surely illustrate the human pain and emotions 131 endured by the women in their revolutionary quest is essentially romanticized and glossed over

(and at times even blacked out) in the pages of Mate’s naïve journal entries.

In regard to that journal, we simply do not have access to its complete contents for the sake of comparison. However, in his biography of Minerva, Galván—who, like Alvarez, describes Mate as “la más tierna y quizá la más afectiva de las hermanas [the sweetest and perhaps most affectionate of the sisters]”—does include brief, one-sentence excerpts from fifteen of Mate’s journal entries spanning January 8, 1954, to February 11 of the same year (212). One example, an excerpt from the January 15 entry, is as follows: “Me siento muy deprimida y a veces quisiera desaparecer para no ver tantas injusticias de la vida [I feel very depressed and, at times, I want to disappear so as not to see so much of life’s unfairness]” (213). This passage does not suggest that Mate is naïve to the realities of life in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo; rather, it demonstrates, like the other excerpts Galván presents, that Mate was fully aware of her family’s hardships and, despite her arguable immaturity (as evidenced by the of the passage), she did not always romanticize her sisters’ situation.

In regard to Galván’s excerpts, Brown has found that, “a comparison of the language used in the fictional diary versus the fragment of the real one quoted in Galvan’s book shows that the former freezes her discourse into that of a superficial, trivial, childlike enunciator, as if to emphasize her ‘innocence’” (109). Brown goes on to assert that the excerpts are also “notable for their tacit confirmation of María Teresa’s admiration of Minerva” (109). While, it is true that

Galván’s excerpts show a doting young girl who is highly concerned with the movements of her older, idealized sister, it is also true that Galván—whose own focus is on the life and character of

Minerva, not Mate—has selected particular passages from Mate’s diary in order to show their

“patéticos testimonios de estos negros días para la familia Mirabal [moving testimony of these 132 dark days for the Mirabal family]” (213). For this reason, his selections are necessarily more serious than some other passages that might display a kind of adolescent ebullience. In fact,

Galván does describe the entire diary as capturing “sus vivencias descollantes sean éstas muy alegres or muy tristes [her notable experiences be they extremely happy or sad]” (212-13).

These comments about the purpose behind Galván’s selection of the excerpts may, in some ways, undermine the strength of Brown’s earlier claim regarding Mate’s discourse; however, the fact remains that Alvarez is not faithfully following the actual diaristic document in her creation of the fictional journal and therefore voice of the Mate character. Despite the fact that the dates on some of the fictional Mate’s journal entries match the dates of the excerpts provided by

Galván, the content of the two “journals” does not coincide. Alvarez is clearly departing from the source document in her creation and presentation of Mate’s journal entries; therefore,

Galván’s method of selection, it is likely, as Brown argues, that Alvarez is overemphasizing

María Teresa’s innocence in order to establish that characteristic as the basis of her stereotypical characterization.

Finally, the same can also be said for Patria, the pious one. All of Patria’s sections are dominated by religious language and . Even when discussing the counting of ammunition or the composing of lists of weaponry, these revolutionary activities are never far from religious imagery, as in the following example: “Mate and I drew up the list [of weapons] ourselves in the pretty script we’d been taught by the nuns for writing out Bible passages” (168).

Furthermore, Patria’s “conversion” to revolutionary thinking also occurs in a church. She is there when a group of Trujillo’s insurgents open fire on the campesinos gathered in the church, and Patria finds herself hiding behind a toppled statue of la Virgencita. There she finds herself praying in order to keep her emotions in check, “but my prayers sounded more like I was trying 133 to pick a fight. I’m not going to sit back and watch my babies die, Lord, even if that’s what You in Your great wisdom decide” (162). Throughout her sections, Patria characterizes her revolutionary struggle as a religious struggle, a crusade of sorts. She views the antitrujillist conspirators as like “angels sharpening their radiance before they strike,” and she characterizes their mission as “[spreading] the word of God among our brainwashed campesinos” (163, 164).

In an epiphanic, Plato’s-cave moment of deciding to join the revolution, Patria, again in a church, turns away from the altar:

and saw the packed pews, hundreds of weary, upturned faces, and it was as if I was

facing the wrong way all my life. My faith stirred. . . . Here I am Virgencita. Where are

you? And I heard her answer me with the coughs and cries and whispers of the crowd:

Here, Patria Mercedes, I’m here, all around you. I’ve already more than appeared. (58-

59)

She thinks of the cries of the people, people in need of the revolution, as la Virgencita answering her prayers. Her calling to join her sister’s movement becomes a vocational call from above.

And her mission with the movement becomes to save souls as much as to save lives. While, her struggle with her faith may seem “real,” may seem humanizing, the fact that Patria’s entire involvement with the revolution is couched in religious terms seems somewhat overdrawn.

Undoubtedly, religious piety was important to the historical Patria, as it was for the entire

Mirabal family. However, Galván provides no evidence that piety outweighed other virtues in the life of the historical Patria; he does nothing to suggest that Patria could be characterized through an overemphasis on religious spirituality. Galván describes her as “la mujer consecuente y solidaria [a solid and consistent woman]” and as “el tipo de persona capaz de dar la otra mejilla cuando recibía una bofetada [the type of person capable of turning the other cheek when 134 slapped]” (297). He also quotes another writer’s (Antonio J. Tatem Mejía) description of Patria which includes the following observations: “la mujer de belleza estética y espiritual [an aesthetically and spiritually beautiful woman],” and “no era política . . . era sencillamente una dulce mujer dedicada por completo a su hogar, pero con gran espíritu cívcico, profundamente religiosa y humana, con un humanismo capaz de llegar al sacrificio por el bien de los démas [she was not political . . . she was simply a sweet woman completely dedicated to her home, but with a great gentle spirit, profoundly religious and compassionate, with a compassion great enough to sacrifice for the good of others]” (297).33 These descriptions

do mention Patria’s spirituality and piety; however, those qualities do not seem to take precedence over other qualities such as her sweet gentleness and commitment to family. In fact,

Miguel Aquino García does not list piety as her most outstanding characteristic; rather, he argues, “El aspecto más importante del carácter de Patria era sin embargo su inmenso sentido de familiaridad [The most important aspect of Patria’s character was, nonetheless, her great sense of

family]” (23). It is clear from the above passages that religiosity was an important part of

Patria’s makeup; however, that is also not the only way one can interpret her character. Again,

as with Mate’s embellished innocence in her journal entries, we see Alvarez departing from

historical source material via overemphasis—striking the same chord page after page—in

characterizing Patria by her one defining characteristic, piety.

Minerva’s rebelliousness, Mate’s innocence, and Patria’s piety become almost their lone

identity markers leaving them no choice but to respond to plot situations in accord with their

assigned roles. Clearly, the simplification of otherwise complex human beings and the

establishment of easily identifiable identity markers are effective strategies for embedding

33 Throughout his text, Galván prints all of his quotations in boldface type; hence, I have replicated that type here when citing one of his quotations. 135 historical personages into a group’s collective memory in a lasting way. This is no exception in the United States’ collective memory, as we already have Honest Abe, Nixon the liar, Benedict

Arnold the turncoat, racist Strom Thurmond, sultry Marilyn Monroe, and the list goes on. North

American collective memory is littered with historical people—real-life, living-breathing people in all their complexities and contradictions—who are largely remembered based on one dominant characteristic.34 The critics, then, are correct that Alvarez is guilty of making myths of

these characters she so longed to humanize. However flawed Alvarez’s characterizations may

seem as a result of this stereotyping method, it ultimately aids her ultimate purpose to bring

acquaintance of these women to North American readers.

As a result, when Lynn Chun Ink critiques Alvarez saying, “The text thus essentially admits

women to an already established national community rather than a newly reconstituted one,” she

is quite right (795). However, I do not consider this to be a criticism. Alvarez has indeed

worked to admit these women into the already established North American (not Dominican) community, and she has attempted to place her legendary heroines into that community by helping English-speaking North American readers “remember” an historical event they have otherwise “forgotten” (or even forgotten that they had forgotten). However, to say that Alvaerz’s accomplishment does not create a newly reconstituted collective is not entirely true. While it is true that she has not resorted to blatant, postmodern narrative pyrotechnics in order to raze the construction of North American collective memory, she has subtly challenged that construction simply by jogging the North American memory in regard to these legendary women. The very act of successfully bringing the Mirabal sisters—and all they endured, all they represent—to the attention of the North American memory is by its very nature a reconstituting act. As

34 In the case of Benedict Arnold, he is so associated with the character trait that his name has even become a synonym for the characteristic in common parlance. 136 aforementioned, a group’s collective memory is intimately related to that group’s constructed identity and to that group’s legitimization of their present status. If Alvarez’s readers come to think differently about the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean region (and consequently the United

States’ involvement therewith), they must necessarily come to think a bit differently about how they, their group associations (class, race, gender, etc.), and their nation have come to identify themselves.

This, while not a wholesale debunking of North American collective memory, is nonetheless a reconstitution; it is a reconstitution from within that memory. And like Lewis Nordan, Julia

Alvarez relies most heavily on the power of narrative—albeit, a narrative constructed of equal parts documented history and fabricated fiction/legend—to level her subtle challenge. She has united both “history” and “story” into one seamless narrative in order to provide the scaffolding on which North American readers, as a collective, may now hang a “memory.” Dedé speaks of the phenomenon of present identity construction via memory of the past when she remarks, “I’m not stuck in the past, I’ve just brought it with me into the present. And the problem is not enough of us have done that” (313). Alvarez has taken it upon herself to bring the Mirabal sisters’—and thus the entire Trujillo-era Dominican Republic’s—past into the North American present, because, frankly, not enough of us have done that. 137

CHAPTER 3

Using the Fusion: The Role of Fictional Biography in René Steinke’s

Holy Skirts and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer

John Updike recently quipped that most literary biographies “are just novels with indexes” (qtd. in Holmes 8). Certainly, such a commentary, taken for a virtual commonplace when uttered in

1999, does not originate with Updike. We can go back as far as Rousseau to find similar statements.1 Similarly, in a manifesto published in the inaugural edition of the journal biography, Leon Edel remarks, “[the biographer’s] temperament, his mind, his craft filter out disparate materials and create a life instead of a figure of papier-maché” (1). However, despite certain thinkers’ recognition of interpretation and even invention/creation within the genre of biography, biography has always had a far greater claim to “truth” than even the most verisimilar novel. Biography is, by its very nature, rooted in verifiable fact, and due to this generic contract, biography has historically been treated as pure truth. Case in point: Edel follows the above-cited statement with, “The biographer is allowed to be as imaginative as he pleases, so long as he does not imagine his facts” (1). However, as Updike’s comment attests, there has been a radical shift in thinking about biography over the course of the twentieth century.

1 Centuries earlier, Rousseau famously remarked that biographers’ attempts to capture real lives on a page resulted in nothing more than “ingenious novels” (here, I am relying on the translation of Peter France and William St. Clair in their introduction to Mapping Lives) (Rousseau 1149). It should be noted that Rousseau—sometimes referred to as the father of modern autobiography—makes such comments about biography as a way to privilege autobiography. He was far less aware of the “fictional” construction and performativity associated with autobiography that much poststructuralist theory has since revealed to us. 138

Most point to Lytton Strachey’s influential Eminent Victorians when speaking of the modernization of English-language biography. In his preface Strachey describes the scrupulous biographer in this way:

It is not by the direct method of scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can

hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. . . . He

will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a

little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from

those far depths, to be examined with careful curiosity. (5)

Strachey’s methodology here flies in the face of earlier hagiographic “great men” biographies, which assumed a kind of wholeness of the subject and completeness of the history thereof. One had only to represent that completeness in a scrupulous, straightforward, chronological narrative.

Strachey’s idea, on the other hand, blatantly suggests incompleteness—perhaps even randomness—and highlights the role of the biographer in selecting, arranging, and interpreting these incomplete bits of material. Suffice it to say that under the influence of Strachey and the entire modernist movement, biography could no longer safely assume wholeness and completeness. During the modernist era, the self was viewed as primarily fragmented; thus, any attempt at arranging and ordering a life on a page of type necessarily became a kind of fiction.

The very idea that a “whole life” could be captured in roughly 500 pages began to look like the absurdity that it is; thus, as Laura Marcus argues, modern biographers began, under the ineffable influence of Freud, to focus on their subjects as characters, looking at major themes or motifs in the person’s life that might synecdochally represent the “whole” life (196). This focus on a biographical subject as a character, in some ways, resembles the kind of character focus most often associated with mimetic fiction. In fact, Marcus argues that we often “know” our fictional 139 characters more intimately than any “actual” people, and that “[this paradox] became a rationale for the appropriation of novelistic strategies in biographical writing” of the twentieth century

(202).

In speaking of “adventurous twentieth-century autobiographers” (and his insight is equally applicable to biographers), Paul John Eakin goes even further than simply to argue that biographers appropriate fictionalizing techniques. Instead, he reasons, “fictions and the fiction- making process are a central constituent of the truth of any life as it is lived and of any art devoted to the presentation of that life. Thus memory ceases to be for them merely a convenient repository in which the past is preserved inviolate” (5). For Eakin, in the twentieth century, the notion that (auto)biographical texts “can offer a faithful and unmediated reconstruction of a historically verifiable past” is utterly dead due to our near total conflation of memory and imagination (5). In a more recent study, Mary Evans takes these ideas further yet. She argues that biography is a kind of response to the fragmentation and ambiguities of twentieth-century identity—that is, the very act of putting a life on paper is a stabilizing act (131). However, despite biography’s attempts, “no ‘real’ person actually exists, and cannot be contained, let alone represented in print” (138). For Evans, biography ultimately says more about the biographer than the subject, in much the same way that a novel, though claiming to represent the life of a character, truly represents the psyche of the author. As a result of these insights, Evans declares the biographical act (whether the subject be oneself or someone else) an absolute impossibility.

Each of these representative theorists displays the extent to which, in contemporary thought, invention, interpretation, and imagination have become widely accepted components of biographical writing. Advances in biography have seen the dissolution of the “stable,” “whole” subject and even the chronological presentation of life events. Thematic, ambiguous, and 140 sometimes even indeterminate character studies (and of people outside the realm of “great men” status as well) have become more commonplace. Despite the fact that the field of biography has grown and changed into a more open, less totalizing genre as a result of these influences, Ina

Schabert, in an influential, taxonomic study, argues that these techniques cannot be fully integrated into what she calls factual biographic narratives due to the obvious constraints of the generic contract and the verifiability it requires. As a result, Schabert argues for a new genre, fictional biography, that bridges the gap between the factual verifiability of traditional biography and the exciting and influential narrative advancements of modern and contemporary fiction, and she boldly claims that “fictional biography by now prospers as a genre in its own right” (13).

Schabert coins the phrase “hybrid biography” to describe these fictional biographical texts that selectively splice documentary evidence into “creative nuclei” around which to build a conjectural inner life of the subject—a realm that no self-respecting historical biographer would inhabit without ample quotations from a journal or letters.2 Schabert’s pronouncement of the

arrival of a new genre now seems to have been a bit hasty. Certainly the popularity of and

prolific biographical output by Norman Mailer—who, along with Richard Ellmann, serves as

Schabert’s primary models of hybrid biography—at the time may have suggested a budding

trend; however, the declaration of a prosperous new genre may have been a bit premature.

Nonetheless, if we look at the function of some recent fictional biographies, we may begin to

see a characteristic that could potentially be the hallmark of the fictional biography genre should

it ever grow to the level forecasted by Schabert. Fictional biographies have the ability to fuse the

concepts of inside and outside, internal and external. As we saw in the previous chapter, for

2 On this point, Schabert, in a way like Barbara Foley, does believe in the notion of an imaginative or essential truth—as opposed to the verifiable truth of historical biographies—that can emerge from these creatively spun hybrid biographies. However, it is not my intention to debate essences, as I am more concerned in this project with formal textual mediation and the effects of such constructions. 141

Nordan and Alvarez internal was the priority—the internal imagined thoughts of the characters were central; the internal coherence of fictional narrative was the driving force. As we will see in the final chapter with Sorrentino and Vollmann, their focus on the external documentary evidence is so extreme that it even begins to interfere with internal narrative coherence and denies readers the opportunity to peer into characters’ heads.3 Fictional biographies, on the other

hand, balance the two halves of the internal/external dichotomy and even fuse the two.

The first way that fictional biographies accomplish this fusion is building the internal upon external biographical facts. Schabert suggests that fictional biographies can be arranged in order to anticipate the arc of the subject’s life, to connect symbolically what

are otherwise disparate events, to select an impressive moment to reach a climax or finale, and to highlight major achievements without the necessity of relating comparable lows or scenes deemed irrelevant to the novel’s structure. In short, “the outer world of biographical fact is seen in reference not to history but to an inner world which is the creation of the novelist;” the internal

aesthetic structure orders the outer world of biographical fact (4). While this “internal structure/external data” form is clearly a feature of fictional biographies, it is not exclusively a feature of fictional biographies. Other forms of documentary fiction utilize the same formal quality, as do historical biographies if one is inclined to lend credence to much of the aforementioned biographical theory. What makes fictional biographies unique in this respect is

the second inside/outside fusion that they employ. Unlike many other forms of documentary

fiction, fictional biographies imply—akin to Schabert’s “creative nucleus” concept—that

external evidence can be used to infer an historical personage’s internal consciousness.

3 In fact, reviewers of Sorrentino’s Trance often lamented that they were never given the chance to peer inside Patty Hearst’s head and understand her motives for joining her kidnappers in their “revolution.” This, of course, was a purposeful move on the part of Sorrentino, not a flaw of the novel’s execution, as will be discussed further in that chapter. 142

In short, fictional biographers tread where responsible historical biographers dare not (at least not without copious quotation from diaries and the like): the psyche of the subject. Dorrit Cohn provides a helpful taxonomy of the ways that various types of biographical writing address the subject’s psyche. “Historiographically scrupulous” biographers will rely heavily on a conjectural syntax to relate psychological material. They lean on phrases such as, “he must have felt . . .,”

“at this point she might have believed . . .,” or “perhaps she thought . . . .” Regardless of the syntax, the scrupulous biographer will “clearly mark off his own from his subject’s discourse and resist, above all, lapsing into free indirect style” (Cohn, “Fictional Biography” 10). The less scrupulous, story-driven biographers will often “integrate autobiographical source material seamlessly into the psycho-narrative text, with explicit quotation yielding to implicit paraphrase”

(10). Finally, the “hybrid biographers” (here Cohn borrows Schabert’s terminology)

“unabashedly cast away all historiographic inhibitions” and resort to “nothing more nor less than the consistent application of focalizing techniques” such as free indirect discourse or stream-of- consciousness style (11). Narratologically, then, this final category—“biographies that act like novels” as Cohn calls them—is quite similar to the novels that act like biographies with which I am presently dealing (11).4

4 The purpose of Cohn’s paper is to reestablish the line between fiction and nonfiction from a narratological perspective, as she feels that the work of theorists following Hayden White has gone too far in presuming the erasure of such a line. In fact, Cohn titles the collection in which this article later appeared The Distinction of Fiction because she is most concerned with those narratological signposts that render fiction distinct from nonfictional discourse. I am less concerned with proper here; however, for those so inclined, Cohn’s book is very useful. It is at this point, moreover, that I must depart from Cohn, as she believes that there is truly only one novel—Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot—that acts like a biography. Marbot takes a wholly fictional subject and narratologically treats that subject as would the biographers in Cohn’s first (“scrupulous”) category (even to the point that some reviewers reviewed it as a biography). That said, I am unsure where Cohn would place a novel like Steinke’s Holy Skirts. It is likely that she would place it in the same category as the “hybrid biographies” of Norman Mailer, which she elsewhere calls “fictionalized historical biography”—that is, fictional discourse applied to the life of an historical personage (Cohn, Distinction 85). She reserves the label “fictional biography” for a fictional rendering of a fictional character (her example is Mann’s Death in Venice) (Distinction 85). These incredibly precise distinctions, to which Cohn devotes an entire book, are not my main concern here, so I will continue to call the novels I analyze in this chapter fictional biographies, and the only distinction I will concern myself with is that between fictional and historical biographies. 143

Indeed, René Steinke’s Holy Skirts, a fictional biography of a little known modernist performance artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer, a fictional biography of the final years of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life, utilize a variety of Cohn’s focalizing techniques. There is a seamless transition throughout both texts between the thoughts of the narrators and of their subjects. The narration works differently in the two novels as we will see later; however, there is a decided lack of conjectural syntax, and the narrators’ use of focalizing techniques allows them to slide in and out of their subjects’ consciousnesses. In short, the narrators appear to be simultaneously inside the subjects’ consciousnesses and outside in the

(imagined) historical world. If not simultaneous, the narrators, at the very least, have the unbridled ability to traverse that boundary at will. Therefore, not only are these two novels comprised of an internal aesthetic coherence that structures external biographical/factual data, but they are also centrally focused on the life of an historical personage whom the narrator has the ability to enter into (live within) as well as view from the outside (comment upon).

Contemporary fictional biography, as exemplified in Dreamer and Holy Skirts, is therefore the most wholly fused—the most fully integrated in terms of the internal/external dichotomy—form of contemporary documentary fiction explored here.5 They are more overtly centered around

“facts” than Alvarez and Nordan, but less self-conscious and therefore more traditionally

5 Cohn reads a similar fusion in novels containing what she calls “simultaneous narration”—this is when a novel about past events is narrated in the continuous ; the past is both lived and recorded simultaneously (the example she uses is Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians). She argues that one effect of simultaneous narration is “the seamless continuity that simultaneous narration achieves between outer and inner reality, report and reflection. It is precisely this continuity that retrospective first-person narration can never fully achieve, since—even when the narrator’s past thoughts and perceptions are rendered in free indirect style—the itself inevitably reminds the reader that they are mediated by memory, presented when they are no longer literally present” (Distinction 107). While it is true that the past tense, even when focalized through free indirect discourse, certainly disrupts any continuity between report and reflection due to the mediation of memory, I fail to see how the past tense effects the fusion of inner and outer reality. Tense no doubt affects time—a past tense novel cannot be lived and told at the same time the way that a simultaneously narrated novel can—but tense does not affect space. Inner and outer can continue to be fused due to focalizing techniques and the seamless integration of fictional and factual materials—as is the case with both the novels I examine here—regardless of tense. It is for this reason that I argue in this chapter that both Johnson’s and Steinke’s novels do utilize a fusion of outer and inner reality despite being told in the past tense. 144 novelistic than Whitehead, Winegardner, Sorrentino, and Vollmann. In order best to see what

Steinke’s and Johnson’s novels mean, we must carefully attend to how they work, their form and methodology. It is through this attention to form and method that we can come to understand the complexities and subtleties of these authors’ approaches to the past and the documentary method of representing it. As a result, both Johnson and Steinke use this internal/external fusion to great effect in realizing their texts and their fictional purposes: to embody the messages and aesthetics of their subjects while also complicating any fixed identity that history, biography, and myth may have assigned to them.

Confusing the Puzzle: René Steinke’s Holy Skirts and the

Resistance of Fixed Historical Identity

I.

Ina Schabert, with whose formulation I began above, asserts that the “genre” of fictional biography “is most successful with obscure lives, where lack of material reduces the factual portrait to a mere sketch or silhouette” (13). This is certainly the case with the subject of René

Steinke’s fictional biography Holy Skirts. The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, for contemporary readers, is a relative unknown. Aside from Steinke’s 2005 fictional biography and a recent (published in 2002) historical biography by Irene Gammel—both of which were researched and written virtually simultaneously, thus denying each author the ability to use the other’s work as a source—there has been very little historical interest in the Baroness Elsa von

Freytag-Loringhoven. For the most part, “the Baroness,” as she was often called, has been nothing more than an historical footnote, making cameo appearances in (auto-)biographical works by/about Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, George Biddle, and 145

Margaret Anderson and in historical works about early twentieth-century Greenwich Village or the New York Dada artistic movement. Rarely, in written history, has the Baroness commanded attention or taken center stage—the very acts for which she was most known in early twentieth- century Greenwich Village society.

Reared in the German port town Swinemünde by an abusive father and a mentally unstable, syphilitic mother, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, neé Else Plötz, fled to Berlin at the age of nineteen where she began her performing career. There she gained employment at the

Wintergarten Theater as a “living statue.” The Wintergarten was known for producing salacious shows masquerading as high-class art, hence the classically inspired, though scantily clad,

“sculptures” that graced the back of the stage during shows. It was at the Wintergarten that Elsa gained her first experience as a model and also gained her first experience with sexual promiscuity. These experiences at the Wintergarten, in many ways, launched Elsa’s career.

After three short-lived marriages—to avant-garde architect August Endell, writer/translator Felix

Paul Greve, and Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven—the Baroness wound up in New

York as the proverbial starving artist. There she embraced the principles of the growing Dadaist movement and began to turn her life and body into works of art. She was, some have argued, the first true performance artist, although that terminology would only come into vogue decades later. She designed her own attire, including all of the following: hats made from a coal scuttle, a military helmet with a feather, and a birthday cake (complete with burning candles); jewelry consisting of curtain rings, teaspoons, and a stamp worn as a beauty mark; outfits made from newspaper, an acrobat’s uniform, and a bolero jacket; a bra made out of strung together tomato cans; and props consisting of a herd of small dogs (including her beloved Pinky), her pet canary, and a handmade, hand-held plaster penis. For Elsa, every day, every outing was a chance to 146 perform. She also participated in some more traditional artistic endeavors such as painting, assemblage/collage, and , her favorite form. Along with her traditional and performance art, the Baroness also gained notoriety for her loud, brash, sometimes mad, and almost always eccentric personality and behavior. Accompanying this “unladylike” (by the day’s standards) behavior was an aggressive sexuality that led her to experiment with a wide range of male and female lovers in the ultimate pursuit of female sexual pleasure. All of this earned the Baroness

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven undisputed status as Queen of New York Dada, a true icon of the artistic age.

Why, with all her undoubted influence in the modernist art scene, is the Baroness’s legacy so unknown? It is strange that this unforgettable woman could be so entirely forgotten. History— where it even bothers to remember her at all—has been largely unkind to the Baroness until very recently. With the recent Whitney Dada exhibition including some of her works, a socio-critical text centered around the Baroness by Amelia Jones, the historical biography by Irene Gammel, and the fictional biography by René Steinke, the Baroness’s historical reputation is perhaps in a state of repair. Many are now beginning to see her as a revolutionary performance artist who was so far ahead of her time as to be underappreciated. Some are recognizing her as the necessary precursor to such contemporary acts as or Courtney Love, and all signs point to Elsa having made as big a splash in the1910s as did, say, Madonna in the 1980s. Steinke’s own contribution to this reputation recuperation is, first of all, bringing awareness of the

Baroness to her readership. Just as Julia Alvarez used fiction to acquaint North American readers with the Mirabal sisters, Steinke, too, holds this hope for Holy Skirts. Presumably a novel, especially one garnering the attention accompanying a National Book Award nomination, will have a wider public reach than Gammel’s impressive historical biography, which is most 147 likely to find its way into academic and museum libraries rather than the homes of curious readers outside the academic and artistic community. It falls to Steinke, then, to acquaint readers with the Baroness as an important but often overlooked artist and woman. Furthermore, Steinke utilizes a mock-biography form and the indeterminacy thereof in order to embody the Baroness’s aesthetic. The result is that Steinke grants the Baroness center stage and in so doing undermines the ideology behind the patriarchal historical process that relegated this uncategorizable woman to the footlights to begin with.

II.

Before looking at how Steinke clothes the Baroness in her fictional form, it is first necessary to attempt to understand just who was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and how she has been portrayed. Answering these questions will lead inevitably to the more important question: who does she become in the hands of René Steinke. In her own words, delivered to a New York

Times reporter in 1915, Elsa adequately summarizes her artistic modus operandi:

[T]his being independent is so interesting, I see that life is so well worth the living. . . . I

long always for self-expression. . . . As I stand in my place on the model throne I feel

within me the rhythm of life. . . . I am not merely the model who poses. I seek as best I

may to give artistic expression, to show forth something of the thoughts within me.

(“Refugee Baroness” 18)

This statement, clearly toned down for the sake of the news medium, as opposed to the flamboyance sometimes displayed in her private correspondence, nonetheless seems to capture the essence of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s mindset. She finds life in independence from her husband(s), and that life cannot stay bottled up inside her for long. She embodies an endless 148 search for ways to express her inner thoughts and feelings, the life bubbling up inside her.

Naturally, some of the aforementioned details regarding her dress and behavior are the fruits of that search. None of this may sound scandalous or off-color—after all, the woman merely wants to express her independence and love of life. However, it was 1915, and the Baroness’s behaviors were not always received favorably.

As previously cited, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven has long been a mere footnote in the history of New York Dada and early twentieth-century Greenwich Village. When not actually a footnote, however, she is literally given no more than a page or two in most historiographies or

(auto)biographies of the era and its people. In collecting and totaling these small and perhaps individually insignificant recollections, we can come to see just how the Baroness was “read” by her contemporaries. It is difficult to resist starting with William Carlos Williams’s recollections of the Baroness, as they are downright comical; moreover, he does, at least titularly, devote an entire chapter of his autobiography to her (although the seven-page chapter entitled “The

Baroness” contains only about three pages of text actually devoted to her). At one point,

Williams and the Baroness were lovers, and he fell hard for her, admitting that she “didn’t leave me so easily” (166). However, in the next breath, Williams laments, “I was foolish enough to say I loved her. That all but finished me!” (166). He is, of course, referring to a cartoon-esque episode in which Dr. Williams was called away to see a patient, and Elsa, not wanting him to go, grabbed him and cuffed him on the neck. In response, Williams admits, “I bought a small punching bag after that to take it out on in the cellar, and the next time she attacked me, about six o’clock one evening on Park Avenue a few months later, I flattened her with a stiff punch to the mouth” (169). As if the image of Williams training like a boxer for a fistfight with the Baroness isn’t farcical enough, Williams also implicates other artist-lovers of the Baroness. He reports 149 that an anonymous Russian painter, finding Elsa naked under his bed, fled the scene, and that

“Wallace Stevens at one time was afraid to come below Fourteenth Street when he was in the city because of her” (168-69).6 If we can take Williams at his word—and it should be noted that

his tone implies embellishment—the Baroness’s overt sexuality and overall aggressiveness were somewhat frightening to those men who just could not help becoming enraveled in her web.

Along with her sexuality, the Baroness’s personality also draws scrutiny and subtle (and

sometimes not-so-subtle) criticism by historiographers and biographers. In all of her cameos in

historical material from/about the New York Dada era, Elsa is described, to varying degrees,

negatively. She has been described as “eccentric” (Schwarz 52, Baldwin 53) and “zany”

(Stansell 231), and as a “poseur” who exploited publicity opportunities and flaunted her

peculiarities (Ramirez 383-84). Even in his relatively flattering portrayal of Elsa (one of the

few), Steven Watson recognizes that, at times, “the Baroness might have been dismissed as a

schizophrenic street person” (271). However, Watson attempts to correct this apparent

misperception by arguing that within avant-garde circles “she embodied the most radical of

personality experiments” and by crowning her Queen of New York Dada (271). Even his recuperative attempt, though, is marred by a kind of unflattering mad-scientist terminology describing “radical experiments.” Along with these unflattering descriptions of her personality and mannerisms, writers have also failed to view the Baroness as a serious artistic force in the

New York Dada movement. This is most clearly evidenced by the frequent misattribution of her

“readymade”-style sculpture God to photographer Morton Schamberg.7 Aside from simply

6 Gammel identifies Williams’s “Russian painter” as Lithuanian American sculptor William Zorach (267). 7 The sculpture, essentially a segment of plumbing pipe, was widely attributed to Morton Livingston Schamberg until 1994 when Francis Naumann, in preparing the New York Dada exhibition at the Whitney and the accompanying published monograph, became the first to theorize that the Baroness likely created the sculpture, while Schamberg merely photographed it. Even after making this apparent discovery, however, Naumann continues to caption his photographs of the sculpture (two such photos appear in the monograph) with reference to a collaboration between Schamberg and Freytag-Loringhoven, thus denying that it was the work of the Baroness 150 being denied credit for influential art pieces, there is also ample criticism of artistic endeavors that were correctly identified as her work. In making the point that Elsa was not considered to be a major writer by her peers, Hugh Ford argues that the Baroness was “not even a complete imitation of a Dadaist” (250).8 Ford not only blatantly dismiss the Baroness’s poetry, but he denies her even the label of “imitation Dadaist”; she was not even good enough, he seems to say, to warrant the “poseur” status assigned by Jan Seidler Ramirez. Another such blatant disregard for the Baroness’s role in the rise of New York Dada appears in Christine Stansell’s American

Moderns. She belittles the Baroness, calling her “something of a Dada mascot for Man Ray and

Duchamp” and arguing that she became “a kind of pet project of living art, to feed, shelter, and encourage” (206). Overall, what we see here is that virtually no one—neither contemporaries nor decades-removed commentators—has taken the Baroness seriously, not in her art, her style, her influence, or her life. For most, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was nothing more than a freakish sideshow to the circus that was New York Dada.

alone. In fact, in the case of one such photo, Naumann labels it, “Photograph of God by Schamberg and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven” (129). Bucking against his own theory, not to mention all rules or alphabetizing, Naumann places Schamberg’s name ahead of Freytag-Loringhoven’s, thus further perpetuating the allegedly mistaken notion that Schamberg was the primary mind behind the sculpture. This continues the kind of rhetoric that has always accompanied attribution of God. One earlier example appears in Schwarz’s Man Ray biography in which he credits the “highly gifted” Schamberg with creating the sculpture and the “eccentric” Baroness with merely influencing it (53). 8 Ford’s assessment represents one instance where the biographical material is inconsistent. One of the lives in question in his quadruple-biography Four Lives in Paris is that of Margaret Anderson, former co-editor of the influential modernist magazine The Little Review, which was responsible for the first American publication (serially) of Joyce’s Ulysses as well as publication of influential work by Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and the Baroness herself. According to Irene Gammel’s recuperative biography of the Baroness, Anderson and her partner (in both business and life) Jane Heap spent almost as much time (if not more) defending their publication of Freytag-Loringhoven as that of Joyce (Gammel 254-57). Ford highlights the story a bit differently than Gammel, citing Anderson’s misgivings about the Baroness’s work: . . . the exotic Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whom the editors [Anderson and Heap] mistakenly tried to present as a major writer. That she was not—not even a complete imitation of a dadaist, as they believed—became clear when they published a long piece by the baroness called “Thee I Call Hamlet of Wedding-Ring,” supposedly a critique of William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell. Margaret’s misgivings gave rise to one of her most pungent observations: “The policy of The Little Review has always been: a free stage for the artists. There are moments when I believe this to be an uninteresting policy.” (250-51) Finally, Ford goes even further to say that Anderson and Heap’s disagreement about continued publication of the Baroness “was one of several signs that The Little Review had lost direction” (251). 151

Enter Gammel and Steinke.9 We know from Steinke’s own acknowledgements that she and

Gammel were working on their respective “biographies” at roughly the same time. Steinke

reveals, “though my research began before the book was published, Irene Gammel’s biography

Baroness Elsa was a helpful source later in the project, as was our correspondence and conversation” (360). The implication here is that Steinke’s research and overall notion of the

Baroness were already largely formed prior to her having read Gammel’s biography. Gammel’s

book, we can then assume, did not figure heavily in Steinke’s overall shaping of her Baroness,

though it is possible that casual correspondence between Gammel and Steinke did play

something of a role. For the most part, however, it seems safe to assume that the two authors worked most closely with the primary materials—the Baroness’s papers, letters, and unfinished

autobiography—in shaping their respective Baronesses. This presents us with a unique situation in which two authors roughly simultaneously consult the same primary biographical materials yet ultimately present two very different versions of the same historical personage, Elsa von

Freytag-Loringhoven. Naturally, in writing an historical biography, Gammel is bound by the unwritten generic contract stating that biographers are responsible to the verifiable, “the factual.”

As Ina Schabert has lucidly pointed out, authors of fictional biographies are responsible only for

capturing the overall “poetic truth” of the subject’s life, and as a result the internal consistency of

the fictional biography—the aesthetic pattern established by the author—is essentially the only

9 During this period, Amelia Jones also produced a text to which the Baroness is central. In her 2004 book Irrational Modernism, Jones presents what she calls a “neurasthenic history” of the New York Dada movement. Jones’s overall project is to undermine the dominant conception of New York Dada which essentially draws a line from Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia—what Jones somewhat sarcastically calls the triumvirate—to postmodern art via the anti-establishment sentiment of both movements. On an even larger scale, Jones is offering a feminist challenge to what she sees as the patrilineal arc of most art history, which conceives of that history as a progression from one male genius to the next. Jones attempts to accomplish this radical “neurasthenic history” by using the Baroness’s life as a kind of interpretive , as a tool for unmasking the patriarchalism dominating art history. As such, Jones’s text is, obviously, not as biographically detailed as those of Gammel and Steinke, nor is it intended to be. The Baroness-as-interpretive-tool methodology does place the Baroness at the center of the text but only indirectly so, as art history and its trajectory and practice are the true subjects of the text. It is for this reason I am focusing on the dichotomy between Gammel and Steinke, the two “biographers” of Freytag-Loringhoven, for my analysis of fictional versus historical biographical treatment. 152 thing to which the writer of the fictional biography is responsible. Both, of course, are interested in repairing the largely damaged historical image—where one exists at all—of the Baroness; however, they necessarily approach this project in very different ways.

III.

Steinke’s approach to a resurrection and reconstitution of the Baroness’s historical reputation is, essentially, modeled after the Baroness’s own self-image and therefore includes some necessarily biased and political choices. Steinke admits in her “Author’s Note” that “the story is told from the Baroness’s perspective,” and that she has therefore “often recast events as [the Baroness] might have seen them” (357-58). This perspective most likely accounts for many of the decisions examined in this section. The Baroness herself clearly would have much to gain by presenting herself as a sympathetic figure; therefore, Steinke also overemphasizes the sympathetic elements of the Baroness’s story.

In her unfinished autobiography, the Baroness speaks of her perceived victimization at the hands of husband Felix Paul Greve. At one point, she reflects, “What I did not understand was that he could feel any satisfaction in having impassioned simple me for a victim” (93). Of course, the Baroness appears far less simple and victimized when she later describes one of her sexual conquests as a “feminine victory” and her orchestration of multiple lovers as “my private little theatre” (151). In these autobiographical musings, we have perhaps the purest account of the Baroness’s own perspective on her story—a perspective that includes a simultaneous appeal to the reader for sympathy for the simple, helpless victim as well as the aggressive assertion of a feminine right to sexual pleasure. These, of course, are also Steinke’s tactics in presenting a sympathetic and artistically-politically advanced Baroness figure; she offers readers an 153 aggressive feminist icon who is simultaneously deserving of readers’ sympathy as a victim.

Thus it seems that Steinke is true to her promise of presenting the story from the Baroness’s perspective, as her choices resemble some of those the Baroness actually made in presenting herself. Therefore, we can see Steinke as intentionally utilizing the fictional biography form— and the inherent slipperiness of the conventional historical biographic form which all fictional biographies necessarily highlight—for an obvious philosophical and political end.10

There are some major chunks of the Baroness’s life story that are missing from Steinke’s rendering. For instance, when she first arrived , the Baroness was to meet Greve in

Pittsburgh. From there, they traveled into Kentucky where they lived together for a time. In

Kentucky, in fact, the Baroness began to consider seriously her writing, and there she produced her first major work (apart from her collaborations with Greve while in Germany). It was from

Kentucky that Greve fled the marriage, leaving her in poverty. In notes Djuna Barnes intended

(unsuccessfully) to convert into a biography of Elsa, Barnes jotted, “after abandoned [Elsa] lived in tent with negroes—in Virginia or Kentucky” (qtd. in Gammel 153). After her apparent tent experience, the Baroness moved north to Cincinnati where she took on some modeling work.

Only after her stint in Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati did the Baroness move to Greenwich

Village and begin to make her name in the art world. All of these seemingly formative

10 In her “Author’s Note” Steinke also explains her alterations of the historical narrative of the Baroness’s life in this way: “To preserve the story, I have also compressed time, changed the names of her husbands, omitted certain episodes in her life, and moved incidental locations” (357, my emphasis). This is somewhat curious phrasing on the part of Steinke. It raises the questions: Why are alterations necessary for the preservation of the story; does Gammel’s more complete and less altered historical biography not adequately preserve the story; and is it the “true story” that even gets preserved when one alters the so-called facts? If she were to be more accurate, Steinke might have to phrase her caveat as such: To present an otherwise complicated story in the most positive light possible, I have compressed, changed, and omitted. Or perhaps even, “to preserve the Baroness’s reputation” would be a more precise phrasing. It is certainly possible that in saying “to preserve the story” Steinke simply means that changes were necessary in order to preserve the internal aesthetic consistency of the novel (i.e., avoiding the introduction of tangential characters that would only confuse readers, or compressing chronology so as to keep the novel at a manageable length and appropriate scope or attention span), and this concern with story would certainly be in keeping with the tradition of fictional biography. However, the fact remains that Steinke’s alterations change the tenor of the story (at least as it is presented in Gammel’s historical biography); thus, more than “preserving,” Steinke appears to be adjusting the story to suit her political/theoretical agenda. 154 experiences—including her first encounter with utter poverty, her first independent poetic output, and the loss of what Gammel calls her “most important love relationship”—are completely excised from Steinke’s novel. Instead, Steinke drops Elsa directly into New York once she leaves Germany.

The other major period of Elsa’s life that is absent from Steinke’s text is her “decline phase” in Europe. Steinke’s novel climaxes with Elsa’s triumphant poetic performance at a costume ball thrown in her honor (an event that may not have happened at all, as Gammel makes no mention of such a ball). Readers are then offered a brief, several-page denouement that includes

Sara Albright’s discovery of the Baroness’s lifeless body in Paris. What is missing from this progression is the long, slow, unpleasant decline that Elsa experienced in Europe. According to

Gammel, Elsa was growing madder and therefore more outrageous until her friends organized and funded her return to Germany. In executing this maneuver, “Americans came to her help, acting generously and kindly. Perhaps they also thought it was an easy price to pay—for peace.

There must have been a sigh of relief as the Village prepared to return to Europe its Baroness, who had been mocking Americans and their young artists so sardonically, relentlessly, and violently” (Gammel 311). Steinke’s text, of course, makes no mention of the Baroness’s increasing anti-American sentiment or of the fact that the Villagers may have been happy to see her return to Europe. In fact, Steinke deletes the stop in Germany altogether as well as the events there, including: struggles with her visa status preventing immediate departure for Paris, continued attempts at extorting money from her friends in America and Paris, an unrelenting and apparently unrequited obsession with Djuna Barnes, and the overall struggle to stay healthy and sane. This slow fall from grace and drawn out unraveling of the once proud Queen of New York

Dada are not narrated in and, in fact, are scarcely suggested by Steinke’s novel. Certainly, 155

Steinke includes enough minor intimations of decline to entertain questions of suicide in the death scene; however, Steinke prefers to keep the focus on the Baroness’s triumphant highs rather than her late-career sordid lows.

There are certainly other episodes in the life of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven that Steinke skips over in the preservation of her story, the most notable being the famous bout with William

Carlos Williams. Nonetheless, the two aforementioned periods are the largest chunks of time

“compressed” by Steinke. One could easily argue that such compressions are solely aesthetic, stylistic choices necessary to keep the story manageable; however, a look at some of Steinke’s additions to and alterations of “the facts” reveals several primary political moves she executes in her presentation of the Baroness: 1) heightening sympathy for the Baroness by emphasizing her early victimization; 2) drawing causal links between the Baroness’s formative experiences and her sometimes unsympathetic behaviors; and 3) highlighting the potential feminist impulses behind the Baroness’s sometimes unexplainable actions as a way of linking her life and work to contemporary political concerns.11

Steinke’s establishment of Elsa as victim during her early life begins on the first page of the

novel. The novel opens with the introduction of an actively sexual young girl, which raises

questions about her background. A few pages later, the narrator offers a brief glimpse into the

mind of such a girl, “She could not remember when there had not been an alarming absence

inside her. . . . The sensation made her want to create evidence of herself” (Steinke 7). Readers

can very quickly ascertain that this seemingly debauched little girl is the product of an unhealthy

home life, and she is looking to fill her absence and make her mark by acting out sexually.

11 Throughout this section I will be using Gammel’s historical biography for comparison’s sake rather than Elsa’s own presentation of her life in her autobiography. I do so because Gammel has far less to gain by “spinning” the story; whereas, the Baroness herself, like Steinke, plays up her own victimization, as she has the (conscious or unconscious) need to justify her behavior. 156

Further evidence of abuse at home is offered when the young Elsa thinks to herself, “Women who were cowards ended up married to brutes, their teeth falling out, their backs bowed” (6). In these early passages, we see Steinke laying the groundwork for a rationalization of Elsa’s later- life outrageous behavior. Elsa had to become outlandishly expressive to respond to the absence planted inside her by her abusive home life, and she had to become aggressive with her husbands and lovers so as not to fall prey to brutes. Steinke establishes Elsa’s sometimes suspect behaviors as necessary and reasonable responses to her early-life abuses, thus setting up a kind of novelistic psychological cause-effect relationship between Elsa’s early victimization and some of her perceived transgressions occurring later in life.

This pattern of presentation continues when Elsa begins to become involved in prostituting herself after shows at the cabaret. Gammel describes this period as a period of voluntary sexual exploration, an assertion of a woman’s right to “libidinal euphoria;” however, this period was also “slightly dampened by the realization that coitus did not automatically provide her with sufficient luxury and financial support” (64). Though Gammel does note that Elsa disliked the associations accompanying the identity marker “prostitute,” this passage does intimate that she began to view her sexual explorations—in which she would be participating anyway—as a business opportunity. Steinke, on the other hand, represents this period as a kind accident. She figures Elsa as a kind of naïf who is unknowingly sucked into the cabaret culture. This is evidenced by fellow performer Natalye’s educating her: “‘Elsa,’ Natalye said, ‘you don’t know anything about it, do you?’ Staring at her face in the mirror, Elsa saw how obvious it was that she was too stupid to live in Berlin. [Natalye continues:] ‘Of course you don’t come right out and say it like a whore does, but how do you think we all get along?’” (21). This innocent Elsa who is corrupted by the culture of her profession is quite different from the business savvy 157

Baroness given to us by Gammel. While financial necessity is the driving force in both Elsas’ decisions to accept money for sex, Gammel hints at a more active role for her Elsa than does

Steinke with her victimized naïf.

Elsa may not have ended up married to a brute as was her mother; however, by Steinke’s reckoning, Elsa’s three husbands found other ways to victimize her. In fact, the most prominent sites of Elsa’s early victimization in the novel are her marriages. Relating Elsa’s retrospective feelings about her marriages, the narrator memorably comments, “Later in life, Elsa would become fond of saying that each of her three husbands stole something from her. It made her past sound less maudlin. It made her husbands sound more devious and implied she had a passion for thieves, men who took what they wanted, graceful on their feet” (58). There are several important implications in this passage. First, these lines amount to Elsa’s admission that her past has indeed been maudlin. Then, this maudlin past, as well as her moment of weakness in which (via free indirect discourse in the narrator’s voice) she is able to remove her veil of brashness to reveal hurt, only serve to reinforce readers’ sympathy for the Baroness. However, this passage, which smacks of spin-doctoring, raises the question as to how devious her husbands really were and leads readers to wonder about the veracity of the novel’s anecdotes (perhaps even compelling them to check with Gammel). That said, the evidence provided in the text— albeit filtered through the consciousness of the Baroness—reveals the fictional Elsa to be largely a victim of her husbands’ transgressions. Thus, her identity as victim, though highlighted, no longer seems fixed. It cannot be a given; the fictional Elsa herself has essentially asked readers to view her life as a series of constructions and fabrications.

One example of Steinke’s highlighting Elsa’s marital victimhood, arising from her first marriage to August Endell (called Lydell in the novel), involves the decision to allow Elsa to 158 take a lover.12 Gammel describes a situation in which Elsa became involved in a serious flirtation with Felix Paul Greve while married to Endell, and as a result, “she negotiated with her husband the right to take a lover” (120, my emphasis). Gammel clearly places the onus of this decision on Elsa. She actively sought out Greve as a lover, and merely had to “negotiate” with her impotent husband for her right to an affair. Steinke, however, places the impetus for her affair with Franz Trove (the Greve character) within Lydell himself. Lydell tells her: “I’ve figured it out.’. . . ‘I’ll hire a new boy for you each week, a university student. That way you’ll never get bored, and I’ll never be jealous” (91). Steinke’s Elsa character does not immediately take him seriously, and even balks at the nonchalance of the idea of a new lover per week: “He seemed to think it was merely a bit of bodily housekeeping, a rub here, a spurt there, as simple as relieving oneself in the toilet” (92). In Steinke’s presentation of this exchange, Elsa is victimized in several ways. Not only is she forced to endure a sexless marriage, but her husband then attempts to pimp her out to a host of other men for nameless, faceless, meaningless sexual

12 As we’ll see again with Christopher Sorrentino’s novel, Steinke does not necessarily have a consistent system for changing/retaining the names of historical personages. She admits in her “Author’s Note” that she has changed the names of Elsa’s husbands; however, they are not the only ones whose names are changed. Most of the famous artists and patrons retain their names in the novel, regardless of whether they play a sizeable role or simply make a cameo (i.e. Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, George Biddle, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman). However, aside from just her husbands, some of the other incidental characters’ names are changed. Elsa’s aunt in Berlin, Elise in real life, is referred to as Aunt Ida in the novel (53). Steinke spells the name of Elsa’s first employer differently than he did historically. Henry de Vry spelled his name with a “y” (as evidenced by the photo of a poster of de Vry found on page 63 of the Gammel text), but Steinke spells it de Vris (8). Stienke also knocks the first name off painter Douglas Gilbert Dixon calling him simply Gilbert Dixon. Steinke also turns little-known art student Sara McPherson into Sara Albright, and once she has become Sara Albright, Steinke greatly embellishes her role. She sets up Albright as a kind of best friend and confidant to Elsa—Albright is the one who ultimately discovers Elsa’s dead body in Paris in the novel’s Epilogue— however, the real-life McPherson barely warrants a mention in Gammel’s biography. Finally, aside from just changing people’s names, Steinke also rearranges the official title of the film created by Ray and Duchamp in which Elsa starred. The title of this well-documented (failed) experimental film was Elsa, Baroness von Freytag- Loringhoven, Shaving Her Pubic Hair. Steinke rearranges it as The Baroness, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Shaving Her Pubic Hair (277). Some of these changes—especially those that seem most trivial such as knocking the Douglas off Douglas Gilbert Dixon’s name or shifting the “Elsa” and “Baroness” in the film title—are quite minor and almost appear to be somewhat random. It is clear that Steinke has done a considerable amount of research in completing this novel, so I do not wish to suggest that she has simply made careless errors. However, a motive behind this naming system is not readily apparent. 159 encounters. This is quite a different scenario than Gammel’s version in which Elsa, still a victim of a sexless marriage, schemes to be granted permission to pursue her infatuation with Greve.

Once Elsa is with Greve/Trove, Steinke presents the relationship initially as a classic sort of love story ultimately destroyed by Trove’s hand. In order to do so, Steinke must erase the string of infidelities perpetrated by Elsa while Greve was incarcerated on fraud charges. During

Greve’s prison sentence, Gammel describes Elsa’s year as having been spent in a series of

“sexual adventures” mostly with homosexual men (Gammel 134). Steinke does not acknowledge these “sexual adventures” in her story of the Elsa-Franz relationship; rather she chooses to present the relationship as relatively peaceful until its dissolution in New York.13

Steinke likely characterizes this relationship rather conventionally in order both to emphasize the importance of the relationship—which might be undercut by mention of Elsa’s infidelities—and to increase sympathy for Elsa when the relationship falls apart on the heels of Trove’s plagiarism. This plagiarism episode, which accounts for Trove’s fleeing from New York and the inevitable termination of the Elsa-Franz marriage, appears to be wholly fabricated. There is some evidence that the two worked collaboratively on some writing projects while still in

Germany; however, there does not appear to be any evidence to support an accusation of plagiarism on the part of Greve. Greve did often fictionalize Elsa’s life (not unlike Steinke herself) creating female protagonists in his novels after her image (the title character in Fanny

Essler being the most prominent example). In a way, this is perhaps the same kind of thievery— stealing someone’s past and identity for one’s own use. This may account for Steinke’s choice

13 Steinke’s erasure of these “adventures” includes the erasure of Elsa’s relationship with the man she nicknamed “Mr. of Thumb” on whom she spends a significant portion of her autobiography (upwards of 40+ pages). Clearly Elsa’s sustained concentration on the relationship in her autobiography signals that she deemed this period in her life equally as noteworthy and important as her relationship with Greve. She certainly makes no attempt to erase or evade. In fact, Elsa matter-of-factly begins a paragraph saying, “I had three sex affairs during Felix’s absence in which the young assistant doctor [the man she calls Dr. Phil] was not included although I often visited him in his room during daytime (properly with door ajar toward the hall) for excitement and temptation” (137). 160 to invent a plagiarism incident between Greve/Trove and Elsa; the scene becomes a way for

Steinke to dramatize more concretely Greve’s ethereal, artistic abuses of Elsa in print.

Finally, Steinke also heightens Elsa’s victimization at the hands of the Baron von Freytag-

Loringhoven. In Gammel’s historical biography, Baron Leopold earns barely three and a half pages of attention. In those pages, Gammel does mention his reputation as a playboy, his lack of income and reliance on his women for monetary support, and his filching of Elsa’s savings before leaving New York for Europe. Clearly, he was not an ideal husband. However, according to the implications of Gammel’s choice of focus, he was not terribly important to the

Baroness’s life and work either. Steinke, on the other hand, dwells upon the Baron’s transgressions and their effect on the Baroness’s mental state. As a result, the Baron’s foibles— his womanizing and his poverty (which in Steinke’s rendering is owed to his gambling problem)—and their effect on Elsa’s mental state dominate a significant portion of the middle part of the novel until his death is finally announced on page 331. In the meantime are interspersed scenes in which Elsa struggles internally with the Baron’s infidelities, addictions, and careless behavior. One example places a pathetic Elsa in her room “watching the clock, waiting for Josef to come back, wearing that ridiculous harem girl’s costume that he had bought for her at Wanamaker’s . . . thinking of how she would seduce him and how pleased he would be to find her there like that, awake and ready for him” (217). Instead, he arrives home smelling of alcohol and perfume, and he falls asleep immediately. Furthermore, the Baroness blames her sadness over the Baron’s death for her outburst at Duchamp which resulted in her having broken his famous piece The Large Glass—another of Steinke’s fabrications without apparent basis in truth. Elsa tells Duchamp, “‘I wanted to tell you [that the Baron had died],’ she said, ‘and when you weren’t there I broke the Glass.’ She did not know what else to say” (341). Here we get a 161 portrait of a woman desperately in love with her philandering husband and who, upon hearing of his death, literally shatters a masterwork of Modern art.

This is quite different from the vision of Elsa’s marriage to the Baron presented in Gammel’s historical biography. Gammel does not completely exonerate the Baroness from blame in this short-lived sham of a marriage. It is presumed that Elsa’s marriage to Freytag-Loringhoven was not even legitimate, as she was likely still legally married to Greve when she “wed” the Baron.

Furthermore, she lied about her age on the official marriage certificate; thus, the marriage was essentially defunct before it ever began. Stienke includes this scene in her novel, but not without justification: “In the application for the marriage license, [Elsa] said she had not been married before and claimed she was three years younger, because she wanted to take those years back from Franz” (146). In Steinke’s version, the blame for Elsa’s marriage to the Baron being, legally speaking, little more than a sham is placed squarely on Trove/Greve’s thieving of her youth, not on Elsa’s own opportunism. Gammel, on the other hand, goes on to suggest that

Elsa’s lies were not the only way that she victimized the Baron: “Elsa would use Baron

Leopold’s gift of a title effectively as a provocative red flag to declare her cultural aristocracy in democratic America” (160-61). Here we get a portrait of the Baroness as an opportunist who only used the Baron for the benefits that would accompany her “stealing” of his name, of his aristocracy. In short, for Gammel, both Elsa and Leopold are equally blameworthy for their doomed coupling. This is quite different from the story of the philanderer and his relatively faithful (and only unfaithful in response to his infidelity) “wife” who is devastated by his actions and eventual death, and who lied to him only because she was mistreated by her previous husband. 162

Steinke’s alterations are also often used to highlight the Baroness’s avant garde influence.

Whether it be in relation to her feminist politics or her conception of art, Steinke engineers her story to forward the argument that the Baroness was ahead of her time and is, therefore, retrospectively more important than history has so far given her credit. This also portrays her as more appealing to contemporary readers because her ideas about art and life, in Steinke’s rendering, become more easily matched to similar contemporary notions. An example from early in the novel reveals Elsa’s thinking about her responses to men. After deciding that

Mello’s band of artsy men were not likely to listen to her, she makes a statement that, although in direct response to a specific situation, rings as a kind of mantra that is echoed in many of her later acts and performances: “they probably wouldn’t listen. But that made her want to talk all the more loudly” (45). Another telling example occurs when the fictional Baroness has her head shaved for the first time. The beautician condescendingly asks, “It’s good for a woman to look feminine, no?” and in her own mind (as filtered through the words of the narrator) Elsa decides,

“Feminine, Elsa knew, was a power so pervasive it didn’t need landmarks or signs” (123). Yet another important example depicts Elsa’s thoughts about the fact that she had been introduced to only male poets as a young girl. She essentially decides that she will be the one to change the perception of female poets by doing something entirely different. She remarks (again as related by the third-person narrator): “What the dismissive men didn’t know yet was that Femaleness was its own wily force” (149). One page later, as well, we see the Baroness’s fury at being denied entry to particular New York clubs.

Along with the emphases that are apparent in the previously cited passages, Steinke also makes a significant addition that is meant to highlight the Baroness’s politics. The scene in which the Baroness sneaks into the Daughters of Democracy benefit party and executes a 163 performance piece with her plaster phallus appears to be purely fictional, similar to Steinke’s invention of Trove’s plagiarism. There is no doubt that she did sometimes carry around a plaster penis which she used to shock old ladies; however, Gammel makes no mention of a public performance with it at a pro-war party. Steinke’s invented scene is packed with political messages. Elsa’s crying out of “Think of your pleasures, ladies” while brandishing a plaster penis is clearly a feminist, countercultural move, and her commentary, “What looks obscene really is not, ladies,” is a blatant modern art manifesto (325). The fact that all of this happens at a pro-war party becomes its own kind of anti-war statement. Because of the scene’s distinctly contemporary feel, it is likely that the insertion of this fictional scene becomes Steinke’s way of paralleling the Baroness’s presumed politics with contemporary feminist and anti-war sentiment.

The influence of interpolated scenes and narratorial commentaries such as these serves to color a good deal of the Baroness’s other acts in the novel that without these contexts might seem more a product of madness than revolutionary politics.

Certainly Gammel’s text is also informed by a feminist sensibility; therefore, she too points out when the Baroness’s actions can be construed as politically progressive and important for their ability to influence the thinking of those around her. However, Gammel’s honesty about some of the Baroness’s foibles—including Gammel’s full account of Elsa’s increasing syphilitic madness and her long, slow decline—allow readers of this historical biography to place these progressive political acts in a larger context. In short, in Gammel’s account, readers are able to view the Baroness’s outrageous behaviors as a complex product of progressive politics, a lack of self-esteem and the need for constant attention, as well as outright madness. This fact does not render the Baroness any less important, influential, or noteworthy in Gammel’s text. This comparison merely reveals for readers Steinke’s attempt to highlight the Baroness’s 164 revolutionary impulses, downplay some of the pure madness, and ultimately link her early twentieth-century life to twenty-first century concerns in a way that presents the Baroness as important and appealing to contemporary readers. This move represents Steinke’s advantageous use of the inherent interpretive possibilities of presenting a life in writing, whether that be an historical or fictional biography. This fairly common strategy, however, is supported by a more important and far more unique use of form on the part of Steinke.

IV.

As we have seen, both Steinke and Gammel attempt a reexamination of the Baroness’s life and legacy; however, unlike Gammel, Steinke is not bound by the generic contract of historical biographies, as her “biography” is a novel. As a result, the internal aesthetic of the story is her primary master, not factual verification or the larger movements of history and culture. In fact,

Steinke is so concerned with story that, at first glance, Steinke’s novel does not appear to have an overly complex or groundbreaking form (certainly not like those that will be explored later in this study). However, just as was the case with the seemingly mad Baroness, looks can sometimes be deceiving, and Steinke is using form in far more interesting ways than her seemingly conventional novel outwardly indicates.

Holy Skirts is told by a third-person narrator who has access to the Baroness’s consciousness; thus, it is primarily through the narrator’s voice that we receive the Baroness’s commentaries on her own life situations. Indeed, as previously discussed, Steinke admits in her “Author’s Note” that “the story is told from the Baroness’s perspective,” and that she has therefore “often recast events as [the Baroness] might have seen them” (357-58). On the surface, though, it does not appear that Steinke attempts to match that perspective to the novel’s form. For instance, Steinke 165 chooses not to mimic the Baroness’s distinctive, modernist —with its excessive and often random use of dashes—as evidenced in Elsa’s autobiography and letters. Steinke also chooses to eschew any narrative pyrotechnics that might signal the Baroness’s eccentricity, arguable decline into madness, or the modernist aesthetic of the age in which she lived and prospered. Instead, Steinke remains faithful to the Baroness’s perspective through a traditional third-person limited narration. Avoiding what might be construed as trite, obvious narrative gimmickry, Steinke instead represents a much more subtle embodiment of the Baroness’s aesthetic. Steinke’s plain narrational choice—and the lack of any symbolic narrative gestures— is likely meant to mimic the informational, businesslike tone of the conventional biography.

If we return to Dorrit Cohn’s earlier cited description of conventional biography, we can see that:

even the most sympathetic biographer will, so long as he is histiographically scrupulous,

clearly mark off his own from his subject’s discourse and resist, above all, lapsing into

free indirect style. The result is a highly heterogeneous textual surface that can not [sic]

readily be mistaken for the homogeneously omniscient inside views ruling third-person

novels. (“Fictional Biography” 10)

Cohn goes on to mention that popular biographers, who strive for readability more than scrupulousness, participate more in the kind of free indirect discourse that scrupulous biographers are careful to avoid. I would most liken Steinke’s form to the second of Cohn’s categories.14 Steinke is clearly a sympathetic biographer; however, as her account it fictional,

she has no use for the guarded scrupulousness of the “historiographically sound” biographers.

14 In an earlier note, I mentioned that Cohn herself would most likely place Steinke’s novel in the “hybrid biography” category alongside works by Mailer and Ellmann. However, here I am arguing that Steinke, though perhaps best assigned to the “hybrid biography”—or even the more general “fictional biography”—category due to the fictional nature of the presentation of her subject, is formally (without regard for her fictionalized content) most similar to the second category of “unscrupulous,” popular biography. 166

She also has no problem indulging in free indirect discourse, as the majority of our knowledge of

Elsa’s innermost thoughts is conveyed via the third-person narrator’s invasion of the Baroness’s consciousness. Moreover, Steinke’s narration is not as overtly playful or self-conscious as are the so-called “hybrid biographies.” Though pushing boundaries in her own subtle way, Steinke aims to be somewhat less radical than the hybrid biographers. The fictional Elsa thinks of her own writing, “She wanted her work to move between inside and outside, to obliterate those boundaries. . . . To be permeable was human, thrilling” (309). Though Elsa’s notion of obliterating boundaries likely jibes more with the work of hybrid biographers, Steinke’s free indirect discourse—the amalgamation of both inside and outside—allows the entire novel to be subtly permeable in that way. In short, Steinke delivers the intimacy and knowledge of an autobiography/first-person account with the critical and emotional distance of a biography/third- person account. As a result, Steinke’s form most resembles the conventional popular newsstand biography, and I argue that this is no coincidence and is, in fact, Steinke’s primary achievement.

There are several key reasons why Steinke presents the Baroness’s story in this manner. The most obvious is that Steinke is able to garner the sympathy of an intimate portrait of her subject’s consciousness while retaining the “objective” authority of a third-person rendering. Of course, as we saw above, a comparison of Steinke’s version with that of Gammel’s scholarly biography

(out of Cohn’s first category) reveals Steinke’s biases and political maneuverings; nonetheless, readers who have not taken the time to perform such a comparison are likely convinced of the soundness of Steinke’s account due to its mock-biographic presentation. Thus the mock- biography form lends not only an air of believability but also a sense of gravity to Steinke’s text about a woman whose sometimes bizarre antics might otherwise be dismissed as wholly unserious. It would be easy enough to craft a comedic novel out of the raw data that comprise 167 the Baroness’s life; however, Steinke’s form makes it clear that her Baroness is to be viewed seriously, if not tragically.

This raises another related implication of Steinke’s choice of form. I have just alluded to

Hayden White’s theory of emplotment in suggesting that the raw data of history can be arranged in such a way as to be comedic, tragic, romantic, melodramatic, or any other of the traditional

Western narrative plot structures. Remember that one of White’s key arguments is that historiography essentially makes raw historical materials familiar to readers because of readers’ familiarity with the mode of emplotment. In much the same way, we can see René Steinke using the “plot” of the pop-biography to familiarize readers with her otherwise unknown and perhaps even unknowable subject. The analogy to White’s theory of emplotment is not perfect, but the idea here is that Steinke makes the unconventional (Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) conventional through her use of a familiar textual form (the pop-biography). Not only does

Steinke mimic the overall shape and narrative voice of the pop-biography, but she also plays upon key tropes in American biography—and American narrative in general—such as the tragically abused youth whose life is defined by a search for acceptance; the plucky youth who rises from her sordid beginnings to reach a level of respectability and even fame; and the starving artist who eschews any sense of comfort or stability for the sake of the deified notion Art.

Steinke essentially takes the unconventional, unpredictable, and sometimes downright crazy

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and clothes her in recognizable Western/American tropes and narrative structures so that the outrageous Baroness’s life and legacy can reach and be understood by a wide audience otherwise unlikely to benefit from knowing her story. This a move not unlike that performed by Alvarez in In the Time of the Butterflies. Clothing the

Baroness in eccentric, unpredictable prose and narrative gimmickry—which might indeed befit 168 the Baroness and her lifestyle—would, nonetheless, only serve to render her even less accessible and would ultimately undercut any serious political or artistic power her life and work might represent. As a result, Steinke chooses to “stay out of the way,” so to speak, and allow the

Baroness’s story to become familiar to the reading public through the widely recognizable and easily accessible pop-biography “plot.”

The other major implication of Steinke’s formal choices is the ability to comment subtly on the very notion of biographical truth and its antithesis, the performativity of identity. Certainly, the pop-biographical form she has chosen does not afford the critical opportunities that either of

Cohn’s other categories does. The critical scholarly biography (like Gammel’s) keeps the subject at a greater distance, thus affording a greater opportunity for critique, and the hybrid biographies overtly obliterate (and therefore implicitly critique) the biography/fiction boundary.

Steinke, however, is not interested in an outright, blatant critique of the biographical form, and she is certainly not interested in critiquing her subject. Instead, she wants to keep the biography form intact, as she uses that form in order to protect the image of her subject but at the same time embody Elsa’s own aesthetic notion that any self-presentation is necessarily an artifice. But, of course, the best artifice is that which is not obviously artifice (in the way that, say, “hybrid biographies” might be). Just as the Baroness’s performed antics and unintentional madness become indistinguishable, so too do Steinke’s truths and fabrications about Elsa’s life, thanks in large part to her choice of fictional form. In this way, the pop-biography form Steinke chooses is fitting, with the arms-length intimacy of its free indirect discourse working simultaneously to reveal and protect the Baroness, and the subtlety of its critique allowing Steinke to perform her own form-follows-function kind of artifice. 169

In the novel, the Baroness reveals the crux of this aesthetic, somewhat offhandedly, while browsing in an art gallery: “She told him art had to account for people’s blind spots—there was no such thing as a true whole picture” (159, my emphasis). Not only does the Baroness’s comment reveal the thought behind some of her performances—performances meant to fill in some of these blind spots—but it also serves as a kind of authorial explanation of Steinke’s own purpose in crafting the novel. Certainly some of the earlier (largely male) critics of the Baroness believed they had captured the whole picture, but Steinke’s art, like that of the Baroness herself, is designed to fill in some of those critics’ blind spots. In another instance, the Baroness character in the novel once again comments upon the aesthetic at work in both her work and that of her creator Steinke. When making her fictional visit to the censor at the Society for the

Prevention of Vice, Elsa discovers, “the only way to get through to this John Winters [the censor] was to confuse the puzzle and then jigsaw the pieces into a new order for him” (287).

Again, the Baroness character in the novel—presumably along with the real-life character on whom she is based—is in the business of reordering the puzzle throughout the entire novel: the puzzles of gender, art, sexuality, public decorum, and more. Steinke, too, is using this novel to re-jigsaw the pieces of the Baroness’s life in such a way as to highlight her importance both in her own context and for contemporary culture as well.

Several times throughout the novel, the Baroness explicitly reflects on the aforementioned notion of the contingency and performativity of identity. Very early in her life and the novel,

Elsa understands the performance aspect of presentation of self: “To be a woman was to be looked at. But what was seen was partly up to her” (24). Much later, when at a party Jane Heap asks the Baroness if she ever tires of people looking at her, before responding, she thinks, “the one forum a woman always had was her dress—so why not use it? There were ideas she wanted 170 to test, questions, and people were either attracted or repelled, as they should be” (241). Such passages as these—in no short supply throughout the novel—plainly reveal that the Baroness understands the performativity of identity and the control she can wield through her presentation of self. These passages show us the Baroness re-jigsawing the puzzle that is her own identity to attack the blind spots of those around her. Manipulating her presentation of self is her primary aesthetic.15 The Baroness understands that prior centuries’ notions of fixed identity are merely a myth. Similarly, Steinke’s primary aesthetic in writing the novel has also been the manipulation of the (fictional) Baroness’s own “presentation of self” and the “unfixing” of the Baroness’s often-negatively-portrayed identity.

Steinke, then, utilizes the fusion of internal and external afforded her by the fictional

biography genre. She utilizes the external evidence (the same evidence available to Gammel) to

infer an internal (self-)interpretation of the Baroness’s life. Then, she presents this intimate

internal interpretation of the Baroness’s life and work while mimicking the objective external

biography form. Throughout all of this, she allows the Baroness’s internalized politics and aesthetic to achieve external novelistic form. Ultimately, it is within this fusion—both the internal/external dichotomy of fictional biography and the fact/fiction dichotomy of all documentary fiction—that Steinke allows the Baroness to “come to life.” Within this space, the

Baroness, per her own ostensible aesthetic theory, is able to defy fixed identity and slide between the various roles she chose to play: aggressor and victim, artist and poseur, revolutionary and madwoman, and even historical personage and fictional character.

15 At least in the novel, it is her primary aesthetic. It would not be a great leap, however, to assume that the real-life Baroness, knowing what we know about her, was also purposefully and artistically controlling her presentation of self. After all, her own body was perhaps her best known work of art. 171

Our Speculum, Our Mirror: Charles Johnson’s Dreamer and the Poetics of Integration

I.

As previously noted, Schabert argues that fictional biography, as a genre, works best with obscure lives lacking full documentary accounts (13). This is certainly the case, as we have seen, with the subject of René Steinke’s fictional biography; however, Charles Johnson boldly chooses for the subject of his fictional biography one of the most prominent and recognizable men in American history. Historical biographies and critical commentaries about Martin Luther

King, Jr. and his influence number so many that it is difficult even to know where to begin.

Furthermore, King has virtually reached the status of myth in this country, with his own national holiday, speeches and letters memorized in schools alongside the nation’s founding documents, and a host of other mythic images and anecdotes. Not only is King fully enveloped by American culture, but it is because King is so ensconced in—and therefore commodified by—American culture that Johnson chooses to reenact King’s final years in his novel Dreamer.

Unlike most fictional biographies, Dreamer does not focus solely on one life. There are actually three different characters who figure prominently in the novel. Obviously, King himself is a key character in Dreamer, as the external factual evidence driving this documentary novel is drawn from King’s final years in Chicago and Memphis. The present of the novel begins— minus the -based prologue meant to offer some context for the events narrated in the novel—on the evening of July 17, 1966, in a Chicago flophouse where King finds respite after a riot broke out following one of his marches. From there, the novel follows King’s life arc until his funeral in April of 1968. King’s backstory is filled in through remembrances, recollections, and flashbacks proper throughout the novel. That said, King’s story is not the only—or even, at 172 times, the main—story in the novel. Johnson lays King’s historically influenced story alongside the entirely fictional narrative of two other characters who play major roles in the novel.

In fact, King is not necessarily even the protagonist of the novel. The most likely candidate for that designation is Chaym Smith, a wholly fictional King look-alike who enters King’s camp to work as a kind of body double. Until his “training” by members of King’s entourage, Smith has been a troubled vagabond with a questionable past who is used, in typical doppelganger fashion, as a for King. Smith and King are radically different and remarkably similar at the same time, and, as will be discussed later, Johnson centers the novel on Smith as a way of complicating King, of revealing him from another angle. Finally, the invented narrator, Matthew

Bishop, also plays a key role in the novel. Bishop is an eager young student of King’s who is also rather tentative and unsure of himself. Matthew’s own story—along with those of King and

Smith, which he relates—is also featured prominently in the novel, leaving the novel with three lives and three intertwined stories wrapped around the factual base that is the biographical history of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The shape of the novel is also atypical for a fictional biography. The novel begins with a

Prologue, written entirely in italics, that sets the scene for the events in the novel and that seems to establish an omniscient narrator. When the novel proper begins, in un-italic type, we are immediately (in the very first sentence of Chapter 1) introduced to a first-person narrator,

Matthew Bishop. However, lest readers think of the prologue as an anomalous all-knowing, scene-setting entity, the first chapter is followed by another similar italicized section. The italicized and plain-type sections then alternate through Chapter 5 when the italicized sections appear to stop. The next italicized section appears at Chapter 10, and the two types of chapters once again alternate until the novel closes at the end of Chapter 13. All in all, there are five 173 italicized sections which are alternated regularly with plain-type sections with the major exception of the five consecutive plain-type sections located directly in the center of the novel.

Aside from the typeface, the italicized sections are also different from the plain-type sections because the italicized sections allow an intimate, internal glimpse into King’s psyche, though they are still narrated in third person. It is unclear whether these sections are narrated by some version of Matthew Bishop or, more likely, by the kind of nameless author stand-in that is more typical of fictional biographies. Overall, we receive information about King in a variety of ways in the novel, as opposed to the straightforward life-story that we might expect from a fictional biography: the historical explanations and contextualizations of the italic-narrator, the direct thoughts of King himself via the italic-narrator’s free indirect discourse, and the recollections and commentaries of Matthew Bishop as he relates the King/Smith story.

This multifaceted, layered form—with its tripartite storyline, multiple focus characters, double-voiced narration, different typefaces, and fiction/history amalgamation—creates an obviously multi-dimensional text. Readers are forced to view King from a variety of perspectives—both inside and outside, omniscient and limited, as well as through his double,

Chaym—which inevitably creates a complex picture of a very complex and conflicted man. This multi-dimensional narrative that utilizes the inside/outside fusion of the fictional biography form allows Johnson to rescue King from what Johnson has called the “curse of canonization” (“The

King” 194). In his essay “The King We Left Behind,” Johnson laments that in all our idolizing and in the sheer ubiquitousness of King’s image, Americans have lost sight of the heart of King’s message. The image of King has become a “hollow” “hagiographic presence,” almost a kind of mythic mascot, as opposed to a great thinker and leader with a deeply philosophical message that is still relevant in contemporary culture (Johnson, “The King” 194). Johnson, whose own well- 174 noted philosophical beliefs are heavily influenced by King’s, wishes to draw attention away from the “small, kitschy statues in [King’s] likeness” and back to the man and the message (194). He chooses this hybrid form, this fictional biography, in order both to embody and reemphasize

King’s message of integration and to at least begin the process of reversing the “curse of canonization” from which the great Martin Luther King, Jr. currently suffers.

II.

The first, and most obvious, way that this inside/outside fusion manifests itself in Johnson’s novel is formally. Unlike Steinke, Johnson is not attempting subtly to fuse inside and outside by mimicking an historical biography; instead, he is much more deliberate in his traversing of that boundary. Johnson makes it very clear that he is interested in having King’s distinct internal and external realities reside in this single narrative through his unconventional use of narration.

Already with the aforementioned use of multiple narrators, we see an instance of internal/external fusion in Dreamer. The one I am calling the “italic narrator” is ontologically a resident of the internal world of King’s consciousness, and Bishop is ontologically a member of the external (albeit novelistically imagined) historical world. Yet, both narrators exist simultaneously in the same novel, within the same fictional world.

Each narrator comments conjecturally on the opposite world as well as revealing information exclusive to his own world. Take, for example, a seeming throw-away comment that Bishop makes late in the novel. After mentioning the name of Robert Kennedy, Bishop extraneously adds the parenthetical detail, “(only two months away from the bullet that would end his life)”

(227). This is obviously information to which the internal world of King’s consciousness is not privy, and it clearly establishes Bishop as a figure who is wholly a part of the novelistic “real” 175 world—so much so that he already has knowledge of “history” that has not yet happened at the time in which the novel takes place. Likewise, the italic narrator relates information to which

Bishop could not possibly have access. After relating the telling moment in which King’s philosophical foundation is shaken upon meeting his doppelganger, the italic narrator reveals a moment in which King silently questions his own philosophies: “It was a shamelessly Platonic argument, he knew that, yet of its veracity he’d been so sure. At least until now” (46). Again, this kind of wavering, that the fictional King entertains in his own mind but never reveals outwardly, is the kind of information Bishop could never provide. The two narrators, then, are residents of two entirely separate ontological worlds; however, they are commenting on the same life, narrating the same story. In effect, this creates a kind of meta-level to this fictional biography. Not only does the novel contain the distanced author-stand-in of traditional biographical writing (minus the conjectural syntax, of course), but, in Bishop, Johnson has also created a kind of fictional biographer for his fictional biography.

These narrators are joined not simply because they inhabit the same novel and tell the same story, but they are also joined in the person of Charles Johnson, or at the very least a kind of implied author Johnson has created. Johnson does attempt to separate the knowledge of Bishop from that of his italic narrator (who may or may not fairly be conflated with Johnson himself) in instances such as the following. After talking with Chaym about Chaym’s belief in Eastern philosophy, Bishop admits, “While I cannot speak with authority on the esoteric subject of dharma, I can tell you that I was on the first Chicago-bound Illinois Central the very next day”

(160). Johnson, himself an expert in Eastern philosophy, could easily speak with authority on the subject of dharma, but we see Johnson attempting to create in Bishop a narrator whose knowledge is distinct from and limited in comparison to that of the italic narrator and the author 176 himself. In the passage, Bishop seems to want to dismiss the subject on which he is not well- versed so that he can simply get back to telling the plot—his real domain, his functional task.

However, elsewhere, Bishop can be found speaking lines that Johnson has previously published as his own. First a rather subtle example: In the opening line to his short nonfictional commentary on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy, “The King We Left Behind,” Johnson notes:

“It was said he could recite passages from Plato whole cloth from his head” (193). Bishop uses eerily similar terminology when he points out this same tidbit of data early in Dreamer: “King, a freshly minted Ph.D., often looked up from his notes, closed his copy of Plato’s collected dialogues, and brought whole cloth out of his head passages from Plato’s apology” (25, my emphasis).

In a slightly more dramatic example, I return to “The King We Left Behind.” In demonstrating the continuing relevance of King’s integrationist philosophy, Johnson proclaims:

The sponge “Bull” Connor bathed with came from the Pacific Islands, his towel was spun

in Turkey, his coffee traveled all the way from South America, his tea from China, his

cocoa from West Africa. Every time he wrote his name he used ink evolved from India,

an alphabet inherited from Romans who derived it from the Greeks after they’d borrowed

it from Phoenicians who received their symbols from Semites living on the Sinai

Peninsula between Egypt and Palestine. (198-99)16

It should be noted here that this sentiment is derived from King himself; however, in King’s

version of this sequence, “Bull” Connor is replaced by a “we”: “we reach for a sponge which is

provided for us by a Pacific islander” (King 181). Likewise, in Dreamer, Johnson places the

sequence directly into the mouth of King. When accepting an award from a local church in

16 This kind of sequence appears in much of Johnson’s work. In fact, Johnson bases an entire short story—the title story from his collection Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories—on a sequence just like this one. 177

Chicago—and it is at this point of the novel that readers cannot be certain if it is King or Smith on the stage—the fictional King reveals himself when he is asked to spontaneously preach. He responds with a sermon including the following: “That sponge ‘Bull’ Connor bathes with comes from the Pacific Islands. His towel was spun in Turkey . . .” (139). It is significant that the sequence uttered by the fictional King is taken almost verbatim from Johnson’s version with

Johnson’s syntax, not from the historical King’s own version. As the fictional King continues the speech, the only alteration is that he begins to implicate other enemies, speaking of Orval

Faubus’s coffee, George Wallace’s ink, and Malcolm X’s alphabet (139-40). Otherwise, the speech is essentially verbatim from the passage in Johnson’s article, albeit derived from a speech given by King.

This is significant because it reveals that the italic narrator—a narrator easily conflated with the author or at least an implied author, as is the case with most historical biographies—is not the only narrator in the novel who is directly speaking the author’s words. The internal world of

King’s consciousness is not the only place where Johnson’s philosophies and words reside in the novel. By placing his own, previously published, thoughts into the mouths of Matthew Bishop and the fictional King—spoken into the external world and promptly related to readers via

Bishop—Johnson “tips his hand,” so to speak, in regard to his philosophical control of both the internal and external realities in the novel. Therefore, inside and outside are conjoined within the philosophical project of Charles Johnson; inside and outside become two separate but interrelated facets of not only a single novelistic narrative but also a unified narrative purpose.

178

III.

Once we move past the form of the novel, the most obvious thematic juxtaposition is that of fiction and history, and in many ways this, too, takes the shape of an inside/outside fusion, as history has a clear external (to the novel) referent in documented sources, and fiction is necessarily beholden only to its own internal aesthetic structure.17 In the case of Dreamer, the

majority of Johnson’s historical information is drawn from Stephen Oates’s King biography, Let the Trumpet Sound. There is, of course, such an abundance of biographical material on King

that the question arises as to why Johnson would select Oates’s text as his primary historical

source. A look at Oates’s preface yields a clear answer: Oates’s text attempts to accomplish in

biography what Johnson hopes to accomplish in his fiction. First of all, Oates is one of the cadre

of biographers (whom Cohn would potentially label “unscrupulous”) most interested in telling a good story. Despite the pro forma caveat that “Unlike the writer of fiction, the writer of lives is limited to what really happened and cannot, must not, invent anything,” Oates also admits that he has “endeavored to make Let the Trumpet Sound a good story” (xiii). On the subject of biography in general, as opposed to his aims for this particular work, Oates sees biography as “a storytelling art,” as a “form of literature which conveys the warmth and immediacy of a life being lived” (xii). Implicit in these statements is the sense that Oates is interested in “entering into” his subjects, making them come alive, rather than critically examining them. And despite the biographer’s difficulty in entering into the mind of his subject, Oates attempts to do just that.

He admits:

While some people tried to discourage me from delving into the personal King, fearful

that I might somehow tarnish his image, I have attempted to depict all sides of this

17 Or as Cohn puts it, “[W]hen we speak of the nonreferentiality of fiction, we do not mean that it can not refer to the real world outside the text, but that it need not refer to it” (Distinction 15). 179

complicated, creative, and divided man—the public figure and private individual, the

outer and inner selves. I have no interest in adding to the deification of King as a

flawless immortal. (xi, my emphasis)

In short, Oates, like Johnson, wants to rescue King from what Johnson has called the “curse of canonization,” the deification of which Oates speaks here, and he does so by digging into King’s personal life as best a biographer can (i.e., with copious quotations from King’s writings and from people close to King, such as his wife or Ralph Abernathy). The shared vision and purpose of this biographer and this fictional biographer make it easy to see why Johnson would select

Oates as his primary source for factual information.

For the most part, Johnson is very faithful to Oates’s presentation of King’s biography.

Johnson draws his accounts of the major events pretty directly from Oates: The march in

Marquette Park in Chicago (Johnson 116-17, Oates 412-13); the drafting of “The Summit

Agreement” (complete with direct quotation by King) (Johnson 151-52, Oates 414-16); a conversation with John Kennedy about Communist accusations raised in regard to King

(including direct quotation from Kennedy) (Johnson 188; Oates 247); and the events surrounding the famous speech at Holt Street Baptist Church in which King asks blacks to “face facts” about themselves (Johnson 203, Oates 126-27). Johnson also bases some of the smaller, more minor, more personal events in his King’s life on Oates’s account. For instance, Johnson describes a reluctant young King agreeing to be baptized in his father’s church only because his sister was planning to do so, and he did not want her “to get a leg up on him in anything” (78). This sentiment is drawn from Oates who writes that King agreed to be baptized only because he was

“determined that Christine was not going to ‘get ahead of me’” (3).18 Johnson’s account of

18 Inexplicably, however, Johnson changes the year of King’s baptism, and as a result of keeping King’s birth year consistent, he also necessarily changes King’s age at the time of his baptism. Oates places King at five years-old in 180

King’s courting of Coretta also closely follows the Oates account of this period (Johnson 191-92,

Oates 41-45). Johnson even follows his sources (including, but not limited to Oates) in regard to some seemingly insignificant details, such as the fact that his fictional FBI agents drive green

Plymouths (Johnson 184, Oates 333) and accidentally refer to King as Zorro, apparently an FBI code name allowing them to communicate about King in secret (Johnson 205, Ray 247).

However, arguably the most major of all events in King’s life story, the plotting and execution of the assassination, is not actually taken from Oates but from James Earl Ray’s own account of the authorities’ accusations (Johnson 189, Ray 180-81).19

As the above cited examples attest, Johnson does establish a kind of documented historical

platform for his novel—a creative nucleus, as Schabert would call it—and he does, for the most

part, “get his facts straight,” so to speak, at least as those facts are presented in Oates’s and other

biographical sources. That said, there are also moments in the novel where Johnson departs from the historical evidence or at least puts it to different use. One somewhat typical example shows

Johnson drawing from Oates but also using his novelist’s license to embellish the scene for more

dramatic effect. In the scene, Oates is attempting to demonstrate the boy-King’s early doubts

about “Sunday-school Christianity” and all the overdrawn “stamping and shouting” that occurred

at his father’s church (14). As an example, he quotes King saying, “At thirteen, ‘I shocked my

Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus’” (14). Johnson, as in the passages previously cited, hews very closely to Oates’s account, having the novel’s King reflect,

“at thirteen he shocked his teacher and classmates by rejecting the idea of Christ’s bodily

1934 when he is baptized; whereas, Johnson moves the baptism to 1936, making King seven (Oates 3, C. Johnson 78). 19 Ray includes these so-called “hypotheses” about his connection to racist lawyer John Sutherland, St. Louis mobster Russell Byers, and crook John Paul Spica for the purposes of debunking the authorities’ hypotheses and providing the real story. Johnson, however, does not allow for Ray’s explanations, and simply follows the hypotheses as though they are true. Johnson does, nonetheless, allow Matthew Bishop to make several comments (see page 229, for example) about potential FBI involvement in the assassination—comments that are true to the spirit of Ray’s defense of himself in his autobiography. 181 resurrection from the sepulcher” (79). However, Johnson does more than this; he uses Oates’s observation that King was put off by the stamping and shouting of the Baptist Church as an opportunity to dramatize novelistically this early struggle and render it more powerful than the mere reflective words of King as quoted in Oates. Johnson spends two pages detailing an anecdote about an attractive young girl at King’s church who becomes possessed by God’s spirit and begins to writhe and shake on the church floor. Johnson’s King remembers, “Now she writhed on the floor like a worm. Water ran down her legs. Her light cotton dress rose above her brown thighs, giving him an eyeful of what he’d fantasized about all summer long before the girl’s mother shoved her garments down. . . . Watching the girl had aroused him” (79). In this scene Johnson dramatizes King’s struggle with the clash of the earthly and the Godly—with

“Spiritual hunger and sexual longing simultaneously”—from a very young age (79). This image of a young boy attempting to peer up a classmate’s skirt while she experiences a spiritual awakening certainly renders Johnson’s King more human than hagiography would allow. He ceases to be a sort of deity, and becomes, in the eyes of readers, a man whose struggles are not so different from any other man’s. This is certainly one small instance of Johnson’s attempts to tell the “poetic truth”—to get the story “right,” so to speak, while using a novelist’s tools. Small scenes such as this also allow Johnson to subtly begin the process of rescuing King from the

“curse of canonization.”

There is one instance, however, when Johnson departs from Oates in an attempt, it seems, to reify the deification of King. This potentially hagiographic lapse, which would seem to be directly contrary to Johnson’s purpose in the novel, occurs in relation to allegations of marital infidelity on the part of King. In the novel, the build up to the moment is not unlike the scene just described above. Johnson is dramatizing King’s struggle with upholding his faith in the face 182 of doubts and human desires: “But maybe—just maybe—what he preached to others was impossible. Surely the commandments applied to him as a Christian minister” (194). King’s struggle to reconcile his words with his actions and his public image leads Johnson to the subject of an FBI wiretap that produced a tape recording of a party King attended—a recording that was eventually sent to Coretta and used to allege infidelity. Oates suggests that these were more than mere allegations, stating, somewhat nonchalantly, “His close associates were aware that he strayed and did not judge him for it. . . . Still, with his enormous conscience, King felt guilty about his sexual transgressions” (283). For Oates, there is no question that infidelities occurred; he seems more concerned with demonstrating how those transgressions help to humanize King and helped King to grow and learn. Johnson, on the other hand, departs from Oates’s line of thinking regarding these transgressions, instead choosing to have his italic narrator defend King from these allegations: “He’d been at that raucous party, yes. People there told dirty jokes. A listener could conclude there was sexual activity in the room, but nothing—absolutely nothing— on the tape directly implicated him. His voice could barely be heard in the room” (194). The tone of this passage almost resembles the loophole-seeking rationalizations of a guilty man. It would be easy to read such a passage as a flaw in Johnson’s plan to reverse the “curse of canonization,” as Johnson’s wishing to uphold the deification; however, readers must also account for the fact that this passage, related by the italic narrator, is focalized through King’s own consciousness. Therefore, if King sounds, in this passage, a bit like a guilty man rationalizing his transgressions to himself, that is perhaps exactly what we are to take away from it. In that case, the scene becomes another of Johnson’s attempts to humanize the idol. The departure from the critical-yet-sympathetic stance of Oates, contrary to initial appearances, 183 becomes a way not for Johnson to deify further his subject, but to reveal even more of his human frailties, his transgressions and, consequently, his own self-rationalizations.

Another departure from the documented facts that bears analysis is in the naming of the

Memphis detective, who some conspiracy theorists believe acted as a spy for the authorities in their orchestration of King’s assassination. Johnson calls the man Ed Reddick, and points out, accurately, that he was stationed in a firehouse near the Lorraine Motel to keep an eye on the

Motel (Johnson never specifies whether or not he believes that the man was keeping watch for protection purposes or for the purpose of timing the assassination). Johnson’s narrator Bishop notes: “some Negroes called Detective Reddick a spy,” and Bishop goes on to admit, “This welter of conflicting ‘facts,’ of so many testimonies that contradicted one another was dizzying, and I swear I didn’t have a cross-eyed guess as to who was telling the truth” (231). According to

James Earl Ray’s account, Johnson gets the naming of this detective wrong. According to Ray, his name was Ed Redditt (248). One could argue that this is a mere slip; however, the argument can be made that it is actually a purposeful conflation. This is based on the fact that Lawrence

D. Reddick, an academic historian, was a close friend to King and even wrote an early biography of King in 1959 entitled Crusader Without Violence. If we read the conflation of Ed Redditt and

Lawrence Reddick into the character of Ed Reddick as a purposeful one, we can conclude that

Johnson is highlighting the statement Bishop utters about the dizzying variety of accounts regarding King’s life and death. A biographer and a potential conspirator have in common that both have something to gain in spinning their respective versions of “the truth,” which is certainly one of the themes of the novel. In fact, at one point Chaym Smith boldly proclaims,

“All narratives are lies, man, an illusion. Don’t you know that? As soon as you squeeze experience into a sentence—or a story—it’s suspect. A lot sweeter, or uglier, than things 184 actually were. Words are just webs. Memory is mostly imagination. If you want to be free, you best go beyond all that” (92). Johnson’s conflation of a biographer and a potential conspirator implicates the two types of narrative—the biography and the first-person eyewitness account—in this argument that all narratives are lies. While it is true that Johnson’s narrative is also implicated in Smith’s argument, it is also true that Johnson’s narrative is mostly imagination—as demonstrated by his license to conflate characters when he wishes—and therefore more akin to actual memory, according to Smith’s line of thinking, than that of the historical biographer or eyewitness.

This notion of history as illusion and fiction as memory is even further highlighted in yet another noteworthy use of history in the novel. Shortly after the fictional King delivers a rousing speech at a local Chicago church, Chaym Smith, moved by the spirit of King’s message, decides to offer an old man a ride home. When the old man enters the car, he mistakes Smith for King, blames King for all his troubles, and opens fire on Smith. The man’s words to Smith before opening fire include, “Luther King, I’ve been trying to get to you for twelve years” (144).

Matthew Bishop even remarks that the old man’s rhetoric sounds familiar, only realizing too late that Izola Curry had used similar phrases before thrusting a letter opener into King’s chest (C.

Johnson 146). Indeed, according to several sources, Curry famously yelled “Luther King, I’ve been after you for five years” before unsheathing the letter opener with which she intended to kill him (Oates 138, Bennett 99). Lerone Bennett also notes that, after the fact, Curry listed all of the following as reasons for wanting to kill King: his alleged involvement with communists, his attempt (though he denies knowing her prior to the incident) to convert her from Catholicism, and her own anti-integrationist feelings (99-100). The old man in Johnson’s novel sums up his motive into one simple statement, “I don’t want nothin’ anymore. Y’all took it all. Ministers 185 like you are responsible for all my troubles” (146). This scene becomes a perfect demonstration of Johnson’s history/fiction fusion, as the fictional double of the historical figure experiences an event parallel to a documented historical event, including virtual direct quotations. It is even more telling that the narrator points out the parallel within the bounds of the text, leaving no possibility that the parallel will be missed. Not only, therefore, does Johnson place the documented alongside the fictional in this novel, but he even embeds the historical within the fictional through a scene such as this one. The fictional and historical become interconnected rather than simply lying alongside one another.

Like most authors of documentary fiction, Johnson works to fuse the fictional and the documented. Not only does this serve, in Dreamer, as an implicit critique of narrative history— and also not-so-implicit in the case of Chaym Smith’s “all narratives are lies” speeches—but

Johnson also has another, more specific purpose in mind in his blending of fact and fiction. He is using this fusion to at least begin to reverse the “curse of canonization” that haunts the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. For Johnson, King’s message of integration, peace, and harmony is still highly relevant today; yet people forget about the essence of that message in this age of superficial flashing images and sound bites. For Johnson, King has been reduced to “Six-inch plastic King dolls, along with plastic podiums” (“The King” 194). Johnson’s use of history and fusion of the documented and fictional in this fictional biography are his way of shattering the plastic dolls and allowing people to become refocused on the complexity of the man and the message that inspired the dolls in the first place.

186

IV.

Aside from the multivocal narration and the juxtaposition of fiction and history, there is another key way in which the narrative of Dreamer is layered so as to highlight this inside/outside fusion.

This second layering is caused by Johnson’s introduction of the fictional Chaym Smith as a central character. The most obvious way that Smith is used in the novel is, in typical doppelganger fashion, as a foil to King—both to highlight certain of King’s characteristics and, even more so, to challenge and complicate aspects of King’s character. For instance, shortly after Smith is introduced in the novel, the King character thinks, “There in the predawn shadows, in the unveiling parentheses into which Smith’s coming placed his most cherished beliefs, he wondered if perhaps [equality] was no more than a word, an abstraction, empty sound signifying nothing” (45). He goes on to think about the way that this physical look-alike has had a virtually opposite, photographically negative life: “The idea of justice in his life and Chaym’s was a joke.

Not only was the distribution of wealth in society grossly uneven, he thought, but so was God- given talent. Beauty. Imagination. Luck. And the blessing of loving parents. They were the products of the arbitrariness of fortune” (47). These passages, spurred by the appearance of

Smith, both highlight King’s compassion for the less fortunate and genuine concern regarding injustice, as well as providing readers a portrait of a complex man who is not, despite popular misconception, beyond doubting himself and questioning the importance of his work. The appearance of Chaym allows Johnson and his italic narrator an opportunity to complicate the fictional King’s characterization and reveal the historical King to be a fuller, more dynamic character rather than a mere hagiography.

Aside from this typical doppelganger function, Smith also provides Johnson with the opportunity to introduce another layer into the narrative via the Biblical/mythic story of Cain and 187

Abel. In that story, of course, Cain kills his brother Abel out of envy, and as a result the story is most remembered as a representation of bloodshed, oppression, and difference. As such, the

Cain-Abel narrative is used by Yahya Zubena—a black nationalist character whose rally

Matthew attends toward the end of the novel—to describe the relationship between whites and blacks. Yahya, a character whom critics have claimed is based on the figure of Eldridge Cleaver, metaphorically sets up whites as Cainites and blacks as Abelites as a way of arguing that blacks/Abelites have been silent victims of their fellow citizens for too long and must reverse the violence upon the whites/Cainites. This interpretation of the Cain-Abel myth sees only the division between the brothers. Matthew’s response to this revolutionary, Black Nationalist rhetoric is to describe Yahya’s position as an “airtight, one-dimensional interpretation of history, one in which there was no room for ambiguity, or for counterexamples to his arguments, or for people like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or even Jackie Robinson. His historical vision was kitsch” (173-74). Johnson’s argument, via Matthew’s observations, is that Yahya’s interpretation, focused fully on division, is a simple one, an interpretation that fails to see the complexity wrought by the irrevocable familial unity of the two supposed enemies.

Johnson, of course, like the historical King, is much more concerned with the complex unity existing between Cain and Abel than in anything that might divide them. As a result, he establishes Chaym as a Cain to King’s Abel. This formulation becomes most clear when

Matthew, influenced by what he calls Smith’s obsession with Cain and Abel, reads Ricardo

Quinones’s The Changes of Cain.20 After reading the book, Matthew relates several important

insights to readers. First, he concludes, “Of the two—him and Abel—only Cain possessed

subjectivity. A complex inner life. It was said that Western man himself was Cain, cursed with

20 Quinones’s book is not specifically named within the text of Dreamer, but it is only very thinly veiled. Also, Johnson mentions Quinones’s “invaluable book” prominently in his acknowledgments section (10). 188 the burden of restlessness and the endless quest for selfhood” (161-62). Matthew also discovers that “Caym, Kaym, even Chaym were etymological variations on [Cain’s name]” (162). At this point, simultaneously with the readers, Matthew comes to discover that Chaym represents (in the novel for readers, and in his own life for Matthew) the complex, tortured Cain figure in perpetual search of himself. Like Cain and Abel, Smith and King are virtually identical in physical appearance, but they are separated by, as the fictional King remarked to himself in an earlier cited passage, “the arbitrariness of fortune.” To continue the Biblical parallel, it appears as though God has bestowed all his blessings upon the favored son of Adam, in this case King, and laid a hard road ahead of the less favored brother, Chaym. For the first half of the novel, moreover, Smith fully participates in the role of Cain even to the point of envying the gifts of

King. At one point, Smith blatantly remarks, “Shit, as long as he’s alive, I guess I’ll always be nothing” (130).

Aside from the obvious fact that Chaym outgrows the envious, chip-on-his-shoulder role of

Cain as the novel progresses, the other major departure from the mythic story is that, unlike

Abel, King does indeed have subjectivity. He is able to recognize his own blessings and the seeming arbitrary nature of the manner in which they have been bestowed. For example, when first meeting Chaym, King reflects, “He might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down, beginning not in his father’s commodious, two-story Queen

Anne-style home in Atlanta but instead across the street in one of the wretched shotgun shacks crammed with black poor” (32). He recognizes that the blessings in his life are fragile and that he and Smith could just as easily have been assigned different roles. Overall, the addition of this mythic layer to the narrative of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last years adds another level of complexity to the King character in the novel. This doppelganger and its relation to the 189 story of Cain and Abel ultimately challenge the fictional King’s philosophical stance and personal comfort; Chaym’s presence forces him to reconsider or at least question some of his theories and his own life choices. As a result, it is easy to see how this layer adds to the overall project that Johnson is forwarding in the novel. However, there is also another subtler way that

Johnson may be using Chaym, the doppelganger motif, and the allusion to the Cain/Abel story.

I argue that it is possible to read Chaym and King, symbolically, as two competing halves of the historical Martin Luther King, Jr. I do not mean to suggest that, in the novel, Smith is a kind of Poe-inspired figment of the fictional King’s imagination or that Smith is some sort of spirit- world apparition floating through the mind of the fictional King and subsequently the novel.

Rather, they symbolically represent two warring halves of a complex man and his multifaceted philosophical influences. Such a formulation, pointing to some larger philosophical level behind the normal character-development and plotting of a novel, fits with Johnson’s self-designation as a “philosophical novelist.” Furthermore, there is evidence within the novel to suggest such a convergence. First, the plot evidence lends itself to this interpretation. Throughout the course of the novel, Smith’s harshness and cynicism soften a bit, and he comes to embrace King’s message. We can read this transformation as symbolic of King’s suppression of any of his own cynicism or doubts for the greater good of his overall public ministry and message. Also, toward the end of the novel, Smith succumbs to the inevitability of his past catching up with him, and in the face of blackmail by the FBI, he agrees to inform upon King. This begrudging resignation to one’s fate is similar to the almost morbid acquiescence to an early death that is palpable in his famous late sermon “A Drum Major for Justice.”21 Finally, once King has been killed and

disappears from the earthly world, so too does Smith seem to almost vanish from the world. As

21 This sermon was so focused on mortality and King’s own reflections on his impending death that a recording of it eventually served as the eulogy at his funeral (a scene that Johnson depicts, complete with excerpts from “A Drum Major for Justice,” on page 234). 190 a symbolic fragment of King’s whole person, Smith must also fade away when King himself fades from this world.

The shape of the plot upholds this symbolic, philosophical reading. There are also key moments in the novel where this very sentiment is explicitly explored. The most obvious moment of King/Smith convergence in the novel occurs after King has delivered the rousing extemporaneous speech at a church in Chicago. Throughout the scene, Matthew and, consequently, readers are unaware of whether or not it is King or Smith-as-King delivering the address. At one point early in the speech, Matthew relates, “Shivers played across my shoulders.

The more I listened and looked, the more I suspected it was Smith, not King, at the microphone”

(140). Once the speaker has finally been revealed as King himself, Smith is described as nothing more than a shadow, and when he steps from the shadows, from “offstage” (off both the literal stage as well as the figurative stage of history), he rambles, as though in a kind of reverie: “Some of the things he said . . . That was my stuff. Not things I’ve ever said, but stuff I’ve felt. Like my spirit is trapped in his, which is so much clearer and bigger and cleaner. His voice . . . It feels when he’s preaching like his words come from inside me, not outside—like he gives my soul a voice” (142). This moment, which serves as the catalyst for Smith’s abovementioned transformation, also serves to demonstrate the fusion of Smith and King as facets of the same person. In the end, all the things each of these two characters come to represent are merely the competing aspects of the complex historical King which Johnson ultimately wants to present.

Smith represents Eastern philosophy, King represents Western philosophy; Smith a loner, King a public figure; Smith a cynic and a doubter, King a hopeful visionary; Smith the transformed,

King the transformer; Smith an outsider, King the center of a community; and the list could go on. All of these dichotomized descriptions, however contradictory some may appear on the 191 surface, are a part of what constitutes the complex, multifaceted, “whole” historical King, and in

Dreamer, Johnson, by embodying the two halves in two separate but related characters, plays out externally what is otherwise a fully internal struggle. This, then, is another inside/outside fusion, as Johnson uses Smith to get at King from the outside but also, as they are symbolically fused, from the inside. The Smith-doppelganger, therefore, is the perfect device for the bridging of internal and external, as he is, in a way, simultaneously both outside and inside of King.

The ultimate achievement of all of Johnson’s fusions in Dreamer— fiction/history, inside/outside, novel/biography, first-person/third-person, King/Smith, Cain and Abel myth/King’s life story—is that his fictional account of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life demonstrates and even embodies the very point of King’s life work: integration. The historical

King’s message of integration, which according to Johnson has become obscured by the hagiography that now surrounds King, courses throughout this novel. For example, the Bethel

A.M.E. Church, that is in many ways the centerpiece of both Smith’s and Bishop’s growth and transformations, is described in the novel as a kind of palimpsest: “The structure was a tissue, a layering of lives and architectural styles based not on the principle of either/or but of adding this to that, and yes of course throw that in too, the Jewish, the Christian, the Greek, the African, the

Roman, the English, the Yankee, for these could only enrich the experience of the spirit” (179-

80). The integration of all these influences, as Bishop narrates it, enriches the experience of the spirit, and the seeming transformation of Chaym Smith, as well as the growth of Matthew Bishop himself, become examples of how an integrated spirit such as exists in the Bethel A.M.E. Church can, indeed, effect a positive result. Another example of this kind of integration occurs when

Matthew ponders the sheer variety of sources that have exerted an important influence on King’s thinking: 192

I wondered, as we examined King’s intellectual genesis and his Elizabethan borrowings,

if the self we constructed was anything more than a fragile composite of other selves

we’d encountered—a kind of epistemological salad—indebted to all spoken languages,

all evolutionary forms, all lives that preceded our own, so that, when we spoke, it could

be said, in the final analysis, subjectivity vanished and the world sang in every sentence

we uttered. (104)

Again, we can see that Bishop is describing King much the same way he describes the church in the previous passage: as a kind of palimpsestic collection of influences that join together to enrich our lives and cause the world to sing in our every utterance.

This is clearly Johnson’s understanding of the message of King’s life work, and he also places sentiments such as these directly into the mouth of King in the novel. There are several moments in the novel in which the fictional King speaks, like the documented words of the historical King, of integration, and these passages also come to serve as a kind of characterization of the novel itself. One such moment occurs in the “Bull Connor’s Sponge” speech cited earlier, and is indeed also highly influenced by the same documented source. After working through the sequence of everyday ways that we are all indebted to other human beings across this world, the fictional King states: “After a time, I tell you, a man comes to see only a We, this precious moment as a tissue in time holding, past, future, and present, with all of us in the red, everlasting debtors—ontological thieves—in a universe of interrelatedness . . . Every man and woman is a speculum, our mirror. Our twin” (140).22 In the juxtaposition of speculum and mirror—an

interpolation by Johnson and not a part of the historical document from which the speech is

22 The notion of all humanity as “eternally ‘in the red,’” as “everlasting debtors,” is drawn verbatim from the words of King himself in his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (King 181). The speech, however, is not officially entitled “Bull Connor’s Sponge”; that is merely the moniker I have assigned to Johnson’s appropriation of King’s passage for the purposes of this chapter. 193 drawn—we see Johnson hinting at the internal/external fusion that I have argued is the novel’s overarching and adding that new form of integration to a speech representative of the historical King’s message. There is, indeed, a similar passage in which that inner/outer sentiment is explicitly invoked. This time, however, the words remain in King’s head: “Every social evil he could think of, and every ‘ontological fear,’ as he was fond of saying lately, arose from that mysterious dichotomy inscribed at the heart of things: self and other, I and Thou, inner and outer, perceiver and perceived. It was a schism that, if not healed, would consume the entire world” (18).

Dreamer is Johnson’s attempt at healing that schism. In both form and theme, Dreamer represents King’s message of integration and interdependence, and in artfully placing the focus squarely on King’s message—as opposed to perpetuating hagiography—Johnson is also attempting to begin the process of reversing King’s “curse of canonization.” As the title of his notable essay belies, Johnson believes that in our haste to idealize King we have left his vision and message behind. In revisiting the documentary evidence surrounding King’s life and, subsequently, in repackaging that image—much the same project that Steinke performed in regard to Baroness Elsa—in all its complexity, sans deification, in this fictional biography,

Johnson returns King and, perhaps more important, his message to the forefront. Again, this is rather similar to Steinke’s attempt to bring Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven back to the forefront of the history of New York Dada. Ultimately, in completing such projects, both Steinke and

Johnson aim for one final fusion, this one in the mind and life of the reader: the fusion of philosophy and action. 194

CHAPTER 4

Unnatural History: Myth and Historical Discourse in Colson Whitehead’s

John Henry Days and Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues

In an influential article in which William Bascom differentiates myth from legend and , he argues, “Myths are prose narratives which, in the society in which they are told, are considered to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past. They are accepted on faith; they are taught to be believed; and they can be cited as authority in answer to ignorance, doubt, or disbelief” (4). In adding to his definition, Bascom notes that the heroes of myths are rarely human, and that myths often explain and account for the world’s creation and the current characteristics of plants, animals, and landscapes around us. Bascom’s definition obviously refers largely to myths in the most traditional, ancient sense: gods and trickster figures endowing animals with defining characteristics, molding mountain ranges, or spinning celestial bodies into motion. However, such a definition does not take into account the more modern concept of myth as false (but widely accepted) ideal, as in the Horatio Alger “myth of the Self-Made Man” or the prototypically American “myth of the Melting Pot.” In a relatively recent study designed to update the concept of myth for twentieth-century America, James Oliver Robertson argues, “We are Americans in a world we are trying to explain and understand. Our myths . . . give us a sense that the world is understandable and explicable” (8). These two terms, “understand” and

“explain,” are littered throughout much of Robertson’s introductory material and, indeed, become for him the primary functions of myths, even in contemporary America. It seems that, 195 for Robertson, modern myth performs in much the same way as the ancient myths described by

Bascom. While it may be true that we can learn something about a culture by examining its mythology, it is far too simple to stop at “understanding and explaining” when considering the function and power of myth.

In complicating modern notions of myth, an obvious starting place is the mid-twentieth- century work of structuralist critic Roland Barthes. Barthes, adopting a semiotic position, reads myth primarily as a system of communication and, therefore, not a thing, object, or concept in and of itself. In fact, he reads myth as a “second-order semiological system,” taking the “sign” from the first-order linguistic system (in this case, the sign is “myth”), emptying it of its context, and putting it to use as the signifier of the second-order system (114). Because Barthes reads myth as a mere sign system, as a form itself, he argues that there can, therefore, be “no latency of the concept in relation to the form” (121). As a result, “myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear” (121). Barthes then famously characterizes this distortion as naturalization—myth “transforms history into nature,” which, for Barthes, is “the very principle of myth” (129). In other words, consumers of myth tend to view myth, not as communication or a relation of signifier and signified, but as a kind of whole taken for fact. In this way, Barthes formulates myth as a kind of depoliticized speech rendering its historical content not as ideological fabrications or even explanations, but as simple, plain-to-see facts. In this process of naturalization,

myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the

simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what

is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is 196

without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful

clarity. (143)

In Barthes’s description of the essential function of myth, it becomes natural; it is adopted by members of a culture as a mindset or ordering without its construction ever having been questioned or considered. As a result, myth glosses over any complexity, ambiguity, or instability that may have previously accompanied that historical content before its mythification.

In short, the “truthfulness” and overall acceptance of myth almost “goes without saying” as a cultural effect (Barthes 143). The ideological possibilities and implications of this naturalization are obvious. In fact, Barthes even goes on to argue for the bourgeoisie as using myth, and its quality of smoothing over complexities and undercutting dialectics, both to transform and obscure history in order to protect their social and cultural power.

Drawing on Barthes’s important notion of the function of myth as naturalization, Richard

Slotkin has applied these ideas in useful and important ways to modern American mythology

(most specifically, the “Frontier myth”). First and foremost, Slotkin—not unlike Bascom, who does stress ancient myth’s roots in some past, however remote—views myth as necessarily historically based. He argues against psychoanalytic thinkers who view myth as some kind of archetype based on “the nature of things” or “the nature of language,” instead arguing for myth’s concrete historical roots (Gunfighter 9). Further highlighting myth’s historical contingency,

Slotkin also insists on viewing myths as having been fabricated by specific human authors, despite the fact that “human authorship is the very thing that myth is organized to deny” (Fatal

26). That last comment reflects Slotkin’s application of Barthes’s concept of naturalization, and in making that application, Slotkin even ramps up the ideological implications. He argues that myths “are also ideologically loaded formulations which aim at affecting not only our 197 perceptions, but our behavior—by ‘enlisting’ us, morally or physically, in the ideological program. Myth is invoked as a means of deriving usable values from history, and of putting those values beyond the reach of critical demystification” (Fatal 19). Put more succinctly, “Myth is history successfully disguised as archetype,” and this disguise allows myth to resist the kind of everyday critique that would undercut the power of the ideology with which the myth is loaded

(Fatal 20). Finally, in applying Barthes’s general notion, Slotkin ultimately finds himself more concerned with what myth has done to history and how that affects our present. He notes:

[A]lthough the materials of myth are historical, myth organizes these materials

ahistorically. . . . It is not simply that the making of legends alters or misrepresents the

facts of historical cases . . . . What is lost when history is translated into myth is the

essential premise of history—the distinction of past and present itself. The past is made

metaphorically equivalent to the present; and the present appears simply as a repetition of

persistently recurring structures identified with the past. (Fatal 24)

Slotkin seems to view in myth, then, a kind of blind, ideologically interpolated trajectory, in which we continue to allow ourselves to organize our present around seemingly archetypal grounded in a version of our past. Slotkin’s own body of work serves as one large testament to this theory: in his trilogy of critical texts on the “Frontier myth,” Slotkin reveals how this mythic structure has continually resurfaced throughout American cultural history as an organizing and ideologically dominant metaphor without much concomitant wrangling over the contradictions, inconsistencies, and complexities wrought by previous generations’ “Frontier” exploits. Instead, the “Frontier myth” appears to us an obvious, natural fact of American life, not an ideologically fabricated modern American myth. This is a primary example of the way in 198 which myth can become naturalized—the idea of conquering new frontiers appears natural and foundational to contemporary Americans, not ideologically fabricated.

I present this background about the naturalizing function of myth because both novels under consideration here, Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Mark Winegardner’s The

Veracruz Blues, centrally focus on the workings of myth in American culture, the relation of myth to history, and, ultimately, the fabrication and constructedness of American myth.

Whitehead’s novel revolves around the veracity of the myth of John Henry, the hulking steel- driving man who challenged a steam-drill to a drilling contest at Big Bend Tunnel in southern

West Virginia and died shortly after winning the contest.1 On the other hand, Winegardner,

through the vehicle of baseball—one of our most myth-obsessed institutions—explores a wide

variety of twentieth-century ideological myths including the myth of “The American Dream,”

the myth of an imperialistic frontier destiny, the myth of Emancipation, and the myth of a

democratic meritocracy among others. Furthermore, aside from simply exploring the myths

surrounding John Henry and American imperialism, both novels also challenge a second, meta-

level myth: what Marc Colavincenzo has called the “myth of historical discourse.” In light of his

postmodern view that historiography can only really make educated guesses about “what really

happened” (a more moderate position than, say, Hayden White’s while still a recognition of the

1 Some may argue the relevance of including Whitehead’s John Henry Days in a study of documentary fiction, as the documentary veracity of John Henry is quite uncertain. There are strong cases to be made on both sides of the argument about whether a John Henry who beat a steam drill actually ever existed. However, I am prepared to consider this a documentary fiction for several reasons. First of all, the 1996 John Henry Days festival, which serves as the primary setting for the novel, did indeed take place in Talcott, WV. Thus the fictional characters who descend upon Talcott in the novel are actually providing an alternate historical rendering of a real occurrence (though it should be noted that the actual John Henry Days festival did not end with a homicide). Second, the book includes sections focusing on actual historical figures such as Paul Robeson, Guy Johnson, and Moses Rascoe. Though these sections are merely interludes breaking the action of the fictional plot, I doubt that anyone would declassify Dos Passos’s U.S.A. as documentary on the grounds that the appearance of figures like Andrew Carnegie is not sustained through the entirety of the novel. Finally, and admittedly a bit more abstract a reason, the Guy Johnson figure in the book (patterned after a real-life historian who attempted to ascertain the truth of the John Henry myth) argues that the veracity of the myth is incidental, as the legend itself has become an historical reality playing a key role in African American folk life. 199 role of authorial invention), Colavincenzo characterizes the “myth of historical discourse” as the naturalized Rankean belief that written history is an unquestionable truth about the way things really happened. As a result, he argues, postmodern historical fiction converts “naturalized historical discourse . . . into a mere signifier which reveals through ironic distance and contrast its own inability to be what it claims to be—an objective and reliable presentation of reality”

(53).2 In this way, both novelists self-consciously pattern their books around the search for

veracity and “true history” and the inevitable failure thereof. In both novels, this search motif

(incidentally figured in each novel by a journalist-acting-as-historian character) places the process of collecting, sorting, interpreting, and writing history at the forefront (rather than

allowing that process to remain a naturalized given) as a way of opening up historical discourse

to indeterminacy.

In essence, Whitehead and Winegardner combine their explorations of American myth with

the presentation of documented historical material, and in doing so, place the constructedness

and historical contingency of those myths on display, ultimately questioning their veracity and

“blissful clarity” to recall Barthes’s phrase. In short, through their juxtaposition of the mythic

and the documentary, these novels essentially reverse the naturalization process; they remove the

archetypal disguise and transform nature back into history, and a contingent, ultimately

indeterminate history at that. As a result of this denaturalization of myth, Whitehead and

Winegardner lay bare some of the ideological underpinnings of our essential American myths— including the very myth of historical discourse—and ultimately ask us to reconsider our blind acceptance of those mythic structures and question the ways we have shaped our present to account for these seemingly “natural” mythic pasts.

2 Colavincenzo’s study is focused solely on texts that can be categorized as postmodern historical fiction. I am less concerned with the categorical marker “postmodern” here; however, the function of the texts I examine—that is to say, denaturalizing myth—happens to overlap with the function Colavincenzo reads in his “postmodern” texts. 200

A John Henry of His Own: Colson Whitehead and the Indeterminacy of History

I.

“Then comes Bob’s return. . . . The second novel, recapitulating some of the first’s themes, somehow lacking, emboldened by success he tries to tackle too much” (Whitehead 71). So goes the description that Colson Whitehead’s narrator in John Henry Days provides of Bob, the

Everyman artist. Bob’s return is sandwiched between the other two phases of “Bob’s” career,

Bob’s Debut and Bob’s miraculous comeback. John Henry Days is Colson Whitehead’s return, his second novel. On the heels of a very successful debut novel, The Intuitionist, Whitehead did indeed storm back onto the scene with a bold, ambitious second novel that happens to overlap thematically, ever so slightly, with his debut. However, Whitehead won’t need a miraculous comeback, as it appears that he is here to stay. With his second novel, Whitehead again garnered a collection of rave reviews, some drawing comparisons to Ragtime and Underworld.3 In John

Henry Days, Whitehead returns to some familiar territory. A few of the themes which carry over from The Intuitionist into this book are the distanced (either by abstract existential philosophizing or temporal historical distance) examination of contemporary race relations and a search for truth(s). Whereas The Intuitionist characterized that search in a sort of existential, hard-boiled, noir manner (Hammett meets Sartre?), Whitehead chooses a symbol of that search in John Henry Days that is much more well-known to him: the journalist.4

The protagonist of John Henry Days is a freelance pop journalist floating along from press

junket to press junket who joins a ragtag bunch of fellow “junketeers” (as Whitehead calls them)

3 In the interest of fairness, it should be noted that the comparison to DeLillo’s Underworld was not necessarily made with the best of intentions. James Wood, reviewing for , speaks of John Henry Days’s failures as stemming from the novel’s influence and parentage, which Wood traces to Underworld and DeLillo in general. I mention the comparison to DeLillo as a favorable one because the very same reasons why Wood is disgruntled about both Underworld and John Henry Days—“tends also to the sociological,” “antique massiveness,” “[it] bloats novelistic form,” and “[it’s] as if a giant were shuffling historical billboards and thrusting them at us” among others—are the reasons why so many, myself included, celebrate these two novels. 4 Whitehead himself was a TV and culture critic for the Village Voice before his success as a novelist. 201 for a festival in Talcott, West Virginia celebrating the release of a postage stamp bearing the image of Talcott’s supposed native son, the legendary John Henry. The varied folk legend most often states (depending on whose version one consults) that John Henry was a hulking black man born to slavery somewhere in Alabama, who after Emancipation found his way to Talcott, the home of the Big Bend Tunnel.5 John Henry was allegedly the star steel driver on the crew

working to clear the tunnel for use by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. When a salesman

came to the tunnel wishing to demonstrate a new steam-powered drill that would eliminate the

need for the men’s manual labor, John Henry challenged the steam drill to a contest. As the

story goes, after a day’s worth of hammering and drilling, John Henry had beaten the machine

handily. In the battle of man versus machine, man had won; however, the victory was short-

lived, as the legend ends tragically with John Henry’s death right there at the tunnel’s mouth.

The details of the John Henry myth are sketchy at best, as is perhaps to be expected when

dealing with oral history/myth. All of the following are questions researched and argued by

scholars of the myth: Did he drill 14 feet or 21 feet? Did he die of exhaustion or exposure? Did

this all happen in West Virginia or in Missouri? Did John Henry hail from Alabama or Texas?

Was there really a living, breathing John Henry or is he an allegorical figure existing only in oral

ballads and work songs? One thing is for certain: in July of 1996 a John Henry Days festival

was held in Talcott to commemorate the recent stamp release.6 Thus the action of the novel

5 The official cartographic name of the landmark is Great Bend Tunnel; however, there is almost no mention of that name in the ballads and other versions of the folk legend. It is always referred to as the Big Bend Tunnel. 6 Even though the John Henry Days festival did indeed occur in Talcott and neighboring Hinton on July 12-14, 1996, the celebratory events at Whitehead’s fictional festival are drawn only loosely from the documented festival. According to a July 10th article in The Charleston Gazette, the celebration began on a Friday evening with a dinner and dance (perhaps not unlike the dinner at which J. nearly chokes to death). On Saturday, the Postal Service did have an official stamp unveiling ceremony followed by a staged reenactment of the fateful contest with the steam drill. However, the Gazette article does not suggest that the reenactment (staged by a theater group rather than a pair of local strongmen) included actual steel driving or that it occurred outdoors near the tunnel. And very certainly, the documented festival did not end in murder. In essence, Whitehead appropriates a real-life festival for his setting and 202 revolves around the junketeers’ descent upon rural West Virginia and the truths they seek to uncover there.

The plot of the novel revolves around hapless freelancer J. Sutter who attends the John Henry

Days festival to cover the stamp unveiling. While at the festival, J. nearly chokes to death at a dinner event, becomes enthralled with a woman in attendance, and also becomes enthralled with the veracity of the John Henry myth. While searching for the “truth” about John Henry, J. also finds himself taking stock of his life and what it has become; therefore, his historical research becomes the catalyst for a personal quest as well. Finally, the novel ends with a mysterious homicide perpetrated by a crazed stamp collector in attendance; however, readers are never told who falls victim to the crime. This roughly outlined plot, however, does not necessarily drive the novel; it merely serves as a loosely overlying organizing element that allows for a great deal of digression and deviation.

The form of the novel is diverse. The majority of sections utilize third person narration; however, the focus-character shifts from J. Sutter, our ostensible protagonist and shameless junketeer; to Pamela Street, the tormented daughter of a deceased John Henry memorabilia collector; to Alphonse Miggs, homicidal philatelist; to John Henry himself as he prepares for the fateful contest at Big Bend Tunnel; and to other minor characters along the way. There are also sections that are not traditionally narrated. For instance, there are several sections of conversations between nameless U.S. postal workers which appear as movie script dialogues

(there is one such dialogue that includes J. and fellow junketeer “One Eye” as well). Postal service press releases and an excerpt from a stamp-collecting magazine also appear as sections in the novel. Also, aside from the recurring characters, who are each the focus of more than one

stages events similar to those that occurred there; however, the festival attended by the junketeers in the novel is largely fictionalized. 203 section in the novel (J. and the junketeers, Pamela, Alphonse, John Henry, the postal workers, and the owners of the motor lodge in Talcott), there are historical personages who make one-time cameos as point-of-view characters. Among them are Guy Johnson, a folklorist studying the

John Henry myth; Paul Robeson, preparing for a role in a short-lived John Henry Broadway play; and Moses Rascoe, a Chicago blues man preparing to record a John Henry song.7

In effect, the novel is structured loosely around a fairly traditional plot of the wayward

journalist attempting to “find himself” while searching for the truth of the John Henry myth and

ending tragically, albeit indeterminately, with a pile of dead bodies. However, this plot is really

only skeletal at best, as the diversions into the past (both within the present time sections via

flashbacks to the characters’ earlier lives, as well as in the sections focusing entirely on figures

from the past) leave the book’s structure seeming anything but conventional. Overall, the events

of the book are a bit like a wheel with John Henry as the hub and the various spokes leading out

to the rim that is all those whose lives have intersected in some way (writing, music, theater,

stamps) with the legend of John Henry. The organization of this material in the book is also

quite circular, winding its way in and out of the past and present and ultimately, via the

indeterminate ending, twisting off into the future in ways we cannot yet foresee. This circular

form works to link the present to the past, allowing Whitehead to comment on contemporary

culture with the distanced, “objective” eyes of an historian looking back. And even more than

just critiquing contemporary culture, Whitehead is also able to use this form and this novel to

explore just how far the influence of our histories and myths can reach and how central these

histories and myths—irrespective of their documentary “truth” and, in fact, designed to obscure

7 Though his full name is not given in the novel, the assumption is that the blues man referred to as simply Moses is Moses Rascoe, a blues great who did perform a song called “John Henry.” 204 and naturalize that “truth”—are to the life of our contemporary culture and to the ways we pattern our current and future experience.

II.

The first step in Whitehead’s novelistic critique is an indictment of the historical process, or the

“myth of historical discourse,” to recall Colavincenzo’s phrase. Whitehead accomplishes this by making history indeterminate. This indeterminacy functions antithetically to any naturalization, as indeterminacy essentially forces readers to think and question as opposed to succumbing to blind acceptance. The most obvious way this indeterminacy manifests itself is in the novel’s ending. Whitehead teases readers with the answers to three important questions which ultimately remain unanswered when the book closes: 1) who are the victims of Alphonse Miggs’s homicidal episode? 2) does J. leave with Pamela or remain in Talcott for the remainder of the festival, and if so is he among the murder victims? 3) what is J.’s full name? The “murder mystery” is introduced in the novel as early as the fifth section which opens with the words,

“After the killing is over, the gunman has slid to the ground” (24). As late as page 370, through a conversation between postal workers, we learn that those killed and wounded in the shooting are journalists (and it is suggested that they, the bystanders, were killed by bumbling police officers attempting to shoot Miggs); however, the journalists in question are never named.

Because we never find out whether J. stayed, we are left to wonder if J. is numbered among the dead and wounded. Clearly, no nonfictional written history could end in this kind of indeterminacy, especially in light of the fact that there are numerous witnesses who presumably know the answers to the questions readers are left pondering. However, unlike an historian, who would be bound by the rules and assumptions of historical discourse to provide the facts or at 205 least wager an educated guess as to the outcomes of these events, Whitehead elects to leave the ending of the novel entirely ambiguous. I do not mean to suggest that Whitehead otherwise closely mimics nonfictional historical discourse in his novel. There is no sustained effort to mimic the discourse; however, the inclusion of ostensible examples of historical discourse, such as the “recorded” dialogues between postal workers or letters and published documents, does ground the novel more firmly within the world of historical discourse than a more traditionally plotted novel would. Such inclusions also serve as relevant points of comparison for the indeterminate moments in the novel. Although the indeterminate ending device is used in a rather heavy-handed manner, Whitehead’s undermining of the historical process is made quite clear in his resistance to definite answers and a neatly concluded ending.

Aside from the obvious indeterminacy of the ending and the critique of the historical process implied therein, Whitehead is also able more subtly to undermine the assumptions of historical discourse by highlighting the inconsistencies present in the histories told and written about the

John Henry legend. In fact, the entire book is introduced by this very concept. The novel’s

“Prologue” is comprised of fourteen brief snippets of oral testimony regarding the truth or falsehood of the myth of John Henry. This collection of competing testimonies appears unnarrated, unmediated, and entirely without context. No attempt is made by Whitehead or a narrator to shape or interpret the information contained within these passages. These fourteen voices are simply left to speak for themselves, and they certainly do not come to any kind of consensus. Most of the voices claim some sort of first- or second-hand privileged knowledge of

John Henry; however, the information provided by these voices varies wildly. Some say John

Henry was black, some say white; some say it was the C&O Railroad, some say AGS Railway; some say it was the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia, some say Cursey Mountain Tunnel in 206

Missouri; some say there was no steam drill and that Henry was injured in an ordinary tunneling accident; Henry’s birthplace is listed variously as Mississippi, Tennessee, or Alabama; and so forth. Whitehead’s case for the slipperiness of historical “fact” is furthered by the knowledge that these passages are actual snippets of historical discourse rather than polemically contrived by the author. According to the book’s copyright page, all but two of these testimonial fragments are taken, almost verbatim, from interviews conducted by three separate folklorists studying the veracity of the John Henry myth, John Harrington Cox, Louis Chappell, and Guy B.

Johnson.

In studying the same raw material and interviewing some of the same subjects, Johnson,

Chappell, and Cox came to very different conclusions. Cox believed that “John Henry” was really John Hardy, a murderer who was hanged in Virginia and of whom there is documentary proof of existence, and that the two names became interchangeable as ballads and tales about the man spread from region to region. Chappell deduced that the John Henry myth is entirely true; there really was a man named John Henry who died after defeating a steam drill in a contest.

And Johnson concluded, albeit tentatively, that the John Henry myth was indeed just a myth but that its status as myth renders it no less important to African American culture. It is no wonder, then, that Whitehead chooses to appropriate this figure of the indecisive historian who wrote the open-ended, inconclusive text on the John Henry myth for his own book. Guy B. Johnson appears as a character in John Henry Days for one section near the middle of the novel. Many of the details in the Guy Johnson section of the novel are taken directly from information provided in Johnson’s book, John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend. These include: Johnson’s collaboration with Howard Odum on a book of folk songs, his open disagreement with Cox

(whose study appeared ten years prior to Johnson’s), his use of a boy named Herbert as a tour 207 guide in Talcott, his disappointment at an elderly gentleman (Herbert’s grandfather) who apparently knew John Henry but claimed otherwise after Johnson spent hours tracking him down, and others. Even some of Johnson’s statements in his book are patched directly into

Whitehead’s text without quotations. One minor example is in Whitehead’s use of the distinctive phrase “the place where John Henry met his Waterloo” (161). The expression is lifted from a letter written by a Miss Willa Wood to Johnson and excerpted in Johnson’s text on page

14. A more significant example of Whitehead’s appropriation of Johnson’s text rests in the passage around which Whitehead seems to base his entire characterization of Guy B. Johnson the character: “For Guy the question of whether the John Henry legend rests on a factual basis is, after all, not of much significance. No matter which way it is answered the fact is that the legend itself is a reality, a living functioning thing in the folk life of the Negro” (161). This passage is taken almost verbatim from the conclusion of Johnson’s “Man or Myth” chapter found on page

54 of his text.

Here Whitehead’s undocumented appropriation of a document—Johnson’s text—once again fosters a sense of indeterminacy. At first, readers are left to wonder how much of Whitehead’s text, especially the sections dealing with real life figures (Johnson, Paul Robeson, Moses Rascoe, etc.), is documentary and how much of those sections is purely fictional. And if readers do enough research to recognize some of these appropriations, then they are left to wonder just how much more of Whitehead’s text may be appropriated from sources they have yet to encounter.8

The point is that Whitehead’s blending of voices—whether they be the documented voices of the scholars’ interviewees, the textualized voices of the scholars’ own written work, the fictionalized voices of historical figures (like John Henry himself), or the fictionalized voices of Whitehead’s

8 I want to make it clear that I am, in no way, attempting to level plagiarism charges at Whitehead here. Rather, I recognize that he is deliberately blending voices (both fictional and historical) for narrative effect, and I am simply attempting to analyze that effect. 208 invented characters—contributes to the indeterminacy of his presentation of history and his undermining of a unitary historical discourse. Whitehead is not attempting to corral all the disparate voices into one definitive, interpretive argument, as Louis Chappell clearly does in his book, John Henry: A Folk-lore Study. Rather, Whitehead wants to allow a multiplicity of voices to speak within an open system that leaves space for varying interpretations and, thus, for any number of present and future reconsiderations. In this way, Whitehead’s text is more like that of

Johnson, the historian who refuses to classify his own position as complete and definitive and who leaves endless room for multiple interpretations and competing versions of the narrative truth.

In fact, it is possible to read Whitehead’s novel as mimicking the overall form and approach of Guy Johnson’s historical study. Johnson’s text is framed by the author-narrator’s (as it is a nonfiction text, we can be certain that the speaking voice in the text is that of the author) search for the truth of the John Henry myth. This search appears in the form of a multiplicity of interviewed voices that are patched together in Johnson’s text. The book also includes quite a few primary documents in the form of the ballads and work songs which Johnson spends three chapters analyzing before returning to the question of the myth’s validity in the concluding chapter. Whitehead’s novel utilizes a similar approach, though he does not exactly follow

Johnson’s organization and method. Whitehead’s text is also largely comprised of a multiplicity of voices (or if one wants to be particular, a multiplicity of perspectives as explored via the singular third person narratorial voice) offering a varied set of perspectives. If we count the few sections of John Henry Days that appear as press releases and articles, we can therefore also see

Whitehead providing some access to “primary documents.” And finally, Whitehead’s novel, like

Johnson’s study, concludes without a totalizing resolution. 209

Johnson’s final chapter begins with a statement unthinkable to the professional historian: “All questions of authenticity of the John Henry tradition fade into insignificance before the incontrovertible fact that for his countless admirers John Henry is a reality” (142). This abstract, figurative reality is enough for Johnson. Several pages later, in his final paragraph, Johnson even goes so far as to admit, “maybe there was no John Henry,” before moving on to state that the myth’s veracity truly does not matter (151). Earlier in the book, while reflecting on his own work and the purpose of the book, Johnson best summarizes his method: “I am not irrevocably wedded to [my] position, and I hope that this volume will be instrumental in provoking someone to bring to light what I have failed so far to find, namely, some evidence of a documentary sort which will settle the question conclusively” (54). It should be noted here that Johnson does indeed believe that a definitive truth is out there somewhere; however, he is not arrogant enough to believe that the exploration ends with him, not arrogant enough to believe that he holds the definitive word on the matter. This, in fact, may be the only conclusive truth that one can really ever find—that each person alone can never really know “the whole truth.”

This, too, becomes the purpose of Whitehead’s appropriation of Johnson’s method and even parts of his text (not to mention the inclusion of a Johnson-character as well). Whitehead wishes to make History into histories; he intends to render any hegemonic, official version of history indeterminate and therefore utterly unstable. For Whitehead, the historical process cannot yield a definitive truth or an authoritative set of “facts.” Indeed, as Johnson suggests, the only incontrovertible fact is that the “facts” as we know them do not necessarily matter. For

Whitehead, then, Johnson becomes a figure of openness; whereas, a folklorist like Louis

Chappell, who claims to have the answer after examining the body of evidence, comes to 210 represent the hegemon.9 In fact, Whitehead’s novel includes a critique of approaches to history

resembling Chappell’s. In regard to the variety of witnesses to Miggs’s murderous shooting

spree at the John Henry Days festival, Whitehead’s narrator observes, “The witnesses share what

they have seen and fit their perspectives into one narrative through a system of sobbing barter.

In these first few minutes a thousand different stories collide; this making of truth is violence

too, out of which facts are formed” (24). Here Whitehead characterizes the arrogant, closed-off

nature of hegemonic official History and of the so-called “facts” that are a product of that

History as utterly violent. In considering Whitehead’s precise language in this passage, one

cannot help but be reminded of the kind of violent collision of cultures that has so often resulted

in white American domination and the subjugation of less politically powerful groups. This type

of violent collision that results in the entrenchment of a particular culture at the expense of

another would seem to be akin to the kind of violence that, as Whitehead’s narrator argues,

results in the creation of a particular version of “truth” and “fact,” also to the exclusion of other

possible truths.

III.

Once it has become clear that Whitehead is using this novel and its resemblance to Guy

Johnson’s work and approach for the purpose of opening up History and making it more

indeterminate than those with the power to control “official history” would have us believe, it

then becomes possible to identify why history is and should be considered so indeterminate: the

human. The second phase of Whitehead’s novelistic critique of historical discourse marks his

insertion of the human back into the historical. Whitehead recognizes the element of

9 It becomes significant at this point to note that Chappell is the white historian and Johnson is the black historian. Both study the same basic material and come to wholly oppositional conclusions. 211 interpretation inherent to any creation of historical discourse, and he uses this novel not only to highlight the role of human invention in historical discourse but also to celebrate the multiplicity engendered by such a concept. In short, for Whitehead, that historical discourse necessitates human intervention and interpretation does not render that discourse useless or impotent; rather, this reinsertion of the human into the historical makes the historical all the more culturally powerful.

When reading, learning, or thinking about history, it has become too easy to confuse the historical rendering with the unmediated “real” thing/event. The arrogant assumptions of early historical writers and the too straightforward approach of much American historical education has led us to perceive a one-to-one correspondence between historical rendering and object/event rendered. Only relatively recently have historiographers begun to recognize their own hand in the shaping of history. In John Henry Days, Whitehead, following the lead of these postmodern historiographers, reveals the fully mediated nature of all historical accounting, whether it be personal or professional. Early in the novel, Whitehead sets the tone for this manner of thinking.

A mere six pages after the Prologue has concluded and the novel proper has begun, J. lands in the Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia and convinces himself that, here in the South, he has landed in another place altogether, another America that does not belong to him. However, via a parenthetical aside by the narrator (and presumably within J.’s own consciousness at this point), J. reconsiders this observation in light of his own personal biases: “(None of this is true, of course, but perception is all; to and from each his own dark continent)” (14-15). Here already, the true—and it might as well have been printed with a capital T—is deconstructed in favor of personal perception, individual mediation. Pamela Street has a similar experience much later in the novel. After extended consideration of the John Henry statue affixed atop the Big Bend 212

Tunnel entrance, “[Pamela] catches herself. This is an artist’s rendering. She is confusing the statue before her with the man, and the man with her conception of the man” (263). Here

Whitehead has complicated any notion of a one-to-one correspondence between history and “the real” by revealing the hand of the creator and introducing the viewer’s perception as a key element in historicizing or even any kind of mediation of reality at all—whether that mediation is as obvious as a sculptor figuring an (arguably) historical personage or simply a Northerner mediating his own experience of exiting a plane in the South through his Northern biases.

The mediation and invention inherent in the historical process, however, are not necessarily always as innocent as involuntary biases or a sculptor’s artistic license. There are several key instances in the novel where Whitehead demonstrates a deliberate alteration in the representation of history. One of these instances occurs within a flashback to J.’s days as a schoolboy:

When the teacher mentioned slavery, swiftly, usually only in terms of Mr. Lincoln’s

proclamation, as if the particular institution only came to be in its ending, invariably two

or three white kids turned around to look at J., putty faces full of something, curiosity or

compassion he didn’t know, they always looked away when he met their eyes and he

grew warm. (Or did he stare straight ahead fixated on the stapler on the teacher’s desk

and merely see them fuzzy in his peripheral vision. Which version flatters the boy he

wants himself to be). (139)

In considering the mediation performed by his own memory, J. wonders about his unconscious mind’s ability to shape the past in ways favorable to his own present conception of his boyhood self. In this case, the mediation appears to be more purposeful—provided that we give credence to Freudian notions of the active nature of the unconscious mind—than, say, the mere presence of ingrained involuntary biases. If this is not enough to reveal historical mediation for personal 213 gain, Whitehead does provide another, more blatantly political and economic example. In one of the sections in which we are privy to Pamela’s decision-making in regard to whether or not she should donate her father’s John Henry memorabilia collection to Talcott’s new John Henry museum, the narrator allows us to peek momentarily into Talcott’s mayor’s thinking on the subject:

The mayor wonders if they need this man’s collection of artifacts as much as they

thought they did. Maybe they can hire someone to make things out of plaster and call

them replicas of the genuine article. The tourists will have already paid their entrance fee

and tourists never feel completely ripped off at tourist places, no matter how much they

have been misled. (112)

With such an example, readers are made aware of the political maneuvering and corruption of history that is likely more prevalent and of more consequence than a mere tourist bait-and-switch game in tiny Talcott. This small scene in the novel is nonetheless significant, considering one of the book’s overarching purposes is to reveal the constructedness of history. The scene carries with it a connotative connection to all the times when history is distorted by the powerful. It calls to mind that old adage that it is always the victors who write history.

However, the subjugated are not the only ones who can be duped. In another key scene in the novel, Lucien, the head P.R. man who is in charge of “The List” and pulls the strings of the puppets/junketeers, ponders the contrived nature of this whole festival and the town in which it is held:

Is this really homey or is it constructed in some way. Is their sincerity actually the

hapless grasping after something they believed their fathers possessed. There’s a safe

deposit box containing their heritage, but they don’t possess the right documentation. 214

Lucien suspects he is falling for a deception that beguiles the con artist and the mark in

equal measure. (295)

Again Whitehead places constructedness—of history and of the perceived present—on display; however, in this instance, even the constructor is not in full control of the construction. Even a character who is figured as a kind of puppet-master in charge of the Pynchon-esque secret P.R. system, “The List,” cannot be in full control. I read this scene as a microcosm of the entire historical enterprise. Once we become aware of the role of invention in historical discourse, as postmodern historiography has allowed us to be, we begin to ask the same kinds of chicken-and- egg questions that Lucien is asking in this key scene. Which came first: the history about which we write or the writing after which we shape our perception of the “actual history”? And like

Lucien’s conclusion about the conned con artist, we can never be sure of the answer to that question, not even as deconstructive postmodern historiographers. The fact of the matter is that our perceptions and personal constructions of reality can never be separated from that reality.

Not even one who is fully aware of her mediations of reality can truly claim control of these ubiquitous, involuntary mediations. The result of Whitehead’s critique of historical discourse, then, is to reveal both the role of mediation in our perceptions of reality and the manipulation of that mediation by those in power. However, if even those in power are conned by their own confidence game, how can we ever be sure of what has happened and what is presently happening? How can we avoid a crippling sense of chaos? As Whitehead’s is not a novel like those of Pynchon and DeLillo, he does provide an alternative to the crippling systemic chaos that results from his deconstruction of the historical process. His answer lies in the personal.

There is no “real John Henry.” There is not even a “folk John Henry.” There are many John

Henrys, an endless number of John Henrys. For Whitehead, history becomes utterly personal. 215

He wrests it from the hands of those in power, those claiming control over “official” history, and gives it to the people. We each have our own John Henry, and unlike the conclusion of historians like Louis Chappell, no one can claim to hold the definitive truth about John Henry.

Whitehead effectively demonstrates this point in a powerful, enigmatic section near the beginning of the novel. The small section would be easy to forget in the larger scheme of the novel; however, it resonates throughout much of what happens in the rest of the novel. In this section spanning pages 101-103, a nameless man climbs a grassy hill, sits upon a stump, and begins to compose a John Henry song. After finishing the song, the man wisely ruminates,

“Song done? Not yet. He knows that. Like a dollar bill it changes hands. Others will hear it and add a verse, goose the rhythm, slow it down to fit their ” (102). The man then goes on to reflect on his own historical authority to even be composing this song: “He wasn’t there at Big

Bend. This is his own John Henry . . . . And if the man who taught him the song has his own

John Henry, let him. The next man will have his. Someone else will change his verses and today’s John Henry will be gone, or secret in altered lines like memory” (102-03). In several ways these passages come to include all of us. First, this everyman songster is a figure for all of us, is representative of our individual power to shape our own past and construct our own individual versions of a collective history. Furthermore, the nameless man allows us each to add a verse, to alter the historical account.

This scene, then, establishes history as a continual personal construction specific to each individual (and sometimes each community of individuals) and, therefore, not something that a single person or group can ever completely control. Once again, Whitehead is opening up history to a wide range of voices, placing them in a position of importance alongside the “big names” in history and historical discourse. It is also significant that this notion of multiplicity, 216 culled from a small, seemingly insignificant scene early in the novel, returns in the final section in Pamela Street’s reflection about something her John-Henry-guru father told her:

You could split the songs into so-called official versions, her father used to say, the ones

made by established singers and put on vinyl, cassette, and CD, and then there were the

songs of the people, entirely different, the mis-sung versions, belted out by people who

misremembered the lyrics and supplied their own haphazard verses. Like when you sing

in the shower, she told him, and if you can’t remember the right words you make up your

own to fill in the gaps. . . . Then you’ve assembled your own John Henry. . . . That’s all

there is to the song for you. (373)

Here we see the official vinyl-clad version as contrasted with the haphazard shower-sung version. This is an obvious symbol for the same contrast existing between official (and often hegemonic) versions of history and individual accounts of that same history. Whitehead is most concerned with the gaps and opening up those gaps to be filled by the people. While the personal histories may not hold the same external authority as official versions, the haphazard, misremembered, and mis-sung personal histories are no less important, significant, and ultimately true for those who own those versions of history. Furthermore, these often

“inaccurate” (by professional historical standards) personal truths are just as alive, cherished, and culturally enriching as any official history could ever be. Whitehead arrives at much the same conclusion in his novel in which he celebrates the personal and communal—and largely oral— histories while undermining the arrogance, exclusiveness, and power-wielding associated with much official history as well as older conceptions of the entire historical enterprise. This, of course, does not signal an abandonment of the documentary, as Whitehead’s form and inclusion of documentary detail attests; it simply means that individuals are free to interpret, alter, and 217 create documents as they see fit (as opposed to blind acceptance of “official versions”). This act necessarily works to undermine any sense of naturalization. No myth can be taken for a fact if multiple, contrasting versions abound. Furthermore, if we recognize ourselves as individual authors of our version, we become blatantly aware of the myth’s constructedness and can no longer believe it to be a given. Thus, for Whitehead, personalization becomes the antithesis of naturalization, thereby stripping the myth of its ideological power and handing that power to the multiplicity of individual “authors.”

IV.

It would be unfair, however, to categorize John Henry Days as total celebration. The critique leveled by Whitehead in the novel does not end with the institution of history. Even while celebrating the personal, Whitehead nonetheless has some criticism for contemporary culture as well. It is clear that the two key figures in the novel are our protagonist J. and John Henry himself. These two men are symbiotically connected across generations. In many ways, it seems that Whitehead sets up J. (could the initial stand for John?) as a contemporary incarnation of John Henry. John Henry is officially “free” from slavery at the time of the contest at Big

Bend Tunnel; however, he is working a slavish, menial job because it is all that he can get.

Henry, thus, becomes a kind of slave to his work. J., too, is ostensibly free, but he is also figured as a slave to his work, especially in light of his almost somnambulant chase after the Bobby

Figgis junketeering record for most consecutive junkets. In the Big Bend Tunnel, John Henry is surrounded by other men like him who are trapped, by necessity, in this dangerous and thankless job. And in the name of a “plodding obeisance to pop,” J. is surrounded by a host of junketeers working the same thankless job as he (47). Their job is not entirely free of danger either, as the 218 legendary Bobby Figgis lost himself and ultimately disappeared, essentially “devoured by pop,” as the Figgis legend would have it (111). Finally, John Henry died at the hands of progress in a grand symbolic gesture of defeating only to be defeated. Progress earns the last laugh, as John

Henry loses his life and the steam drill and railroad continue on. We are unsure of whether or not J. loses his life (either figuratively, like Bobby Figgis, or literally, at the hands of a disgruntled, gun-wielding philatelist). And just like the young J.—who in a flashback to his school days asks of the John Henry legend, “Did he win or lose?”—we are left to ponder that same question about J. himself at the novel’s end (142). As a way of highlighting the ambiguity of the John Henry story’s ending, Whitehead ends his contemporary John Henry story in a way that does not allow us to answer one way or the other; the indeterminate ending leaves us no choice but to ask the question about J. that so many have, more philosophically, been asking about John Henry for years.

This connection between the John Henry myth and the contemporary man who is living out a version of that myth forces us to consider in just what struggle J. might be engaged. The overall struggle of the John Henry story is the obvious man vs. machine struggle, and it remains the same for J. J. is a man vs. the popular culture machine; he is engaged with a deadly struggle with contemporary media. Of his own personal battle with his contemporary media-driven reality as represented by his junketeering streak, J. ponders:

You could look at it and think the fight continued, that you could resist and fight the

forces and you could win and it would not cost you your life because he had given his life

for you. . . . Or did he have to give up himself for this to happen. The price of progress.

The way John Henry had to give himself up to bring something new into the world. (378) 219

Must J. give up his life to junketeering in an attempt to conquer it and bring something new into the world much like John Henry? Or can J. resist, walk away, and reclaim his life? We know neither what J. decides nor what Whitehead prescribes due to the overtly ambiguous ending.

However, it seems clear that Whitehead’s equation of a contemporary man’s struggle with media culture with a steel driver’s struggle with the machine meant to replace him—a seemingly unfair comparison, at first glance—signals Whitehead’s deadly seriousness about the runaway train that is contemporary media. Whitehead appears to be arguing that we have become slaves to our media-dominated world and that we may lose ourselves to these “thinking machines” (i.e., TVs, computers, etc.) that threaten to replace our own independent thinking. For Whitehead, humanity’s struggle with media is a dangerous game that asks the very same question J. asks himself as he epiphanically stands in Big Bend Tunnel: “How long does it take to forget a hole in your self? He wins the contest but then what?” (322).

Though it is most pronounced with J., our protagonist, this struggle of twentieth-century humans with machines and the progress they represent is also figured in small ways in the lives of the novel’s minor characters. They too find an analog in John Henry, and they can take strength in John Henry’s victory much the same way that J. does. Perhaps the best twentieth- century analog to John Henry’s man versus machine battle appears in a section about a very minor character, Jake Rose. Jake is a saloon pianist who has been asked to compose a John

Henry ballad. Toward the end of a brief chapter in which is narrated the difficulty of Jake’s life and career, Jake quotes a bandmate, Big Danny, as saying “the minute he figures out the system, it changes, a guy can hardly keep up” (203). If this were not comment enough on the inability to deal with progress, Jake ruminates further, “Some places got music machines, player pianos that play songs that are already set, and there’s no use for a plugger when they got a machine to do it. 220

No need for a musician that breathes and bleeds when you got a machine to do it” (203). Like

John Henry, whose livelihood was threatened by a machine, so too is Jake Rose’s twentieth- century existence challenged by the player piano. In this seemingly insignificant little chapter,

Whitehead continues to explore the theme of humanity’s existential battle with progress that is the heart of the John Henry myth.

Another minor character, Guy Johnson (albeit only minor in terms of the length of his appearance), also experiences a John Henry-esque challenge in his daily life as a university history professor, and he takes strength in the John Henry story via a message on a small piece of paper he keeps in his pocket:

Each morning when he leaves the house, to prepare himself with his daily battle with

university intrigue, he reads what he has written there. Since he arrived in Hinton, he

consults it whenever he is about to begin another foray into the field. He reads, we make

our own machines and devise our own contests in which to engage them. (163)

Here we see Johnson equating his daily challenges with university life and historical research to

John Henry’s physical contest with the steam drill. Johnson characterizes his daily struggles as a

“battle” figuratively implying a similar kind of strain, emotionally and spiritually, that John

Henry feels physically in the tunnel. Similar to the situation with J.’s battle with the pop culture machine, Johnson’s battle is not literally man versus machine as in the case of Jake Rose vs. the player piano, but like J., Johnson figuratively considers it as such as demonstrated by his jotted phrase about engaging our own machines in contests of our device. Again, Whitehead shows us the theme of the John Henry myth played out throughout various stages of the twentieth century, signaling the ongoing relevance of the historico-mythic figure of John Henry in the lives of not only his character, but his readers as well. 221

Finally, Whitehead provides an example of the John Henry struggle as a transcendent existential concept in the form of the metaphor “layin’ the line.” This concept comes to us through Pamela Street’s father, the John Henry enthusiast. In a flashback scene, Pamela, via the narrator, recalls:

Layin’ the line, out of her father’s mouth, became this all-purpose non sequitur that

testified to balance in the world, whether the matter be existential or quotidian. Stub a

toe? Layin’ the line. Passing grades in chemistry? Layin’ the line. Summer heartbreak,

a backed-up toilet, walking pneumonia, winning three bucks in Lotto. Layin’ the line,

girl. You were layin’ the line whatever you did, trudging through dust until you returned

to it. (113)

This small, homey memory on the part of Pamela Street not only serves as another example of

Whitehead’s drawing a connection between the myth of John Henry and contemporary humanity, but it also extends the concept to any kind of struggle. In this passage, Whitehead moves beyond an individual one-to-one analogy, such as J. vs. his plodding obeisance to pop,

Jake Rose vs. the player piano, or Guy Johnson vs. university politics—analogies that are nonetheless highly significant to the novel. Instead, he allows the John Henry myth to pervade all aspects of life from illnesses to toilets to chemistry classes. Here Whitehead figures the John

Henry myth as a constituent part of the very fabric of twentieth-century American life. And this move only lends more power to individuals and their own versions of, responses to, and control over the historical and mythic past that is so much a part of every American present.

For Whitehead, like Guy Johnson, the myth of John Henry is very real in terms of social effect. Regardless of its documentary truth or falsehood, the myth continues to live on in the minds and cultures of those to whom it belongs. Counted among those are J. Sutter and the other 222 characters in this novel. For these characters, John Henry’s cautionary tale of a human’s demise at the hands of machines, progress, and the forces of power in this country is all too real. Theirs is a contemporary cautionary tale bearing many of the same lessons; however, the machines are not steam powered drills but televisions, personal computers, player pianos, and the more abstract publicity machine and political machine among others. More than just a cautionary tale for contemporary people and a critique of our slavish relationship to media; however, Whitehead also offers an important critique of the mediation involved in experiencing, remembering, and documenting history. He forces open the closed spaces of history by making history indeterminate. This amounts to a critique of the assumptions undergirding much of historical discourse, and the result is that Whitehead gives history back to the people. For Whitehead, history becomes so intensely personal that no one individual or institution can truly claim to own, control, know, or represent an official version of something so multifaceted as history.

Overall, Whitehead is celebrating personal mediation while debunking the more singular mediation of those in power, the kind of mediation responsible for the sway of contemporary media and much of the historical enterprise. In the end, John Henry died; however, in

Whitehead’s own personal version of that myth—his own personal John Henry—he died so that we might have a chance of living freely.

Baseball is America: The Game of Imperialism in

Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues

I.

Mark Winegardner’s eclectic writing career has recently taken yet another bizarre turn. After an extensive search conducted by Random House and the late ’s executors, Winegardner 223 was selected from among roughly forty published authors to write the next chapter in the story of the family. He can now add the recently published Returns to his already unpredictable list of publications. Winegardner began his career with a non-fictional travel narrative entitled Elvis Presley Boulevard. He then went on to publish two more non- fiction books, both of which happen to be about baseball: Prophet of the Sandlots, the story of a scout, and The 26th Man, a co-written (auto)biography of a career minor

leaguer. Continuing with the baseball theme, Winegardner then published his first novel, The

Veracruz Blues, about the Mexican baseball league. With his second novel, he went for the big

one; his beefy, 600-page art-novel, Crooked River Burning, drew comparisons to Dos Passos’s

U.S.A. Trilogy and E.L. Doctorow’s City of God among other respected literary works. After a

well-reviewed collection of short stories entitled That’s True of Everybody, Winegardner has

now penned the sequel to the Mafia classic, The Godfather. When pressed, in interviews, about

his seemingly motley career, Winegardner is fond of answering that, although it may not be

immediately obvious, his work is indeed linked by a running theme: American mythology.

Whether it be the bohemian cross-country road-trip, the American Mafia, or the all-American

game of baseball, Winegardner’s subjects are all the stuff of American myth.

In the case of The Veracruz Blues, the subject is the 1946 baseball season. While some may fondly remember “Slaughter’s Mad Dash” in the ’46 World Series, there is nothing truly legendary about the 1946 baseball season in America. However, in , 1946 is “La

Temporada de Oro”—The Season of Gold. In 1946, the made a run at becoming the third “major league.” Led by Jorge Pasquel, the enigmatic and enormously wealthy commissioner of the league, the Mexican League’s Season of Gold represented the first fully integrated baseball season played on North American soil. Pasquel put together a 224 collection of the finest talent his money could buy, regardless of nationality or skin color. In

1946, Pasquel’s league sported some of the best players from Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and the

United States. Pasquel “raided” the American Negro Leagues and even the white Major

Leagues—especially in the wake of ballplayers returning from wars and displacing their wartime replacements—often doubling those players’ salaries in order to induce them to “jump” to the

Mexican League. In short, Pasquel tried to “employ men of all races . . . and show the world true mestizo baseball, never before seen anywhere” (Winegardner 158). Obviously, as “La

Temporada de Oro” has been obscured by history, Pasquel’s dream of a third major league did not come to fruition. In fact, his archetypally democratic league fell prey to problems common to democratic states. Pasquel’s utopia came up far short of ideal.

Winegardner’s story of The Season of Gold is told largely by Frank Bullinger, Jr., an aged sportswriter, failed novelist, and repeat-offending adulterer. The fictional Bullinger, however, is not necessarily the narrator of the novel; he primarily serves as the book’s fictional author. The book purports to be a collection of interviews conducted by Bullinger as he covers the Mexican

League’s 1946 season. As a result, each chapter is separately narrated by one of Bullinger’s

“interviewees”—Theolic “Fireball” Smith, a fiery aging Negro Leagues pitcher; Roberto Ortiz, a hulking-but-gentle Cuban champion; María Félix, Mexican actress, socialite, and seductress; and Danny Gardella, a Bronx-bred gym rat and former New York Giant. Five chapters are narrated by Bullinger himself, but even one of these is dominated by mini- interviews with Major Leaguers Sal “The Barber” Maglie, Vern Stephens, and Red Hayworth.

In a way, this chapter, Chapter 6, is a model of the book as a whole—composed, or perhaps compiled, by Bullinger but dominated by the voices of his “interviewees.” Because the book is multi-vocal, it reads more like a scrapbook of the 1946 Mexican League season than a novel. 225

The people in the book (and sometimes narrating the book) and the events which give rise to the book are largely factual, but despite the scrapbook-collection-of-real-life-events feel,

Winegardner assures his readers in his “Author’s Note” at the head of the book that this is purely a work of the imagination.10 Paraphrasing Tim O’Brien in that note, Winegardner admits to

being “more concerned with the story-truth than the happening-truth” (“Author’s Note”).

Through the novel’s “historical scrapbook” feel, Winegardner, like Whitehead, explores the

process of historical discourse, and in doing so, also unsettles and ultimately denaturalizes some

key twentieth-century American myths including the “Frontier myth,” the “American Dream

myth,” and the “Melting Pot myth.”

II.

The combination—and consequent confusion and complication—of fact and fiction in The

Veracruz Blues is simultaneously both its central mode and theme. The form of the book becomes one of its primary functions. Winegardner is ultimately exploring the slippery

boundary between fact and fiction and the role fiction plays in the creation of historical fact.

With the role of fiction as his controlling subject, Winegardner’s selection of sports in general,

and baseball in particular, is therefore an artful choice for the metafictional literary work he

hopes his novel to perform. Of the nature of fiction, and sports fiction more specifically, Tom

LeClair argues in “Two on One: The Universal Basketball Zone” that every novelist

simultaneously relates a truth while admitting to a lie, and “these simultaneities make any fiction,

not just sports fiction, like a game. And yet sports fiction, by its very nature, seems the

10 Maglie and Stephens were solid American ballplayers with names at least vaguely recognizable to even the casual fan of American baseball, though not popular enough to be the stuff of myth (like Babe Ruth who makes several short appearances in the novel). The inclusion of these relatively recognizable ballplayers highlights the reality of the characters and events in a novel otherwise dominated by unrecognizable minor baseball figures like Smith, Ortiz, and Gardella. 226 appropriate place to work and rework the circularities of the paradox” (103). Winegardner’s novel, while not recognized as a metafictional masterwork like Coover’s, certainly plays its share of metafictional games with its readers. As with Universal Baseball Association, readers of The

Veracruz Blues are not soon to forget that they are participating in the act of reading, in the act of viewing fiction. What is easy to forget is whose writing we are reading.

The overall structure of the novel plays a key role in this first fictional game. The book is set up as a book within a book. In reading Winegardner’s book, we are reading Frank Bullinger’s writings about The Season of Gold in the Mexican Baseball League, and within Bullinger’s story, we are reading a series of interviews, stories told by Bullinger’s subjects. Bullinger provides headnotes for these interviews, and he even breaks into the interviews periodically to offer editorial notes—or is it really Bullinger offering the editorial notes? Could it be

Winegardner himself? The answer is not immediately clear to readers. The first of these editorial interruptions occurs in the initial Fireball Smith interview: “And the pitching! After

Dihigo was Leon Day, who ought to be in the Hall of Fame [Ed.: Day was elected to

Cooperstown in 1995], and Ramón Bragaña, this tough-ass black Cuban with a diamond for a front tooth” (16). Readers have no way at this point to differentiate between Bullinger and

Winegardner as the “Ed.” in question.

Later on, in an interview with Sal Maglie (embedded in a chapter “by” Bullinger) a more peculiar editorial note intrudes: “given up for dead by my hometown Cleveland Indians, he was traded to Brooklyn and led them to the pennant” (78). If we know anything about the author’s background, we immediately recognize that Winegardner is from Northeast

Ohio, and what’s more, the author bio that the publisher provides in the front of the book 227 reminds readers that Winegardner, at the time of the novel’s publication, lived in Cleveland.11

Any readers who had settled on Bullinger as the editorial intruder are now asked to call that conclusion into question—at least for five pages until Maglie makes explicit reference to

Bullinger’s Cleveland Heights upbringing. Aside from these ambiguous editorial notes, we are also left to question who conducted and organized the “interviews” that make up much of the book. In light of their being Bullinger’s editorial notes, it is Bullinger who ostensibly performs these other editorial functions. As further evidence, there are multiple places within the

“interviews” where the interviewees directly address Bullinger by name. However, we know from Winegardner’s acknowledgments page (strategically placed before rather than after the text of the novel) that in researching the book, he interviewed many players including Danny

Gardella, one of the novel’s key “interviewees.” This kind of constant confusion between author and narrator—incidentally both are writers from the Cleveland area who interviewed a bunch of ballplayers—represents the first and most obvious metafictional game readers of The Veracruz

Blues are asked to play.

Another complication of the book-within-a-book form is the level of involvement in the narrative we ascribe to Bullinger (or is it Winegardner?). In his prologue Bullinger proudly announces, “Allow me to introduce myself. I have lived life as a liar and an observer” (2). He admits:

The names of my ex-wives have been changed to protect my ass; however, I can tell you

that “Diana James” is someone whose real name any literate person would know. Some

passages have been changed at the request of those involved, their lawyers, or their heirs.

11 Winegardner is currently a faculty member at , but at the time of the book’s publication he was working at John Carroll University in Cleveland. 228

You will find inconsistencies concerning how much money Jorge Pasquel paid different

people. Figures conflict. (8)

He then closes the prologue saying, “So, here. Here’s a good story, told as straight and true as I am able” (8). Again, later in the book, Bullinger admits that there are some impediments to the truth of his narrative, that the “truth” is sometimes relative. At the head of the third of four interviews with Theolic “Fireball” Smith, Bullinger speaks of Smith’s decision not to let a white man profit from his story, so Bullinger pays him off: “For the record, this and all subsequent utterances from Mr. Smith are examples of checkbook journalism. . . . The results of said practice were not, in this writer’s opinion, unduly biased” (140). Again, at the head of the single interview with María Félix, Bullinger provides a similar caveat: “For the record, I have discussed with Ms. Félix the possibility of ghostwriting her memoirs; this may account for her remarkable candor” (147). Not far past the midpoint of the book, Bullinger forces readers to call into question just how “straight and true” is the remainder of Bullinger’s narrative; this necessarily leads to readers retrospectively questioning the validity of Bullinger’s interviews from the first half of the book. That is, if readers hadn’t already had some questions about the validity of the information based on Bullinger’s enigmatic (yet even more honest for admitting its dishonesties?) prologue.

For the most part, “Bullinger” does get his facts straight; however, it is the places where he decidedly does not that are of interest.12 All the ballplayers mentioned are real (as is María

Félix, often considered to be the Mexican Marilyn Monroe), and many of the anecdotes they tell

12 Clearly, Winegardner must be credited with the intentional embellishments listed here and the important implications thereof. However, Winegardner has also admitted to having read every edition of a local Mexican newspaper for the entire duration of the 1946 baseball season. It is possible that along with some of Winegardner’s intentional embellishments there may also be some “inaccuracies” that have resulted from the vastly different perspectives of the Mexican journalists serving as some of Winegardner’s key sources. This fact only serves to emphasize further the contingency of historical discourse. 229 are easily verified. For instance, Fireball Smith’s report of the 1946 season opener is largely correct. The game did, according to the March 22 edition of the New York Times, end in a 12-5 win for the Blues including homers from Gardella and Luis Olmo (though Smith’s and the

Times’s attendance figures do not exactly match up) (“Mexican” 31). Also, as Bullinger mentions on page 246, Danny Gardella did indeed get a single at-bat with the Cardinals after reinstatement (though according to my baseball encyclopedia, it did not result in a strikeout). A photo in the Times on July 19 verifies Smith’s story (appearing on page 201 of the novel) about decking an umpire (“An Umpire” 14). According to a report in the July 10 edition of the Times,

Roberto Ortiz’s account of the Mexican League all-star game in chapter 10 of the novel is largely correct—Gardella did hit two homers in an 11-8 win for the “South” all-stars despite a late grand slam by a “North” player. The only exception is that Winegardner has Mexican President

Alemán throwing out the first pitch; the Times places United States Admiral William F. Halsey in the ceremonial role (“Gardella” 27).13

All of the exceptions mentioned above appear to be relatively minor mix-ups or memory

lapses on the part of the fictional interviewees; however, there are a few key examples of

Winegardner and/or his characters radically embellishing anecdotes to a much greater degree.

One of these examples revolves around the antagonistic character Vern Stephens. The salty

Stephens was one of the few genuine stars (along with and Max Lanier) to jump

from the Major Leagues to the Mexican League, though Stephens’s time in Mexico was limited.

In their history of Latin Americans in baseball, Michael and Mary Adams Oleksak report that

13 I believe I may have even found the New York Times article (if indeed there is only one) Bullinger references in his epilogue: “even the great, gray New York Times said that the removal of the reserve clause would mean the ruination of the game” (247). The article “From Abner Doubleday to Danny Gardella” appeared in the February 11, 1949 edition of the Times. The author, Arthur Daley, writes (among other inflammatory comments): “Gardella may yet take a place in baseball history with Abner Doubleday. It was Doubleday who is accorded the distinction of inventing our great American game. Dauntless Dan could very well become the fellow who destroyed it” (30). Echoing this sentiment, Daley ends with: “the muscular little fellow [Gardella], like Samson, may yet push over the columns on which a notable structure once rested” (30). 230

Stephens played in only one game, incidentally supplying the game-winning hit (51). On page

111 of the novel, Winegardner does indeed grant Stephens his game-winning hit; however, in the novel, Stephens sticks around for one more game. As Gardella tells it in the novel, Stephens, in his second game, went 0-for-4 presumably due to a serious hangover.14 Then Gardella adds the

final, brutal touch to the anecdote, “In the fifth inning he crapped his drawers, right on the field.

We gave him the business for that. But grant him this, he had moxie” (111). Here we see

Winegardner clearly “playing with” the documented facts in order to create a kind of villain for

the novel, in the person of Vern “Meat” Stephens.

In another key exaggeration, Winegardner plays with the ultimate symbol of American baseball, Babe Ruth. Indeed, the Babe did make a trip to Mexico as a guest of Jorge Pasquel.

The New York Times followed the story of Ruth’s visit almost daily. The Babe did agree to put

on a brief, fifteen-minute batting exhibition during which he was lobbed easy pitches—pitches

that the washed-up Babe fouled off and missed nonetheless (“Dodger” 22, Winegardner 130).

That part of the fictional Gardella’s story matches up; however, from there, Winegardner begins

to depart from the newspaper accounts. According to the Times report, Carmona the manager

became angry with Bragaña the pitcher due to the Babe’s incompetence, and the two, as

Carmona puts it, “threw a few punches, tossed around a bit and called each other a few names”

(“Dodger” 22). Winegardner, too, tells of an angry Bragaña throwing a few punches, but for

Winegardner it was not just an everyday occurrence of dugout roughhousing. After the batting

exhibition, Winegardner inserts the Babe as a pinch hitter in the game. When the proud Cuban

pitcher refuses to groove one to the now-slothful American, Jorge Pasquel steps in and removes

14 Even while grossly exaggerating the anecdote about Stephens’s drunken, incontinent performance, there is still an element of verisimilitude here. Stephens was notorious around the Major Leagues for being a hard man and an even harder drinker. Baseball scholar and statistical guru Bill James euphemistically notes, “the word ‘carefree’ is one of the more pleasant ones to which [Stephens’s] reputation has become accustomed” (608). 231

Bragaña from the game. Bragaña then “stormed off the mound and . . . coldcocked the Sultan of

Swat” (Winegardner 134). Here again, Winegardner pointedly alters the “truth” of the story. I will further explore the imperial implications of some of these alterations in a later section, but for now what is noteworthy is that Winegardner—and consequently Frank Bullinger and the whole cast of interviewees—clearly knows the facts and chooses strategically to modify and exaggerate them in order to dramatize a cultural conflict and, ultimately, to give the story-truth precedence over the happening-truth.

In this way, Frank Bullinger is not really a reporter, per se; he is a storyteller. We know he is a budding novelist—and a terrible one at that, if we are inclined to believe the Hemingway character in the novel. Hemingway tells Bullinger, “My advice is, go cover that goddamned baseball game. Go cover thousands more goddamned baseball games, Frank, and write about those games and the men who played them. Write true sentences about that great game” (49).

Write about the game he does; however, the truth of those sentences about the great game is at times questionable. Bullinger may fail as a novelist proper (and perhaps even as a journalist proper), but he becomes a wonderful storyteller, and sometimes fictionalizer, of the Mexican

League’s “Temporada de Oro.” In his Epilogue, Bullinger even admits that this is nothing more than a story. He acknowledges, “I wanted this story to be about people you have never heard of, who had the same exact dreams and got partway there” (250, emphasis added). In short,

Bullinger, under the guise of professional journalism, gets to write his novel after all—he, in many ways, writes Winegardner’s novel, and certainly vice versa.

This metafictional game—the confusion between what is Bullinger’s and what is

Winegardner’s work, between what is “true” and what is fabricated or exaggerated—is a key part of the novel, and also serves to unify the novel with its subject, the game of baseball. This unity 232 of form and subject is a key part of what makes the novel work as serious fiction. About

DeLillo’s and Coover’s sports novels, LeClair admires the “appropriateness of the books’ forms and styles and textures to the sports that were the authors’ subjects [and] the sophistication of the games within the books and the games the books played with readers” (“Two on One” 93). 15

Winegardner, too, makes an appropriate link between the sports novel genre and the

metafictional games he wishes to play. As a result, the novel ceases to be about baseball, and

instead uses the game of baseball to play games with the reader and ultimately provide a

stunning and appropriate commentary on the nature of fiction, history, memory, and culture.

Winegardner goes to great lengths to blur the line between what is “true” and what is simply a

construction. In closing the narrative, Bullinger relates a story about looking at old home movies

with his daughter Elizabeth. She remarks that her mother does not appear on the film very often,

and Bullinger reflects, “It’s a crime, I thought, whose lives get recorded, and the arbitrary

reasons why” (250). Although, Elizabeth is a seemingly unimportant character who was only

recently introduced in the narrative and is therefore an unlikely candidate to take on an authorial

voice, she delivers perhaps the most telling speech in the novel:

“It’s just as well,” Elizabeth said. “All these movies look false, in a way. Us, but not us.

Flat. Stark. Too real. They don’t fit with the pictures I have in my head. But mom, I

don’t know. Somehow I can see her better than anyone. My memories of her are truer

than all this.” (250, emphasis added)

15 By way of example, LeClair goes on to point out that football is a game of “long periods of preparation and recovery interrupted by explosive, seemingly random action [and DeLillo’s] End Zone is set up that way” (“Two on One” 95). The rhythm of a football game and season is similar to the rhythm DeLillo wishes to call upon for his novel; therefore, his choice of football is a good one. Likewise, LeClair notes that Coover’s use of baseball as a trope mirrors his desire to eschew action and character involvement by concentrating on copious names, nicknames, statistics, and overall historical data. Baseball—a game obsessed with stats and data in a way unlike any other American sport—is obviously an apt choice for Coover’s novelistic concerns with American history and systems and the growing lack of importance of the individual. Likewise, both of these novelists are supremely interested in the games that postmodern and contemporary fictions and metafictions play with their readers. 233

In this passage, Elizabeth recognizes that the home movie, the “actual” and “real” recorded history of her mother, is insufficient to deliver the truth of her mother’s existence. In the same way, Frank Bullinger, Jr. embellishes the “real” history of the Mexican League’s Season of Gold and likely tampers with the “actual” words of his “interviewees” for the purpose of delivering a more revealing, albeit highly fictionalized, account of the season, which resists the kind of journalistic flatness and starkness Elizabeth sees on the movie reel. Furthermore, Mark

Winegardner, as author of all this—the book, the book within the book, and the interviews within that book—plays with the history of the 1946 baseball season, plays with the names and lives of real-life ballplayers, and ultimately plays with the reader in order to tell the story-truth rather than the happening-truth. The Veracruz Blues asks readers to consider the sometimes arbitrary—and other times carefully constructed by power structures—nature of history. In considering these questions, readers are also inherently considering the problems of the myth of historical discourse. Certainly, the problematizing work of the novel extends beyond the history of baseball in North America to American history and mythology at large.

III.

Baseball itself has a deep, rich history, more so than any other major American sport. It has an obsession with statistics, records, past eras, golden ages, and all around tradition. “The good ol’ days” are sometimes more important to baseball than even the present moment—they are clearly more important to baseball than they are to other American sports. Not only this, but baseball, right up there with apple pie, has often been made synonymous with American culture and history. Jacques Barzun famously remarked that one who wants to know about America needs first to learn the game baseball. Recalling LeClair’s notion that an artful sports novel will 234 appropriately link the sport to the metafictional games—the subject to the theme—we see that

Winegardner’s interest in American history and how it is constructed and remembered lends itself nicely to the sport of baseball. However, this is not the sole work of The Veracruz Blues; more than simply questioning the production of history, Winegardner is also providing commentary on the historical contact and sometimes clash among American, African American, and Latin American cultures. In The Veracruz Blues, baseball becomes an for the arrogance of American culture—as it has been defined by American Dream and Frontier myths—and the clash between American culture and its various sub- and neighboring cultures.

In this way, baseball is once again an appropriate choice, as it is currently the most international and multicultural of the American sports.16 American baseball also exists in a number of countries sporting their own thriving leagues: Mexico, Japan, Korea, Cuba, etc.17 Certainly,

though, baseball was not multicultural from its inception. This very struggle for integration, as

well as the players’ effort to get out from under the oppressive reserve clause, serves as another

loaded trope Winegardner utilizes in order to thrust the book beyond “mere baseball novel”

status.

The reserve clause seems a fitting starting place for discussion of cultural conflict in the

novel. This clause essentially bound players unconditionally to their teams giving the players no

freedom in the matter of where they played or the conditions under which they played.

Throughout The Veracruz Blues, Frank Bullinger sets up Danny Gardella, a rarely remembered,

insignificant, clowning ballplayer, as the hero of the players’ union, the union which would

eventually defeat the reserve clause and grow into the strongest union in professional sports (and,

16 One might argue that hockey is the most international, multicultural American sport; however, one could also argue that hockey’s Canadian roots challenge its status as a truly American sport. 17 The Mexican and Japanese leagues, in particular, are considered to contain teams on par with American AAA minor league ballclubs. More and more, many scouts and general managers think of the Mexican and Japanese leagues as minor leagues to be mined for future major league players. 235 some might even argue, the strongest labor union in the whole of the United States) where it currently ranks today. In the only piece of actual reporting that Bullinger shows us, he writes a scathing piece defending the budding union which characterizes, in no uncertain terms, the

Major League owners as dictators. The article begins, “Ironic, isn’t it, that so many ballplayers fought as soldiers for world freedom, for the overthrow of tyrannical dictators, only to come home and have the magnates of baseball behave the same way?” (96). In the article, Bullinger refers to teams as “Fascist monopolies,” and the Major Leagues as “the Master Race Leagues”

(96). Furthermore, earlier in the book, Roberto Ortiz describes his motives for jumping to the

Mexican League saying, “It wasn’t money that made me jump camp from the [Washington]

Senators. It was that insensitive imperialist Clark Griffith, the owner of the team, and his big mouth” (57).

Here Ortiz perhaps allows himself to get carried away. I would not be so quick to label baseball in America as imperialistic. Some may argue that American baseball has an “internal imperializing” function whereby those in power take over not another country but simply other sub-cultures within the same country. However, the “victims” of baseball in America include not only Negro Leaguers like Theolic Smith or Cubans like Roberto Ortiz, but also hundreds of whites (of varying classes) who would seemingly belong to the same culture as those purportedly doing the imperializing. For this reason, I choose to characterize baseball in America as a hegemony or plutocracy. Despite the obvious racism perpetrated by American baseball (Jackie

Robinson had taken the first step across the color barrier only one year before the novel’s

“Season of Gold”), the oppression seems, on a larger scale, to be about class—the rich in power 236 have total control and have created a culture of lived dominance among the subordinate classes.18

An example of this lived culture of dominance plays out at the end of the book. Mickey

Owen and Roy Zimmerman, on behalf of the twenty-seven Major Leaguers who had jumped to

Mexico and were banned from baseball, visited Gardella to convince him to drop his lawsuit

against baseball and its reserve clause. Owen asks Gardella, “Can you sleep knowing you kept

men like or Fireball Smith from getting their chance at the big leagues?” (246).

Gardella replies, “I’m not who’s keeping those men out . . . . Then or now. It’s those

bloodsucking owners, Mick. They don’t think they’re accountable for obeying the laws that

govern any other sort of business” (246). This exchange very succinctly captures the whole

culture of baseball in America: Owen represents the members of the subordinated class who feel

they must toe the line at all costs and who even blame the resisters rather than the oppressors

themselves for the oppression they experience. Gardella, on the other hand, is the only one of

the twenty-seven banned players who has the insight to expose the owners for the

“bloodsucking” robber barons that they are. What happens, then, when baseball, this American

cultural epitome and therefore hegemon, is exported to another country?

In the aforementioned piece of scathing reportage, Bullinger falls for Jorge Pasquel’s utopian

dream labeling him “a Mexican Horatio Alger” (97). A Mexican Horatio Alger indeed—Pasquel

and, perhaps even more so, his league rise from rags to riches only to use those riches to

establish the same kind of plutocracy in the Mexican Baseball League that already existed in the

American Major Leagues. He imports American players to play an American game under the auspices of an American mythic ideal: the free, equal, meritocratic, thoroughly “Alger-ian”

18 I am basing my notion of hegemony on Raymond Williams’s keen revision of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that appears in Williams’s book Marxism and Literature. 237

Democracy. Not only, then, does the oppression of the reserve clause imposed by the American baseball owners become a symbol of American hegemony, but so too does Pasquel’s entire experiment. In his final interview in the book, Danny Gardella retrospectively reflects, “You think that if the Pasquels did get their league to be as good as the majors, do you really believe

Jorge Pasquel would be one bit different than [the American owners]?” (227). Gardella recognizes that Pasquel and his league were really no different from the oppressive systems from which these players fled. Pasquel essentially tries to “out-America” America, beat them at their own game, and the result is a strikingly similar brand of oppression. The Mexican baseball league essentially falls into the same traps as the American Democracy whose ideals it adopted.

Bullinger’s, and therefore Winegardner’s, book works to detail the dissolution of Pasuqel’s utopian dream. The first trap that Pasquel’s league falls into, the first step toward the destruction of an ideal, is the corruption of the leaders. As both commissioner of the league and owner of its most famous team, the Veracruz Blues, Pasquel takes on a dictator-like role. He can essentially do whatever he wants with this team and this league. There are times when he wishes to manage, coach, or even pitch, and he simply dons a uniform and takes the field. He also arms his umpires with guns in order to force the players to do as he orders. Even worse, he personally arranges the teams; there is no democratic draft system. He handpicks players for his team, and distributes the rest of the cast-off players to the less popular teams. The two teams that play in

Mexico City (including the Veracruz Blues who were moved from Veracruz but retained their name) are awarded the best players, and teams on the less-populated outskirts are granted the leftovers. Players are moved from team to team “like a pawn on a chessboard” to make room for high-priced (read: white) talent (117). At a game between the Monterrey Sultans and the Blues, a young Mexican reporter tells Bullinger, “They don’t whistle [the Mexican equivalent of 238 booing] because it is the visiting team. They whistle because they resent the Pasquels for stocking the Mexico City teams with all the imported talent, trying to buy a championship for the capital. It is no different in your country” (101, emphasis added). Like the American Major

Leagues (and the country for which they function as a microcosm), the running of this

“democratic” league is not so democratic. Those in power have absolute power; the “pawns” have no say whatsoever. The league is subject to the every whim of its dictatorial commissioner.

The results of this oppressive supervening power structure are sanctioned inequality and the concomitant rioting and infighting. This “melting pot” of a baseball league is reduced to split, warring factions. Washed up white major leaguer Mickey Owen refuses to play with the black players, Pasquel loads up his Blues with the white American ballplayers while relegating the black players to supposedly worse teams, and fans inevitably choose sides. In regard to playing against the almost all-white Blues, “Fireball” Smith recalls, “We wanted to show them, Jorge

Pasquel, all Mexico, and all the world, that a team of black men could embarrass the cups and sannies off of the best-paid, mostly white talent money could buy. We didn’t talk about it much.

But everybody thought it” (211). Even when the “immortal,” albeit washed up and dying, Babe

Ruth comes to Mexico for a hitting exhibition, difference and inequality come into play. When

Ruth enters the game as a pinch hitter, the crowd had “chosen a favorite: Bragaña, this Cuban

Negro who’d played in their country for years and who was working on a shutout and was about to strike out the biggest Yankee of us all. There was also the matter of brown versus white”

(133). The spectacle did not become a matter of awe for the Babe. It did not become a matter of great veteran pitcher versus great veteran hitter, as Pasquel might have hoped in the beginning of his great democratic experiment. Instead, it was a matter of brown versus white, of Cuban versus Yank. This scene becomes a microcosm for the entire Season of Gold. Difference and 239 division became the rule. The meritocratic egalitarian dream of Jorge Pasquel fell prey to corruption and grew into an extended cultural clash. The Negro players who had fled from the racism, inequality, and sanctioned oppression of American baseball found more of the same on the allegedly level playing fields of the Mexican League.

It becomes clear, then, that Pasquel’s importing of American players and the American democratic ideal is accompanied by the unwitting import of American hegemony. The imperialism enters the equation only when the existing Mexican culture is entirely subsumed by an invading external culture. Therefore, it is baseball—as a myth, as an abstract concept, as a general symbol for American culture—that serves as imperialist. Through the conduit of Jorge

Pasquel, who becomes a symbol of the American capitalist plutocrat, American cultural attitudes invade Mexican culture. Pasquel’s desire to create a third Major League—to become a global power in the baseball world—and his win-at-all-costs approach to achieving this power attempt to suppress the existing culture of his country. The Mexican culture within the book is characterized as a culture of the grand gesture, especially when it is a grand gesture of losing.

Diego Rivera, a symbol of Mexican culture, in his cameo in the book argues, “The Mexican . . . is trapped by a past that belongs to everyone and no one, least of all himself. A past of unhappy compromise. A past where he contents himself with symbolic victories in actual wars” (66).

Likewise, “Fireball” Smith uses an apt baseball metaphor to describe what he has learned about

Mexican culture: “Most Americans expect to win most of the time. . . . Mexicans don’t see it like that. Mexicans aren’t surprised if they lose ’em all. . . . A Mexican wears his defeats like a badge of honor. Kind of like a country full of Chicago Cubs fans” (144).

This is the culture in which Pasquel tries to buy and cheat his way to a championship, both literally and figuratively. In the rags-riches dichotomy, “the Mexican Horatio Alger” will stop at 240 nothing to achieve riches, whereas the people of Mexico seem to be happy grandly donning their rags, figuratively speaking. Baseball serves an imperializing function by imposing, through the medium of Jorge Pasquel, American myth, American cultural values, American democracy,

American ballplayers, and American arrogance (via characters like Vern Stephens and Mickey

Owen) onto a seemingly weaker, easy-to-dominate culture. An American brand of baseball dominates “La Temporada de Oro,” turns it into the “Season of Gold,” mines that gold until nothing is left, and turns around and returns to America leaving a barren, broken down, beaten culture to rejoice in its losses, likely in a grand gesture.

There are several ways in which Winegardner, as the framer of this history of oppression, draws greater attention to the cultural problems of this system than mere journalistic accounts might. Certainly Winegardner’s aforementioned decision to play with the facts, to exaggerate the historic “truth,” helps to underscore these themes. In the epic at-bat mentioned above, not only does the prideful Cuban pitcher refuse to serve up a home run ball to The Babe, but

Winegardner also allows Bragaña to sucker punch one of the greatest American cultural icons.

The often brash and arrogant Ruth is “put in his place” by a no-name Cuban. Similarly, in exaggerating the Vern Stephens anecdote, Winegardner keeps Stephens around for one more game—just long enough to smear him a bit further, both literally and figuratively. In a final retributive act against the arrogant buffoon that is the novelistic rendering of Vern Stephens,

Winegardner, essentially, craps on Stephens and all he stands for.19 Even the somewhat minor

alterations Winegardner makes to the factual story are charged with subversive sentiment. When

Ortiz substitutes President Alemán for a United States admiral as the All-Star game’s ceremonial

first-pitcher, Winegardner is again, this time more subtly, undercutting American culture. He

19 For more on what Stephens represents in the novel, see the following section which more closely examines some of the key players in Winegardner’s game of imperialism. 241 refuses to grace the American military man with the honor, and instead offers it to the chief

Mexican governmental officer. In essence, this reversal signals Ortiz’s, as well as

Winegardner’s, choosing to support the Mexican rather than the American government. In each of these cases, Winegardner’s departures from the historical facts display an undermining of

American culture, an embracing of Mexican culture, and a subtle (and, at times, not-so-subtle) critique of a bullying America culture.

By using something so quintessentially American as baseball and by placing it in a “foreign” context, Winegardner effectively reveals the arrogance of American culture. Just as María Félix reflects that she is only able to see her faults and sympathize with the wife of Jorge Pasquel

(from whom she stole him) once she has achieved a sense of temporal distance, so too can

Americans (both the players in and readers of the novel) better see some of the problems of their culture when they have achieved some geographical distance from that culture (152). “Fireball”

Smith, for instance, after hearing a revolution-minded speech by Diego Rivera, began to think

“about what Rivera said about Mexico, about how you could say that same thing about the

American Negro” (66). Smith recognizes something new about himself and his own situation after seeing it played out in the life of a Mexican with whom he would seem to have little in common. Likewise, by placing American culture and ideals, as defined by our myths of frontier destiny and world superpower, in Mexico and subsequently revealing the flaws and dissolution thereof, Winegardner has made those flaws more highly visible to American readers. It is easier to face ourselves when we do not at first resemble ourselves, and Winegardner achieves this very effect by using the trope of baseball-in-a-foreign-country.

IV. 242

While the imperialistic work of baseball may leave Mexican culture beaten and suppressed,

Winegardner finds value in the Mexican culture of losing that remains. His characters—a collection of lovable losers, or perhaps “Cubs fans” as “Fireball” Smith might have put it—do not embody the win-at-all-costs American cultural attitude; rather, they find themselves embracing the Mexican culture of losing grandly. Not only do the characters in the story “side” with Mexican culture, but Bullinger, the storyteller himself, actually resides within Mexican culture; he lives in and writes the book from Veracruz. In embracing Mexican culture, these characters form a kind of subversive resistance movement working subtly to undercut the the

“Alger-ian” myth of the Self-Made Man, the myth of the American Dream.

To begin with, there is no hero in the book; there is hardly a protagonist. The leading candidate for the role of protagonist is certainly Frank Bullinger, Jr.; however, even if we read

Bullinger as the protagonist of Winegardner’s story, who then is the protagonist of Bullinger’s story? Perhaps one could argue that Danny Gardella is this protagonist, especially in light of the fact that in his acknowledgments list, Winegardner thanks Joseph Campbell and his text The

Hero with a Thousand Faces for helping him to structure the Danny Gardella storyline.

However, despite Gardella’s being modeled after the hero of Campbell’s book, he does not get any more attention or “good lines” than do “Fireball” Smith and Roberto Ortiz. The point here is that neither Winegardner’s nor Bullinger’s book is structured around one protagonist/hero with a supporting cast surrounding him. Instead, the novel features a sort of ensemble cast of anti- heroes, of lovable losers, and this ensemble of anti-heroes works to establish and, in some ways even valorize, a culture of losing. 243

In his cameo, Vern “Meat” Stephens plays the important role of representing American culture.20 In his interview with Bullinger, Stephens makes a few telling, and very American, comments. Describing his attempts to make a phone call from a Mexican hotel, Stephens remarks, “I couldn’t get an operator who spoke English. You believe that?” to which Bullinger dryly replies, “It is a Spanish-speaking country, Vern” (90). Even more telling than this arrogant assumption that everyone must speak English, Stephens typifies the whole of American international relations via a single sports metaphor: “People say they want upsets, but that’s romantic horseshit. Viva Goliath, I say. The trick to life isn’t figuring out how to beat Goliath.

It’s figuring out how to be Goliath” (87). Stephens—whose real-life career was riddled with stories of drunken brawling—becomes the perfect embodiment of American bullying and the perfect contrast to Winegardner’s band of lovable losers. The ultimate result of Stephens’s several-page appearance in the novel is that he is smeared with his own feces, and he ultimately sneaks back home to America under the cover of night. He cannot survive in the culture

Winegardner has set up for the novel, and as a result he and his attitudes become the object of

Winegardner’s cultural subversion.

Instead of a hard-drinking, hard-fighting All-American guy with a nickname like “Meat,”

Winegardner prefers the small-time hero, and he creates a culture in which this type of character

thrives. After one of his rallying speeches about the formation of a player’s union, Gardella

wonders, “Why are any of us alive but to change the world in one small way? If not the world, a world. If not a world, our world. Of course, Frank, we’re both proof that it can be a long leap

from clown to hero” (228). In characters like Gardella—a no-name, little-talent ballplayer who

20 Certainly, over the course of the novel, Jorge Pasquel represents the growth of modern American culture from innocent Horatio Alger hero to imperialistic bully; however, this portrayal happens over the course of the entire book. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Winegardner is using Stephens to provide a quick, microcosmic snapshot of American cultural representation. 244 never quite succeeded in establishing the union—and Bullinger—a wandering, philandering failed novelist—Winegardner bridges the gap between clown and hero by establishing a kind of clown-hero, a lovable loser who wins only the smallest of victories (but victories nonetheless).

After collecting the game-winning hit in a meaningless game, Gardella says of one of those small victories, “When I rode on those shoulders, suspended over a sea of mud, a hero in a victory that was so small and surrounded by so much defeat that no one remembers it anymore—that, my friend, was a moment which lasted forever” (240). Through characters like Gardella,

Winegardner elevates the meaningless victory won by the clown-hero to the status of myth, and in so doing, he subtly subverts the American culture of winning big, of dominating, of being

Goliath. Bullinger even puts this subversion into words in his Epilogue, “I think that anyone who accomplished all he set out to do needs to come back, live another life, and learn what living a life means” (249). Bullinger goes on to reflect on the book he has just finished

“writing”/narrating:

I have known these people: Babe Ruth and Satchel Paige, Ernest Hemingway and “Diana

James” [the “famous” New York poet in the novel]. Their stories you know. I wanted

this story to be about people you have never heard of, who had the same exact dreams

and got partway there. That’s not nothing. It is, I now believe, everything. (250)

Losing, not winning, becomes heroic for this cast of characters. Losing in a noble and learnéd way, not decisively defeating weaker opponents, becomes something to strive for, and “That, ladies and gentlemen, is Mexico. That, ladies and gents, is what it means to have the Veracruz

Blues” (214).

Ultimately, Winegardner uses this engrossing tale of loveable losers told by Frank Bullinger, perhaps the most loveable loser of them all, to provide a necessary critique and subtle subversion 245 of a dominant, arrogant American culture and the myths those in power use to sustain that cultural front. The art of this novel lies in Winegardner’s ability to make the story-truth more important, more probing, and certainly more critical than any happening-truth, than any purely journalistic account of the Mexican League’s 1946 baseball season could be. Winegarnder, like

Whitehead, concludes that personal and collective mythology can be “true” despite its lack of historical facticity, or that the “story-truth” can be truer than the “happening-truth.” In utilizing both documented history and fabrication, as well as formally figuring this fusion as an historian- like search for truth, both Whitehead and Winegardner challenge “official history” by rendering it more open and less definitive that those in control would have it. Furthermore, in celebrating a kind of personal and oral history as significant—and also in mimicking this sort of orality in the novels’ multivocal, multiperspectival forms—these authors are also opening up history to the unheard voices and giving control of history back to individuals. In short, Whitehead and

Winegardner place the constructedness of history and modern American myth on display and ultimately reverse the Barthesian naturalization process. As a result, they give American myths and American histories back to American individuals. 246

CHAPTER 5

A Play of Contradictions: Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance, William Vollmann’s

The Ice-Shirt, and “The New Nonfiction Novel”

As mentioned in the introduction to this project, Hayden White is perhaps best known for having reintroduced the notion of authorial invention into historiography, which was otherwise attempting to masquerade as a social science under the influence of the

Annales school. This move caused a blurring of the increasingly-thought “obvious” line between history and fiction (i.e., the historian finds stories, and the novelist invents stories). As a result, there has been an ongoing attempt on the part of some historians and scholars of literature to redraw that line in the wake of White’s influential claims and the overall instability of referentiality that has resulted from poststructuralist culture. For instance, just a few years after White’s groundbreaking Metahistory appeared, Paul

Hernadi reasoned that the novelist’s differentiation between author and narrator, a differentiation that is absent in historiography, constitutes the line. In the decades following, Dorrit Cohn made similar claims using complex narratological concepts to proclaim fiction as distinct from all other forms of discourse, most especially nonfiction writing. Writing in 2002, Kalle Pihlainen drew the line at the level of narrative coherency, arguing that the historian’s commitment to referentiality results in a less complex, less compelling system of signification. And onward goes the list of possible formal and technical differences that a variety of scholars cling to in the hope of 247 reestablishing the line that White, in the eyes of many, recklessly obliterated. However, if White controversially argued that historiography moves toward fiction in its use of plot forms, then we may be left to wonder what happens on the other side of that so-called line when fiction begins to move closer to historiography.

Before answering that question—the very idea behind this entire chapter—it is first necessary to review how White argues his case. According to White, “histories” are made from “chronicles” (ostensibly lists of raw historical data) through this process he calls emplotment. These raw historical data are merely potential story elements that are then arranged into a plot (tragedy, comedy, romance, etc.) by the historian (White,

“Historical Text” 46-47). The (hi)story, then, is only really comprehensible to a given audience because of that audience’s familiarity with the plot structure utilized by the historian in her selection and arrangement of data. For White, our very experience of

“history—the real world as it evolves in time—is made sense of in the same way that the poet or novelist tries to make sense of it, i.e., by endowing what originally appears as problematical and mysterious with the aspect of a recognizable, because it is familiar, form,” and this is precisely why “we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author” (“Historical Text” 60-61). Finally, for

White, the whole matter comes down to the figurative nature of narrative. He warns that we must never mistake a narrative account of events for a literal account of those same events because “a narrative account is always a figurative account, an allegory” (White,

“Question of Narrative” 48, my emphasis). Once again, however, what happens when an obviously figurative account begins to masquerade as a literal account? 248

White’s ideas are quite reasonable and helpful when thinking about the typical historiography or typical novel (even including traditional historical novels and many of those I have discussed thus far in this project). However, Christopher Sorrentino’s

Trance and William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt are hardly typical novels, and they potentially present new problems for all scholars who have been thinking about the arguable line between historiography and fiction. The first of these challenges reaches the very core of White’s equation of historical and fictive narrative: emplotment. Neither

Trance nor The Ice-Shirt is emplotted in a traditional way, and, in fact, both tend to resist the types of archetypal emplotment that White borrows from Northrop Frye. These two novels are structured around the incidental occurrence of one thing after another—more along the lines of an annal or chronicle—as opposed to the imposed teleological causality of an emplotted historiography. The novels do not lurch forward due to the inertia of an archetypically constructed plot but rather meander from one potentially unrelated and

(sometimes even downright tangential) but temporally adjacent scene to the next. In other words, mere chronology, as opposed to a causal chain of familiar plot elements, dominates these novels’ structures. As a result, one is tempted to turn around White’s controversial notion that histories are like “translations of ‘fact’ into ‘fiction,’” as

Sorrentino and Vollmann are translating fiction into fact (White, “Historical Text” 53).

This is not entirely true considering that Vollmann calls his novel a “Symbolic History” and Sorrentino warns in his “Author’s Note” that “seekers of documentary truth are gently encouraged to look elsewhere” (Vollmann 397, Sorrentino 516). Though not nearly as quotable, it is perhaps more accurate to flip White in this way: Sorrentino and

Vollmann translate fiction into the semblance of fact. 249

This sort of construction—fiction resembling fact and vice versa—calls to mind the late-twentieth-century idea of the “nonfiction novel.” Ever since Truman Capote coined the phrase when describing In Cold Blood, scholars have long been pondering the fact- fiction line in relation to this subgenre—referred to liberally as the nonfiction novel, literary nonfiction, new journalism, the fact novel, and the literature of fact among others.

In an early, representative description of the budding genre, John Hollowell—citing the most frequently recognized practitioners of the nonfiction novel form, Capote, Norman

Mailer, and Tom Wolfe—assigns some of the following characteristics to the nonfiction novel of the 1960s: “the writer is placed in the role of witness to the moral dilemmas of our times”; the author avoids the insertion of fictional characters into the plot; and the author utilizes a hybrid form that includes features of novels, news reporting, and

(auto)biographical narrative (15). These characteristics—especially the notion of author- as-witness (as opposed to creator) and the avoidance of invented characters or events— suggest that the nonfiction side of the “nonfiction novel” binary be privileged, and indeed the holy trinity of practitioners mentioned above are all primarily journalists (perhaps

“new journalists”) who happen to be drawing on the conventions of novelistic fiction to explore the ambiguities and concerns of their era. In essence, these “new journalists” appear to be simply taking White’s notion of emplotment—what is already present in any nonfictional narrative—to a kind of extreme. In short, they may simply be making their nonfictional, journalistic reports look and sound like novels.

More recently, though, some scholars are attempting to wrest Capote’s useful label

“nonfiction novel” away from its roots in this kind of new journalism. Mas’ud

Zavarzadeh, whose text The Mythopoeic Reality is perhaps the most influential study of 250 the nonfiction novel, views the genre in a more complex, and ultimately more helpful way. Zavarzadeh argues, “[the nonfiction novelist] does not totalize the chain of events and experiences (facts) in terms of either a pre-existing (a priori) interpretation of life, like the fictive novelist, or an emerging (a posteriori) ‘truth,’ similar to the factual narratist. His use of facts is post-mimetic and phenomenalistic” (65). Zavarzadeh goes on to clarify this somewhat unwieldy claim as follows:

The phenomenalistic use of fact in narrative is post-mimetic, non-verisimilar (the

narrative is an open system), transcriptive, anti-symbolic, and purely literal. . . .

By using facts phenomenalistically, the nonfiction novelist merely registers facts

without the accompaniment of an interpretive pattern, which makes an observed

fact part of an imposed metaphysical scheme. The nonfiction novelist’s

arrangement of facts is not endorsive (authenticating) but mythopoeic: it reveals

the disorienting fictiveness inherent in the facts. In other words, facts are not used

to establish or unveil an order but are allowed to enact, in their totality and

entirety, the ambiguity, unpredictability, and disorder—in short, the entropy—of

the actual. (65-66)

Even though Zavarzadeh does make reference to new journalists like Capote, Mailer,

Wolfe, and Hunter Thompson in making his case, he clearly does not read the genre of the nonfiction novel as merely emplotted nonfiction or creative journalism. There is an inherent ambiguity and undecidability in Zavarzadeh’s conception of the nonfiction novel. For him, the nonfiction novel moves beyond the imposition of narrative order on an entropic world of disparate facts—with which he associates the job of the nonfiction narratist—to better represent the contradictions and uncertainties of a postmodern time. 251

Another more recent scholar, John Russell, makes a similar move but ultimately pushes this kind of formulation to another level in an effort to separate further the nonfiction novel from its new journalistic kin.1 Russell argues, “Modern reportage [read: new journalism?]—with its efforts bent on foregrounding devices, sweeping detritus to the side—has little use for bricolage. But the nonfiction novel lives by it” (7). Here,

Russell is referring to Claude Levi-Strauss’s famous image of the bricoleur using

whatever is at his disposal—therefore a finite and ultimately heterogeneous (because not

designed for a particular project) group of materials—for his creative purposes (Levi-

Strauss 17). As opposed to using particular tools for a particular project (as would Levi-

Strauss’s engineer) or establishing an internal narrative coherence and vision for external

facts (as would a new journalist or perhaps any nonfictionist), the nonfiction novelist is

described by Russell as allowing “an outward torque [to carry] their narratives along,

trailing loose ends” (9). Finally, in characterizing the nonfiction novel, Russell also calls

upon Northrop Frye’s discussion of the anatomy mode. For Frye, the anatomy displays

“the constant tendency to be encyclopaedic [sic] and exhaustive both in technique and in

subject matter, and to see both in highly intellectualized terms” (313). In short, Russell

views the nonfiction novel not as nonfictional materials draped in fictional clothing but as

ambiguous, heterogeneous, variously formatted, encyclopedic, and perhaps even anti-

narrative (as in relying on “outward torque trailing loose ends” rather than an imposed

internal coherence).

1 According to Russell’s definitions, Capote, Mailer, and Wolfe cannot even be considered nonfiction novelists. Instead, Russell points to writers like Robert Byron, Primo Levi, and Michael Ondaatje as his examples. Russell, then, appears to be the logical extension of Zavarzadeh for the twenty-first century. He seems to be updating the ideas established by Zavarzadeh and attempting to dislodge entirely Capote, Mailer, and Wolfe from the nonfiction novel terminology. 252

By older standards, the novels of Christopher Sorrentino and William Vollmann could never be classified as “nonfiction novels.” Sorrentino and Vollmann are not primarily journalists; they are not wrestling directly with contemporary moral dilemmas (though they may be doing so subtly and implicitly); and therefore they are not physically or perspectivally “close” to the people and events portrayed, they are not “witnesses.”

However, the above-cited revisions of the nonfiction novel genre by Zavarzadeh and

Russell apply remarkably well to the work of Sorrentino and Vollmann. I am not necessarily so concerned here with discovering a generic classification for these unique novels (whether it be nonfiction novel, bricolage, or anatomy); such labels are far less interesting here than the theories behind them. Rather, I am interested in what Sorrentino and Vollmann are attempting to accomplish through their novels and their masquerade as factual history, and adding these ideas about the “new nonfiction novel”—which approaches the history-fiction line from the fiction side—to White’s ideas regarding emplotment—which approach the history-fiction line from the history side—should prove fruitful.

Take first White’s notion of the purpose behind historiographic emplotment. He argues convincingly that the entire point of historians’ emplotment is to familiarize readers with forgotten or unknown events due to these readers’ familiarity with the modes of emplotment. These events come to be recognizable “not only because the reader now has more information about the events, but also because he has been shown how the data conform to an icon of a comprehensible finished process, a plot-structure with which he is familiar as a part of his cultural endowment” (White, “Historical Text”

50). If we accept this notion, then Sorrentino’s and Vollmann’s opposite, bricoleur-like 253 move of “de-plotting” their novels can be seen as an act of defamiliarization. Sorrentino and Vollmann, then, essentially attempt to defamiliarize their readers with the standard, official—traditionally plotted—stories of Patty Hearst and Norse Vikings respectively.

This “de-plotment,” then, becomes a way for these authors to undermine the commonly accepted versions of two (albeit drastically dissimilar and temporally separated by centuries) stories that have become folded into the popular American imagination. As a result of this defamiliarization, the kind of association that Capote needed readers to feel with his ostensible protagonist Perry Smith no longer applies. Sorrentino is not interested in readers identifying with Patty Hearst; nor is Vollmann concerned about presenting an orderly history of the discovery of North America. Instead, these authors, via their de- plotted, bricolage form, are most interested in leaving their texts open. They are allowing the tangential to reside alongside the ostensibly important material with no sense of foreground and background, and ultimately establishing a play of contradictions within their texts. These wide-open, monstrous, and informationally thick texts do ultimately represent implicit critiques of contemporary American history and culture; however, these critiques are necessarily mutli-dimensional and include space for their oppositions as well.2

Overall, within the continuum of contemporary documentary fiction which I have

been working to establish, Sorrentino and Vollmann clearly register as the most highly

documentary. In fact, their novels are so documentary (and sometimes almost anti-

narrative) that they are at times virtually impenetrable; however, upon completion, one is

easily struck by magnitude of their accomplishments. Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance

works as not only a critique of the media-influenced accepted popular history of the Patty

2 In fact, as will be discussed later, Sorrentino’s novel becomes the subject its own critique. 254

Hearst case, but even more so as a tour de force send-up of our entire media age, the politics behind its control, and the consequent loss of identity and reality that accompanies our rampant mediation. For this reason, Trance would seem to make a perfect capstone to this entire project. However, William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt is doing something different altogether, something even more remarkable. While The Ice-

Shirt is indeed heavy on the documentary and, at times, light on plot—thus rendering it a nice fit for this chapter—the novel is doing so much more. Vollmann’s novel—the ultimate bricolage or anatomy—appears to “do it all.” The novel seems to cover all points on the continuum in one encyclopedic stroke. And with the kind of touch that only one of our true contemporary masters could wield: he “does it all” relatively successfully.

In this way, I suppose I am arguing that Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt is a kind of ur- contemporary-documentary-novel, and for this reason it will have the final word in this project.

Our Own Blank Renown: Christopher Sorrentino and the

Power of Contemporary Mediation

I.

“It was a mythological event, crowded with uniquely American figments—Bonnie and

Clyde, Superman, Perry Mason, Nigger Jim, and the Lindbergh baby all come to mind; and it was a descendant of much older archetypal myths about evil dragons and captive maidens, about Sleeping Beauty, Persephone, Helen of Troy. It was not just any one of these, it was all of them; it was a kind of all-American pie” (Alexander 6). So goes

Shana Alexander’s assessment of the almost two-year Patty Hearst ordeal beginning in 255 early February 1974. Alexander was among the journalists present in the courtroom covering Hearst’s trial, the charges being those associated with the Hibernia Bank heist performed by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in . In introducing

Anyone’s Daughter, her own personal version of the trial transcript, Alexander goes on to argue that the nation had become so enraptured by nostalgia for the kind of American pie referenced above that there seemed to be no one looking forward. She describes a culture suffering from media image-fatigue and thus, rather than looking forward, defining itself by its past and images thereof (24). She describes the debacle that was SLA and the

Hearst ordeal as a kind of Babel in which “everyone was talking at once, and each was speaking a different language” (4). In effect, she almost perfectly describes Christopher

Sorrentino’s Trance.

Clearly Sorrentino is familiar with Alexander’s 1979 book, as the “Author’s Note” appended to his 2005 novel lists Anyone’s Daughter as a source. In that “Author’s Note” he also acknowledges as his two primary sources Vin McLellan and Paul Avery’s The

Voices of Guns—widely believed to be the definitive history of the SLA and Hearst’s involvement therewith—and a three-part series of exposés published in Rolling Stone in which Jack Scott and Steve Soliah (anonymously at the time) provided the “inside story” of the Hearst kidnapping and what followed to authors Howard Kohn and David Weir.

However, Sorrentino’s list of sources, including several more texts after the three mentioned above, is hardly the most interesting part of the “Author’s Note.” In the opening paragraph, Sorrentino admits, “I thought in this case it might be of use to affirm that while many of the situations this novel depicts, and the people it portrays, are drawn from a well-documented episode in recent American history, I have disregarded the 256 record whenever it’s served my purpose to do so” (515). Sorrentino then follows this assertion with a lengthy description of the way that disregard plays out: omissions, conflations, inventions, embellishments, anachronisms, and more. Then he finishes the note, after having listed his primary sources, with a reinforcement of his opening disregard: “As is my habit as a fiction writer, I conducted no fieldwork, archival research, or interviews toward the completion of this book. Seekers of documentary truth are gently encouraged to look elsewhere” (516).

Several items in this note are ironic or just plain disingenuous. The first, and most obvious, is that by page 516, seekers of documentary truth have presumably already read the novel and therefore not looked elsewhere. Also, while it might be true that he has not conducted any fieldwork or interviews in preparation for the novel, Sorrentino has clearly made full use of other writers’ fieldwork and interviews (i.e., those of McLellan, Avery,

Kohn, and Weir). Furthermore, interviews are hardly necessary in the case of the SLA members themselves, as they kept elaborate records of their own (published and unpublished) communiqués, which are conveniently collected by Robert Brainard

Pearsall in a book appearing in Sorrentino’s source list, not to mention liberally excerpted in McLellan and Avery’s text. I do not mean to suggest that Sorrentino is an out-and-out liar, as it is certainly true that he has taken liberties with his material. However, I do believe he overstates his case in his “Author’s Note,” as the novel is far more documentary than his “gentle” rebuke implies.3 Sorrentino’s strong, and perhaps

overstated, case for the not-so-documentary elements of Trance seems almost like a

3 Reviewer Evan Hughes speculates that legal concerns forced Sorrentino to so vehemently insist on his fictionalizing in that “Author’s Note” (39). In an interview with Peter Wild, however, Sorrentino shrugs off the issue of legality suggesting that he changed some of the names on his own accord “even when legally it would have been perfectly OK” (Wild). 257 defense mechanism, an attempt to separate himself from the bestselling popular

“historical novelists” (neo-Walter Scotts), who unselfconsciously believe they are simply animating history and revealing the Truth, or the popular narrative biographers/historians who seem to want to “play novelist” with their historical material. Sorrentino’s

“Author’s Note,” then, is something of a defense of his literary-artistic vision. However, despite the defense mounted in that note, the novel itself, in all its copious minutiae and true-to-life detail, makes it clear that Sorrentino is indeed trying to “get the story right,” at least on some level.

The story that serves as his source is hardly in need of lengthy introduction or summary, as it was one of the more bizarre and memorable events in recent American history, and one of the first American events to be subjected to the kind of seemingly endless media coverage that has come to characterize so many contemporary news events

(O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the Unabomber, Lacy Petersen’s disappearance, and dozens of other such stories come to mind). On February 4, 1974, Patricia Campbell

Hearst—daughter of newspaper mogul Randolph Hearst and heiress to the fortune yielded by the media empire of her grandfather William Randolph Hearst—was dragged from her Berkeley apartment under the cover of night. She was then held captive in a small hall closet at the hideout of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a revolutionary activist group concerned with prisoners’ rights, the plight of the poor, and a general undermining of the “fascist pigs” of the wealthy upper class. A little over a month after her abduction, Patty professed to join her captors, converting to “Tania” the newest SLA revolutionary. Of course, one of the most highly debated controversies throughout the entire ordeal, and especially at trial, was whether or not Patty voluntarily “converted” to 258 revolutionary thought or was coerced or brainwashed. One now had to question whether or not Patty/Tania was victim or perpetrator. After a bank heist (in which Patty was caught on tape bearing an automatic rifle in San Francisco’s Hibernia Bank) and the deaths of many of their comrades in a shootout with the FBI, Patty and two of her fellow revolutionaries, Bill and (“General Teko” and “Yolanda”), went on the lam hiding out in a series of apartments in the Bay area before retreating cross-country to farmhouses in Northeastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York. After laying low on the

East coast, the three (along with new companions Jack Scott and ) returned to California to attempt to renew the revolutionary fight. The group was eventually apprehended by the FBI in mid-September 1975 in their pair of San Francisco apartments.

Sorrentino’s novel picks up the story on the day of the fiery shootout between the FBI and the SLA. He opens with the scene in which Patty (renamed Alice Galton in the novel) shoots up Mel’s Sporting Goods Store in order to free Bill and Emily Harris

(Drew and Diane Shepard in the novel) from the clerk’s custody after Bill had been caught shoplifting. This event is what ultimately put authorities on the trail—that had otherwise gone cold—of the SLA, leading finally to the fateful shootout. From the shots fired at Mel’s, Trance follows the story until the fugitives’ apprehension, filling in necessary backstory (i.e., the kidnapping itself and Patty’s conversion) via flashbacks.

The narrative form of the novel is quite unconventional. There is no single narrative voice controlling the narrative; rather, there is a shifting (and not in any discernable pattern) consciousness allowing readers a glimpse into the minds of a variety of characters major and minor: from Jack Scott (Guy Mock in the novel) and Catherine 259

Hearst (Lydia Galton) to more tangential characters like Martin Soliah (Howard Rorvik) and Scott’s publishing friend Paul K. Hoch (Adam K. Trout).4 The story also sometimes comes to us via documents such as newspaper columns, the SLA’s released communiqués, transcripts of radio/TV broadcasts, and portions of letters written by various players in this drama (such as Donald DeFreeze and Wendy Yoshimura). This multiplicity of voices, coming to readers from a variety of angles, characters, and textual formats, provides for the Babel-like confusion of voices so wonderfully imaged by

4 There is some confusion regarding Sorrentino’s use of names in the novel. For the most part, he changes the names. Patty Hearst becomes Alice Galton; the Scotts become Guy and Randi Mock; and the Harrises become Drew and Diane Shepard (which is itself somewhat ironic, as Shepard is the real-life name of the store clerk at Mel’s whose apprehension of Bill Harris set off the SLA massacre in L.A.). In an interview, Sorrentino exaplains that he changed the names late in the writing process because he felt that the characters had become so different from their real-life counterparts (Wild). Despite changing the real names, he does retain the revolutionary names the SLA members adopted: Cinque, Teko, Yolanda, Tania, all the way down to Wendy Yoshimura’s alias Joan Shimada (the only thing she is ever called in the novel); therefore, it is obvious that he is not in any way attempting to hide their identities. There are some names, however, that Sorrentino does not change. He uses the real names of the dead SLA members (Donald DeFreeze, Mizmoon Soltysik, , , , and ). The other, more tangential, names that Sorrentino does not change are as follows: , Myrna and Trygye Opsahl, Popeye Jackson, Cinque’s children (first names only are provided), Sara Jane Moore, and Tommie Smith. One reviewer, David Ulin, suggests that the only names not changed are those of the dead; therefore, Sorrentino’s naming system becomes a commentary on the mutability of one’s image while alive and the fixedness of death (4). This sounds like a fine explanation, except that not all those called by their real names are dead. Certainly, the first two I listed above (Foster and Myrna Opsahl) are dead, as they were killed by the SLA. Jackson was killed by an SLA sympathizer because his dealings with Hearst gave off the image of a snitch. The status of Cin’s children is unknown, as their full names are never provided. However, both Sara Jane Moore and Tommie Smith are still alive. Sorrentino explains away the use of Sara Jane Moore’s real name in this way: “because I didn’t want to pull a cheap surprise in having her turn out to be Gerald Ford’s would-be assassin [which is narrated in the Coda]. I wanted readers to see that coming” (Wild). That leaves only Tommie Smith. Smith, of course, is the athlete/activist most noted for his raised-fisted posture on the podium at the 1968 Olympics. Smith is connected to the events of the novel because Jack Scott was criticized for hiring Smith as a track coach at Oberlin College. Such a small mention in the novel (on page 141) is perhaps what accounts for Sorrentino’s choice to retain his real name. However, there is another athlete/activist tied to this case who is not named in the novel. After parting with the SLA survivors, Jack and Micki Scott went to reside at the home of basketball star Bill Walton in Portland. This instance is mentioned in the novel only as Guy accepting an offer “from a friend” to live in “his spacious house in Portland, Oregon” (322). Why mention Smith in passing and not Walton? It may be because Smith currently works as a motivational speaker, and is thus still invested in his activist image; whereas, Walton is a TV analyst for NBA basketball games and is thus separated from his activist image. I mention all of this only to show that Sorrentino’s naming (and renaming) system is not necessarily always consistent. For this reason, it would seem to be wasted effort to assign some greater meaning to Sorrentino’s naming system (though Ulin makes an admirable attempt); thus, I have relegated my discussion of this issue to the footnotes. 260

Alexander’s description of the Hearst ordeal as everyone talking different languages all at once.5

This difficult, unconventional, and even disorderly form signals that the novel is far

from a “realistic” psychological study of the so-called “Stockholm Syndrome.” Unlike

Susan Choi in her 2003 Patty Hearst novel, American Woman, Sorrentino is not

primarily interested in Patty/Tania or any of the people involved in the SLA’s

revolutionary activities; rather, Sorrentino is most interested in the media’s and other

onlookers’ interpretations, alterations, and sometimes even corruptions of the scenario

and of Hearst herself. Just as Lewis Nordan’s Emmett Till novel is not really about

Emmett Till at all, so too is Sorrentino’s Patty Hearst novel most concerned with the

people surrounding and reacting to Hearst. In fact, one reviewer laments, “something is

wrong if Tania’s mother is more interesting than Tania” (Paine 4). The reviewer is

correct that the Catherine Hearst character is more interesting to readers than Tania;

however, that is no accident, as Sorrentino himself is more interested in Catherine Hearst

and all the others vying for control of Tania and/or her image. In a way, Sorrentino’s

almost anti-narrative documentary style and the concomitant need to “get it right” are

evidence of his own desire to control the image of Patty Hearst/Tania. The novel does

indeed both mimic and mock the media circus that surrounded Hearst and continues to

gather around a growing number of contemporary happenings every day. However, the

difference lies in that Sorrentino is aware of his own mediated twisting and mutilation of

5 Sorrentino’s chorus of voices and piling of consciousnesses is not in accord with any particular pattern or system, as opposed to, say, something like Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury. In fact, Sorrentino acknowledges an affinity for Sound and the Fury and some of the modernist techniques associated therewith (Laurence). Therefore, we can assume that he was influenced by these techniques; however, the disorder of his multiplicity of voices displays a kind of postmodernist reworking of these modernist-derived techniques. 261 the Hearst image, and that awareness marks a critique of the ever-growing influence of media and mediation on the contemporary human experience.

II.

Before examining the specific critique leveled by Sorrentino in Trance, it is first necessary to take a closer look at the form of the novel and how it sets up the critique that is the novel’s content. In terms of its overarching form, Trance is broken into five parts with four Interludes between them and a Coda following them. Reviewers have offered a wide variety of characterizations of the novel’s overarching structure. David Ulin argues that the book is more than news or history, “but more along the lines of a passion play.

It’s an idea he makes explicit by breaking the novel into five long parts, or acts, each followed by a brief entr’acte, or interlude—a structure reminiscent of a Shakespearian tragedy” (4). What Sorrentino is up to, however, seems anything but explicit, as other reviewers have come up with plenty of other explanations. Jeremy Davies, like Ulin, thinks of the stage, calling the novel “a revolutionary vaudeville” (138). Both Carmela

Ciuraru and Tom Paine think of the book cinematically with Paine even likening the novel to “an extended Robert Altman opening shot that covers 500 pages” (4). Tom

Shone compares the reading experience to “someone flipping between radio stations”

(26). Certainly the notion of music, especially an opera or symphony with their distinct acts and movements, fits with the five-part structure and the terms Sorrentino uses to label the parts—“interlude” and “coda” are terms most recognizably associated with music.6 Furthermore, several of the parts’ titles relate to music as well. Interlude 1 is

6 As further evidence of this, note that Sorrentino’s first novel, Sound on Sound—a novel about the music industry and formally designed to resemble the recording process—also ends with a “Coda.” 262 entitled “Threnody,” a song of lamentation, and the Coda is called “Let My Gun Sing for the People,” a reference to the SLA’s tagline “To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.” However, one cannot conclude definitively that music is the greatest influence on the structure. The interlude entitled “Threnody” may also be referring to poetics, with its connotation of

Greek elegies, and Part Three’s title “Revolutionary Pastoral” also rings with poetic connotations. The fourth interlude, entitled “Adventures in Wonderland,” refers to another kind of non-poetic literature. Finally, the third interlude makes reference to another kind of medium altogether with its title “Dateline: Hillsborough.” The fact is that none of the reviewers is necessarily wrong. There really is no one single influence or referent to point to when looking for explanations of Sorrentino’s five-part structure. In fact, I argue that he is intentionally blurring the lines between media references in order that his structure calls to mind a variety of media whether it be Shakespeare, Lewis

Carroll, Robert Altman films, vaudeville, or flipping radio stations. The overarching form of Trance is a kind of indeterminate media conglomeration, opening up virtually endless possibilities for associations on the part of individual readers and their own media preferences.

The smaller sections and scenes occurring within the five larger parts display a similar variety. Some have headings (a feature more prominent early in the novel); others do not. Some of the headings are descriptive of what follows, such as “1466 East Fifty-

Fourth Street” or “Summer Chronicle”; others are more authorial or directional, such as

“Dan Russell wants to know:” or “Meanwhile . . . .” Some sections are separated by the

SLA’s Naga symbol (the seven headed cobra); others are not (the symbol seems to pop 263 up most often when there is a decided shift in time or place; however, there is not a definitive pattern to its appearance and disappearance as a section divider). Some sections continue the book’s predominant typeface; others change size, appear in italics, or change typefaces altogether. Again, this variety allows for myriad media associations on the part of readers, but perhaps even more, Sorrentino’s textual pyrotechnics and never-the-same-page-twice variety are representative of the fast of the American media machine, the instability of the easily malleable media viewpoints (i.e., Patty-as- victim turns, in a mere moment it seems, into Patty-as-enemy of the state), and the MTV- induced attention-deficit image montages that have become so commonplace in the contemporary media marketplace. Yet another way of spinning Sorrentino’s textual variety is, as Tom Shone keenly recognizes, as a DeLillo-like assimilation of American —as a representation of “the hiss and crackle that fills the country’s derelict spaces” (Shone 26). In short, the variety—a disorderly, almost chaotic sort of variety— displayed by Sorrentino’s form assimilates the qualities of the media frenzy that becomes the primary target of Sorrentino’s novelistic critique.

Aside from simply figuring and backgrounding his media critique, the diversity of

Sorrentino’s form also provides for a diversity of viewpoints. Indeed, Sorrentino’s form allows readers to be present in the minds of various players in this drama from the radicals, their victims, the “fascist pigs” they oppose, and even those bit players tangential to the main action. One might at first think of such diversity as a positive attribute, as any sense of diversity that displaces a kind of myopia or insular thinking would seem to be welcome, especially in light of Sorrentino’s subject matter. However, merely accepting diversity as the opposite of insularity, or even hegemony, is just too 264 simple a concept for Sorrentino’s project. Instead, he chooses to present this diversity as problematic as the insularity we would call its opposite. In Sorrentino’s view, despite a diverse collection of viewpoints, each individual continues to think insularly; therefore, collecting all these views together simply multiplies the myopia. We as readers are in the godlike position to see all points of view; however, the actual actors in the narrated events are wholly unable to see beyond themselves. The best example of this is narrated, ironically enough, through the consciousness of one of the FBI’s criminal pathologists, a man specializing in thinking like others. While lying awake one night thinking about the case, Agent Silliman (the sarcasm could not be more blatant) admits to himself, “He understands a lot of things, but he has trouble understanding these boys and girls who seem to want a different sort of government . . . . He tries to imagine what they do believe but can envision only a buzzing rush of static in his head: a void, chaotic” (374).

Silliman’s attempt to escape his own limited beliefs about the government, his attempt to inhabit even briefly the thoughts of people different than he, results in nothing but more white noise.

Sorrentino further shows the danger of a multiplicity of voices when those voices are sounding off in a less honest and more selfish way than the well-intentioned Silliman.

The scene depicting the FBI-SLA firefight—including its media coverage and Tania,

Teko, and Yolanda’s experience of that coverage—is a prime example of the corruption of a diversity of voices. The voices participating in the scene are as follows: a narrator, an FBI agent on a bullhorn, reporters on the scene, reporters on TV (as watched by the surviving three from an Anaheim hotel), and the surviving three themselves. These voices alternate rapidly throughout the eight page scene, each rarely getting in more than 265 a sentence or two before being “interrupted” by another. Furthermore, each voice “spins” the action to support its own beliefs and agenda. For instance, a TV journalist reports that the SLA is “holding the Negro residents of the house hostage” (when in actuality we know that the residents invited the SLA into their home) to which Teko responds,

“Bullshit! Fascist bullshit!” (86). A few pages later, after one of these “hostages” emerges from the house, the narrator snidely comments, “The police report later describes how an officer places ‘his foot firmly but lightly on her back to stop her voluntary and involuntary movement’” (90). Here, the narrator seems to be suggesting an excessive use of force and an inaccurate spin in the police report. Finally, in a moment of blatant editorializing (a journalistic no-no), the TV news anchor reports,

“What was a house just a few minutes ago is now a funeral pyre for the Symbionese

Liberation Army and their twisted beliefs. proving that those who live by the sword [and here the texts cuts off as it is “interrupted” by another voice] (91). In this important and telling scene, 1466 East Fifty-Fourth Street becomes the Tower of Babel. Each self- serving voice is speaking its own kind of politicized language and spinning the events in a manner favorable to its individual viewpoint. Everyone is shouting at once; no one is listening. As a result, it becomes impossible to “really” see what is happening through all the biased mediation. In a way the scene becomes a kind of microcosm for the entire novel its message about our rampant mediation and sometimes destruction of real, true, past, and present events. Overall, we can see that Sorrentino’s form not only mimics the media frenzy and thus backgrounds the critique it contains, but that form also inherently becomes a part of the critique in its Babel-like demonstration of the impossibility of communication and truth. 266

III.

As alluded to previously, Sorrentino seems, for the most part, to hew rather closely to the extratextual documentary material. Despite his own caveats to the contrary, the content of the novel follows the “plot” of the historical Hearst ordeal with remarkable closeness

(perhaps similarly to an adapted movie that hews faithfully to the book on which it is based). Through all the convoluted safehouse-, automobile-, farmhouse-, and even coast- hopping, Sorrentino continues to hew closely to the journalistic accounts of these events, perhaps at the expense of fictional readability. For example, the arguably unduly- extensive farmhouse scenes can begin to wear on readers. The novel almost seems to lapse into a kind of lull just past the 200-page mark, truly testing readers’ dedication to the text. For the sake of fictional readability and pacing, Sorrentino most certainly could have conflated and/or cut out any number of farmhouses, safehouses, or carjackings, as these events/scenes are so frequent in the history of the SLA. However, the fact is that

Sorrentino chooses to forsake fictional readability in the name of documentary information.

More than just the overarching plot structure, Sorrentino also reveals his desire to “get it right” in his inclusion of seemingly insignificant details. For instance, when speaking of Alice’s potential marriage to Eric Stump (the Steven Weed character), the narrator describes her chosen china pattern as, “Royal Green Darby Panel, Hutschenreuther cobalt blue, and Herand VBOH,” the exact description provided by McLellan and Avery in their account (Sorrentino 9, McLellan 233). A few pages later, Sorrentino makes reference to the only job Alice ever held, “working at Capwell’s, in Oakland, clerking in the stationery department for two and a quarter an hour” (11). Again, McLellan and Avery 267 provide identical details about Patty’s first/only job (230). According to both

Sorrentino’s narrator and Shana Alexander’s trial transcript, when Teko, Yolanda, Tania, and their newly taken hostage Tom Matthews (Dan Russell in the novel) went to the drive-in to avoid some of the heat from the shooting at Mel’s Sporting Goods, they saw the movie The New Centurions (Sorrentino 11, Alexander 45). When the FBI begins to investigate Jack Scott/Guy Mock, they check with his parents in Las Vegas. In both

Sorrentino’s and McLellan and Avery’s accounts, Jack happens to be in his parents’ house when the authorities arrive; however, both accounts record that because Jack happened to be executing a Yoga-inspired headstand at the time, the agents were unable to recognize him upside down as they stood at the door speaking to his father (Sorrentino

378, McLellan 434). When Jack/Guy meets with the Hearsts/Galtons to discuss

Patty/Alice and the possibility of some money coming Jack/Guy’s way, both Sorrentino’s and McLellan and Avery’s versions place that meeting at the Señor Pico restaurant

(Sorrentino 449, McLellan 459). And, of course, the list of Sorrentino’s accurate minutiae goes on.7

I include this lengthy comparison of Sorrentino’s textual details to those of the

prominent historical renderings in order to support my contention that Sorrentino is,

indeed, interested—perhaps even obsessively, down to the most minute details—in

getting the facts straight. Perhaps, then, his is a fiction that is as close to a documentary

account as one can be. However, despite the almost compulsively documentary minutiae

he includes, Sorrentino does participate in some altering and embellishing, and that

altering most often occurs within the realm of character development. For all the above-

7 One detail he does change without any discernible (to this author at least) motive is the relationship of the Soliahs. Sorrentino turns real-life siblings Kathy and Steve Soliah into fictional cousins Susan and Roger Rorvik (339). 268 stated affinity for documentary details, it is the overall presentation of the people involved that manifests Sorrentino’s mediation of the record. One such embellishment is

Sorrentino’s presentation of Teko (Bill Harris/Drew Shepard) as a frightened, paranoid little man. Of course, the historical Bill Harris would have us believe that he was a feared revolutionary, with all his army training and militant rhetoric, who would stop at nothing (killing, robbing, kidnapping) to bring down the so-called fascist insects in power in this country. One obvious, and even quite comical, example of Sorrentino’s embellishment of Teko’s weaknesses is the theft at Mel’s Sporting Goods. This incident is widely believed to have been the catalyst for the massacre on Fifty-Fourth Street, as the vehicle they abandoned at Mel’s bore a parking ticket with the address of one of the safehouses on it. This gave authorities a lead allowing them eventually to track down the other SLA members. McLellan and Avery report that Harris had stolen a bandolier at the store before being apprehended by the store’s clerk (and subsequently freed by Patty’s having sprayed gunfire at the building). However, a radio news broadcast later reported that the suspect had attempted to steal a 49-cent pair of sweat socks (McLellan 344).

Sorrentino turns this small factual error on the part of one news station into a novel-wide running joke, which serves to highlight and heighten the utter ineptitude of Teko that ultimately leads to the deaths of his revolutionary comrades. The notion that an entire

“Army” could be killed on account of a pair of sweat socks places Teko’s incompetence in neon lights. What is more, Teko’s continual refrain “It wasn’t socks,” repeated in the face of a chorus of skeptics throughout the novel, underscores Teko’s concern with image and his overall paranoia. 269

Yet another of Sorrnetino’s minor alterations of history works to heighten the fictional

Teko’s sense of paranoia. In the novel, the switch from the Pennsylvania farmhouse to the upstate New York farmhouse is precipitated by a visit from the propane man among other things. According to Joan Shimada, explaining the situation to Guy over the phone, a worker from a propane company came to the farmhouse to fill the tank and spent five minutes flirting with Tania, and as a result, “Teko is freaking the fucking hell out” (244).

According to McLellan and Avery, however, the propane man never flirted with Patty or even saw her for that matter. The propane man claims to have seen a woman “who just lay on a cot with a blanket pulled over her head while he was in the house [a duration of two hours, he claims],” and he describes Wendy Yoshimura as “a very attractive Oriental woman” (McLellan 397). According to this account, if the propane man was flirting with anyone it was Wendy/Joan, not Patty who was hiding under a blanket out of his view.

Sorrentino makes this seemingly insignificant alteration in order to send Teko into a heightened state of paranoia—in short, in order to freak Teko out. In the novel, Teko responds by striking Tania in the face and ordering all the fugitives to paint freckles on their bodies for camouflage. Once again, Sorrentino forces readers to view this supposed hard-core, visionary revolutionary leader as a petulant child who responds to his paranoia with a kind of temper tantrum. He shows us a revolutionary “leader” who cannot seem to gain control over his own emotions let alone an “Army” or a government. In the novel,

Teko is essentially characterized as a raving lunatic who is simply “playing revolutionary,” not a serious, commanding, politically savvy leader.

The Jack Scott/Guy Mock is also one Sorrentino’s favorite targets. Throughout much of the historical record—and here it should be noted that Scott himself was a major 270 source for the highly influential and sometimes sensational Rolling Stone exposés—Jack

Scott is portrayed as a kind of humanist looking only to circumvent any further violence.

He continually professed to have no particular affinity for the SLA’s revolutionary beliefs, and to prove it he claims he asked them to lay down their arms before moving to his safehouse in rural Pennsylvania. He only, therefore, harbored the fugitives for anti- violence, humanist reasons: to keep them out of the way of any further FBI fire. In the historiographies, we see a man who claims to have offered Patty her freedom while driving her cross-country to Pennsylvania, offering to drop her off anywhere she wished to go. We see a man who met with the Hearsts to serve as a go-between advocating for her safe release, only, allegedly, because he cared about her safety. In short, history has been kind to Jack Scott, if for no other reason than that Scott himself provided much of history’s material. This positive historical portrayal is perhaps furthered by the fact that no criminal charges were ever brought against Scott for his role in the Hearst ordeal.

On the other hand, Sorrentino’s Scott, tellingly renamed Mock, is a greedy self- serving man, interested only in profiting from his involvement with the SLA. The best example of this lies in Sorrentino’s treatment of the SLA book project. According to

McLellan and Avery, the Harrises and Patty had been working on a book well before the project was ever pitched to Jack Scott. In fact, McLellan and Avery have it that Bill

Harris informed Scott of the partially completed book only after they had split up post- farmhouse (with Scott in Oregon and Harris in Sacramento). By this account, the

Harrises were exploiting Jack’s writing ability and publishing contacts rather than Scott exploiting the Harrises’ inside knowledge of SLA activities (McLellan 452). McLellan and Avery also imply that the surviving SLA members’ conception of the book was as a 271 military tract, not a sensational tell-all account (402). Sorrentino, however, places the entire impetus for the book in the hands of Guy Mock. After the L.A. conflagration,

Mock hits upon the book idea, “and he figures if he presents it to the fugitives as a about their carrying on in the face of adversity, while pitching it to publishers as the

Insider Story of the Missing Heiress, things will work out fine” (139). This passage displays a plotting, and manipulative Guy Mock, who has designs on exploiting his unique position from the very beginning. By originating the book idea with Mock,

Sorrentino shows us a Mock/Scott character simply looking to cash in; a far cry from the peace-loving humanism Scott would have us believe was his motive.

Sorrentino also shows us a media savvy Mock participating in the spin doctoring practices of the media machine that is Sorrentino’s primary target. In retrospectively pondering the now-somewhat-disappointing book project, the narrator explains, “Not exactly Book-of-the-Month Club material they have to work with here. Guy had thought that by some osmotic process he could turn these dogmatic wackos into a group of impassioned moderates bearing a message of uplift, ha-ha” (312). This is, of course, not the first time in the novel that Mock thinks of the SLA, and Tania in particular, as his bankable stars. Earlier in the novel, as he thinks about “the authorized story he’ll try to peddle to Macmillan or Viking or Doubleday, and he knows that Teko, and certainly

Yolanda, are aware that the fascist insect will never die, but that they already have attained something even better: They’re handling the biggest star in America” (172).

Once again, these passages highlight Guy Mock’s selfishness and opportunism. He is primarily interested in making money—something that would, of course, place him on 272 the level with those the SLA purports to oppose in the first place—not in saving/protecting lives or waging a revolution.

Furthermore, in depicting the Scott/Mock character as someone almost wholly unsympathetic to the SLA cause (a seeming departure from the historical record),

Sorrentino is able to implant a critical mouthpiece in the novel to verbalize some of his criticisms of the SLA and the media spectacle surrounding them.8 Mock, presumably

like Sorrentino, does not buy into the SLA as a serious revolutionary counterforce.

Rather, he sees their revolutionary project as nothing more than an attempt to claim their

fifteen minutes of fame, as in this passage that comes to us via the mouth of Guy Mock:

But the politics have to take a backseat to the show. Maybe they say they want to

overthrow the government. Maybe they even believe it. But if anything these

guys’ relationship to power is parasitic. Symbiotic, if you will, heh. What they

really excel at is preempting the regularly scheduled programming. (246-47)

Mock is not, however, the only mouthpiece Sorrentino uses. Joan Shimada (the Wendy

Yoshimura character)—perhaps the most grounded and reasonable character in the whole

novel—also levels similar criticisms. Take for example her retrospective thoughts about

her summer with the SLA, which also happen to serve nicely as a summary of the entire

SLA project according to Sorrentino’s reckoning. She describes the SLA book project

and all the promises of money and fame that would result as “all the razzle-dazzle

horseshit that made her realize that there isn’t one single radical in the USA who hasn’t

spent a minute or two wondering who’d play him in the movie” (408). Through Mock

8 Interestingly, in presenting the writer character as a money-grubbing opportunist who happens to be named Mock, Sorrentino is perhaps subjecting himself—also a writer looking to cash in on the SLA story—to his own criticisms. This kind of self-awareness and self-criticism, which will be discussed further in the following section, is yet another way that Sorrentino separates himself from someone like Capote who also cashes in on a sensational true-crime story. 273 and Shimada, Sorrentino is arguing that the SLA is not a viable, socially conscious revolutionary group at all, but rather a bunch of attention-starved kids trying to snatch more than just fifteen minutes of fame or get their rich daddies’ attention by getting on

TV.

From this characterization of the revolutionaries as star-obsessed fools, Sorrentino goes one step farther, arguing that our overexposure to media has not only led these revolutionaries to an obsession with stardom, but it has also led us all to a confusion of the mediated with the real. In a vital passage, appearing at roughly the midpoint of the book, Guy and Randi Mock engage in a conversation about history and the movies, to which the narrator adds: “Movie characters as history, certainly the memory of lanky

Jimmy Stewart and little Alan Ladd coheres into something realer, more authoritative, far more satisfying than the frail group that Randi and Guy have arrived in Pennsylvania to gather up and replant” (246). Guy then goes on to describe the entire ordeal as “the fucking movie of the week” (247). The movies, the mediated images, become our frame of reference for real events. Rather than holding the movies up to “real life” to check for verisimilitude, we check the verisimilitude of our actual lives against the movies to see if we measure up. Due to our overexposure to media and our rampant mediation of our real world, Sorrentino implies that the mediated and real come to switch places in our minds.

We want nothing more than for our lives to come out just like the movies. After all, the movies are realer, more authoritative, and ultimately more satisfying than the paltry lives we claim to lead on this soundstage we call the real world.

Overall, Sorrentino’s embellishments and alterations of the historical record—his self- conscious mediations—work to give us blown-up, larger-than-life characters, characters 274 who resemble the movie stars that, according to Sorrentino, they so long to be.

Sorrentino embellishes history only so that he can turn history into a kind of movie, and in so doing he subtly (and somewhat anachronistically) critiques the out-of-control mediation that has become contemporary American culture. In short, it seems that

Sorrentino views the SLA as the stars of first true “reality TV” series. And one inevitable result of treating our lives as a television program is the loss of identity.

IV.

One of the major criticisms reviewers leveled against Trance is Sorrentino’s denying readers an explanation of or, at least, a look into Patty Hearst’s psychology. New York

Times reviewer, Tom Shone, plainly states that the book, “in the end, delivers few insights into Tania’s character” (26). Tom Paine, in Book World, laments, “sadly no rounded, living, breathing Tania, no literary reincarnation of a flesh-and-blood Patty

Hearst emerges in the novel. There’s no explanation of how her change from preppy to revolutionary occurred” (4). Using quite similar language, Evan Hughes of the New

York Review of Books argues, “Tania and the others are not flesh-and-blood characters.

The novel’s short glimpses into [the revolutionaries’] past lives hold out the promise of fuller portraits that never materialize. . . . The SLA members are often treated less as people than as objects of a clever mockery that leaves them consistently upstaged by their author” (40). Elsewhere Hughes adds, “They aren’t quite real enough for us to care about” (40).9 Sorrentino has directly answered these criticisms saying, “With Patricia

9 Oddly, there is one reviewer who does read the Patty’s character as real enough. The Kirkus reviewer calls the Tania character “pleasingly complex” (505). This sentiment, however, is an anomaly. More than likely, the reviewer is responding to the character’s mysteriousness—or lack of characterization, as it 275

Hearst, or rather with the character Alice Galton, . . . I assiduously left her blank, or at most ambiguous, and a good portion of the rest of the book is others seeing in her whatever they want to find” (Wild). He then snidely adds a direct shot at his reviewers:

“I should mention parenthetically that to me this is probably the most obvious of Trance’s conceits. But some reviewers, at least here in the USA, have seemed especially annoyed that I don’t ‘deliver’ Patty Hearst” (Wild). Often it is unsafe to take an author at his word in regard to his purpose in writing a particular piece (one has only to look at my above comments regarding Sorrentino’s “Author’s Note” for an example); however, in this case it seems appropriate to do so.

In regard to the view of Tania as a vessel for others to fill as they please, neither Guy

Mock nor Joan Shimada acts as a kind of authorial mouthpiece. In this case, it is Lydia

Galton (the Catherine Hearst character).10 In one of Lydia’s lengthy, pensive

monologues (of which there are quite a few late in the novel), she hits upon the

following:

I think they [the media] are trying to take some of her for themselves or to put

something of themselves in her. . . . She belongs to them now. Day after day in

the newspapers, on the television. You lose something. You become a reflection,

all detail and very little depth. It’s as if she’s in a trance, the glowing replica of

every living soul’s fears and wishes . . . . She is exactly what they say she is.

When her presence is no longer required on the television and in the papers, the

were—as complexity. In actuality, the character is more underdeveloped than anything else—and for good reason, as I hope to show in the remainder of this section. 10 The following passage and others like it are likely the impetus behind Tom Paine’s comment that Tania’s mother is a more interesting character than Tania herself (4). Indeed, Sorrentino turns the largely unsympathetic historical figure of Catherine Hearst into a far more interesting fictional character through passages like those that follow. 276

day she stops, perhaps she will have come to herself. But I know that the girl she

comes to won’t be the one we knew. (462)

This passage is striking for two primary reasons. First, Sorrentino, through Lydia

Galton, conveys his essential idea that Alice/Patty is not in control of her own identity.

She is owned by the media, by the people reading and watching the media, by the SLA, and even by her parents. She has become an image on which to trade, not a human being to come to know and understand. But even more, not only does this passage explicitly communicate Patty’s loss of identity due to excessive mediation, but it also becomes a prime example of the very problem it serves to point out. In the passage, we also see a self-aware Lydia—not an image often associated with the historical Catherine Hearst who appeared to be more interested in images than depth anyway—coming to terms with the fact that she and her husband have also participated in the very identity crisis she diagnoses. In order for her to reflect that Alice “belongs to them now,” Lydia must first admit (albeit somewhat implicitly) that she and Hank at once owned Alice’s image as well. Her recognition that when Alice comes out of this she will not be the same girl is also a recognition that the girl she used to be was more a result of what Lydia and Hank wanted to see in her than a manifestation of her own individual identity. Therefore, this passage seems to be filled with a kind of stoic remorse for having begun the process of mediation that ultimately strips Alice of her own identity long before the media or anyone else got involved. Lydia’s admission is perhaps even more interesting in light of the fact that the historical Catherine Hearst is a member of the family that helped to originate some of the media excesses that Sorrentino now critiques. 277

As Lydia Galton discovers above, the media are a prime culprit in the game of trading on Tania’s image. Just like Guy Mock and the SLA (see the pervious section), the media view Tania as a bankable star, an eternally salable image. In one key scene, Tania goes to an all-night movie marathon at the drive-in with Joan Shimada and Susan Rorvik (the

Kathy Soliah character). As she begins watching the movies, Tania notices, “They all seemed to be about her. Not in their particulars, but in their design, in their narrative pattern (396). Her name is used as a punchline in one movie, and another movie opens with a kidnap scene eerily similar to her own ordeal. An indignant Tania cries out,

“They’re stealing my life” (400). Like her mother and father as cited above, the media also feel free to see in Tania what they desire to see. And just like the abundance of

“ripped from the headlines” crime dramas we currently endure (think, for instance, of the

Law and Order franchise), the media machine in the time of Alice/Patty sees in her a story to sell, a phenomenon to exploit, a narrative whose possibilities have not yet been exhausted. Again, Alice/Patty’s identity, as plastered on movie screens across the nation, seems to belong to those around her more than her.

With an eye toward their own media portrayal, the law enforcement authorities also participate in the manipulation of Tania’s image. As the FBI barges into the Morse

Avenue apartment where Tania and Joan are apprehended, the narrator, seemingly filtered through Tania’s own consciousness, reasons:

When they couldn’t rescue her, they relabeled her. Made her a common criminal.

Such was the phrase used by the attorney general of the USA. Simple as

switching a tag. Named her a criminal and then came gunning for her, burned her

lover and her friends. All it took was the potency of a new classification. (501) 278

This passage describes Tania’s switch from victim to fugitive—or as the fictional Guy

Mock quips in a near rhyme, from heiress to terrorist (172)—as yet another symptom of people seeing in Tania what it is they want/need to see in her. In this case, in order to track her across the country, the FBI needs to see her as something other than a helpless, unwilling victim; they need her to be a criminal fugitive in order to justify their aggressive tracking of her and the Harrises/Shepards.

Finally, Sorrentino does not except himself from the group of Tania-image exploiters.

After all, he has written (and presumably profited from) a novel about that very image.

He is just as guilty as the filmmakers and FBI men in his novel, and like his Lydia

Galton, he is well aware of it. One example of Sorrentino’s claiming ownership of

Tania’s image is his presentation of her famous eulogy communiqué. After the death of their comrades, the “SLA Three” recorded a lengthy statement eulogizing their fallen brothers and sisters. Only Tania’s portion of this document is reprinted in the novel, but curiously, it is printed in near verbatim. The first major difference between the actual recorded communiqué and Sorrentino’s reworking thereof is his excising of the curse words and militaristic language. He removes the harsher language—as in when Patty refers to bourgeois values as “fucked-up”—and he tones down the militaristic rhetoric— as in when Patty talks about Gabi’s prowess with a gun—choosing instead to concentrate on the positive lessons she learned from the fallen SLA members (McLellan 365, 366).

For instance, instead of the several lines about Gabi’s military ability, Sorrentino’s Tania, though mentioning her shotgun skill, chooses to focus more fully on Gabi’s patience, gentleness, and sense of justice (Sorrentino 174). Aside from simply censoring the language and toning down the rhetoric, Sorrentino, as novelists are wont to do, also 279 renders the language of the communiqué more aesthetically pleasing. One example occurs in the very first sentence. Sorrentino transforms “the fascist pig media has, of course, been painting a typical distorted picture of these beautiful sisters and brothers”

(McLellan 365) into “the pig media waddles up to the trough to feast upon [our brothers’ and sisters’] brutalized remains” (Sorrentino 174). Onward throughout his presentation of the communiqué, Sorrentino beautifies Tania’s message with clearer, more poignant imagery and more all-around aesthetically pleasing diction and syntax.

One might be tempted to view these seemingly insignificant alterations as Sorrentino merely exercising his novelistic license to make Tania more articulate and therefore make the book sound better. However, Sorrentino declines the use of such license when presenting the documents produced by other SLA members. For instance, the paragraph excerpted from Wendy Yoshimura/Joan Shimada’s letter to her imprisoned boyfriend is produced verbatim (down to the double exclamation points) (501). On two different occasions, Sorrentino reprints documents from Cinque verbatim: Cin’s message to Hank

Galton declaring “you do indeed know me” and his early letter, written from prison, explaining how Cin became the man he is today (157, 190).11 In short, Tania’s

communiqués are the only ones Sorrentino touches up; hers is the only image he seeks to

make his own. Like the characters discussed above, Sorrentino himself sees in Tania

what he wants to see in her. And his control of her image is never more apparent than when he presents the so-called “Tania Interview.” This document was recorded by the

11 There is one minor—and largely unexplainable—exception to Sorrentino’s verbatim presentation of Cinque’s prison letter. Sorrentino does retain the myriad typos and misspellings that appear in the original (at least as it is printed in McLellan and Avery’s text); however, he adds a misspelling of his own. Sorrentino has Cin misspelling firecracker as firer cracker; whereas, McLellan and Avery’s reprint of the document has him spelling the word correctly. Outside of this one inexplicable alteration, the letter is produced word-for-word. 280 surviving SLA members during their stay in the Pennsylvania farmhouse. It was meant to demonstrate Tania’s full conversion from mere Patty, and the transcript was slated to appear in the SLA book that never came to fruition. In Trance, Sorrentino imagines the scene surrounding the interview’s creation and in so doing intersperses lines from the interview. Once again, in her responses he takes hold of Tania’s language, smoothing its rough edges, making her the articulate intellectual he wants her to be. Aside from touching up her recorded responses, however, Sorrentino places the focus of the scene on the questions, piling up question after question without always allowing time for her to respond until the entire scene dissolves into a sea of unanswered narratorial questions.

Furthermore, the questions do not appear in quotation marks, leading to ambiguity as to whether it is Adam K. Trout asking the questions of a physical Tania on tape or the narrator asking the questions in a more general way. Clearly by the end of the scene, once the context of the interview itself has been blown up, the questions belong to the narrator. In focusing on questions like “Who is she now,” “Does she really hate her parents,” and “Did she choose the SLA” and allowing such questions to hang in the air without direct answer, he is suggesting that the questions remain, forever unanswered, always ambiguous (304-05). When he does offer one of Tania’s answers, he always prefaces it with the phrase “On the tape, she says” intimating that what she says on the tape, coached and scripted, is far from a real answer to these complex questions.

On top of that, Sorrentino’s narrator offers telling interjections throughout the interview. After each of Tania’s answers, the narrator—and at this point it should be noted that it is easy to conflate narrator and author due to the overall lack of unified narratorial voice throughout the novel—rhetorically repeats, “Does that make sense?” 281

This refrain, which surprisingly sounds quite sincere in its context, serves to undercut the reliability and authority of Tania’s taped answers suggesting that the “real answers” to such questions are far deeper and more complex than those Tania is coached to provide.

Also, after the taped Tania denies her love for Cujo, the narrator sarcastically responds,

“Hmmmm” (306). Finally, after the pile of unanswered questions becomes too much, the scene ends with the narrator’s brief analysis: “So many questions. They proffer themselves. Though most go unanswered, like prayers” (307). Not only does this important scene work as a kind of critique of the pre-fabricated, scripted “interview,” but even more tellingly it signals the narrator’s (and Sorrentino’s?) takeover of the interview, hijacking of “Tania’s” ability to speak on her own behalf.

In his alteration of both these Tania communiqués, Sorrentino shows that he, too, is participating in the need to see in Tania/Patty whatever it is he wants to see in her. He, too, plays with her image and puts it to his own use, for his own gain. However, he is conscious of what he is doing, just as Lydia Galton (albeit too late) becomes conscious.

In fact, this notion of Patty-as-vessel becomes one of the major themes of the novel.

Furthermore, Patty’s loss of identity—she belongs to them now—is a result of rampant mediation of her and her image coming from all sides. And in response to the hypothetical question “Why write a Patty Hearst novel in 2005,” Sorrentino seems to be saying that the contemporary American media torrent puts all of us in danger of losing ourselves to a kind of rampant mediation of our reality. Furthermore, he figures this mediation through his own fictional, formal mediation of historical documents. He places the mediation of the documentary in the foreground as opposed to its usual place as an implied, backgrounded given. Mediation becomes the mode, not the symptom. 282

Through this fictional form, Sorrentino seems to be warning: if we continue to chase after depthless images—either vicariously through the carefully crafted images of the stars we track and admire or in our honing of our own images to fit with whatever constructed lifestyle we choose—we may suffer the same fate as Tania. When the lights go on, we too may be polished bright with our “own blank renown” (Sorrentino 505).

Encyclopedia Vollmannica: The Ice-Shirt as Documentary Fiction Masterpiece

I.

In some ways, it is clear how Sorrentino, as well as other novelists who rely heavily on and manipulate documentary evidence, carry on the legacy of high postmodern writers like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. At the surface level, the same could be easily said about William Vollmann. In fact, many a reviewer—at least the reviewers who are not exasperated with Vollmann’s density—has claimed Vollmann to be the next _____ (fill in with Pynchon, Joyce, Faulkner, etc.). In one example, Charles Monaghan of the

Washington Post’s Book World claims:

there are at least three writers now living and working who can be ranked among

the eight or 10 greatest novelists America has produced, joining the ranks of

Melville and Hawthorne, Twain and James, Wharton and Faulkner. The three are

William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and the comparatively unknown William T.

Vollmann. (11)

Larry McCaffery, too, makes similar comparisons regarding Vollmann’s work.

McCaffery equates Vollmann’s “monstrous elegance, utter fearlessness, and voracious appetite” with that of Whitman, Melville, Pynchon, and Thomas Wolfe (“Moth” 310). 283

He also likens Vollmann’s fictional output to an early 1930s Faulkner who “was turning out one masterpiece after another” during that time (McCaffery, “Moth” 312). On one hand, it is entirely appropriate for Monaghan, McCaffery, and others to place Vollmann in line with Pynchon, Gaddis, and even Melville and Faulkner due to Vollmann’s enormous scope and mastery of information, or what critic Tom LeClair has called his prodigy (used to mean the monstrosity and unusualness that excites awe and amazement).

However, there is another level at which it is grossly unfair to tag Vollmann as the offspring of Gaddis and Pynchon.12 Vollmann avoids the cynicism and aloofness that

has come to be associated with writers of the high postmodern era (however one chooses

to define that nebulous period). Even in his works that focus on whores, junkies, and

street life in general—the shock factor, of course, being a popular trope of the high

postmodernists—he does so not out of cynicism, but out of a genuine desire to reveal the

humanity of otherwise outcast people. Characterizing the metafictionists’ cynicism as

their teaching us readers not even to trust them, Madison Smartt Bell keenly asserts,

“Here Vollmann’s break with the metafictionists is complete. While he is indeed as agile

in intratextual maneuvers as a Barth or a Coover, he is, at the same time, as sincere as

(yes!) Trollope—or Melville or Dickens or Tolstoy” (44). If Vollmann is adept at

manipulating the fictional (and metafictional) pyrotechnics inherited from his

predecessors of the ‘60s and ‘70s, he utilizes these techniques in the service of a kind of

(perhaps even conservative) humanism. Or as LeClair puts it, “If [his] works exceed the

social politeness of most realism and the political correctness of [his] decade, they do so

12 Indeed, Vollmann’s first published novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, has most often drawn comparisons to Pynchon, and most especially Gravity’s Rainbow, despite the fact that Vollmann has denied any similarity to Pynchon and admitted that he hadn’t even read Gravity’s Rainbow until after Angels appeared in print (McCaffery, “An Interview” 20). 284 from, if anything, a too-earnest concern for readers and other living things” (“Prodigious

Fiction” 16). At bottom, Vollmann is truly most concerned (simplistic as it might sound) with making the world a better place for the human beings inhabiting it.

All of this would seem to render Vollmann a mass of contradictions. Here we have an at-first-sight postmodernist who, rather than displaying an exasperation with this world, is sincerely attempting to dig in and change it. In an interview with Larry McCaffery,

Vollmann admits that he believes literature, like religion, can potentially help people

“change a few specific things” about their lives and surroundings (McCaffery, “An

Interview” 17). Vollmann is not trying to play Superman and save the world; he is merely trying to incite his readers to effect small changes in their immediate lives and their attitudes toward fellow human beings. How can such a complex novelist be working from a rather simple, and timeless, agenda? Again, the contradiction is striking.

This notion of contradiction becomes key to any understanding of Vollmann’s work.

While Vollmann’s heavy reliance on documentary evidence and historical discourse grants him a spot in this particular chapter—and, by the way, his use thereof is quite different from, if not directly opposite of, Sorrentino’s—he manages to accomplish much more. Throughout this project, we have seen the variety of purposes contemporary documentary fiction can serve. We have seen Julia Alvarez and Lewis Nordan fictionalizing history to alter collective memory and advocate for those who have been silenced; we have seen René Steinke and Charles Johnson modify public sentiment about notable figures through false biography; we have seen Colson Whitehead and Mark

Winegardner represent the failure of any search for “true history”; and we have seen

Christopher Sorrentino parody media coverage and critique the contemporary creation of 285 popular history. All these novels achieved these individual accomplishments with mastery. These novels are some of the best contemporary documentary novels available, and therefore, considering our age, they are among the best contemporary novels we have. However, Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt stands above the rest because it manages to do what the other novels do and does so successfully (not perfectly, but successfully).13 The

Ice-Shirt, then, is an (if not the) encyclopedic contemporary documentary novel—a

monstrous, all-consuming entity that embodies this world and embraces all its

contradictions in a single text that can only be called brilliant.14

II.

The Ice-Shirt is the first installment in Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series. The series is

designed to outline the conflicts between Europeans and natives throughout what

Vollmann deems to be the seven major eras in the development of North America. Aside

from just animating these conflicts, Vollmann has designed each dream to revolve around

the European introduction of a new weapon or technology into the native culture that

contributes to the erosion of that native culture (i.e., the Greenlanders’ introduction of the

iron axe in The Ice-Shirt, or the obvious titular weaponry in the sixth dream, The Rifles).

So far, Vollmann has completed four of the seven dreams: the first, The Ice-Shirt,

depicting the Norse discovery of North America; the second, Fathers and Crows,

highlighting the clash between the French Jesuits and the Iroquois in Canada; the third,

Argall, focusing on the relationship of John Smith and Pocahontas; and the sixth, The

13 Here I use The Ice-Shirt as a representative example, as all of the novels so far published in the Seven Dreams series (dreams 1, 2, 3, & 6) could be said to accomplish this. 14 In asserting that The Ice-Shirt embraces contradictions, I am in no way suggesting that Vollmann attempts to reconcile those contradictions. On the contrary, as will be discussed later, it seems that Vollmann relishes the fact of these contradictions and seeks only to represent them, not resolve them. 286

Rifles, simultaneously dealing with Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the

Northwest Passage and the contemporary Canadian government’s oppression of Eskimo cultures in the Arctic regions of Canada.

In a final note in The Ice-Shirt, Vollmann reveals his vision for this entire series: “My aim in Seven Dreams has been to create a ‘Symbolic History’ – that is to say, an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth” (397). In a description of the project that was sent to publishers—and can now be found appended to Larry

McCaffery’s collection of “Vollmanniana,” Expelled From Eden—Vollmann adds this clarification: “In no way will Seven Dreams be a factual history of the dispossession of

American Indians. It will, however, be erected upon a foundation of fact” (Vollmann,

“Seven Dreams” 448). In that same document, Vollmann admits that the series is “meant to beguile and entertain, but also to instruct by presenting a poetically true interpretation of real events” (447, my emphasis). Finally, Vollmann mentions this concept once again with a memorable turn of phrase in a letter to publishers defending Fathers and Crows against editorial cuts: “But I have been able to go beyond histories such as [Bruce]

Trigger’s [history of the Huron people] by making use of the novelist’s tool of character

. . . . And I’ve also drawn on my imagination—but my imagination appropriately filtered and disciplined” (Vollmann, “Letter” 314, 15). It becomes clear from these snippets that

Vollmann’s overall project in this Seven Dreams series is to offer an informed and well- researched history—that is, to “get it right”—without denying his imagination and the novelist’s ability to render “truths” free from what he calls a “slavish literalism”

(Vollmann, Ice-Shirt 397). 287

Though each individual dream takes its own form specific to the age and events it depicts—i.e., Argall is written in a dense mock-seventeenth-century prose, The Rifles includes a time-traveling identity crisis in which a contemporary Vollmann alter-ego

(Captain Subzero) believes himself to be Sir John Franklin, etc.—the general form and rhythm of the novels are roughly the same. Each is ostensibly collected and edited by a scribe—and bricoleur extraordinaire—named “William the Blind,” an obvious alter-ego of Vollmann himself.15 Each includes hand-drawn maps (mostly drawn by Vollmann

himself); sketches of landscapes, vegetation, and tools appropriate to lend atmosphere to

the narrated events (again sketched by Vollmann); authorial interruptions wherein

present-day Vollmann offers some connection between historical events and

contemporary conditions or adds some travelogue-like insight based on his own treks to

the historical sites; glossaries of names, places, and non-English words; and a full complement of bibliographic notes in which Vollmann reveals the sources of his

information and sometimes even his alterations of them. Furthermore, the plots of the

novels are quite irregular, often skipping from one scene to the next without typical

novelistic segue or overt causal connections. While one might be tempted to attribute

this almost anti-narrative, annalistic style to a kind of postmodern formal

experimentation, it becomes clear, especially in the case of The Ice-Shirt, that Vollmann

has borrowed this formal style from older historical forms and documents—in this case,

from the old Norse that serve as the primary source materials for The Ice-Shirt.

15 Some have speculated that this is an appropriate title, as Vollmann has had a lot of problems with his own vision throughout his life. However, when directly asked about the moniker in an interview, Vollmann seems to suggest it is less significant than that. He admits, “It’s partly playing around due to the fact that the sagas often have little monikers attached to the characters,” but he does go on to offer a slightly deeper potential reason as well, “It’s maybe especially appropriate because I’m always trying to understand or ‘see’ things and I never really do” (McCaffery, “Moth” 319). 288

These sagas, like Vollmann’s novel, contain short sections with descriptive titles that follow largely chronologically if not causally. The plots of these sagas put one in the mind of matter-of-factness, eliminating the cultural and political impositions accompanying the romantic, comedic, or tragic emplotment for which Hayden White argues. In fact, Vollmann explicitly comments upon the plots of the Norse sagas, and consequently upon his own lack of ability in the area of plotting, in an interview with

Larry McCaffery:

[M]y work tends to be composed of building blocks that aren’t exactly self-

sufficient but are at least individually cast and machined. I feel like I learned a lot

from the old Norse sagas. What I admired about them most is the way that one

event follows another with beautiful inevitability. My biggest weakness had to do

with plotting. As far as I am concerned, when it comes to plot the sagas have no

equal on earth. (McCaffery, “An Interview” 20)

As a result of this episodic plot structure, we get uneven character development. In

The Ice-Shirt for instance, there is hardly a character in the first half of the book that is terribly memorable or even identifiable after the page has been turned. This is due to the saga-inspired genealogy style of the first half of the novel where Vollmann offers a much condensed history of Norse colonization of Iceland and Greenland. He does so by offering snippets of histories of Norse kings and their roles in these colonizations. He draws information about these kings from the Heimskringla, the Norse book of kings which, like the first half of The Ice-Shirt, seems most interested in providing matter-of- fact information about the kings and their reigns as opposed to allowing readers to peer into the character of these kings in a more novelistic way. Therefore, the early parts of 289

The Ice-Shirt are similar to a mini-Heimskringla, or perhaps even an extended version of the openings to the Norse sagas which begin with lengthy genealogical lists. Either way, the result is a lack of novelistic character development. Perhaps only Eirik the Red appears as a knowable character in the novel’s first half, and that is likely only because his offspring become the protagonists of the novel’s second half. The second half of the novel is a bit more character-driven though it retains the episodic structure of the early parts of the novel.

There has been much talk about the nature of these sagas in relation to the historical record. Are they to be considered historical documents or are they primarily literary endeavors? The currently prevailing thought is that the sagas are an indecipherable mix of fact and fiction, history and invention. As renowned Norse scholar Gwyn Jones has put it, “[M]uch of what was long accepted as a bedrock of fact is now seen as a crumbling cellarage of unverifiable tradition, skilled invention, tendentious evidence, and the vast and variegated book-learned lumber of antiquarian heads” (14). Indeed Magnus

Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, translators of what is often considered the definitive version of the sagas, cite this kind of hybridity as the very root of saga literature: “That is how saga-writing started: a unique blend of entertainment and learning, fact and fantasy, history and story-telling, literary endeavour [sic] and family pride, pagan past and

Christian present” (37). Therefore, any sense we have that these “historical documents” are embellished, unreliable, and even inauthentic (by contemporary historiographic standards) is to be expected. Most scholars have come to believe that these sagas were never meant to be treated as historical documents in the first place; they simply became that in the absence of other more stable forms of documentary evidence about the period. 290

Vollmann is well aware of this, as his description of the Seven Dreams project echoes the sentiment in the above-cited statement by the translators: “Each of its seven volumes is a self-contained work meant to beguile and entertain, but also to instruct by presenting a poetically true interpretation of real events” (“Seven Dreams” 447, my emphases). In

The Ice-Shirt, just as in the saga literature on which it is based, contradiction becomes the rule. This is the legacy of the sagas themselves, and Vollmann has brilliantly exploited the possibilities of that legacy in his novel.

There is no question, then, that Vollmann is attempting to write something akin to the

Flateyjarbók, a massive Norse collection of tales and texts, which even includes the

“Grænlendinga Saga.” About the Flateyjarbók, Vollmann notes:

The Flateyjarbók contains Grænlendinga Saga but not Eirik’s Saga. In this novel

I have sometimes pretended that it does, that the Flateyjarbók is a sort of celestial

Macropedia that contains everything we know about Vinland and the Norse

Greenlanders. As it stands, the range of material in the Flateyjarbók is impressive

enough. (378)

That imagined Macropedia into which Vollmann transforms the Flateyjarbók in his novel would seem to be the ideal to which he is striving in the novel. In creating his own

Macropedia, he has drawn from a variety of primary sources. He pulls the early material about the Norse kings from the Heimskringla, the mythological material regarding Loki and Hel and the underworld from the prose Edda, and the second half of the novel most closely follows the “Grænlendinga Saga.” However, Vollmann also includes poignant scenes from “Eirik’s Saga.” He admits in a note on sources, “I have conflated the accounts of the Vinland voyages in the Tale of the Greenlanders and Eirik’s Saga. There 291 are many contradictions, so many as to baffle the most ingenious interpreters. My conflation is no more satisfactory than the rest” (397).16 This immense conflation of a variety of sources—sources that themselves conflate history, fiction, myth, biography, geography, and more—into one text creates what can only be described as a unique reading experience (to which my description here can hardly do justice). However, the unrivaled accomplishment of The Ice-Shirt rests not merely in its unique structure but in its immense scope, encompassing of contradiction, and ability to accomplish, in a single novel, everything the other novels addressed in this study were able to accomplish individually on a smaller scale.

III.

Earlier in this project, with Lewis Nordan and Julia Alvarez, we saw authors of contemporary documentary novels advocating for the underrepresented through their

16 In light of this admitted conflation, it may be helpful at this point to provide a brief summary of which key events in the novel are derived from which of the two sagas. In “Grænlendinga Saga,” Freydis voyages to Vinland with Helgi and Finnbogi (this occurring after the voyage of Karlsefni and Gudrid). “Eirik’s Saga” places Freydis (absent of Helgi and Finnbogi) in Vinland at the same time as Karlsefni and Gudrid. Obviously, then, Freydis’s massacre of Helgi and Finnbogi and their company only occurs in “Grænlendinga Saga.” In this case, Vollmann is following the “Grænlendinga Saga” for the most part, but conflating the two in allowing Freydis/Helgi Finnbogi to be in Vinland at the same time as Karlsefni and Gudrid. On the other hand, the scene in which Freydis frightens off the Skrælings by smacking her breast with a sword appears only in “Eirik’s Saga.” Also, the Skrælings’ response to the introduction of the iron axe is different in the two sagas. In both sagas, the result is that the Skræling ultimately rejects the axe and tosses it into the water. In “Grænlendinga Saga,” the Skræling first strikes down one of his mates before tossing aside the axe (the version Vollmann uses); however, in “Eirik’s Saga,” the Skræling only strikes a rock causing the axe to break and therefore appear worthless. The talking corpse foretelling Gudrid’s future appears in both sagas, as do the depictions of unfair trade between the Norse and the Skrælings. Thorvald is killed by arrow in both sagas; however, there is disagreement as to where he is hit. Vollmann follows the “Grænlendinga Saga” in placing the arrow underneath Thorvald’s armpit; “Eirik’s Saga” describes him being struck in the groin. The mysterious encounter Gudrid has with her look-alike occurs only in “Grænlendinga Saga.” But the encounter with the so-called Unipeds occurs only in “Eirik’s Saga.” Also, the scene, during the return trip, in which Bjarni Grimolfsson’s men become stranded and draw lots to decide who will take the lifeboat to safety and who will remain and die appears only in “Eirik’s Saga.” These examples clearly illustrate Vollmann’s conflation of the two sagas serving as the primary sources for The Ice-Shirt. Vollmann selects the scenes (admittedly, he often selects the most fantastic scenes) from each saga that will fit best with his novelistic purpose. If one had to choose, it appears that Vollmann more closely follows “Grænlendinga Saga,” which makes sense as it is the one appearing in the Flateyjarbók, Vollmann’s idea of the ur-text of Norse history and culture. 292 subtle reconstitution of a designated community’s collective memory. This, too, is something Vollmann attempts to, and ultimately does, accomplish. While he does not necessarily attack the problem from the collective memory approach—there simply are not people who can actually remember the Vikings’ tenth-century descent upon North

America, and any collective popular conception of these events has most likely been spun as mythology—Vollmann does clearly take the side of the native North Americans and native Greenlanders in his presentation of the attempted colonization of North America.

Regardless of approach, like Nordan and Alvarez, Vollmann hopes that his novel will inspire new thinking about old events; less glorification of European ingenuity and courage; and more empathy for those who were uprooted and destroyed, literally and figuratively, in the process.

The first, and perhaps most obvious novelistic move on behalf of the native peoples is his characterization of the Norse people’s overall disregard for and savage aggression toward the natives they encounter.17 In some obviously fictionalized details—although

the sagas are not terribly kind to Freydis in the first place—Vollmann pictures Freydis as

an arrogant, ruthless, ferocious human being. When filling in some of her inner thoughts,

Vollmann reveals, “[Freydis] hated the Skrælings for being little and dark, like thralls”

(225). Clearly drawing on contemporary conceptions of the Other that have arisen out of

postcolonial theory, Vollmann somewhat anachronistically portrays Freydis as

mindlessly “Othering” those who are not exactly like her, thus allowing her to define

17 In comparing the documents regarding Norse exploration of North America to those regarding Norse exploration of continental Europe, Gwyn Jones argues, “the western voyages were recorded almost exclusively by sympathetic and admiring northern historians and saga-men. The resulting documents are not pot-pourris [sic] of blood and destruction, but appear (for Vikings) restrained and reasonable” (15). Therefore, in taking the side of the so-called Skrælings, Vollmann is essentially attempting to put some of the ruthlessness and savagery of the Norse back into the historical record. 293 herself as superior and to distance herself from them enough to assuage her conscience as she proceeds to destroy them. Later, once the Norse parties have arrived on Vinland to set up camp and attempt to colonize the area, Vollmann has Freydis command her charges in this way: “As for the Skrælings, I say again: Do with them whatever you like.

Rape them, rob them, or make them your thralls; it’s all the same to me” (315). Again veering from the documented evidence in the sagas, but clearly in line with their overall characterization of her ruthlessness, Vollmann uses Freydis to make explicit the

European attitude toward those supposedly standing in their way.18 There is certainly

evidence of a clash between the natives and the Norse invaders, but Vollmann leaves no

doubt as to his perception of the Norse mindset in this frank expression of Freydis’s

biases.

Furthermore, Vollmann even uses language and spelling to portray the Europeans’

disrespect for the natives. When Freydis speaks the name of the Micmac spirit KLUSKAP

Vollmann spells it GLOOSKAP after the spelling recorded in Silas T. Rand’s Micmac

dictionary in which he chose to spell all the words phonetically (based on English

phonetics, of course) rather than honor the native spellings. In a letter exchanged

between the author and Ruth Holmes Whitehead of the Nova Scotia Museum, Whitehead explains, “To use Rand’s spelling is considered somehow almost insulting, as if it didn’t matter how one spelled it because it’s only Indians” (Vollmann, Ice-Shirt 359). Based on this information, Vollmann admits, “I have made Freydis spell KLUSKAP’s name after

Rand’s fashion in order to conveniently represent her hatred and ignorance” (359). In

another similar note that addresses the issue of the Norse lumping native Greenlanders

18 Though the sagas are not as harsh in characterizing Freydis as Vollmann, there is evidence that she was not a well-liked or even respected woman. For instance, the Grænlendinga Saga includes the simple but telling phrase, “Freydis was an arrogant, overbearing woman” (52). 294 and native North Americans together under the moniker “Skrælings”—which, by the way, means something along the lines of “dried-up savage wretches” (372)—Vollmann concludes “that the main point [these two native groups] held in common was the

Norsemen’s sweeping inclusion into a single inferior race” (407). In revealing notes such as these, Vollmann makes his postcolonial agenda quite clear. He is certainly not subtle in characterizing the hatred, ignorance, and all-around ruthlessness of the European would-be colonizers in their relations with the native peoples.

Perhaps a more subtle but equally telling example of Vollmann’s feelings regarding the Norse explorations can be found in his presentation of Bjarni Herjolfsson. It is thought that Bjarni was the first European to actually sight North America. As the sagas have it, Bjarni was blown off course when traveling from Iceland to Greenland and accidentally came across what the Norse called Vinland, Helluland, and Markland (areas associated with the present-day North American areas around Newfoundland, Labrador, and Baffin Island); however, he refused to go ashore despite the pleadings of his crewmen. After spending some few years in Greenland, Bjarni traveled back to Norway where he was sharply criticized for his “great lack of curiosity” in regard to these unexplored countries (Grænlendinga Saga 54). Here the sagas characterize the Norse society as one enthralled with exploration and expansion (after all, they had already colonized Iceland and Greenland). Vollmann picks up on this characterization in his relating of Bjarni’s voyage:

Bjarni stayed with his father [in Greenland] after [the voyage] and became a

farmer. If he had been left to his innocuous labors and ale-stupors, all would have

been well. But at the court of the Earl of Norway he was criticized for being so 295

incurious, and the whirlpool-lives sucked and sucked. Someone was bound to

come to Vinland wearing the Ice-Shirt. (128, my emphasis)

Aside from the striking inevitability associated with history here—a direct example of

Vollmann’s own earlier-cited comment about the “beautiful inevitability” of the sagas plot structures—one is also struck by a tone of sadness. If the Norse, in all their peer pressure and exploration-lust, would have just left Bjarni to his content farming life, all would have been well. Surely, all would have been well for Bjarni, as he would not have been subjected to the criticism he faced; however, one senses that Vollmann’s phrase “all would have been well” is larger than a mere reference to Bjarni’s personal peace. In this passage, Vollmann seems to intimate that Bjarni is to be commended for minding his own business and leaving well enough alone. All would certainly have been well, or at least a bit better, for the North American natives had others, like Bjarni, left their land alone.

Finally, Vollmann uses his trademark authorial intrusions to reveal the contemporary

(circa 1987) continuation of many of the oppressive attitudes and actions rooted in the first attempted colonization by the tenth-century Norse. In a section based on his 1987 trip to Greenland, Vollmann relates the following exchange: “‘They [the native

Greenlanders] are at a very low level,’ said the Danish administrator, earnestly. ‘They often do not speak Danish.’ (And I thought, how remarkable he spoke no Greenlandic!)”

(117). In two other brief relating details from the author’s trips to Newfoundland and

Nova Scotia, Vollmann tells, respectively, of parking lots paved over Native American burial grounds and the MicMac Mall that now stands as an ironic monument to the

Micmac people who once freely inhabited the now-commercialized land (314, 338-39). 296

Through these contemporary intrusions, Vollmann is able to connect contemporary forms of hegemonic oppression to the original attempted colonization by the Norse, which he sets up as a kind of distant relative to the current strains of racism in North America. As

Peter Christiansen has put it:

Thus, whereas, at least in the popular imagination, the Norse discovery of

America appears as an event without much consequence in the historical record,

Vollmann considers it the starting point of racism and imperialism in the New

World. Subsequent depredations were not modeled on what the Vikings did, but

for Vollmann they continue the same story of greed and misunderstanding. (53)

Christiansen keenly identifies one of Vollmann’s overarching arguments in this text, and along with the examples I have provided above, it is easy to see advocacy on behalf of the oppressed as one of Vollmann’s key aims and accomplishments in this text.

However, this is where one of the abovementioned contradictions creeps in. While advocating for the silenced and oppressed, Vollmann is also celebrating the culture of the oppressor. One clear way this is manifested in the novel is in the form. As aforementioned, Vollmann views the Norse sagas as having no equal in terms of plotting, and he has, quite faithfully, structured his novel(s) in strict accord with the example provided by these sagas. Rather than use his form to undermine those in power, as

Nordan does in his comic grotesque, or to allow the silenced to speak in their own voice, as Alvarez’s first-person narrative does, Vollmann drapes his postcolonial purpose in the best imitation, and therefore celebration, of Norse narrative he can muster. One might be tempted to point to Vollmann’s narrative embellishments and interpolations—some, though not all, of which are politically skewed in favor of the natives—to argue that he 297 has created some kind of anti-saga that somehow works against the Norse. However, one has only to look at the utter commitment and reverence with which Vollmann has researched, experienced, and ultimately portrayed the Norse culture. The Ice-Shirt is not a one-sided anti-saga designed to “turn the tables” on the Norse; rather, Vollmann’s novel leaves room for both the oppressor and the oppressed to have voice; for both the Norse and native cultures to be showcased and respected; for both sides of the story to come alive and continue to compete and conflict. As Vollmann, breaking into Freydis’s thoughts at the time, reflects in the novel, “Just as each country’s sky is its own shade of blue (and just as what you see depends on who shows it to you), so must one put on the same shirt over and over in different climates” (248). “William the Blind” is indeed showing us a variety of these “shades of blue,” and in living up to his moniker, he is not fully coloring those shades to us in his presentation. At different points throughout the novel, Vollmann asks readers to don different shirts, to consider, understand, and respect a variety of viewpoints, and to color the sky in whatever way they select, so long as it is an informed, well-researched selection.

IV.

With René Steinke and Charles Johnson, we saw contemporary documentary novelists creating characters out of historical personages. In their false biographies, Steinke and

Johnson put actual people to political uses in their fictional “re-creations” of those people’s lives and thoughts. Again, this is clearly one tactic Vollmann also employs in

The Ice-Shirt. He transforms a compelling and sometimes controversial historical personage, Freydis Eiriksdottir, into a fictional character who can then serve his own 298 novelistic purposes. In fact, it is possible to read the entire 211-page final section of The

Ice-Shirt as a kind of mini-fictional biography in itself. The section is entitled simply

“Freydis Eiriksdottir,” and it clearly focuses on her fateful actions in Vinland and the causes and consequences of those actions.

Before looking at Vollmann’s creation of the Freydis character, it is necessary to look at what we know biographically about Freydis the person. The sagas tell us that Freydis

Eiriksdottir was the illegitimate daughter of Eirik the Red and an unknown mother. Eirik did, however, claim her as his rightful daughter. She married Thorvard of Gardar, a rather meek farmer whom she met in Greenland. It is clear that she spent some time in

Vinland, although the two sagas disagree as to when and how she got there. According to

“Eirik’s Saga,” she joined Thorvard on Karlsefni’s colonizing expedition, and was therefore in Vinland at the same time as Karlsefni and Gudrid. The “Grænlendinga

Saga,” on the other hand, places her in Vinland after Karsefni’s group had returned.

Instead, she organizes an expedition and convinces the Icelandic merchants Helgi and

Finnbogi to gather another boatful of men to join her and increase her manpower in

Vinland. Once in Vinland, “Eirik’s Saga” tells the tale of Freydis smacking her bare breast with a sword during a Skræling attack, thus frightening the Skrælings into retreat.

The “Grænlendinga Saga” tells of Freydis arranging for the massacre of Helgi and

Finnbogi and their men, including the killing of five women by Freydis’s own hand. The two sagas clearly disagree about Freydis’s actions and how to characterize her. In

“Eirik’s Saga,” the men praise Freydis for her courage in frightening off the Skrælings in battle (100). However, the “Grænlendinga Saga” treats her as a criminal deserving of punishment for her Vinland massacre, and even outrightly proclaims her to be “an 299 arrogant, overbearing woman” (68, 52). The historical record concerning Freydis is therefore quite conflicting, leaving this historical figure open to a variety of interpretation.

For the most part in regard to Freydis, as he does with much of his novel, Vollmann more closely follows the “Grænlendinga Saga.” He does, however, conflate the two sagas in some ways. He places Freydis in Vinland at the same time as Karlsefni and

Gudrid, as does “Eirik’s Saga,” but he also has her bringing along Helgi and Finnbogi, a scene out of “Grænlandinga Saga,” at that same time. Furthermore, Vollmann keeps the primary tales about Freydis from each saga—her frightening of Skrælings and her massacre—and combines them into a single narrative. This allows him to create a kind of tension between Freydis and Gudrid (as they are in Vinland together) and to heighten the dramatic nature and overall significance of Freydis’s alleged actions in Vinland.

Already, in analyzing Vollmann’s plot choices regarding Freydis, we can see how he has begun to shape her character. Combining memorable tales from conflicting sagas into one “life” establishes Freydis as more important and central to The Ice-Shirt than she is to either saga. If one were forced to choose, Eirik the Red and Karlsefni would likely be labeled as the protagonists of the sagas; however, in combining details from the two sagas, Vollmann has elevated Freydis to a new level of signification.

Not only does Vollmann make Freydis more important, but he also works to fill in her background, her motives, and the consequences of her actions—elements absent from the somewhat spotty historical record concerning Freydis but essential to the creation of a novelistic character. Early in the novel, even before the final section which serves as a kind of fictional biography for Freydis, Vollmann allows readers a glimpse into Freydis’s 300 young life. The scene begins with one of Eirik’s sons asking his mother why she hates his sister Freydis, and Thjodhild responds that she does not hate anyone, as that would be un-Christian. However, as the glimpse continues, we see the young Freydis as neglected, alone, and therefore growing more rebellious. As a result, “[Freydis] considered herself very secret and mysterious, and gave herself airs, so that Thjodhild found her difficult to bear, and struck her to make her more obedient, but the girl only laughed brazenly” (105).

Here we see some of the formative experiences—experiences of neglect and abuse—that contribute to the arrogant and overbearing woman that Freydis would become. Similarly, when she is an adult and is thinking about perpetrating the atrocities recorded in the sagas, Vollmann again veers from the pages of the sagas to provide motives for her crimes via privileged looks into her internal thoughts. One telling example occurs when, in the novel, the Norse ships are preparing to embark. Freydis insists on outfitting her ship with the most impressive sail regardless of cost and the protests of her husband.

This move is characterized as a kind of one-upmanship over Gudrid whose ship would then be perceived as the inferior ship. Then entering Freydis’s mind, we are told the exact motives for such behavior: “for most of all she wanted her name on men’s lips; she wanted to be remembered. Her gold necklace was sometimes a heavy, choking weight upon her throat, but she had to wear what suited her” (199). Scenes such as these are clearly Vollmann’s inventions, devised to round out Freydis’s fictionalized character and provide insight into the causes of her documented adult behavior. And though scenes like these are based somewhat on what Vollmann is able to deduce about Freydis from sources such as the “Grænlendinga Saga,” there is also clearly a level on which Vollmann is carefully constructing the fictional Freydis to fit political purpose (Freydis as ruthless 301 colonizer/oppressor) he has mapped out for her in the novel. In essence, Vollmann has created a fully realized character out of a scarcely known historical personage, and he has done so in order that he can use Freydis to figure the greed, ruthlessness, and arrogance of the Norse explorers—for Vollmann, Freydis becomes a microcosm of European colonization and the resulting Eurocentric attitude.

In the case of Freydis Eiriksdottir, Vollmann presents a kind of politicized fictional biography of her in the final third of the novel; however, he is not only in the business of creating characters out of real people. Here is where another contradiction creeps in, as

Vollmann also shows that he is equally interested in creating real people out of characters, so to speak. He may have needed to “characterize” Freydis for symbolic purposes in the final section of The Ice-Shirt; however, Vollmann also felt the need to

“humanize” Gudrid, who is presented in a biased, and therefore two-dimensional, way in the saga record. In an interview, Vollmann reveals the thought process behind this move:

[I]n both [sagas] Gudrid is the steadfast woman who is beautiful and fortunate and

marries well. Everyone admires her and she seems to be a good person. And that

was how I originally wanted to portray her. But the more I read over the sagas the

more I felt irritated about Gudrid because she seemed too much like a goody-

goody. I also started seeing that everything she was doing was really to her

advantage, which to my mind actually made her worse than Freydis. (McCaffery,

“An Interview” 16)

As a result of Vollmann’s notion that Gudrid is portrayed as unnaturally good in the historical record, in the novelistic account we see the narrator subtly undercutting some of her perceived goodness. For example, in response to an outburst of anger from 302

Freydis, the following is said about Gudrid (ostensibly from her own viewpoint, though filtered through a third-person presentation): “Gudrid who had always been able to rule

(so she fancied) through a beautifully calculated sweetness, intensely disliked Freydis’s way of managing her affairs” (225, my emphasis). In this example, Vollmann keeps the recorded sentiment from the saga record—that Gudrid, of course, ruled with a sweetness that could easily be contrasted to Freydis’s nastiness—but he also undercuts that record with sarcastic narratorial remarks. In his characterization, or rather humanization, of

Gudrid, Vollmann fully utilizes his temporal distance to “read between the lines” and

“correct” the biases of the saga writers, who clearly favored Gudrid. In fact, in the same interview cited above, Vollmann remarks, “If the anonymous authors of the two sagas could read what I have written, they’d probably feel I had very stubbornly and wrongheadedly distorted the character of this virtuous woman they admired. But I feel that everything I’ve done with them is implicit in the tale” (McCaffery, “An Interview”

16). Vollmann feels he is making her more “real” than the saga writers could have by stripping away their cultural biases. Therefore, The Ice-Shirt contains not only something of a mini-fictional biography in which the real-life Freydis is crafted into a well-rounded character complete with motivations and internal thought processes, but it also contains humanized versions of two-dimensional historical “characters.” In essence, at separate points in the novel, Vollmann is both making characters out of historical people and people out of historical characters.

303

V.

Both Colson Whitehead and Mark Winegardner utilized journalist figures in their novels in order to represent the act of searching for “true history” and the inevitable failure of such a search. Though there is no journalist figure proper in The Ice-Shirt—unless of course we count the Vollmann figure who pops up periodically in the novel, as Vollmann himself has spent a large part of his writing career supporting himself through journalistic pieces—the novel is also figuring the inevitable failure of any search for “true history” or the most “authentic” source of historical information about a given period. In fact, in

Irving Malin’s review of The Ice-Shirt, Malin argues, “[Vollmann] suggests that we can never really know what happened a thousand or more years ago. His ‘history’ is an ‘anti- history,’ a subversive attempt to undermine official, conventional accounts” (313). This is true to some extent; Vollmann, like Whitehead and Winegardner, is well aware of the impossibility of actually discovering, and therefore the futility of seeking, an unmediated

“true history.”

The most obvious example in the novel of Vollmann’s awareness of this impossibility appears almost immediately, in the Preface. Vollmann warns that “the sketch-maps and boundaries here are provisional, approximate, unreliable and wrong. Nonetheless, I have furnished them, for as my text is no more than a pack of lies they can do no harm”

(Preface, my emphasis). Vollmann’s assertion that the book we are about to read is nothing more than a pack of lies does, inevitably, undercut some of the text’s authority before we have even had a chance to crack the spine. Furthermore, this warning illustrates Vollmann’s knowledge that some kind of “true history” is unattainable; that lies—or perhaps less harshly put, an author’s mediations—are all one can really hope for 304 when writing history. One can never truly find out “what really happened” in history, as sources—human mediations—are all we really ever have to go on.

Other authorial intrusions and explanations throughout the novel similarly verify this idea. When commenting on the Greenlanders’ lack of knowledge about where Greenland was physically thought to begin and end during the Viking era, Vollmann admits, “In hopes of resolving that issue, I myself have spent many hours studying the map of Nicolò

Zeno the Younger (1558), . . . but the arms of its islands are featurelessly alien, like the arms of a squid” (104). Here we see Vollmann attempting to “set the record straight,” so to speak, and finding that an impossible task. A more comical, and perhaps even more telling, representation of the difficulty in pinpointing the historical truth arises when

Vollmann confesses, “(What Jorund died of I cannot tell, for there is a wormhole in that part of the manuscript)” (62). These examples illustrate the textual difficulties

(conflicting sources, inaccurate maps, and disintegrating manuscripts) one confronts when attempting to dig up and determine the historical truth. On a more philosophical level, Vollmann is also aware that the sheer massiveness of history makes any attempt at capturing and conveying it impossible. At one point, Vollmann offers the following apology:

If I have passed over the tale of Leif’s foster-father, Tyrkir the Hun, who

discovered the grapes and became drunk on them; if I have omitted the account of

Thorhall the Hunter, who invoked a whale from that made all the Christians

sick, it is not because I wished not to tell them, but because no one can land on

every story-island in Breidafjord in one lifetime. (278) 305

This same sentiment shines forth from another authorial comment appearing a few pages later in which an exasperated Vollmann admits, “I am maddened by the impossibility of describing Vinland” (280). Examples such as these illustrate that Vollmann, like

Whitehead and Winegardner, is keenly aware of the impossibility of finding and representing the authentic historical truth. And no doubt these are the passages on which

Malin bases the notion of The Ice-Shirt as anti-history.

However, despite the fact that Vollmann is clearly aware of the impossibility of finding “true history,” I do not read this novel as an anti-history. Neither does Peter

Christiansen—in responding to Malin’s review, Christiansen argues, “We should resist the temptation to read The Ice-Shirt as if Vollmann is totally skeptical, if not nihilistic, about the nature of truth. . . . If history were really beyond comprehension, Vollmann would have no need to tell the true significance of the events in Vinland” (54). And like

Christiansen, I do not take Vollmann at his word when he calls his own text “a pack of lies.” He does not truly believe that for one moment, and herein lies another contradiction. However much Vollmann pays lip service to the impossibility of capturing the historical truth, in The Ice-Shirt, he clearly wants to represent an historical truth (even if it is a “symbolic” historical truth). Whereas Whitehead and Winegardner highlight the futility of such a search in their novels, Vollmann conducts that very search—both in his fiction and literally as well, in light of his travels to all the places of which he writes. The

Ice-Shirt, then, is the product of the search. One has only to look, once again, at the note preceding the bibliographic source list in the novel: “My aim in Seven Dreams has been to create a ‘Symbolic History’ – that is to say, an account of origins and metamorphoses 306 which is often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth” (397, my emphasis).

Unlike some of his postmodern counterparts, to whom he has often been compared,

Vollmann does believe in the idea of truth, though not a totalitarian notion of the (capital

T) Truth. He says so quite plainly in a short article he has written that, according to its subtitle, is providing a “Diagnosis of a Disease” that is contemporary American writing.

In that article, Vollmann provides a list of rules he feels contemporary writers should follow; #6 on the list is: “We should believe that truth exists” (“American Writing” 332).

Furthermore, as a result of believing truth exists, Vollmann also plainly believes that writers must approach their material with a sense of honesty. Again criticizing one of his fellow American writers, Vollmann expresses this belief in an interview:

My feeling is that if you do things in a spirit of honesty, you’re not using people.

On the other hand if I were, say, Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood I think I

would feel more ashamed of myself, because he must have known that people

were going to read what he’d written more out of titillation than to learn

something. (McCaffery, “An Interview” 24)

This sense of honesty—and even of a kind of teaching—is especially important to

Vollmann when working from historical sources. He says as much in that same interview: “I’ve always felt that when an original source I’m using says something that I have no right to say the opposite. . . . My own feeling is that as someone who has an imagination I have a perfect right to work from these other sources. But my aim should be embellishing them, not distorting them” (16). From these comments, then, we can deduce that Vollmann sees The Ice-Shirt as a fair and honest representation of (at least 307

Vollmann’s perception of) the Viking voyages of exploration and colonization to North

America. If we take Vollmann at his word, The Ice-Shirt is anything but a distortion, anything but an anti-history.

We should, however, not view Vollmann’s attempts at “truth” in The Ice-Shirt as a simple remaking of the sagas, a rewriting in contemporary parlance. In all his honesty and desire to accurately represent the age, Vollmann has, in places, tried to get the story more right than the original sources. One obvious example of this is the aforementioned revision of Gudrid’s character. Vollmann felt that the original sources were characterizing her as too good to be true, so he attempted to make her a truer, more believable human being. A few other examples stand out as well. Take for instance his characterization of King Harald early in the novel: “Of course, because King Harald did what each would have liked to do, his rule was perceived by some as harsh. – Too bad. –

(No doubt the dissatisfaction has been exaggerated in the historical accounts, since spoilsports cry out loudly, while on the other side good losers are silent, being dead)”

(39). Here Vollmann skews his version just a bit to account for what he perceives to be the obvious jealousies at work in the original portrayal. Along similar lines, Vollmann tells of the, previously unknown, outcome of Karselfni and Gudrid’s return trip from

Vinland: “Of their departure . . . little is related, from which we know it was undertaken with gainful success: only failures cry shrilly from the bird-islands of the Flateyjarbók”

(330-31). In one final example, Vollmann even uses the phrase “the truth is” to convey his perception that he is “getting it right.” Of King Harald’s battles in the islands off the coast of Ireland and the United Kingdom, Vollmann remarks, “So the Heimskringla tells it; and yet the truth is that the great game of those islands was to last centuries. The 308

Hebrides, the Faroes, the Orkneys, Iceland and even Greenland all fell in to Norway’s power at long last” (41-43). These interpolations and embellishments show that

Vollmann the bricoleur is using all the tools at his disposal—the hindsight afforded by temporal distance, the supposed impartiality of an American telling a Norse story, the additional research and scholarship regarding the era, etc.—to provide the most honest and accurate representation of the Norse explorations of North American that he knows how. And he offers over fifty pages of bibliographic notes and glossaries to prove it.

Ultimately, the bricolage that is The Ice-Shirt—this encyclopedic anatomy—allows

Vollmann to accomplish in a single novel many of the important functions I have been assigning to contemporary documentary fiction in this project. The Ice-Shirt advocates for those forgotten or outrightly oppressed by history and its writers; it offers politically maneuvered “corrections” of historical personages whose lives and accomplishments have been skewed over time; it challenges the illusory stability that historical discourse and the concept of Truth once bore; and it critiques contemporary culture’s rampant mediation of experience, history, and contemporary reality. But perhaps the greatest accomplishment of The Ice-Shirt—and, indeed, the entire Seven Dreams Series—is not simply that Vollmann is able to create a mutli-dimensional, encyclopedic, documentary masterpiece that addresses a great many of the issues and concerns that constitute the matrix of contemporary experience; rather, the greatest accomplishment is that Vollmann is able to achieve all of this without losing faith in the possibilities of literary fiction.

Many have sounded the death knells for literary fiction in recent years due to all of the multi-media experiences available to today’s consumers, as well as the cynicism and seeming dead-endedness of much writing of the high postmodernist period. However, 309

Vollmann has accomplished a wide-open, multi-dimensional, communicative documentary text—of the sort that high postmodernist writers would likely be proud— but he has done so with a sense of hope: a hope in the possibilities of human beings, a hope in the possibilities of fiction to uncover the symbolic, multi-faceted, multi- perspectival truths that may, after all, be present in our contemporary experience.

Perhaps Vollmann’s advice to American writers is apt for American readers. Perhaps we, too, should believe that truth exists, and perhaps we will begin, once again, to turn to literary fiction for some help finding it. 310

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