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Tragic story, tragic discourse: Modem and postmodern narrative tragedies

Lynd, Margaret Robinson, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1990

Copyright ©1991 by Lynd, Margaret Robinson. All ri^ts reserved.

UMI 300 N. Zeeb RA Ann Arbor, MI 48106

TRAGIC STORY, TRAGIC DISCOURSE: MODERN

AND POSTMODERN NARRATIVE TRAGEDIES

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

Margaret Robinson Lynd, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1990

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

James Phelan

Walter Davis Adviser Debra Moddelmog Department of English To My Brother Glen

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Whatever may seem thoughtful, cogent, or insightful about this dissertation, I owe to the questions and advice of the members of my committee, Walter Davis, Debra Moddelmog, and especially-my main adviser, James Phelan, for his invariably helpful comments throughout the long process of writing. I thank them all. I would like also to thank Judy Bielanski for her help in the high-tech world of inkjet printing. To my husband, Chuck, I offer my thanks for his patience and his encouragement, and to my daughters, Julie, Megan, and Rose, for their patience and their presence.

iii VITA

1970 ...... B.A., Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio

1984 ...... M.A., Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1982-Present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Graduate Research Associate, and Lecturer, Department of English and Department of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Area : English

Minor Areas : Critical Theory, James Phelan The Novel, Walter Davis Eighteenth-Century British Literature, James Battersby Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Les Tannenbaum

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... iii

VITA ...... iv

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

N o t e s ...... 20

I. MARLOW'S DILEMMA: MAKING THE CASE FOR HONOR IN LORD J I M ...... 22

N o t e s ...... 69

II. IMAGE AND DREAM: NICK AND THE STATUS OF GATSBY IN THE GREAT G A T S B Y ...... 72

N o t e s ...... 114

III. QUENTIN AND SHREVE: HISTORY AND TRAGEDY IN ABSALOM. ABSALOM! ...... 117

N o t e s ...... 203

IV. WRITING TRAGEDY: ART AS FAILURE IN L O L I T A ...... 210

N o t e s ...... 246

V. FEMINISM AND AESTHETICS: THE FAILURE OF M AMERICAN DREAM...... 249

N o t e s ...... 282

VI. ROCKETS AND READERS: WAITING FOR THE FALL IN GRAVITY'S RAIN B O W...... 285

N o t e s ...... 360

CONCLUSION ...... 365

WORKS CONSULTED...... 374 INTRODUCTION

Despite their diversity of form, the novels I have chosen to

discuss here all elicit, or at least have some potential to elicit, a

tragic response. Judged against some "standard" of what tragedy is or

is not, they cannot be called tragedies, yet many, if not most readers

have found them to be tragic in some broader sense. In the following

discussion I attempt to define, or at least to describe, that "broader

sense," that is, to understand how and why, despite their generally accepted status as m o d e m or postmodern texts, these novels seem to work as tragedies. I have tried to do this by exploring the narrative techniques, the thematic issues, and the nature of reader involvement that characterize them. That, in turn, has involved what

I hope is a reasonably careful scrutiny of both the story and discourse levels of each novel, or, perhaps more accurately, an examination of the intricate relationship between the two and the ways in which that relationship seems to influence readers' responses to the text as a whole.

At the same time, these are all writerly texts, and as such have incited widely divergent and highly contradictory interpretations. In each case, interpretation depends in large part upon the reader's choices and values, and reading these novels as tragic actions 2

requires the reader to make certain judgments that will either

encourage or discourage such a reading. In the analyses that follow,

I make no claim to having resolved differences among interpretations,

but I would contend that reading them as tragic actions can account

for certain characteristics of each text that are otherwise difficult

to explain.

Notwithstanding the post-structuralist idea that interpretation

and meaning cannot be fixed for any text, part of the reason for

controversy about these particular novels is their apparently

intentional openness to interpretation. Unlike Hardy's Jude the

Obscure. the tragic status of which is questionable because of the

overt content of the story itself (and perhaps because of certain

aesthetic flaws), not because of the instability of the discourse,

these texts are resistant to interpretation: how they will be read depends much more that it does in Jude upon the broader range of choices unstable discourse inevitably offers the reader. At the same time, these narratives do place constraints upon interpretation, and in these cases those constraints guide readers more strongly toward tragedy than toward ambiguity. I think my analyses of these novels offer not a definitive reading but an angle of vision upon them that allows us to see both the uniqueness of each novel and several continuities of technique and theme among them.

The texts I have chosen for this project were, of course, selected on the common basis of their inclusion among a group of novels that evoke a tragic response.^ Apart from that similarity of 3

effect, they were chosen because they seemed to me to be diverse in

terms of content and formal features, and also sufficiently

representative of a range of techniques characteristic of this

particular branch of twentieth-century narratives. Such a range, in

turn, seemed to allow for discussion of the variety of techniques

authors have used to generate tragic effects. Nevertheless, I make

this claim of representativeness quite warily, in part because it

seems to imply a genre of tragic novels, and that is a claim I am reluctant to make.^ These novels are much too diverse to be associated genetically as a formally distinct class; their representativeness is by no means exhaustive, and an analysis of other novels--The Sound and the Fury. Nostromo. A Farewell to Arms, for example--would undoubtedly have identified strategies and issues other than the ones these raise. The value of the project lies, I think, in the possibilities it offers for interpretation that can account for a unified effect without denying the centrifugal characteristics of each text or the multiplicity of interpretations such characteristics invite.

Underlying this ostensible purpose of the project is a larger issue of contemporary critical theory, one that I will address here only indirectly, and that is the question of what it means to read a literary text. It is not news that many contemporary theorists-- psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, deconstructionist--have in common serious objections to the idea of the text as an autonomous aesthetic object, while rhetorical and 4

historical theorists object to the loss of the text's integrity to

intertextuality or thematics. It has remained an underlying desire

of this project since its inception to analyze these novels on the

basis of their effects in order to begin to understand how artists of

this century have in their discourse shown themselves to be concerned

with many of the same issues contemporary critics have raised while

producing novels that nonetheless have discernible aesthetic effects

that it seems to me unrealistic to ignore. Each of these novels in

its own way grapples overtly with at least some of these issues; the

role of narrative in creating history, the role of language in

shaping perception, the clash of Euro-American and third world

cultures since the rise of capitalism, the objectification of women

and of the Other generally, and the transformation and reconstitution

of Nature as an image of our own thought processes. Most

particularly, it is the instability of the discourse, the thematic

content, and the ways in which authors attempt to involve readers in

the unfolding of plots in these novels that serve to foreground such

issues. If the desire for completeness is only partially satisfied

by these texts, that is, if the discourse of each one leaves some

doubt in the reader's mind about how plots are finally resolved, it

is equally true that each one presents the reader with a situation

that is tragic in some way and for someone. That is, in each

instance characters, character/narrators, or, in the case of

Gravity's Rainbow, readers themselves, are put in the position of choosing between two equally hopeless alternatives, one that will lead to their own doom--not death in most cases, but complete

isolation from a community that refuses to recognize them or the values they represent--and one that will lead to conformity to a moribund, inauthentic, life-denying cultural milieu of one kind or another. The tragic protagonists of these texts choose the former, and readers may (or may not) lend a sympathetic ear to the dilemmas these characters confront.

Many critics have contended that the twentieth century has not been amenable to literary tragedy because of the relativity of values, the lack of consensus in our century on what constitutes truth, and the plurality of views on all subjects, but I would contend that tragedy has typically involved the individual's compelling need to overstep the boundaries any society imposes, and such is the case with these texts.^ I would agree also with Murray

Krieger's early assessment that novels tragic in the broader sense of the term are not less powerful than the starkest of classical Greek tragedies, notwithstanding the fact that in the novels the tragedy is frequently buried in complex, heteroglossic texts rather than displayed in the tight, inevitable action of an Oedipus or Antigone.^

Unlike formal tragedy, these novels lean heavily upon interpretation for their effects, and the actions of these novels take place within the context of societies whose business it is to deny the possibility of tragedy, as Mr. Compson does in The Sound and the Furv when he insists that tragedy is always second-hand. If tragedy seems out of place in an absurd or empty universe, it is the tragic protagonist who 6

insists upon value in any case. The worlds within which these

characters act are presented as thoroughly bourgeois--routinized,

crass, vulgar, superficial, antithetical to all but material human needs. Given these worlds, the actions characters take can never be

justified or seen as tragic from within the novels, yet as readers, we can and do see them as such.

As I have been implying, much critical discussion of tragedy has revolved around the attempt to define tragedy and around what texts are "genuinely" tragic. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have arisen from this discussion. The first is the notion that literary tragedy must be defined in terms of its formal features and discussions of it kept separate from vague conceptions of "the tragic.The second is that regardless of its formal structure, a sense of the tragic pervades many texts--including some novels--and requires analysis whether or not the text as a whole is called a tragedy.® More is at stake in this argument than an academic disagreement between formalists and thematists. While these novels are denied formal unity here, their discussion as tragic actions raises questions about their narrative structure without claiming the exclusivity or "rightness" of a particular interpretation. As a heuristic device, if nothing else, calling these novels tragic not only helps answer aesthetic questions about each one, but allows us to address larger issues of thematic content and narrative technique that connect them to history and to each other. If it is true that the vigor and intensity of a single-plotted action such as Oedipus or 7

Othello provide a sharp contrast to the sprawling heteroglossia of

Gravity's Rainbow or the meandering ruminations of Lord Jim, it is

also true that all six of the novels discussed here are, if their

tragic effects are given credence, structured in such a way that a

sense of the tragic emerges more powerfully than other effects, even

though other effects are generally present to one degree or another.

I have assumed that the particular criteria derived by Aristotle

from his study of Greek tragedy and which later critics have

modified, expanded upon, or discredited, are not very useful for my purposes here.^ I have, however, following Aristotle, called novels tragic on the basis of the aesthetic response they seem to elicit, although that response is itself problematic. Setting aside that problem for now, and adding the caution that the following account is a general one that necessarily oversimplifies the complex experience readers encounter in reading these texts, I have assumed that the tragic response is a result of readers' sympathy for a character in conjunction with the knowledge that that character is headed for ruin in one way or another. "Sympathy" is itself a somewhat problematic term here; by it I simply mean that readers are asked to see a tragic character as one who is neither wholly victimized by circumstances nor wholly responsible for his or her own demise--the tragic protagonist must be both guilty and innocent, or, in other terms, must adhere to some value that the reader also values, but that nonetheless results in a large and irrevocable loss for the protagonist.® What that value is and what that loss entails, however, depends upon the 8

particular work; whether readers find the value important and the loss

extreme--and the novel tragic--will depend upon their own judgment of

both in conjunction with the authors' skill at manipulating that

judgment. The degree of sympathy, and hence the degree to which

readers may find these works tragic, will depend more upon such

judgments of value than upon judgments of character.

To return to the problem of what a tragic response entails for

readers, Aristotle's identification of the combination of pity and

terror as the fundamental tragic emotion has been repeatedly

discussed and analyzed, but never, to my knowledge, entirely

displaced, except, of course, as part of the larger problem of

aesthetic and reader response in general. What has been challenged

explicitly is his idea of catharsis, the notion that through sympathy

for the tragic protagonist, the audience of the tragic drama are

purged of their own fears that a similar fate may befall them--indeed will befall them if they accept the idea that individual death is always in some sense tragic, that the body's own desire to live will unarguably be defeated in due time.^ (This is not to imply that in literary works death and tragic fate are in any sense synonymous; on the contrary, tragic fate involves only a meaningful and permanent loss, the nature of which will vary markedly from text to text.)

While Aristotle only introduces the idea of catharsis, leaving to later commentators the task of analysis and debate, his principal reason for introducing it seems to have been to offer some explanation of why an audience would willingly--indeed, eagerly-- 9

subject itself to the miseries of an Agammemnon or an Oedipus.

Although Aristotle does not say so, the implication of his concept of

catharsis is that tragedy plays an essentially conservative role in

people's lives because it allows the audience to return to the

productivity of normative life after purging themselves of any desire

to overstep the bounds of their own societies.

It is precisely Aristotle's notion of catharsis with which

Nietzsche so passionately disagrees in The Birth of Tragedy. F o r

Nietzsche, Aristotle's idea of catharsis, along with Euripides'

"realism" and Socrates' "optimism," were responsible for the death of

tragedy. Whereas, Nietzsche believed, the players in the dramas of

Aeschylus and Sophocles were "masks" of Dionysos, who represents the

realm of pure, ecstatic Will, the actors in Euripides' plays were

thoroughly Apollonian: the form itself, the characters and actions as

imitations of individuals and their behavior, were the source and end

of the aesthetic experience. The Apollonian spirit in Aeschylus

and Sophocles, on the contrary, was not the essence of the drama, but

rather served the formal aesthetic function of creating words and

images through which the Dionysian spirit could be apprehended and later celebrated in unrestricted revelry, a Dionysian rapture arising

from the "shattering of the princinium individuationis" (22). For

Nietzsche, tragedy was a solace not because it offered a release from painful emotions so that energy could be directed toward contemplation and the acquisition of knowledge, but because it offered itself as the aesthetic means by which the audience could 10

celebrate "the spirit of music," the constantly changing (Dionysian)

flux manifesting itself in (Apollonian) form:

The metaphysical solace (with which, I wish to say at once, all tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement. (50)

It was, Nietzsche believed, the role of the Socratic mind and the

civilization it engendered with its reliance upon symbolic logic and

scientific knowledge rather than myth, that denied this Dionysian

element he found at the heart of tragedy. The Socratic mind served

not as a source of enlightenment, but as a means of containing and

eviscerating the terror and beauty of life's power. The Socratic

dicta that knowledge gives rise to virtue, and virtue leads to

happiness are counter to Nietzsche's justification of existence on

aesthetic terms--the universe as an aesthetic expression of God, not a moral one. Consequently, for Nietzsche, in Dionysian art delight was to be found in the affirmation of life behind form and phenomena, while in Apollonian art, delight was to be found in the form and phenomena, in the verisimilitude of the characters and actions, and hence in the moral instruction that verisimilitude purveyed.

If Aristotle provided not only the grist for countless critical mills to come, he also provided an analytical method of separating the elements that can help account for the aesthetic effects of literary works, regardless of what he meant by catharsis, or why he 11

believed it significant. If, in addition, modern novelists do not

produce the kinds of actions and characters he describes, his

discussion of the interaction of elements has nonetheless provided

for my own analysis of narrative tragedy a way in which to discuss

the techniques authors have used to construct their novels as tragic

actions ; this is, for the most part, the procedure I have used in

analyzing these novels. That said, however, it is Nietzsche's

critique of Aristotle and his insistence upon the limitations of

rational thought that are most germane not only to the thematic

issues the authors raise in these novels, but also to the discursive

techniques they use and to the ways in which they involve, and in

some cases attempt to incorporate, readers into their narratives.

It was Nietzsche's belief that genuine literary tragedy would

not flourish until the limitations of rationality were articulated

and myth restored as the repository of wisdom and the well-spring of,

human value:

The fact that the dialectical drive toward knowledge and scientific optimism has succeeded in turning tragedy from its course suggests that there may be an eternal conflict between the theoretical and the tragic world view, in which case tragedy could be reborn only when science had at last been pushed to its limits and, faced with those limits, been forced to renounce its claim to universal validity. (104-05)

If there is a single theme that runs through each of these novels, it

is a variant of this idea: each of these authors insists, however divergent their subject matter may be, that m o d e m society has sold its soul to the sterile myths of material and scientific progress. 12

Even if it is universally recognized that truth is ultimately

unattainable, science maintains its grip on the imagination in the

belief that the search for knowledge is inevitable and that that

search brings us closer to truth and to virtue, and virtue to the

Good. What the authors of these novels insist upon is not only the

falseness of this view, but the irrevocable loss both to individuals

and to the larger community that this view necessitates. This sense

of loss--the failure of m o d e m culture to provide access to Dionysian

beauty and terror--is the signature of m o d e m and postmodem tragedy.

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is a pre-modem narrative

tragedy that begins to raise the kinds of concerns typical of m odem and postmodern works. Hardy's Jude was an avowed attempt to write a tragedy that would be for the Victorian age as intense and powerful as Greek tragedy had been in its own age. The principal reason that critics have been reluctant to grant tragic status to this novel is its lack of catharsis, although that lack has been ascribed to a variety of causes, including, for example, the following: the novel appears to offer despair rather than affirmation; Jude's defeat appears to be without redemptive value ; the society in which Jude lives is portrayed in a wholly negative light; the children's murder is so improbable it converts the novel to melodrama; Sue's abandonment of Jude seems inadequately motivated. The novel may elicit a variety of responses, the reasoning goes, but a tragic response is not among them. Yet these objections, it seems to me, can only be made by adhering to an Aristotelean notion of catharsis. 13

which, as I have suggested, and as I believe the following analyses

will demonstrate, is not applicable to modern narrative tragedies.

Jude's fate is to have his isolation and alienation from the

community made official and permanent.

All that intervenes between Jude's fate and the reader's tragic

response is the fact that the community from which he is alienated is

not worth belonging to. The society Jude struggles against is an

opponent with no stature; consequently Jude's stature is diminished as

well. If we think of Jude as a dramatization of the 1 egocentric,

legalistic, moralistic, progressive "Socratic" civilization Nietzsche

identified as a barrier against Dionysian authenticity and a hedge

against a cosmos indifferent to individual suffering and death, we can

say that Jude represents a new direction for tragedy, one in which

catharsis is not possible. That is, whether one accepts or finds

objectionable the Aristotelean idea of catharsis, because there is

absolutely no recognition within the narrative of Jude's suffering,

readers are alone in their extension of sympathy to him and his

circumstances. Whatever aesthetic difficulties may encumber this

novel and make Jude's fate appear more melodramatic than tragic,

Jude's singular, heroic attempt to live authentically outside the

legal and moral limitations his society imposes calls for readers not

only to sympathize with Jude, but to recognize his failure as tragic.

While it seems unlikely that Hardy would have agreed with Nietzsche

that rationalism itself was necessarily a means of containing and denying Dionysos, he would surely have agreed that the constraints of 14

the legal, moral, and economic systems of Victorian England placed

unreasonable and cruel restraints upon intellectual, emotional, and

sexual fulfillment. Jude anticipates the evolution of a much more

enlightened society, but he gives no indication of how or why that

evolution might occur; we can only speculate whether Hardy meant that

people would reach that future state of enlightenment by reason or

revelation or some inevitable historical process. In any case. Hardy

creates a tragic situation by pitting Jude's values against a

moralistic and legalistic society that has no redeeming virtues.

The novels I discuss here at some length are closely related to

Jude, not in terms of anything so direct as Hardy's influence upon

their authors, but in terms of understanding why these works seem to

evoke a tragic response even though none has the unequivocally tragic

ending of an Othello or Antigone. Unlike Jude, which is, whether

successfully so or not, a clear attempt to write a modern tragedy,

these novels do leave some doubt as to the completeness of their

endings. When I first began thinking about this project, I intended

to consider the novels without regard to the chronology of their

publication, solely on the basis of particular techniques authors had

used that seemed to be counter to the production of tragic effects. I

expected, for example, to begin with Lolita and An American Dream,

focusing on Nabokov's and Mailer's use of protagonist/narrators whose

redeeming qualities seemed tenuous at best, making them highly unsympathetic characters. The more I read and wrote, however, the

clearer it seemed to me that I could not ignore the ways in which 15

these novels reflect political, sociological, psychological, and

intellectual concerns that have changed over the course of this

century. While placing them within their historical contexts is

beyond the scope of this project, I have discussed them in

chronological order because Conrad and Fitzgerald employ narrative

techniques, raise thematic issues, and involve readers in ways that

are similar to each other and that reappear in Absalom. Absalom! and later in Lolita. An American Dream, and Gravity's Rainbow, although in highly varied form and for purposes unique to each text.

Each of these novels employs one or several narrators whose authority over the subject matter is highly questionable because of the high stakes each has invested in the working out of plot. (The narrator of Gravity's Rainbow is different in this respect. He is the single example here of a third-person, omniscient narrator, yet however varied his repertoire of rhetorical tricks, and however removed he is from the events of the story, the voice that pervades the novel is heavily invested in its outcome. Indeed, the consistency of the narrator's voice is one of the few sources of stability in the novel.) For the other five novels, tragedy centers upon the narrators themselves and the ways in which they manipulate their language to suit their own purposes. In part, it is because there is no authoritative voice in these texts that the tragic effects I am claiming for them are never going to be entirely unambiguous. Nick Carraway's manipulation of language, for example, raises Gatsby from his role as a foolish and unscrupulous romantic to 16

a hero at the same time that Gatsby's romanticism is somehow

different from and more appealing than the restless dreams of other

characters. Nick's subjectivity in light of his claims of

objectivity erase for the reader the boundaries between subjective

judgment and objective description, leaving Gatsby finally a figure

who garners or fails to gamer the reader's sympathy, depending upon

how one assesses Nick's role in the storytelling process. In An

American Dream. Rojack does for himself much the same thing Nick does

for Gatsby; he creates from his own verbal skills a heroic version of

himself whose acts of physical and sexual violence are described as

events that liberate him frors America's politically and morally

corrupt systems of power, thus severing Rojack's actions, which are

reprehensible, from his motivations, which are (or are Intended to be) admirable. As is the case with Gatsby, a large part of the reader's willingness to sympathize with Rojack depends upon whether the reader believes Rojack's motivations are inspired by values that are in fact worth preserving. I make no claim here of Mailer's having been influenced by Fitzgerald in his use of a character/narrator whose very language and self-interest call into question the authority of his own text; I would merely point out that this technique raises problems in each case in regard to the ways in which language may be manipulated to rewrite reality and to the inadequacy of the notion of objectivity.

The issues raised by the discourse of these novels are closely intertwined with thematic issues that have to do with the way in 17

which these novels work as tragic actions. In each case, although in

highly variant manifestations, a central thematic concern is the way

in which rationality, conventional morality, and language itself form

a thin veneer of normality and respectability over either the dumb

indifference, the terrifying irrationality, or the equally terrifying

beauty of the cosmos. This is most bluntly the issue in Lord Jim, in

which Marlow attempts to engineer Jim's redemption and maintain his

own increasingly tenuous belief in the "code of honor," which is

finally all that stands between the comfortable if monotonous world

of British commerce and stark terror. In Lolita. Humbert reveals the

depths of self-deception made possible by his skill at manipulating

language--rationalizing his actions--as he describes how he had

created Lolita for himself as an aesthetic and sexual object. In

recreating that story he also reveals the limits of the capacity of

language to obscure the reality of his own responsibility for

Lolita's demise. Whether Humbert's revelation of his own black

despair is to be believed or whether it is merely a trap for the unwary reader, finally makes little difference as far as this issue is concerned: in either case, both the power and the limits of language are revealed.

If understanding Lord Jim and The Great .Gatsby as tragic actions requires the reader's active choice of interpretation, which in turn is dependent upon the extent to which the reader is willing to share

Marlow's and Nick's interpretations of Jim's and Gatsby's actions, the later novels require their readers' participation in 18

interpretation as well. In Absalom. Absalom!. readers must not only

piece together the Sutpen story, but choose in the final chapters

between Shreve's and Quentin's widely variant responses to the story

they create together. Choosing Shreve's version allows readers to

shift the burden of history away from themselves; choosing Quentin's

makes history as much a nightmare for the reader as it is for

Quentin. In Lolita, readers may choose to believe that Lolita is a

parody, a self-reflexive text whose subject is aesthetics and whose

characters are merely fictional constructs, or they may choose

instead to see Humbert as a tragic character whose fate is to

understand the depth of his crime against Lolita. Choosing the latter over the former forces readers not to intellectualize their response to this text, but instead to confront their own complicity in the process of abstracting Lolita out of her own childhood and into the role of aesthetic/sexual object. In Gravity's Rainbow.

Pynchon takes this process further by implanting the image of the

Rocket as a continual presence in the reader's mind, so that by the end of the text readers are as much victims of the Rocket as are the characters of the novel.

Once again, I do not wish to argue for a historical progression that moves neatly from Hardy to Conrad and Fitzgerald, forward to

Faulkner, and finally to Nabokov, Mailer, and Pynchon. I would note, however, that the narrators, with the exception of Pynchon's, become increasingly involved in the stories they tell, that concern over society's moral and legal constraints upon the individual becomes 19

increasingly a concern over the power of language itself to control

individual behavior, and that the role of readers becomes

increasingly active in the interpretation of texts. Yet tragic

effects are not so much diminished by the lack of authority in these

texts as they are made a matter of choice, even though, as I will

argue throughout, the authors stack the deck in favor of tragedy.

In discussing each novel, I have attempted first to answer some

of the objections critics have raised to reading them as tragic actions. Beyond that, I have tried to show why and how they seem to work as tragic actions and why naming them as such can be a useful method for understanding the power that, for better or worse, they seem to hold over readers. In the following chapters, I attempt to treat each novel as a unique entity and to untangle some of the details of technique, theme, and reader involvement that determine the sources of the particular kind of tragic response each one elicits. 20

Notes

^ A number of studies have been made of works conceived as tragic without regard to their form or genre, in addition to many articles analyzing particular texts as tragedies or as tragic in some respects. Longer studies include, for example, Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy. 3rd ed., (1st ed. 1959; New York: Paragon House, 1990); Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision (Chicago: Ü of Chicago P, 1960); David Lenson, Achilles' Choice (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975).

^ As Clayton Koelb, "The Problem of 'Tragedy' as a Genre," Genre 8 (1975): 248-66, argues, definitions of tragedy are too broad to give meaning to a fixed literary typology. More to the point, while in practical terms, I am treating these novels for purposes of interpretation as if they were representative of a genre, I hesitate to go further than that. The similarity among them that distinguishes them from other m o d e m and postmodern texts is limited to their effects, and that single similarity seems insufficient grounds for such a categorization. Similarities of theme, narrative strategy, and methods of reader involvement are also present, but these are shared with many works that I would not want to call tragic.

^ The "impossibility" of producing literary tragedy, given the uncertainties of our century, is a common theme, its most notable proponents being Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Tragic Fallacy," in Robert Corrigan, Tragedy: Vision and Form. 1st ed. (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965) 271-83; and George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1961). More serious objections arise from the assumptions of other critical approaches that question the humanistic enterprise that the concept of literary tragedy seems to require.

^ Krieger, 1-21, theorizes what he calls a thematics of tragedy, which would remove the idea of the tragic from the aesthetic form that attempts to contain it. In a revision of this introductory essay, "The Tragic Vision: Twenty Years Later," in Robert Corrigan, ed.. Tragedy: Vision and Form. 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1981) 43- 46, Krieger concedes that tragedy in our age may indeed have given way to irony, as Northrop Frye, among others, contends.

^ See, for example, Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1968); and Oscar Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy (New York: New York UP, 1961). 21

^ Krieger, Sewall, and Lenson all fall into this category, although Lenson develops a kind of formalism of his own based on criteria he derives from Nietzsche.

^ In The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle. Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater (1954; New York: Modern Library, 1984).

® Soren Kierkegaard, "The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modem," in Corrigan, 1st ed., 451-70, in attempting to describe the m o d e m tragic hero, refers to this loss as sadness. In our secular age, Kierkegaard says, responsibility tends to be cast wholly upon the individual, but this results in comedy. In tragedy, the protagonist must be partially blameless.

^ See, for example, D. D. Raphael, "Why Does Tragedy Please?" in Corrigan, 1st ed., 187-201.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1956). All references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

See Keith M. May, Nietzsche and the Spirit of Tragedy (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and London: Macmillan, 1990) 1- 26, for a discussion of Nietzsche's use of Apollo and Dionysos. Lenson 12-23, combines Nietzsche's approach to tragedy with his own revision of Hegel's more rationalistic view of tragedy as the clash of two meaningful values. CHAPTER I

MARLOW'S DILEMMA: MAKING THE CASE FOR HONOR IN LORD JTM

Militating most strongly against reading either Lord Jim or The

Great Gatsby as tragic actions is the singular lack of awareness Jim, mindlessly committed to an arbitrary standard of conduct, and Gatsby, equally mindless in his commitment to a woman whose identity derives solely from her class status, display both toward their own situations and toward life in general. Each is a product of his own "Platonic conception of himself," as Nick says of Gatsby, and both Gatsby and

Jim think and act and live within that conception. Not only do they remain untouched by any view that might complicate their own particular dreams, they are both so single-minded and intellectually uncomplicated themselves that neither can so much as conceive of any view of his situation that might complicate or contradict his own.

Indeed, both Gatsby and Jim appear to be so simplistic that the question of their own responsibility descends rather to a question of competence.^ Whether we view the tragic protagonist in an

Aristotelian way, as a good person who errs and is responsible for that error, or in Krieger's less categorical sense, as a participant in an action that dramatizes in whole or in part a tragic view of life, neither Gatsby nor Jim seems to recognize the implications of

22 23

his actions or to acknowledge responsibility for his own disastrous

situation.^ Both Jim and Gatsby believe that circumstances beyond

their control have determined their fates; neither is aware of the

egotism that drives his actions. Contrary to our usual expectations of

a tragic hero, neither appears to understand the nature of his error,

even as he meets his disastrous fate. Consequently, their status as

tragic characters--given the "facts" of their cases, as Marlow might

say--is highly questionable.^

While the "facts" of their respective cases do argue against

reading these texts as tragedies, sliding between these two rather

pathetic characters and the reader's response to them is the

manipulative rhetoric of Marlow and Nick Carroway, who are able to

transform the vagaries of Jim's and Gatsby's romanticism into the

stuff of tragedy. Reading these two texts as tragedies allows us to

question Marlow's and Nick's roles as central characters in these

works: as characters in a novel, the central preoccupation of both is

to create narratives that allow the reader to interpret Jim and

Gatsby as tragic protagonists, largely because of the importance Jim and Gatsby assume in their own struggles against despair. Despite

Jim's and Gatsby's astounding lack of awareness, they nonetheless possess such passionate conviction to their own "shadowy ideals" that

Nick and Marlow ask their readers to imagine them as tragic characters even though, in the narrators' judgments, their ideals are fraudulent, their actions self-serving, and their philosophies simplistic. While readers may or may not be convinced of the tragic 24

dimensions of Jim and Gatsby, Marlow's and Nick's own stories have a

tragic dimension of their own that in some respects supersedes, and

in any case is thoroughly bound up with, the fates of Jim and Gatsby.

Despite their simplistic ideas, Jim and Gatsby profoundly affect

Marlow and Nick: most distressingly for Marlow, Jim's experience

leaves him shaken by his own refusal to acknowledge the truth that the

"code of honor," and the rational, ethical worldview it enables, may

not be worth preserving; Gatsby fulfills Nick's desire for a romantic

object to ease the emptiness of his own life and the capitalistic world from which he no more than Gatsby can escape.

The rhetorical strategies Conrad and Fitzgerald give their narrators to employ reveal the complicated connections between each narrator's own qualified but genuine admiration for the vigor of his hero's commitment to ideals and the fact that those ideals are highly questionable. In both cases, their unreliability is a measure of the level of their involvement in their characters' lives--both are catalysts for the events that occur--and a measure also of the persuasiveness with which they attempt to convince both themselves and their readers that their characters are worthy of the reader's sympathy and respect. Nick's and Marlow's roles as artists, as creators of tragic characters in a world that is inhospitable not only to tragedy but to deeply felt and meaningful commitment of any kind is a principal focus of attention in both texts. Marlow and Nick are themselves subject to a crippling nostalgia and anomie that is never clearly articulated, but that remains the subtext of their narratives. 25

The telling of their stories is itself an inevitably unsuccessful

attempt to regain an integrity of self and an enthusiasm for life that

they have long since lost and that seems as they speak impossible to

regain, troubled as they are by the ambiguities and doubts of which

Jim and Gatsby remain blissfully unaware and which they themselves are

loathe to acknowledge.

Their task is particularly difficult because if Jim and Gatsby

are to be construed by readers as tragic characters--and it is

important to Nick and Marlow that they be so construed--they must be

unwaveringly committed to some value or ethical standard, whether

communal or personal. In both cases that standard is one that the

more sophisticated Nick and Marlow find wanting. If Jim and Gatsby

should perceive the complexity of their own circumstances or the

ambiguity of the ideals toward which they unhesitatingly move, their

single-minded and passionate commitment, which is precisely what

makes them intriguing to Nick and Marlow, would necessarily be

compromised. Alternatively, in the very simplicity of their heroes,

Nick and Marlow (and Fitzgerald and Conrad) run the risk of reducing

their stature to such an extent that they seem more foolish than tragic.^

It is to obscure those simplistic qualities and maximize the reader's capacity for sympathy that Nick and Marlow repeatedly describe Gatsby and Jim as vague, distant, enigmatic characters about whom it is impossible to make final judgments; Nick and Marlow maintain that Jim and Gatsby are finally unknowable. At the same 26

time, they both insist--sometimes obliquely, sometimes by their own

example, and sometimes in direct pleas to their readers--that it is

not at all impossible to imagine the suffering that results from

Jim's and Gatsby's willingness to cast all practical considerations

to the winds for the sake of what they believe in, and to refuse to

compromise in their confrontations with fate. If the shadowy world

of relativist ethics of Lord Jim or the tawdry materialism of The

Great Gatsbv seem inhospitable to tragedy, Nick and Marlow achieve a kind of tragic status in the very act of narrating Jim's and Gatsby's stories. If they cannot quite convince us of their heroes' tragic status, their attempts confer value upon Jim's and Gatsby's doomed efforts and reveal their own desire to create meaning in a world that for Marlow threatens to become meaningless, and for Nick has already done so. The extremity of that loss, however, remains available to us through the medium of narrative art.

Not only are Marlow and Nick profoundly affected by Jim and

Gatsby, they are also participants in the dramas they narrate, and are instrumental in the material causes of their heroes' fateful actions. The narrative each one creates becomes the principal source of meaning in his own life; the characters Nick and Marlow create help them remain above the abyss of doubt and despair in a worlds where materialism and class solidarity obscure doubt, where words obscure emptiness, irrationality, and terror, and where facts obscure truth.

Marlow and Nick come very close themselves to being tragic protagonists in this respect: as characters in their own tales, they 27

commit themselves to a character they know is doomed, and as narrators

of those tales to an art that will make tragedy imaginable in a world

that is hostile to the "exquisite sensibilities" of their heroes.

Those sensibilities are, "objectively" speaking, a bit ludicrous, but

nonetheless mark a raw enthusiasm for life that no other character

exhibits. Neither Marlow nor Nick is the least bit interested in

generic distinctions, but each does want to make his hero's fate

meaningful to his listeners, to his readers, and most of all to

himself. Their attempts to render Jim's and Gatsby's fates tragic

lift Jim and Gatsby above the pathetic and reveal their own failure to

recover meaning outside their own narratives.

I will focus here on Lord Jim and return to The Great Gatsby in

the following chapter. Reading Lord Jim as a tragic work is not, of

course, a new undertaking. While many critics would agree with Ian

Watt, who points out that Lord Jim does not really fit anyone's

definition of tragedy, others have considered the work to be a

tragedy or at least to participate in the tragic in some way.^ John

Batchelor, for example, while agreeing that Lord Jim is unique,

argues that Jim is a tragic protagonist by virtue of the universality

of his experience.^ Murray Krieger cites the text as an example of his definition of the tragic vision and Dorothy Van Ghent as a modern version of the Oedipal tragedy, while Harry Epstein argues that the ambiguity of the text is an essential part of the tragic circumstances of the action.^ Several obstacles loom large in any critical effort 28

to read this text as tragedy. Some I have touched upon in a general

way already, including what seem to me to be the two principal

obstacles: Jim's simplistic romanticism and intellectual naivete and

the absence of an absolute ethical standard against which to judge

Jim's actions. But issues of narrative structure and generic

uncertainty also arise, especially in the rift in the plot that

separates the Patna and Patusan episodes, the psychological realism of

the Patna narrative as opposed to the romanticism of Patusan, and,

according to many critics, the general inferiority of the second half

of the novel to the first. Critics disagree sharply about how to

interpret key episodes, especially Jim's jump from the Patna. his

encounter with Brown, and his death.® Those disagreements make

impossible any consensus about whether the text itself ends in

ambiguity; whether ambiguity should instead be considered a thematic

issue that the text resolves in a particular way; whether the text

argues for, leaves unresolved, or totally undercuts the practical

necessity of the moral standard effected by the British code of honor.

Nor do critics agree about whether Conrad endorses, problematizes, or

views ironically Stein's much-discussed romanticism and, more

recently, his capitalist adventurism.^ Recent attempts to analyze more closely the discourse of the novel add to previous discussions of

Conrad's "impressionistic" technique by drawing attention to the

seamless, non-linear quality of his prose, or find as its ideological subtext a somewhat desperate attempt to legitimize British hegemony over the voiceless, powerless millions who made wealth and luxury 29

possible for Margaret Thatcher's forebears.In short, the critical

history of Lord Jim is long, diverse, and unresolved. Epstein's

argument that contradictory elements in Lord Jim can best be

accounted for as elements that move the reader toward a perception of

Jim's fate as tragic is compelling, but it is Marlow's own desire to

represent Jim as a tragic figure that makes that perception possible.

I want to suggest that Conrad attempts in Lord Jim to expose

the deadening impact of the rational/ethical worldview underpinning

British colonialism and commerce. Progress, efficiency, economic

development, democracy, the legal system--whatever idea or system

that has as its theoretical base the notion that human beings are more

rational than not--are all called into question when Marlow begins to

doubt the "sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct."

Until Jim's case disturbs Marlow's easy complacency, the "code of honor" had remained sovereign for him because it had made life seem orderly, had made it seem as if rules made sense in some ultimate way, and had made it possible for the British navy to cruise the seas pretending that it had the entire world--human and natural--under its control. Jim is interesting to Marlow because he sees that Jim thinks that the code of honor is part of the cosmic order, so that, in the natural order of things, a good, brave person like himself would automatically follow it (and, not incidentally, the good, brave

British should rule the world). Since that didn't happen in Jim's case, Jim thinks the situation aboard the Patna must have been extraordinary, and Marlow wants to think so too, but of course it was 30

not. Never once does it occur to Jim that both he and his case are

thoroughly ordinary; it never occurs to him that his jump from the

Patna was the result of fear. Jim's desire for redemption is a result

of his condemnation by his own class, not of his own sense of guilt.

Such an enormous gap looms between the words he knows and the feelings

he has that he cannot identify his own extreme fear with the word

"fear," and Marlow refuses to tell him that his action was not anact

of cowardice. Indeed, Marlow cannot tell him that because to do so

would be to negate in his own eyes the code's "sovereign power" as an

absolute standard, and this is the crux of the matter for Conrad.The

code is a substitute for emotion; it makes terror and passion quite

literally unthinkable, reduces Nature's terrifying indifference to

individual fate to negligibility, and ultimately turns us all into

automatons.

Conrad creates Marlow as a character who in turn creates a narrative in which he attempts to bring a tragic character to life, first for his listeners and, failing that, finally for a single

"privileged reader" whose response real readers never discover, but most significantly, it is for himself that Marlow wants to believe that Jim is a "special case." Marlow thus has two roles to play in

Lord Jim: first, as a character within his own narrative and, second, as a character within the novel as a whole whose role it is to be the narrator of Jim's story. In the first capacity, he is Jim's fatherly companion, confessor, and benefactor, and he is instrumental in determining the arena in which Jim's fate unfolds. As narrator, he is 31

able to reflect upon Jim's actions and his own, to make sense of what

happens to Jim, and to communicate that understanding to his audience.

As a storyteller within Conrad's novel, he plays the role of an artist

whose own version of Jim subverts without negating the perspective of

the omniscient narrator with which the text begins.

From the time Marlow first appears at Jim's Inquiry, Lord Jim

concerns itself as much with Marlow's role in creating and recreating

Jim's life as it does with Jim. From this perspective, the text's

division into three separately narrated accounts, the apparent rift in

the plot between the Patna and Patusan episodes, and the problems of

ambiguity, relativism, and doubt that are raised in the text can be understood as part of the overall movement of the text toward a tragic conclusion and toward a revelation of the artist's role in creating the illusion of tragedy. The one truth to rise above the mists of doubt and ambiguity in this text is Marlow's recognition that Jim is tragic, although Marlow does not necessarily see his task in terms of form or genre. The "truth revealed in a moment of illusion" that

Marlow refers to before he leaves Jim, Jewel, and Patusan forever is that Jim will never accept being "nearly satisfied"; he will insist on redeeming himself in some as yet undisclosed way, and the fact that he will do so will make him tragic. Marlow's difficult task is to convey the "truth" of Jim's own experience through the medium of art.

The largest part of Lord Jim is narrated by Marlow to a crowd of relatively unresponsive after-dinner listeners, but the effect of the omniscient narrator who opens the novel remains with the reader 32

throughout Marlow's narrative. This narrator quickly establishes his

own perspective on Jim and on the world Jim inhabits. In an

ostensibly "objective" voice, he speaks from beyond the represented

world of the novel. Although a closer look will reveal that he is in

fact less objective than mildly ironic, skeptical, and, when looked

upon from Marlow's perspective, distinctly unimaginative, he presents

himself as omniscient, and consequently can be assumed to be

presenting an accurate account of the way in which the reader can

expect the represented world to operate and its characters to be

understood. Even though Marlow takes over the tale from the

omniscient narrator, his words always appear within quotation marks,

an unobtrusive reminder to the reader of Marlow's role as a

storyteller within the omniscient narrator's narrative. Presumably,

the omniscient narrator's audience of extratextual readers is

analogous to Marlow's intratextual audience of detached, unresponsive,

unimaginative listeners.

While the omniscient narrator withholds explicit judgment of

Jim's character, the implicit judgments he makes stand in stark

contrast to Marlow's sympathy. That is, two contradictory views are

available to the reader long before Marlow ever appears. If he is

judged solely on the basis of "facts," the Jim of the first four

chapters, in fact, has little to recommend him: he is a dreamer who dreams solely of his own imaginary heroics, a reader who is taken in by the superficial heroism of adventure stories, a sailor in training who is paralyzed with fear when a minor emergency arises, a water 33

clerk whose "Ability in the abstract" seems to amount to little more

than slick and aggressive salesmanship, and a reluctant sailor who

chooses short, safe voyages in quiet Eastern seas over long, dangerous

ones on the open water. In short, in this narrator's view, Jim is a

shallow egotist, given to self-aggrandizement and shameless

rationalization, with a strong potential for cowardice.

Over the course of his own oral narrative, and culminating in the

finale he pieces together from the narratives of others, Marlow

manages to transform this self-aggrandizing dreamer into a tragic

hero. Marlow is able to do this despite the early unfavorable view

because the omniscient narrator's own rhetorical strategies are

carefully designed to permit the reader to reserve judgment of Jim.

In particular, the omniscient narrator is skeptical but nonjudgmental

in his descriptions of Jim's daydreams; the captain of Jim's training

ship is sympathetic to Jim's failure to act in an emergency,

apparently judging it an insignificant and not unusual result of Jim's

inexperience. The narrator does not tell us how or how badly Jim was

injured in a later instance at sea, and hence the fear and despair he

had felt at that time, following as they do the narrator's powerful

description of an angry sea, seem logical and understandable. This

experience, in turn, sets the stage for Jim's drift toward that majority of sailors who declined all hazards and adventures, those who, "in all they said--in their actions, in their looks, in their persons--could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, thé determination to lounge safely through existence. 34

Moreover, the reader learns of Jim's fearfulness, his inertia,

and his capacity for romantic escapism only after learning in the

opening pages that the handsome, capable, likable Jim has become a

vagabond because of his sensitivity to some painful event in his

mysterious past. Significantly, the narrative begins after Jim's

trial and before he goes to Patusan when Jim is most alone and most

vulnerable. The reader is invited to see Jim as a puzzling character

rather than a foolish and sentimental one: in these early pages what

might easily be defined as romantic egotism is couched in the somewhat

enigmatic but nonjudgmental term "Ability in the abstract," and the

reader is again encouraged to sympathize with Jim, or at least to withhold judgment. The omniscient narrator's sardonic mention of

Jim's "exquisite sensibilities," the imprecision of the term "Ability in the abstract," the implicit criticism of the phony salesmanship of

Jim's job (the captain of a docking ship is "received like a brother by a ship-chandler he has never seen before....To the captain he is faithful like a friend and attentive like a son, with the patience of

Job, the unselfish devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on the bill is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane occupation" [5]) all allow the reader, as Marlow's narrative begins, to be open to whatever slant Marlow is willing to give it.

The reader is exposed to a kind of double vision of Jim right from the start.

In addition to presenting Jim as an ambiguous character, the omniscient narrator also presents obliquely, principally by means of 35

highly charged descriptive passages rather than direct statement, a

universe indifferent to human destiny, a universe that only

occasionally and randomly moves without warning from its pitiless

blankness to vindictive anger on the one hand or beatific tenderness

on the other. When it does, the narrator suggests, it is not Nature,

but the "Imagination, the enemy of men, the Father of all terrors"

(11) that converts a storm at sea into anger, a starry night into a

motherly smile. The same Imagination that makes Jim the self-

engendered hero of fictitious adventures leaves him helpless when it

shows him terror:

Only once in all that time he had again the glimpse of the earnestness in the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made apparent as people might think. There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention--that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he had seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated ; all that is priceless and necessary--the sunshine, the memories, the future,--which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life. (10)

Here again, the reader is not told that Jim was afraid; rather terror is evoked, Jim is wounded, and the reader is invited to separate Jim from his fear. By the time the Patna grinds over the fateful obstruction, the omniscient narrator has managed by indirection to 36

suggest that the reader withhold judgment of Jim, see that the

universe is indifferent to human fate, and see that the Imagination is

the source of terror--the fear of complete and permanent isolation and

anonymity, what Kurtz calls "the Horror"--and see that for Jim, as for

anyone, such Horror is no pleasant or easy thing to comprehend.

Finally, in these opening chapters, the narrator establishes

Jim's frustration--and, by implication, Marlow's--with the Inquiry's

obsession with "facts" that cannot begin to reveal the truth of what

happened on the Patna. Alone among the ranks of human beings that

sit in judgment upon him, Jim singles out Marlow as capable of

understanding his case. The reader is left with the perception of an

enormous gap between Jim's imaginary heroism and his inability to

recognize or acknowledge his own capacity for terror, a capacity made

large by Jim's own overdeveloped imagination. For Jim, his

imagination provides the "best parts of life"; it is also the source

of his greatest weakness. Although the narrator leaves it to Marlow

to continue the narrative, Marlow enters the story not as a disinterested narrator, but as a character who does not entirely understand either Jim or his own growing interest in Jim's case. As

Marlow's oral narrative progresses, that interest changes from a kind of curious indignation to compassion to awe. If, by the end of the novel, it is clear that no straightforward account of the facts could render Jim a tragic hero, it is equally true that the slant Marlow gives those facts is meant to establish for Jim precisely that status. 37

As a character in his own narrative who oversees Jim's life

after the Inquiry, Marlow's interest in Jim is complex, but not

finally ambiguous.Initially, he singles Jim out from his unsavory

Patna companions because he is "one of us," a youth who, in Marlow's

experience, exemplifies the very essence of clean-cut sincerity and

unquestioning allegiance to duty upon which the code of honor relies.

That code, in turn, is the foundation upon which the power of the

British Empire is built and maintained; it makes possible the

solidarity of men of a certain class, establishes the superiority of

that class over all others, inspires unquestioning trust in those

below it as if its superiority were part of the cosmic order, and

validates British enterprise--and for the "us" of Marlow's phrase,

human enterprise means British enterprise. The code constitutes

meaning in an otherwise purposeless world of arbitrary action. Marlow

is first drawn to Jim by the desire to exorcise his own doubts about

the code ;

"I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible--for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man's creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death-- the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct." (39)

The code of honor, in Marlow's view, is an arbitrary substitute for an absent ethical standard, but its arbitrariness does not invalidate its necessity for Marlow as. a standard that protects the individual white male from isolation and ensures the continuity of his community and his class. 38

Marlow's role as a character in his own narrative and as a

catalyst in Jim's fate ends when Marlow leaves Patusan; his role as a

character in Conrad's novel does not. As a character in this larger

sense, his principal task is to narrate the ending of Jim's story, not

from his own experience, but from fragmentary reports of other

characters--to "reveal the truth in a moment of illusion." No longer

bound even by his own direct involvement in Jim's actions, he is free

to create his own version of Jim's final adventures. As an oberver of

and participant in Jim's life, Marlow develops deep and complex

emotional ties to Jim and is deeply affected by his death.

Throughout his narrative he continues to insist that he can never

fully know him, despite, as he points out many times, the stunning

simplicity of the man. Marlow can, on the other hand, imagine Jim's

suffering and, in recreating it for the reader, satisfy (or nearly satisfy) his own desire to believe that Jim's defense of the code of honor is meaningful. And, indeed, Jim's suffering is quite real, even if the value he tries to preserve is not.

Conrad, it seems to me, is insisting here that the imagination, nudged into action by the medium of art, is the crucial element that brings an indifferent universe to life and makes the pain of others real to us, as Jim's is to Marlow. If Marlow fails to convince either his readers or himself that Jim's uncomplicated sense of honor is worth dying for, he nevertheless succeeds in conveying the passion of

Jim's commitment, at least to those who can imagine, to those who can 39

feel. And anyone who can't, Marlow tells us, doesn't count; such a

person is not "one of us":

"Yes! few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count. . . .1 don't know how much Jim understood; but I know how he felt, he felt confusedly but powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion--I don't care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered. . . . We exist only insofar as we hang together." (160)

The solidarity Marlow evokes here is not the solidarity of those

committed to the code, but the solidarity of those who can imagine

Jim's suffering, including the listeners Marlow wishes he had, but

does not; in fact, his listeners are bored with his story and glad

when it ends. Marlow, who mistrusts his own capacity to imagine, asks

his readers to exercise theirs: the readers he would like to have

would surely be aware, as Jim is not, of doubt, ethical relativism,

the absence of absolutes. Like Marlow, they would also remember the

clarity of their youthful illusions, when they had believed in courage

and moral superiority as attributes of character, rather than, as

Marlow's narrative implies, habitual and mindless patterns of behavior without which Marlow's merchant marine would sink like a stone. In fact, Marlow is sceptical of his ability to present Jim as he wants him to be understood, but more than he mistrusts his own capacities,

Marlow mistrusts those of his audience:

"My last words about Jim shall be few. I will affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be 40

dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions--and safe--and profitable--and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone--and as short-lived, alas!" (162)

While Marlow doubts his listeners' capacity, he makes clear his

intentions to try at least to reawaken their imaginations. Marlow's purpose coincides exactly with Conrad's famous dictum from the Preface to "The Nigger of the Narcissus," that the artist's role is to make the reader see. From this perspective, the phrase "one of us" has a second set of constituents, not the army of British seamen, held in soldarity by a simple and eminently powerful code of honor, but those who, like Jim and Stein, can imagine and feel: those who can "see" in this broadly romantic sense. Such readers would find shaken their current belief in the iron-clad bond of honor.

Unlike the omniscient narrator, Marlow does not know Jim's thoughts and motivations. Oddly enough, the omniscient narrator's perspective is both much closer to and much farther from Jim than is

Marlow's. Significantly, Marlow also knows much less about Jim when he first meets him than the reader already knows from the omniscient narrator's comments. As Batchelor puts it, contrary to most stories,

Marlow knows less and less about Jim as the story progresses.This is not entirely true, however ; indeed, at many points in the story

Marlow reveals that Jim's transparency is almost laughable, and would 41

be so were it not for the largeness of his child-like sincerity. All

that remains enigmatic throughout Marlow's narrative is the intensity

of Jim's commitment to his own Platonic conception of himself and the

nature of Marlow's commitment to Jim. While Marlow has no access to

Jim's inner being, he believes he knows everything there is to know

about this simple fellow. Indeed, there is so little to tell that

Marlow must explain why he dwells at such length upon his own

reactions :

"I am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused reflections because there remains so little to be told of him. He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you. I've led him out by the hand; I've paraded him before you." (161)

Marlow refuses to judge Jim, not because he is particularly enigmatic

or unknowable, but because he does not want the reader to judge Jim on

rational grounds. Instead, he creates a haze around Jim precisely so

that readers will not judge him a simplistic, egotistical dreamer, as

they eventually would, given only the information provided by the

omniscient narrator. The more Jim's character is made to seem enigmatic, puzzling, unknowable, undecidable, ambiguous, the greater the chance that readers will make the leap Marlow wants them to make, to understand in a revelatory moment, the reality of Jim's existence.

Marlow's initial interest in Jim derives from the dilemma of his own troubling doubts about the code: as the very embodiment of that class of young men who are essential to maintaining the status quo of

British imperialism, if not cosmic order, Jim's failure to uphold the 42

code by succumbing to fear is absolutely obvious to everyone,

including Marlow, but it is not at all evident to Jim. This latter

fact is what makes Jim's case unusual in its own right, of particular

interest to Marlow, and a great threat to the code itself. Having

jumped from the Patna. Jim is free to interpret his own actions in one

of two ways: he can admit responsibility for his own cowardice, or he

can insist that the circumstances of the moment were responsible for

his actions, that he was not afraid for his life but overwhelmed by

the force of events, and that his action, therefore, was not really an act of cowardice but rather a compulsive and compulsory action over which he had had no control. The first interpretation is unthinkable for Jim because it clashes with his romantic conception of himself and he takes the latter course: "'"I had jumped. . . " H e checked himself, averted his gaze. . . ."It seems," he added'" (81). What would ordinarily be a simple matter of a sailor not making the grade, admitting his failure and falling into dissolution or crime or water- clerking, becomes instead--and this is what fascinates and later moves

Marlow--a battleground for the opposition between Jim's conception of himself as a romantic hero and the apparent fact of his cowardice, and an illustration of the gap between the actual fear he had felt and the signifier fear that he cannot bear to attach to it. More generally, Jim's case comes to represent the opposition between the individual's perception of terror and the imposition of an ethical code designed precisely to solidify the power of the community and to overrule not only the individual's own instinct for self­ 43

preservation, but the capacity to be awed by the spectre of death.

Jim's case shakes Marlow's belief not because he is a special case,

but because he is not:

"He was outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of intelligence and the perversions of--of nerves, let us say. . . .1 would have trusted the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes--and, by Jove! it wouldn't have been safe. There are depths of horror in that thought. . . .1 couldn't believe it. I tell you I wanted to see him squirm for the honour of the craft'" (34).

As Marlow's narrative progresses, it becomes clear to him that the code is maintained at the cost of the individual's capacity to apprehend, via the imagination, either terror (as in Jim's case) or

Beauty (as in Stein's), and this facet of Jim's romanticism comes to appeal most movingly to Marlow. Several times we are reminded by the omniscient narrator and by Marlow that the sailor's life is a tedious, unromantic affair, and so, for the most part, is Marlow's.

Jim reminds him not only of the many young sailors he himself had instructed, but of his own lost youth and shattered idealism. For

Marlow, the concept of oneself as a romantic hero is a characteristic of youth that is inevitably lost in the real confrontation between oneself and one's terror, not a romance writer's abstract idea of terror, but real terror in a real storm, on a real ship with real spars falling and the real possibility of sinking to the floor of an indifferent sea. The code ensures an automatic response to the 44

reality of impending disaster that is swift and unthinking; fear is

mercilessly suppressed so that order can be maintained during the rare

but utterly unpredictable emergencies that arise at sea. As the

French lieutenant affirms most clearly, such moments can never be an

excuse for breaking the code, and indeed the continued existence of

the code depends upon its power to discipline the imagination severely

enough that the fear of dishonor will take precedence over the fear of

death,

Marlow's dilemma with respect to Jim is clear: the cowardice of

Jim's act is an established fact for Marlow, but Jim's ingenuous and

impassioned insistence that he is rather an unwilling victim of

circumstance combines with Marlow's desire to believe that for Jim,

as "one of us," there must be some "shadow of an excuse" that will

allay his doubts. Marlow reluctantly chooses between abandoning Jim

to his fate and salvaging him from probable dissipation by burying

him in a semi-respectable job somewhere, so that, as he says, he will

not stumble over him some years hence in the gutter. Indeed, by the

time he turns to Stein some two years after the Inquiry, Marlow has

long since lost the hope of finding an excuse for Jim that might allay his doubts. Rather, the "reality" of Jim himself, his child-like and

implicit belief in his own preposterous dream of himself awaken in

Marlow the fatherly concern that takes precedence even over the

"fellowship of the craft," Jim's betrayal of which had so outraged

Marlow at the time of the Inquiry. Most difficult for Marlow, Jim recalls to him his own past: 45

"There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward! What we get-- well, we won't talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality--in no other is the beginning all illusion--the disenchantment more swift- -the subjugation more complete. Hadn't we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid day of imprecation? What wonder that when some heavy prod gets home the bond is found to be close; that besides the fellowship of the craft there is felt the strength of a wider feeling--the feeling that binds a man to a child." (94)

Much of Marlow's interest in Jim springs from his own lost youth

and his own disillusion. For Marlow, Jim threatens the code because he is, to all appearances, the best there is, by rights the standard-

bearer of his class.Marlow, unlike Brierly, is compelled not to answer definitively whether Jim is coward or victim. To answer victim is to deny the code, to answer coward is to deny his own youthful passion and idealism. And it is precisely this dedication of the young to an ideal that matures, however mindlessly, into the faith that upholds the code itself. Hence, the final reason for Marlow's insistence that Jim is unknowable, his case undecidable: as long as

Marlow can keep Jim's status in doubt for himself, he need not acknowledge "the horror" that doubting the code itself would entail.

Marlow packs Jim off to Patusan not realizing that there is no place remote enough, isolated enough, small enough to be overlooked by Fate.

Sooner or later--and this is what terrifies Marlow in his confrontation with Jewel--the unexpected, the unpredictable will 46

occur. Nor can Jim be made harmless to others: his absolute need to

"follow the dream" will end in tragedy for himself, holocaust for the

inhabitants of Patusan, and abandonment for Jewel, the very thing she

most fears.

Marlow summons a parade of characters to give their opinions of

Jim before they quickly disappear for the remainder of the text. The

appearance of these characters, however, does not constitute a random

collection of perspectives, nor is their effect on either Marlow's

listeners or the reader largely a quantitative one, a barrage of different opinions sealing the undecidability of Jim's fate.

Beginning with Brierly and moving through Stein to Jewel and

Cornelius, a clear progression of attitudes asserts itself. Marlow, who tells the story through his visit to Patusan without knowing its ending, had not fully understood the significance of events when they had occurred. Instead he attempts, as he says, to try to give the full flavor of his feelings about the events as they occurred, not as he understands them in the present time of the narration. This series of opinions, in fact, moves the reader gradually closer to Stein's full and unhesitant sympathy and finally to the stark extremes of

Jewel's adoration, Tamb'Itarn's loyalty, Cornelius' hatred, and Brown's disdain.

Brierly, the first of these characters, sees clearly the danger

Jim poses to the code of conduct: Marlow, who admits that he did not understand Brierly's motives for suicide at the time--he had thought

Brierly had been forced to relive some unbearable memory of a 47

cowardly action of his own--is impatient and very angry that Jim

insists on going through with the Inquiry. Far from being an act of

courage, Jim's insistence seems to Brierly a far more serious act of

cowardice: Jim has no right, Brierly says, to force the Court of

Inquiry to torture him in front of the heterogeneous gallery. The complete presence of mind with which Brierly commits suicide--an efficient and probably terrorless death--suggests that he understands that Jim's argument, in fact, negates the code in the eyes of the world. After all, the code is only necessary in moments of emergency, and those are precisely the moments when circumstances âfi make victims. Maintaining the code requires that no circumstances ever mitigate the crime: to make Jim's argument at all is to call the code into question, make thinkable its arbitrary status.

Marlow never tells us with certainty why Brierly had committed suicide, but according to Brierly's shipmate it is because he thought so highly of himself, a somewhat cryptic remark that could mean either that he did recall the indignity of some unfortunate memory of his own or that he foresaw a series of arguments like Jim's that would chip away at the code until the code finally ceased to exert any power at all. In either case, Brierly is intolerant of Jim's position, even if he is personally sympathetic to Jim. Moreover, by leaving the question of Brierly's suicide slightly open, Marlow can use Brierly to increase the reader's sympathy--if even this bastion of honor has something to hide, Jim gains in stature; if, conversely, Brierly dies because he foresees the end of the code, the uncertain status of the 48

code itself is underscored. Above all, the lack of final resolution

of Brierly's motivations emphasizes the limitations of Marlow (and the

reader) to make final judgments about another's state of mind.

Neither we nor Marlow can know anyone with much certainty; with

Brierly, as with Jim, the only way to "know" is to imagine. Moreover,

if Marlow were to state clearly and unambiguously that the code was not absolute, such a statement would absolve Jim of guilt in the world's eyes and of shame in his own, as would a firm assertion that even the upright Brierly was capable of an unconscionable act.

Alternatively, a clear agreement that Jim's insistence on going through with the Inquiry was, as Brierly believes it, an act of self- indulgence would reinforce the possibility that Jim was a mere egotist. In a case of what Watt calls "delayed decoding," Brierly's conduct and Marlow's report of it become, if not more clear, at least more complex.

As Marlow and the reader move through the succession of other characters' assessments, we move from Brierly's total rejection to more sympathetic stances: from Chester's practical interest in Jim's strong back and authoritative good looks and his desire to capitalize on Jim's loss of honor; to the French lieutenant's mindless adherence to the code and indifference to Jim; to the fatherly rice-mill owner who loves Jim without knowing Jim's crime and who will not believe that crime egregious whatever it may have been; to Epstein and

DeJonghe, both of whom, once they l e a m the nature of Jim's crime, are entirely sympathetic to the "poor devil." Far from being a 49

miscellaneous and essentially random set of perspectives on Jim, this

series is itself carefully crafted by Marlow--he admits that he gives

"typical examples" from among Jim's many jobs--as a means of moving

the reader subtly but steadily toward the wholehearted endorsement of

Jim's romantic nature by Stein.

Each of these reported cases has its own complications, but, in

addition to a progression toward greater sympathy for Jim, in

general, those characters who are less favorably portrayed by Marlow

tend to have little sympathy for Jim. Thus, for example, Chester, in his unscrupulous capitalistic ventures with the cannibalistic

Robinson, lacks the "moral posture" of respectable captains of merchant ships; hence Jim's failure to uphold the code makes him a prime candidate for Chester's use. Chester is motivated by the same dream of wealth as other merchants, but, seeing no necessity for a moral code or the solidarity of community it enables, he, and Brierly at the other end of the moral spectrum, sees Jim's case with none of the sympathy that motivates Marlow, Marlow thus powerfully justifies his own intuition that Jim is a special case, which in fact he is not, except insofar as Marlow the character perceives him--and Marlow the narrator creates him--as such.

Especially difficult for readers of Lord Jim is what appears to be the generic inconsistency between the Patna and the Patusan episodes: the psychological realism of Chapters 1-19 and the scarcely credible romanticism of Chapters 21-45 are held together only by 50

Stein's analysis of Jim's situation and his delineation of Jim's

prospects.But the apparent disjunction disappears if it is

reconsidered in terms of what Marlow sees as his obligations both as

Jim's benefactor and as the creator of Jim's character as he wants his

listeners to imagine it. Throughout his oral narration, Marlow, in a

move parallel to the series of perspectives he reports from other

characters, becomes more and more deeply involved with Jim's fate.

That involvement depends upon the human bond he feels among himself,

his own youth, and the young men he has instructed; moreover, that

bond not only supersedes the solidarity of the craft, but is, finally,

the only thing that makes the tedious work of seamanship worth the

effort for Marlow. The significance Marlow attaches to that bond is

large; Jim's status as "one of us" comes to represent everything that

gives meaning to Marlow's life. It is not by accident that it is in

the thoroughly nostalgic anticipation of returning to England with a

"clear conscience" that Marlow attempts to dispose of Jim once and for

all. Nor is it insignificant that Marlow's chief pleasure in being a

ship's captain comes not from the work itself, nor from the wealth it brings, nor from the peace of Eastern waters, but from the young

sailors he has trained;

"By-and-by, when he has learned all the little mysteries and the one great secret of the craft, he shall be fit to live or die as the sea may decree; and the man who has taken a hand in this fool game, in which the sea wins every toss, will be pleased to have his back slapped by a heavy young hand, and to hear a cheery sea-puppy voice: 'Do you remember me, sir? The little So-and-so.' 51

"I tell you this is good; it tells you that once in your life at least you had gone the right way to work. I have been thus slapped, and I have winced, for the slap was heavy, and I have glowed all day long and gone to bed feeling less lonely in the world by virtue of that hearty thump. Don't I remember the little So- and-so's!" (35)

Paradoxically, it is the imaginative capacity to recognize terror

that brings to birth the code of honor ; it is the capacity to believe

oneself fearless, as Jim does, that attracts young men to commit

themselves to it. That terror is displaced by the lesser fear, as in

the case of the French lieutenant, of losing honor, a fear manageable

enough to keep men committed to the code--losing honor becomes a

greater fear than losing one's life. There can be no heroism on the high seas, only a dogged commitment to duty, and the logical end case

is, as Marlow himself recognizes, the comic absurdity of Bobby

Stanton's attempt to save a reluctant lady from a sinking ship.

This nostalgia for his own lost past makes it impossible for

Marlow either to condemn Jim's cowardice or to condone his stubborn idealism. Marlow is sympathetic when Jim first attempts to explain his actions on the Patna :

"'One knows a downright lie. There was not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and wrong of this affair.' 'How much more did you want?' I asked; but I think I spoke so low that he did not catch what I said. He had advanced his argument as though life had been a network of paths separated by chasms. His voice sounded reasonable.'" (94) 52

Moments later, a similar exchange occurs, but this time Marlow reveals

not Jim's lack of subtlety, but his own anger:

"'A hair's breadth,' he muttered. 'Not the breadth of a hair between this and that. And at the time. . .' 'It is difficult to see a hair at midnight,' I put in, a little viciously, I fear. Don't you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me--me!--of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour." (95)

Jim's case awakens not only Marlow's doubts about the arbitrariness of the code; it also makes him begin to wonder whether what is lost by adhering to the code is not perhaps as important as what is gained, and to wonder whether the code obscures other truths and other bonds of solidarity. This is, in fact, the precipitating cause of Marlow's doubt. That is, what Marlow comes to doubt is not the value of the code of conduct as it functions in the seaman's world, but the entire order that the code makes possible. Marlow already knows that the code is both arbitrary and necessary to maintain the life to which he has devoted a lifetime. What is terrifying to him is the thought that that order is somehow not legitimate, but rather that it is life- denying in some fundamental way--most obviously in its persistent blunting of the imagination. The untenability of Jim's position, as

Brierly suggests, undercuts the legitimacy of the world of ethical law and military order that defines the European as Human, the non-

European (and those like Jim who fail to make the grade) as 53

substandard Other. Jim's case shows Marlow that this order depends

upon the inability to bring the world to life imaginatively.

Indeed, Marlow's own stake in preserving the code of honor,

arbitrary or not, is far from negliglible. Uncertainty, randomness,

cosmic indifference, the arbitrariness of the code of honor, Jim's

simplistic mind, his cowardice, and his commitment to a foolish and baseless dream of his own heroism are givens of the text, both from

Marlow's point of view and from the omniscient narrator's, not points of contention which readers are asked to see as positive, negative, or undecidable. What is at stake is both Marlow's and the reader’s capacity to cut through these issues to what Marlow himself calls the

"reality" of Jim and his tortured conscience, and that reality is sorely at odds with all that the code of honor enables. Moreover, such insight is not likely to come from weighing the facts of Jim's case, nor is insight into anyone else's. To the intrepid French lieutenant's commonplace, "'"Mon Dieu! How the time passes!"'," Marlow responds with a quick description of the source of such insights:

"Nothing could have been more commonplace than this remark; but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision. It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very fulness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much-- everything--in a flash--before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence." (103-04) 54

The ambiguity of Jim's case is a function of the value Marlow places

on the passion of Jim's commitment to his own individual perception of

reality--his own imagined world. As Marlow's tale proceeds from his

first glimpse of Jim with the Patna crew to his last view of Jim as an

enigmatic speck on the Patusan shore, the power of Jim's imagination,

his enormous capacity to dream, even though the dream is little more

than pure self-deception, captures Marlow's heart and forces him to

question what a young man may lose--what he himself has lost--when he

commits himself to honor.

Only when the effort to prevent Jim's dissipation fails does

Marlow turn in desperation to Stein, who offers Jim an arena for his heroism; remote, isolated, and populated by people whose lives are irrelevant to Marlow's commercial world (except to the extent that they can be exploited economically), Patusan has a great deal in common with the Patna. It is a place whose fortunes matter to no one of Jim's and Marlow's class. Even Stein's connection with Patusan, despite his respect for Doramin, is primarily a commercial interest.

It is offered to Jim as a proving ground for his imagined heroism, a place where he can regain, on however small a scale, the honor he has lost. In Patusan, what happens, Marlow and Stein believe, will matter to no one but Jim. Hence, Jim's removal to Patusan is to everyone's advantage: Stein can continue to believe in the value of the dream,

Marlow can evade the questions Jim's case raises about the code and the uneasy nostalgia it raises about his own youthful disillusionment, 55

and Jim can have a "second chance," even though his actions will be

irrelevant to the "real" world of commerce, and even though, as Marlow

believes, Jim's destiny is "'graven in imperishable characters upon

the face of a rock'" (133),

Marlow discovers, however, in his conversation with Jewel that

Patusan is not such a world, that there is no escape from human

involvement and no avoiding the consequences of one's actions, but he

quickly rejects that terrifying insight. Marlow sees very clearly the horror of Jewel's fear that Jim will abandon her and sees also that

Jim's coming to Patusan causes her suffering. Jewel's awareness of the inevitable consequences of Jim's obvious and (to her) absurd need to prove himself offers a perspective that is outside Marlow's two mutually exclusive interpretations of Jim's character--coward or special case. Jewel's insight in effect deconstructs the dichotomy of honor and cowardice, leaving Marlow--though only momentarily--beside himself with fear.

Marlow wants to believe that Patusan is a vaguely unreal world, a stage upon which Jim's destiny can be played out, since the commercial world is not, as Marlow contends, "big enough" for Jim to lose himself in. (Indeed, the chronic conflict and tenuous stalemate

Jim finds among the people of Patusan seems too obviously the result of European opportunism to have been overlooked by Conrad. Jim's

"redemption" destroys Dain Waris, the only conceivable native candidate for leadership, and leaves Patusan in far more extreme disarray than it had been accustomed to when he arrived. Jim's need 56

to defend his British "honor" delivers the final blow to an already-

devastated people.) Marlow is not unaware of the mawkishness of his

description of Jewel and Jim's storybook romance, yet insists upon its

accuracy:

"I suppose you think that I, too, am romantic, but it is a mistake. I am relating to you the sober impressions of a bit of youth, of a strange uneasy romance that had come in my way." (203)

With all the remoteness of a Hemingway, Marlow contends, he is

transcribing their world, not his own interpretation of it. Yet once

Fate, in the person of Brown, sails up the river, events move forward

with the inevitable logic of a Greek drama, as Marlow notes. Above

all else. Brown is a capitalist without a code, hence a random

element, a loose cannon in the intricate and unstable political

structure of Patusan that Jim has created. As Jocelyn Baines points

out, it is not Jim's misjudgment of Brown that causes the disaster,

although he certainly does misjudge him.^® Jim makes the best choice

he can to avoid bloodshed and maintain peace, and he is not entirely

unaware of Brown's treacherous nature--he sends Tamb'Itarn to warn Dain

Waris of Brown's retreat. His greatest error is his misjudgment of

Cornelius, who singlehandedly enables Brown to attack Dain Waris and

who has been discounted repeatedly by both Jim and Marlow as a

repulsive, but negligible, annoyance and nothing more, a source of waspish irritation rather than a character of dangerously evil

proportions. Indeed, the reader, Marlow, and Jim should all have 57

been alerted to the viciousness of which Cornelius was capable, and

Cornelius' bitter assessment of Jim is both astute and prophetic;

"'Hê, save himself? He knows nothing, honourable sir-- nothing whatever. Who is he? What does he want here- -the big thief? What does he want here? He throws dust into everybody's eyes; he throws dust into your eyes, honourable sir; but he can't throw dust into my eyes. He is a big fool, honourable sir.' I laughed contemptuously, and, turning my heel, began to walk on again. He ran up to my elbow and whispered forcibly, 'He's no more than a little child here--like a little child--a little child. Of course I didn't take the slightest notice." (235)

It is, of course. Brown, who perceives Jim's childlike egocentrism

and uses it to his own advantage.

Jim's egocentric vision falls far short of Stein's much more

mature idealism, which is capable of encompassing the human-centered

universe of contradictory perceptions--beauty and ugliness, terror and

peace, life and death. Indeed, Stein recognizes without an instant's

hesitation, the source of Jim's problem: "'I understand very well. He

is romantic'" (152). After many years of critical evaluations that

for the most part identified Stein as an admirable character, and as

the principal source of insight and wisdom in Lord Jim, more recent

critics have re-evaluated his role, and many have questioned the high

status his character has been assigned.While I would agree in essence with Rader that Stein should be accepted at face-value, I do

think Stein's character and position are colored by ambiguities that require some rethinking.If, as I have contended, this text moves the reader toward an understanding of Jim's suffering, the issues his 58

case raises, and the consequences of his fate for Marlow, then Conrad

needs to create a character like Stein in order to provide the final

move for Jim that Marlow is too practical and unimaginative a man to

make. Marlow turns to Stein in desperation, when all his efforts on

Jim's behalf have proved futile. When he goes to see Stein, his

desire is to bury Jim, to be rid of him. Because Stein takes Jim's

case seriously, Jim gains the stature of being admired by a man who

not only is avowedly romantic himself, but who is likewise a very

successful capitalist. On the other hand, a comparison of Stein and

Jim would certainly find Jim wanting: where Jim's idealism is solely

a projection of self, Stein's is directed outward, both toward decisive action and the appreciation of Beauty, and toward a means of

surviving in a contradictory world. Where Jim's romanticism is a function of baseless self-aggrandizement borrowed, like Madame

Bovary's, from romantic literature, Stein's grows out of actual experience with life, love, and death. Yet Stein does accept the

"reality" of Jim's situation. Even though Jim is a lesser character,

Stein, like Marlow, is moved by Jim's youthful passion and commitment.

He believes, after all, that the content of the dream does not matter nearly as much as the willingness to follow it, and he provides Jim the chance to do just that. Stein not only legitimizes Marlow's interest in Jim, but intensifies it and makes it real:

"'What is it that by inward pain makes him know himself? What is it that for you and me make him-- exist?' "At that moment it was difficult to believe in Jim's existence--starting from a country parsonage. 59

blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material world--but his imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with an irresistible force! I saw it vividly, as though in our progress through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery." (155)

However, while Stein's endorsement of Jim encourages the reader

to see Jim as a character of larger proportions than he might

otherwise seem, helps the less romantic and frankly stymied Marlow

keep Jim from collapsing in the gutter, and, in practical terms of the novel's plot, gives Jim an arena in which to play out his destiny,

Stein himself is not the moral center of the novel. Stein has withdrawn from the materialistic world of commerce and created his own little island, with its own cavernous buildings and its own recreated

Nature. His catacombed beetles and his enshrined butterflies are efficient symbols of good and evil. Beauty and Life on the one hand.

Death and Destruction on the other.That his perfect specimen of a rare butterfly does seem to flutter its wings even as Marlow watches suggests that the Beauty Stein has captured is real and powerful and lasting. On the whole, though, Stein's surroundings have a rather dusty, disintegrative quality about them that emphasizes Stein's age and loss of the energy required to "follow the dream," as he is himself quick to point out. It seems to me that Jim's vitality is as important to Stein as it is to Marlow, despite their very different 60

characters and histories--it has been some time since Stein has

immersed himself in any element more destructive than a bushel of dead

insects. Thus, while Stein's interest in Jim legitimizes Marlow's,

the artificiality of Stein's self-created universe (itself made

possible by European capitalism) undercuts that legitimation.

At the same time that Stein admits his past failures, present

uncertainties, and future doubts, the fact that his wealth has been

built not only upon his sterling character, but upon his own

capitalistic adventurism adds another factor of uncertainty to the

reader's judgment of him, and prevents the reader from assuming that

Conrad whole-heartedly endorses romanticism--even Stein's version of

it. Stein's instructions to follow the dream are qualified: staying

afloat in the destructive element (and the possibly mixed metaphors

make that passage problematic) is a kind of general approach to life

that would seem to have meaning only when applied to the actual

experiences of an individual life. If Stein believes that the

"disease of consciousness" requires the continued existential conflict

that immersion in the destructive element would seem to imply, Jim

hardly seems capable of fulfilling that role in any but the most

limited of ways and in the most limited of settings. Patusan is thus,

at least from Stein's point of view, an appropriate setting and Jim an appropriate character for an event that can no longer occur in the

"real" world, which is governed not by what Nietzsche would call the tragic vision that evokes genuine terror, but by a capitalist vision of law, order, domesticity, and dullness. That is, Conrad has 61

created, through Marlow, what is essentially a manufactured tragic

character: it isn't the value Jim defends that makes him tragic, but

solely the fact that he does defend it. Consequently, his story can

evoke a tragic response only through the manipulations, subterfuges,

and disclaimers of Marlow himself. In doing so, Conrad seems less to

endorse an ethical standard as a practical necessity than to draw

attention to the terrible human price that standard exacts.

Significantly, the novel ends with Jewel inert and abandoned in

Stein's house, Stein preparing to leave his world "'while he waves his

hand sadly at his butterflies,'" and Marlow asking "'Was I so very

wrong?'" The answer is technically for the reader to answer, but

Marlow characterizes his listeners as dull and unimaginative and the

privileged man as one who is likely to reject "'any faith mightier

than the laws of order and progress,'" suggesting once again that

solidarity is bought at the cost of imagination and that the real

reader might do well to consider that cost.

As a participant in Jim's drama, Marlow confronts the question

of Jim's destiny in his encounter with Jewel the day before he leaves

Patusan. When Marlow tells Jewel, who believes that Jim will leave her, that Jim is too good to abandon her, she knows--and Marlow admits this to the reader--that he is lying and demands the "truth."

Marlow acknowledges with great agitation the simple "truth" that Jim is "not good enough" to return, but Jewel rejects that explanation as well. Marlow's predicament here is that his own doubts about the value of the code make him unable to believe that Jim is "not good 62

enough"; his understanding of Jim's devotion to the code makes him realize that he will never place Jewel above honor, should he be called upon to make that choice. Nor can Marlow bring himself to admit to Jewel or to himself that Jim is doomed to be destroyed by some unpredictable confluence of events in this less than stable community if he lives up to his own ideal, and to be destroyed by his own shame if he does not, even though Marlow knows Jim's destiny is

"graven upon a rock." Contrary to his expectations, Marlow recognizes that even Patusan, unreal dream-world that it almost is, cannot protect Jim from the random animosity of events. The horror, the perception of terror Marlow runs from in this scene--and here as nowhere else in the novel Marlow nearly collapses with fear--is

Jewel's inevitable abandonment and Jim's inevitable destruction.

As Jewel describes her own abandoned mother's gruesome death,

Marlow recoils:

"'The tears fell from her eyes--and then she died,' concluded the girl in an imperturbable monotone, which more than anything else, more than the white statuesque immobility of her person, more than mere words could do, troubled my mind profoundly with the passive, irremediable horror of the scene. It had the power to drive me out of my conception of existence, out of that shelter each of us makes for himself to creep under in moments of danger, as a tortoise withdraws wihin its shell. For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive. But still--it was only a moment: I went back into my shell directly. One must--don't you know?--though I seemed to have lost all my words in the chaos of dark thoughts I had contemplated for a second or two beyond the pale. These came back, too, very soon, for words 63

also belong to the sheltering conception of light and order which is our refuge." (225)

But Jewel is not deceived by Marlow's words and he is appalled by her refusal to rest comfortably in an illusory sense of order and

security:

"Wherefore this craving for incertitude, this clinging to fear, as if incertitude and fear had been the safeguards of her love. It was monstrous. She should have made for herself a shelter of inexpugnable peace out of that honest affection." (225)

Marlow attempts to allay her intuition of impending doom--no simple task, as he well knows:

"How does one kill fear, I wonder? . . . You require for such a desperate encounter an enchanted and poisoned shaft dipped in a lie too subtle to be found on earth. An enterprise for a dream, my masters !" (227)

Marlow cannot convince her that she will not be abandoned, but he does manage--nearly--to convince himself that Jim has "mastered his destiny." He escapes into a haze of words, into the nearly comfortable falsehood that Jim will not abandon Jewel, that he will remain in remote, inaccessible Patusan with his small victories:

"He had told me he was satisfied . . . nearly. This is going further than most of us dare. I who have the right to think myself good enough dare not. . . .he is one of us, and he could say he was satisfied . . . nearly. Just fancy this! Nearly satisfied. One could almost envy him his catastrophe. Nearly satisfied. After this nothing could matter." (233) 64

Marlow's interchange with Jewel is the climax of his oral

narrative; his own leap into language allows him to set aside his

perception of the inevitability of Jim's destruction. As Marlow well

knows, and suggests the next day, Jim will not stop short of being

quite satisfied, but by then he is on his way out of Patusan forever,

leaving Jim to his fate, and returning to his earlier position that

Jim is an enigmatic character. When Marlow leaves Patusan, he, in

effect, retreats from his own vivid perception of Jim's impending doom

as he watches Jim disappear, a white speck in the enveloping darkness:

"The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child--then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost him. ..." (242)

Marlow's oral presentation, designed as it is to arouse sympathy

for Jim, ends with Marlow the narrator appearing to awaken from a dream-like state, and Marlow the character fleeing from his own fear and pity for Jim's fate, even though, at this point he cannot know what that will be;

"I had retreated--a little cowed, I must own. I had tried a fall with fear itself and got thrown--of course. . . .It was as though I had been shown the working of the implacable destiny of which we are the victims--and the tools." (230)

The remainder of the text comprises Marlow's reconstruction of events of which he has no direct knowledge. Indeed, the death scene is totally created by Marlow; he has no eyewitness accounts at all, so 65

that Jim's triumphant smile, Doramin's ring coming to rest at Jim's

foot, in fact, all details of what actually happened, are arranged as

Marlow wants the reader (reduced for Marlow to the privileged man) to

imagine Jim's last moments, and presumably as Marlow wants to imagine

them himself.

Marlow leaves Jim to "control his destiny" as best he can,

knowing as Jim cannot, that "'It is not Justice the servant of men,

but accident, hazard. Fortune--the ally of patient Time--that holds

an even and scrupulous balance'" (230). All that is required to

fulfill Jim's destiny is chance, some random event that Marlow will

be free to interpret from afar as he chooses. Buried far from

Marlow's real world, Jim promises to become in all respects what he

has been all along, a tragic hero created by Marlow, not so much by

the Marlow Jim had known as by the Marlow who reshapes both Jim and

his own former self, the Marlow who inserts in his narrative a series

of comments designed to influence his listeners not to judge Jim on

rational grounds, but to imagine his reality. Jim is Marlow's

fictional creation. As such, he seems to require the kind of unreal

world Patusan provides in order not to live out the destiny the real

world would have provided in the form of odd jobs and likely

dissipation, but rather to live out a destiny appropriate to fiction--

a heroic destiny in which he could get the "second chance" for

redemption the real world could not provide. In Patusan, Jim can be a

tragic hero rather than an ordinary boy with delusions of grandeur and a real, if unacknowledged, fear of death. What is finally ambiguous 66

about this text is verbal art itself. The artist seems to be a subtle

liar who manipulates his audience into imagining a character to be

what he is not, but the artist may also be a direct and honest

spokesman for some particular "truth" of human experience: the

suffering Jim experiences as a result of his failure to adhere to the

code by which he defines himself is real, however dubious a value that

code may represent. As Marlow says of Jewel, "'Both of us had said

the very same thing. Did we both speak the truth--or one of us did--

or neither? . . (230).

Finally, Marlow directs his written narrative to the privileged

man. Alone among all Marlow's listeners, this man has shown some

interest in Jim's case, but that interest is not sympathetic. At

this point in the novel, it is clear to Marlow that his entire

narrative has been thoroughly unconvincing: his listeners don't know

how or don't care to respond to it at all, whether because of its

oddness or its incompleteness, the omniscient narrator says he does

not know (he isn't quite omniscient, apparently). Readers, however,

have already been told that it is those who cannot imagine who do not

see that Jim is a tragic character, and apparently all of Marlow's

listeners fit that category. The privileged man himself believes

that Jim is a fool; he is chosen by Marlow to receive the letter

solely because he alone found Jim's case "interesting."

In this final appeal to the privileged man, Marlow grants himself much more extensive powers to mold Jim's story as it suits him. Marlow does not know and cannot know how Jim looked or thought 67

or felt, what he understood or failed to understand, what his

motivations were in dealing with Brown. Instead he presents us with

the possibilities, and those possibilities can be read in any number

of ways, as the divergent critical assessments of Jim's final action make clear. No convincing argument can be made that is not based on a guess or ungrounded supposition; in effect, the privileged man is as likely to be right in saying that Jim is a fool as Stein is in defending his faithfulness to Truth. Marlow himself never even defends his own actions in regard to Jim with any vigor: "Was I so very wrong?"

But the issue of ambiguity that hounds every judgment of Jim's action the reader could conceivably make can be resolved by taking the perceptual leap Marlow repeatedly asks his listeners to make to imagine Jim and by analyzing at the same time Marlow's own motivations in telling the story as he does. If Marlow's action as a character in Jim's life, his motivations for being interested in Jim and for going to Stein, never rise for long above the haze of ambiguity in which he purposely couches them, his actions as a storyteller are not so ambiguous. He admits again and again that not only is he unable to tell the reader how to judge Jim, but that he cannot even judge him himself. He admits also his own desire to see

Jim as a "special case" and admits that at least part of his interest has to do with his doubts about the code of honor. He asks the reader not to judge but to extend imaginatively the solidarity of compassion to Jim; at the same time, Marlow's desire both to allay his own doubts 68

about the code and to believe that Jim's action to uphold his honor was meaningful underlies his narrative. The solidarity, Conrad

suggests, of those who feel and imagine is facilitated by art and, in

this novel, by Marlow's actions as a storyteller: Jim's suffering is real.

At the same time, the art of narrating is itself driven by desires that are not easy to unravel. The ambiguity and undecidability of Jim's story and the status of the code of honor then become the premises of the text, but their undecidability does not make the novel itself ambiguous. Understanding Marlow's role in the construction of Jim's story helps explain why Jim's case touches readers so deeply, even though Jim seems quite incapable of understanding his own culpability at any but the simplest level.

Conrad's novel suggests that, in a world made tame and monotonous by its adherence to laws and standards and rationality in general, tragic art may provide rare access to the inner suffering of others and of ourselves. It also suggests that the world of domesticity and order, legality and ethics, science and progress forms an iron barrier between ourselves and our aloneness, and the function of art is to crash through that barrier. 69

Notes

^ For an exhaustive list of parallels between Lord Jim and The Great Gatsby. see Robert Emmet Long, The Achieving of The Great Gatsby (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1979) 96-107.

^ See Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle (1954; New York: Modern Library, 1984) 219-266, and Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision (1960; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966).

^ I am not relying here or elsewhere on a particular "standard" a tragic protagonist must meet. I am referring rather to my contention that the reader must agree that the value the protagonist insists upon does in fact have some value. In the case of Jim and Gatsby, Nick and Marlow not only leave those values unexamined, but inadvertently call them into question.

^ This is a problem similar to but larger than that of, for example, Willie Loman, that commonest of common men, who represses and denies whatever facts might invalidate his conception of himself. Jim and Gatsby are not capable of perceiving any invalidating views, and hence have no contradictory possibilities to deny.

^ Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1979) 348-52.

® John Batchelor, Lord Jim (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988) 162-74. In this book-length study of Lord Jim. Batchelor compares Jim to Hamlet, but the argument is unconvincing, if only because of the enormous gap between Jim's intellect and Hamlet's and the distance maintained throughout between the audience and Jim's inner being.

^ Krieger 165-79; Dorothy Van Ghent, "On Lord Jim." Twentieth Century Interpretations of Lord Jim, ed. Robert E. Kuehn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969) 68-81; Harry S. Epstein, "Lord Jim as a Tragic Action," Studies in the Novel 5 (1973): 229-47.

® For a recent summary of Lord Jim criticism, see Batchelor 187- 212.

9 See especially Mark Conroy, Modernism and Authority: Strategies of Legitimation in Flaubert and Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985) 88-115.

J. Hillis Miller, for example, concludes in Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982) 22-41, that the various episodes of the novel, all non-originating, repeat and echo each 70

other, revealing Lord Jim as a work that raises questions it cannot answer. On the politico-historical front, Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981) 206-80, argues that the novel demonstrates the power of British imperialism, its discourse finally directing attention toward nostalgia for a pre- nihilistic past and thus away from the social and economic framework of capitalist ideology within which Nature is constructed as dishearteningly indifferent. Without engaging Jameson's complex and compelling arguments, I would merely respond that Conrad does, in fact, recognize that our perceptions of Nature are mental constructions, indeed, that the difficulties arising from that recognition are a principal thematic concern of the novel and a source of Marlow's anxiety.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (1900; Boston: Houghton, 1958) 12. Further references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically within the text.

More critical attention has been paid in recent years to Marlow's role as a character in the novel. For example, Peter J. Classman, "An Intelligible Picture : Lord Jim." Modern Critical Interpretations: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, New Haven, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1987) 33-52, emphasizes Marlow's attraction to Jim's authenticity as an antidote to his own withdrawal into the complacency afforded by adherence to the system of belief the code represents.

While post-structuralist critics such as Miller and Jameson dismiss, although for entirely different reasons, the overt theme of Marlow's reluctant ambivalence toward the code, it seems to me that the effect of Conrad's having Marlow tell Jim's story is precisely to reveal the code as a function of the ideology of colonialism. Marlow's anxiety arises directly from his inability to imagine a social system that is neither governed by arbitrary and merciless law nor wholly anarchic. Marlow's dilemma, proceeding as it does from the omniscient narrator's far less ambiguous assessment of Jim, should not be taken as Conrad's dilemma.

Batchelor 84-89.

See Conroy 99-102, for a discussion of Marlow's emphasis on Jim's class status.

While Jewel is generally dismissed by critics as one of Conrad's typically unbelievable female characters, she alone admits that Jim can only avoid disaster by changing the terms of the argument, that is, by seeing her as more valuable than his "honor."

See Watt 346-48. 71

Watt 175-76, uses the term largely in relation to sensory impressions that are given at one point in the narrative but that only become meaningful in retrospect--a part of Conrad's typical categorization as an "impressionist writer." The term seems to me to be equally applicable, though, to events and characters whose significance is revealed only in the unfolding of the text. One might note in passing that "delayed decoding" is one way of describing the process of reading any writerly text; as Albert J. Guerard notes, in Conrad the Novelist (1958; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965) 130-40, to reread Lord Jim is to read a new text.

F. R. Leavis, in his attack on Lord Jim in The Great Tradition (1948; London: Peregrine, 1962), is perhaps most responsible for the widely held opinion that the novel's first and second halves are incompatible with each other and ths.t the Patusan "romance" is a poorly pieced together story that lacks the subtlety and substance of the Patna narrative. See Batchelor 188-89, for a brief summary of Leavis' position.

20 "Guilt and Atonement in Lord Jim." Kuehn 43.

See, for example, Paul S. Bruss, "Marlow's Interview with Stein: The Implication of the Metaphor," Studies in the Novel 5 (1973) 491-503.

22 Ralph Rader, "Lord Jim and the Formal Development of the English Novel," Reading Narrative: Form. Ethics. Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1988) 230-32.

2^ Tony Tanner, "Butterflies and Beetles--Conrad's Two Truths," Kuehn 53-67, analyzes the novel as an extension of the butterfly/beetle metaphor. CHAPTER II

IMAGE AND DREAM: NICK AND THE STATUS OF GATSBY

IN THE GREAT GATSBY

Fitzgerald's admiration of Conrad's narrative skill is well- known and well-documented. Not only did Fitzgerald admire the complexity and the modern tenor of Conrad's work in general, but openly acknowledged his indebtedness to Conrad in his own introduction to the 1934 edition of The Great Gatsby. as well as in his private notebooks and correspondence.^ My interest here, however, is rather upon the representativeness of Lord Jim and The

Great Gatsby as very different works that employ involved narrators whose own interests and motives in casting their subjects as tragic protagonists are highly significant elements of the narratives they produce. That is, in both texts--though for different reasons--the world of the novel seems to preclude tragedy, yet Marlow and Nick ask their readers to make an imaginative leap in order to respond to Jim and Gatsby as tragic characters; moreover, Marlow and Nick are drawn to Jim and Gatsby precisely because of the largeness of their imaginations. Nick concludes that Gatsby, however deluded he may be, is nonetheless committed to an ideal with an intensity that eludes every other character, including himself.

72 73

A part of the tragic effect of these works involves their

narrators' indirect and reluctant admission and their readers’

understanding that the world of each novel is a diminished one,

reduced in the case of Lord Jim by an ethical system that controls

behavior and denies terror, and in the case of The Great Gatsby by the

capitalist system which reduces Nature to images and artifacts. In

Nietzsche's terms, both worlds block access to Dionysian elements and

make heroic action virtually impossible. For both Marlow and Nick,

the act of narrating is driven by the desire to extrapolate meaning

from the extraordinary lives of their heroes, yet Jim's and Gatsby's

deaths remain unwitnessed, their final and undoubtedly limited

understanding of themselves necessarily left uncertain, shrouded in

the imagined account offered by each narrator.

The world of The Great Gatsbv represents the way in which the

American capitalist system determines values and limits vision.^ No character in the novel is exempt from its pervasive ideology, rendered by Fitzgerald in a series of images depicting the rigid separation of classes and the dehumanizing struggles of individuals to advance themselves within that structure or to defend whatever status they enjoy. Even sickness and health are a function of class. When Nick says there is no more profound difference among men than "the difference between the sick and the well, both George Wilson and Tom

Buchanan have just realized that their wives have lovers; one might assume that both would look a bit under the weather, but they don't.

Wilson is sick because he is poor; Tom Buchanan is well because he is 74

rich. Women are tokens of class status, and Tom is able to flaunt his

own status by dangling the promise of a used car he neither wants nor

needs before Wilson; by carousing with Myrtle, he can demonstrate for

himself his power over the likes of Wilson, and for his friends he can

demonstrate the unshakable superiority of his position.

Given the world of stark contrasts Nick describes in images--

East Egg, West Egg, and the Valley of Ashes--it would seem that only

a character who could step outside this self-perpetuating web of

inequity could evoke a tragic response. Gatsby does not; on the

contrary, in some respects he becomes a symbol of that stratified

world. Yet in Nick's eyes he becomes tragic because he commits

himself to a value that seems to Nick to lie outside this rigid class

structure. Nick's task, then, is to convince his readers and himself

that Gatsby really is in some important way separate from the system

he describes, even though he knows that Gatsby is also very much

caught up in it. Gatsby imagines himself outside this system, or at

least imagines himself merely using the system to achieve a higher

goal by devoting himself to a value that transcends it, yet that value

is inextricably bound to wealth. Further, Nick imagines that Gatsby

recognizes his own defeat before he dies, but there is no evidence

other than Nick's own imagination that he does.

The world of The Great Gatsbv is not devoid of romantic objects, but it is a world in which romantic objects have been subsumed by, and have their meaning in, material objects.^ The artificial world subsumes the natural world so thoroughly that the two are inseparable: 75

"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the

whisperings and the champagne and the stars" (39), and, on the other

side of paradise, natural and artificial are similarly merged:

This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. (23)

The very language of the text consolidates the two, so that when Nick

calls Gatsby a "son of God," the only form God can take is that of Dan

Cody, and when the green light of Daisy's dock is associated with the

"green breast of the new world," that association is less an expansion

of the light's symbolic meaning than a sign of the transvaluation of

the new world's aesthetic promise from constellation and forest to

light bulbs and lumber.

Gatsby exempts himself from Nick's censure because he alone has

discovered and committed himself to an ideal--love--that seems to Nick

to transcend the materialistic strivings of every other character in

the text. "Love" is, of course, a highly problematic term here, not

only in a general way because of its multitude of signifieds, but

specifically in this text because it is not at all clear that Daisy, the object of Gatsby's love, can in any way be separated from the class status she signifies.^ In any case, it is not so much the ideal itself that makes Nick admire Gatsby as the intensity of

Gatsby's commitment to it. Gatsby's capacity for the dream is what fascinates Nick, Nick's assessment is defective because he does not 76

see the extent to which the romantic and the material are intertwined

in his own narrative. Much critical discussion has revolved around

Nick's reliability, some critics seeing Nick as the moral center of

the novel ; others seeing Nick as unreliable, an intentionally ironic

figure; still others suggesting that Nick represents Fitzgerald's own

limited self-awareness and his own fascination with wealth, raising

questions of the extent to which he was able to control the

narrative.^ But if Fitzgerald wants to reveal the totalizing effects

of the capitalist dream, as I believe he does, Nick is a perfect narrator because, while he is aware of the hollowness of the dream, he

is unable to discern its effects upon his own perceptive and interpretive skills. It seems to me not only that Fitzgerald must have been aware of the shortcomings and contradictions of Nick's character, but also that those shortcomings are essential to a principal thematic statement of the text--that American capitalism is a monolithic system that pervades every aspect of life from our deepest sense of self to our most casual social relations. Nick sees the inevitable limits of Gatsby's vision, but he does not see the impossibility of disentangling Daisy as an object of love from Daisy as a symbol of her class. Yet Nick's devotion to Gatsby depends on making a sharp distinction between Gatsby's vitality and intensity of purpose in pursuing Daisy as an object of love and his singleminded pursuit of wealth. Gatsby is heroic, Nick believes, because his acquisition of wealth is only a means of reaching Daisy, his "holy grail" (Nick's term). At the same time, Nick presents Daisy in such a 77

way that she is not really separable from her status, so that,

whatever Gatsby's level of understanding, his "love" for her cannot be

separated from his desire to belong to the privileged class she

represents. Hence, the romantic paradigm Gatsby seeks is intertwined

with wealth and with the euphoria of being b o m wealthy, of never

having to strive to achieve status--of being once and for all removed

from the "hot struggles of the poor."

Moreover, Nick's own romantic longings enable him to identify

Gatsby's "romantic readiness" and his "extraordinary capacity for hope," and to separate him from the "foul dust that follows in the wake of his dreams." Fitzgerald creates Nick as an imperfect judge of Gatsby because Nick is necessarily entrapped within a world in which the ideal merges with the material, so that the image, in effect, replaces the real. Nick is aware of "the unreality of reality" in Gatsby's world, but he believes himself capable of stepping outside the world he describes to make disinterested observations and judgments of it. He does make judgments, but they are not disinterested, and he is left finally removing himself from the possibility of satisfying his own romanticism, removing himself, that is, to the provincial world of the Midwest, which, we are given no reason not to believe, remains the "ragged edge of the universe."

At the same time, Fitzgerald ratifies Nick's judgment of Gatsby by indicting the particular way in which the American economic system and the social stratification it necessitates inevitably limit the imagination. 78

While a less sympathetic narrator might well have found Gatsby

less a tragic character than a dull-witted crook whose reach for

women exceeds his grasp (as many readers have, indeed, found him to

be), Fitzgerald's presentation of both Nick and Gatsby suggests that

their respective limitations are less the product of their own

deficiencies than of the poverty of the "American Dream" and the

rigidity of the class structure it both obscures and enables. Nick's

retreat to the Midwest signals for him an escape from the grotesque El

Greco landscape of the East, but it is an escape that is no more

likely to satisfy romantic yearnings than was his move to Long

Island. Aware of the "snobbishness" of his father's code of

"tolerance," he nonetheless withdraws, sickened by Gatsby's defeat and

the Buchanans' decadence, to an idealized Midwest, selecting a caught

moment from his own past that he chooses for his future.

Significantly, it is not the Middle West itself, its towns or prairies

or even the Carraway house with its attendant "decencies" that

establish Nick's identity, but the "thrilling returning trains of my

youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and

the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow"

(177). If Nick is aware of the limitations of a moral code that

consists of unspecified "fundamental decencies," his own identity is

secure only in the transient moment of returning to a world that

exists in a meaningful way only as an idealized image. "'Can't repeat the past?' he [Gatsby] cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'"

(111). Nick understands Gatsby's remark ironically, that is, as 79

evidence of Gatsby's naivete, but in fact, Nick does retreat to the

past, and by the last page of the text Gatsby's cheerful proposition

turns out to be prophetic : "we" not only can repeat the past, but the

repetition of the past becomes our inevitable fate. By creating a

character with Nick's particular limitations, Fitzgerald can dramatize

both the tragic potential of Gatsby's own character, a particular

instance of the failure of the American dream by one who believes

implicitly in it, and the absence of any substitute, anything

"commensurate with man's capacity for wonder," for a more complex

character like Nick.

In Lord Jim Marlow's experience in knowing, helping, admiring,

and finally re-creating Jim for others leads him to question the

rational world view that underlies the ethical world he has always

inhabited and leaves him finally straddling the two worlds of Stein's

romanticism and Brierly's rationality. If neither is sufficient to

capture the whole of his allegiance, he is nonetheless aware of the

countless "small conveniences . . . the mind of man can conceive"

(225) to avoid facing his or her aloneness in the terrifyingly

indifferent universe that lies just beneath the surface of clipped

lawn and garden fence.^ Nick, on the other hand, is a far less

reflective or self-reflective character than Marlow; at least he is less verbose in his ruminations. For Nick, no Stein exists to ratify

the value of romanticism, which for both Conrad and Fitzgerald might be defined as the imaginative capacity to see beneath the surface of things to find Beauty, Terror, Truth. Instead, reality in The Great 80

Gatsby is the surface of things, the "unreality of reality," and if

Nick is aware of this, he has nothing to assert in its place, other

than an equally unreal image gleaned from his own past.®

Nick's insubstantiality as the moral center of this text has

also caused considerable critical conjecture since the book's

publication. Nick's unacknowledged dishonesty, his own attraction to

wealth, the casualness of his sexual affairs, his attitude of

superiority, and his idealization of Gatsby have all been cited as

problematic, and frequently as evidence of Fitzgerald's own

limitations. Gary Scrimgeour, in an influential essay of 1966, makes

what remains the most extreme argument for this position.^ Nick, he

says, completely lacks self-awareness, ascribing to Gatsby the same

idealized and unwarranted status that Gatsby ascribes to Daisy.

Moreover, comparing Nick to Marlow (in Heart of Darkness^. Scrimgeour argues that Fitzgerald, unlike Conrad, does not lace his text with commentary that alerts the reader to his narrator's vulnerability.

Scrimgeour concludes that Fitzgerald was unaware of Nick's limitations and that he consequently produced a text other--and much darker--than he had intended. But Nick's flaws, as others have argued, serve specific and necessary functions.^® In fact, the sum of Nick's flaws reveals the absence of an outside authority, moral or otherwise, in the world Fitzgerald creates; Nick is necessarily not disinterested, since he, like everyone else in the text, is b o m into an all- inclusive system. When the events of the narrative had occurred; Nick had not understood his own interest in Gatsby, and did not understand 81

it because of the same ideology that had provoked Gatsby to enclose

his own dreams in the self-improvement regimen he had penciled as a

child on the flyleaf of Hopalong Cassidy.

Understanding why this text is best understood as a version of

tragedy requires a careful assessment of Nick's double role as

character and as narrator. Because Nick is narrating an event from

his own past, he is subject to the distortions of memory, the time-

warp that, even as it impedes a "true" reconstruction, also offers

the opportunity to reshape history to suit his own present purposes,

so that Nick is able to present Gatsby as he wants him to be perceived

by his readers. As biographer/narrator, Nick uses a variety of

techniques to preclude the reader's negative judgment of Gatsby and to

ensure that readers perceive him as a tragic character, even though

Nick had not perceived Gatsby as such until just before his death.

Nick appears consciously to distort the past to the extent that he

wants readers to perceive Gatsby's heroism; at the same time, he

appears to be wholly unaware of his own limitations or of his tenuous

suspension above despair. That is, Fitzgerald characterizes Nick by

the contradictions in his presentation of himself: Nick says he is honest, nonjudgmental, detached, and scornful of materialism, yet

proves himself dishonest, moralistic, romantic, and in search of wealth.

The problem for Fitzgerald in creating Gatsby is two-fold: to create a character who has immense longings to transcend his unimaginative surroundings and, at the same time, to make 82

unimaginable all means of transcendence other than the accumulation

of capital. Nick is the perfect narrator because he is taken in by

the dream of riches, and also has both a romantic sensibility and a

conventional set of middle-class mores--a "provincial squeamishness"--

from which to view the excesses of the East. If his romantic longings

are held in check by his middle-class morality and reserve, they are

also held in check by his own carelessness, cynicism, loneliness, and alienation. Consequently, he is quite capable of observing events with some detachment, even as his own romanticism shapes his judgment:

"I was within and without," Nick says, "simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life" (36). Nick has the unique capacity to see, at least after the fact, that Gatsby's devotion to Daisy had been genuine and also that the object of his longing was only the image of "a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" (99). His own imaginative capacity, without an object of its own, settles finally upon Gatsby. Owl-eyes, the perpetual drunkard, gives us a clue here; the cynic who knows it’s all a sham, he, along with Nick and Gatsby’s pitiful father, are the only attendants at

Gatsby's funeral, and he offers the only counterpoint to Nick’s assessment of Gatsby: "He took off his glasses and wiped them again, outside and in. 'The poor son-of-a-bitch,’ he said" (176). In fact,

"the poor son-of-a-bitch" never had a chance to come closer to reality than the facsimile of a real library and the facsimile of love. 83

Nick's dual role as character and narrator begins in the two-

page introduction to his narrative, which is not an introduction, but

a conclusion, a statement of the position in which Nick finds himself

some two years after Gatsby's death. Nick begins with his final

endorsement of Gatsby as a heroic figure and with a somewhat

convoluted statement of his own moral position. Nick's description

of himself here is laden with suggestions of the contradictions in

his own moral status that will be revealed more fully as his

narrative progresses. Nick reflects that his father's advice against

criticizing those who "haven't had the advantages you've had" is

equivalent to the "snobbish" assertion that "a sense of the fundamental decencies" is "parcelled out unequally at birth"; morality, in other words, is a function of class. Only those with the moral wherewithal to make moral judgments can possibly have the capacity to reserve them. Moreover, "reserving judgment," Nick says, is a "matter of infinite hope," a phrase that reverberates in Nick's description of Gatsby as a man with "an extraordinary capacity for hope." The connection between the two is central : to understand the

"truth" about Gatsby is to reserve judgment, and to see the truth about Gatsby's extraordinary qualities is a "matter of infinite hope."

On the other hand, Nick also implies that reserving judgment is a mark of neutrality, an invitation to the "abnormal mind" to reveal itself without fear of condemnation or disapproval. The revelations of such "wild, unknown men" are unwelcome ; they are, Nick says,

"plagiarized." Nick apparently does judge others rather harshly, yet 84

has been accused, he says, of being politically motivated because his

nonjudmental attitude attracts those who wish to confess their

secrets to him. Nick does confess that his tolerance of others'

conduct has its "limits," whether founded upon "a wet marsh or a firm

rock." Nick's ethical limits, then, are uncodifiable, based, one can

only assume, upon the "fundamental decencies" tacitly understood by

the members of Nick's class. (As Nick says, he and his father were

"unusually communicative in a reserved sort of way.")

In the space of less than two pages, then, Nick tells us that he

is a decent, honest, tolerant person, but his statement is laden with contradictions that don't require even a novice deconstructionist to reveal: he reserves and pronounces judgment, he communicates with his father in silence, others trust him with intimacies that he does not want to hear and does not believe, and his moral standards are derived from an intuition of decency that is a function of class. Nick establishes himself as the moral center of the text, but it is a moral center that is called into question right from the start: Nick's reliance on the "fundamental decencies parcelled out unequally at birth" is not a positive assertion of ethical value, but a negative capacity to pinpoint and condemn presumed immorality without having to take any action against it. Thus, he can lie at Myrtle's inquest and admire Catherine's "character" for doing the same, pretend a genuine interest in Jordan, and dismiss with a forgiving handshake Tom's responsibility for the Wilsons' and Gatsby's deaths. Nick's

"tolerance" not only removes any culpability he might suffer, but does 85

its share to perpetuate the destructive system he comes to despise.

By dismissing "the whole damn bunch" as immoral, Nick is able to

condemn individuals without indicting the social structure that

perpetuates their behavior. Here again, Fitzgerald seems firmly in

control: Nick exemplifies the contradictions at the heart of middle-

class morality.

While Nick's moral ambivalence contributes to the difficulty of

understanding Gatsbv as a tragic action, it also contributes to the

particular necessity of doing so. The world Nick presents is a world

of surfaces and images, including Gatsby's, beneath which Nick rarely

cares--or is able--to penetrate. Yet what allows us to see Gatsby as

tragic are Nick's own romantic longings, his loneliness, his desire

for something larger than anything life as he perceives it can offer

him. Never is Nick a more sympathetic character than on those few

occasions when he reveals, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely,

his own "extraordinary capacity for hope," of which, finally, only the

image of Gatsby himself remains. And in this limited respect,

reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope; it at least allows

Nick and the reader to see the waste of Gatsby's misdirected potential. Equally important, it allows us to see that Nick, too

sophisticated not to see the emptiness of Gatsby's dream, also suffers loss in the discovery that he can find nothing worth aspiring to in his own life.

The principal difficulty Nick faces in telling his and Gatsby's story is to present Gatsby in such a way that he will be seen as a 86

character of heroic dimensions who is at the same time subject to the

limitations of a society in which to have money is to be close to God.

Moreover, Fitzgerald has to show that the only alternative to this

"religion"--its holy relics most clearly identified in the rainbow

collection of Gatsby's shirts, its God most clearly in the raw

violence of Tom, its Church for the anointed in the ethereal drawing

room of the Buchanans, its Low Church in Gatsby's garish gardens, its

hell in the Valley of Ashes, where moneylessness is punished under the

watchful eyes of an absent God--is the monotony of a middle-class

respectability which is itself smug, secure, and utterly devoid of

romantic possibilities. Nick himself must be both attracted to

wealth (because it is the only ideal there is in America) and morally

indignant at others' commitment to it (so that Gatsby can be seen as

innocently aspiring to something more meaningful than wealth even in

his pursuit of a corrupt and worthless goal). Nick's double task is

to reveal Gatsby as the object of admiration and of scorn;

Fitzgerald's is, in addition, to reveal Nick as an isolated, alienated

character in his own right, if the imprisonment, the closed circle of

desire, of the American dream's apotheosis of money is to be revealed.

Also, Nick has to be only vaguely aware of the dark conclusions to

which his narrative leads: he has to believe at least that Gatsby's

story must be told. In fact, the valorization of Gatsby and the

telling of his story are Nick's only way out of the American dream, and even that escape is illusory. Nick's own narrative, like every 87

other dream, finally leaves him rowing against the current, receding

into the past.

Nick employs a variety of subterfuges to forestall the reader's

judgment of Gatsby while revealing the bogus quality of his dream.

Nick is unwilling ever to voice his whole-hearted approval of

Gatsby's idealism without at the same time qualifying that approval

with a reiteration of his disgust and scorn for Gatsby. Other

characters, including Jordan, the object of his affection (well,

attention), are never given the same benefit of the doubt that Nick parcels out wholesale to Gatsby; compared to other characters, Gatsby approaches sainthood. Daisy herself is treated both unsympathetically and contradictorily by Nick: on the one hand, she is the object of love that elevates Gatsby's desire, and on the other, she is the symbol of wealth and class, the self-centered, careless siren responsible for Gatsby's downfall. Nick introduces Gatsby only gradually: the reader's first brief vision of Gatsby, at the end of chapter one, is iconic ; he does not appear again until the middle of the third chapter, where he is described as unprepossessing, diffident, modest, with an enchanting and generous smile as well as an open pocket. Nick tells us over and over that he is full of scorn for

Gatsby, but he shows us Gatsby only at his most sympathetic moments, and orders his narrative in a way calculated to maximize the reader's sympathy for Gatsby. His awkward and embarrassed reunion with Daisy follows the revelation of the star-crossed beginnings of their romance and precedes Daisy's attendance at his party, a scene that makes 88

abundantly clear the distance between Gatsby's world and Daisy's.

Nick then describes in painstaking detail Tom's cruel and hypocritical

disassembly of Gatsby's facade and Daisy's desertion of him.

Nick's revelation of Gatsby's past is anachronic and fragmented,

presented not by means of Gatsby's own crude articulations, those

"elaborate formalit[ies] of speech [that] just missed being absurd"

(48), but with Nick's own flair for the vague, impressionistic

rendering of image and scene. Nick also treats Gatsby's awkwardness

and social ineptitude as a function of childlike innocence rather than

dullness or ostentation, and invariably presents Gatsby as the victim

of others' selfishness or cruelty. From the Civets and Leeches,

Endives and Hammerheads, Ferrets and Belchers on the long list of

Gatsby's ungracious and ungrateful guests all the way to Daisy, Tom,

and even poor, bungling George Wilson, everyone takes advantage, in

one way or another, of Gatsby's innocence, generosity, and eagerness

to oblige. Not only does Nick not specify Gatsby's business

"gonnegtions" himself, but keeps Gatsby mostly out of the picture when

he meets Wolfsheim, and ends the scene with Gatsby's extreme agitation

over meeting Tom at the restaurant. Having met Wolfsheim, the reader

knows the worst about Gatsby without actually knowing very much at

all. On the whole, Wolfsheim, proudly exhibiting his human-molar

cufflinks, appears less a sinister mobster than an absurdly

sentimental and comical character, particularly in comparison to Tom, whose very presence exudes arrogance, brutality, and cruelty.

Finally, Nick's characterization of his own past self is of an 89

objective, fair-minded observer of events, whose interest in Gatsby

had been largely a matter of curiosity that grew naturally into

admiration.

At the end of Nick's introduction he presents his final

judgment of Gatsby not in the enigmatic circularity with which he

presents himself but in a clear awareness of the contradiction

inherent in his judgment of Gatsby as an object of both scorn and

admiration. Nick's commitment to Gatsby's "romantic readiness" is

clear and eloquent--what he represents is to be scorned; what he is is to be admired;

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction [a condemnation of everyone in the East]--Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. . . . --it [Gatsby's "responsiveness"] was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. (2)

That Nick has only temporarily closed himself off from others' emotions suggests a renewed interest, but here again the information

Nick provides about himself is contradictory. Indeed, he has just remarked that he has never been interested in intimate revelations, and nothing in the narrative that follows, especially its final page, indicates that he can or will develop such an interest. Rather, only

Gatsby is worthy of his attention. 90

Nick introduces Gatsby gradually over the first three chapters.

In the first chapter, for example, Nick mentions Gatsby briefly four

times: he describes Gatsby's mansion; Jordan and, later, Nick mention

Gatsby's name at the Buchanans'; and Nick relates his first view of

Gatsby. This chapter also establishes Daisy's character and

illustrates the way in which Fitzgerald's rhetoric works throughout

the text to create a double vision of Gatsby, of Daisy, and of Nick

himself, and as such it is worth examining in some detail. This text

is so tightly woven, in fact, that there are very few details in this

chapter that are not taken up in later chapters, where they are

expanded and revealed in their larger significance.

Nick first mentions Gatsby by describing his mansion:

[It] was a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. (5)

Nick's description implies, but does not insist, that the house is a

paragon of ostentation and bad taste, but more importantly, a facade and an image: Gatsby's mansion is a copy of "some Hotel de Ville," not

the thing itself. Throughout his narrative, the physical world Nick describes has the quality of a stage set; Nick describes scenes by highlighting particular details that lend a surreal quality to the environment. In this instance, Nick doesn't make any judgment, but in fact moves on to contrast his own "eyesore" of a house next door, made bearable, Nick implies, by "the consoling proximity of 91

millionaires" (5). Nick diverts attention from the ostentation of

Gatsby's mansion and in doing so elevates it from a likely object of

derision to an object of desire, without entirely negating the

derision. Nick is thus able to conceal Gatsby's superficiality,

while Fitzgerald reveals Nick's own complicated relationship to

money--scornful, and at the same time admiring. Not until the middle

of Chapter 5, when Nick has discreetly removed himself from Gatsby

and Daisy's reunion in his own humble parlor, at a point in the narrative when Gatsby is at his most vulnerable, does Nick reveal the degenerate romanticism that had gone into the mansion's construction:

A brewer had built it early in the "period" craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his houe with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. (89)

Fitzgerald thus neatly fills in the depth of hidden class distinctions and the hollowness of Gatsby's vision while leaving Gatsby unscathed, fumbling through his painful confrontation with the girl of his dreams.

While some self-mockery is evident in Nick's comments about millénaires and peasantry, equally evident is that former interest in money, since Nick has already revealed that he had come to New York expecting to "unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew," and that despite his intention to read literary 92

works and become "'well-rounded'. . . life is much more successfully

looked at from a single window, after all" (4). In fact, Nick will

later tell us, notwithstanding the story he is narrating, he had spent

the largest part of his time that summer poring over financial tomes

and had refused Gatsby's offer of a business deal not because of his

business scruples, but because it was offered "obviously and

tactlessly for a service to be rendered" (84). With admirable

economy, then, Nick elides in this first chapter the gaudy reality of

Gatsby's mansion, and Fitzgerald weaves into the narrative Nick's own

plans to make a quick and easy buck on Wall Street.

At the end of the first chapter, Gatsby appears in person for

the first time, and it is a brief but memorable appearance.

Returning from the Buchanans' "white palace," Nick sees Gatsby on his

lawn.

regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. (21)

Here Gatsby is just another millionaire, comfortable, safe, and self- assured in the blessing of wealth, and, not incidentally, Nick casually inserts the heavens as a "share" of what a man may own.

Intending to speak to his wealthy neighbor, Nick is startled by

Gatsby:

[H]e gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I 93

glanced seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. (21-22)

While the first image of the living Gatsby suggests little more than

an ordinary rich man gazing at the stars with muted dollar signs in

his eyes, the second suggests a mysteriously romantic figure, a

Byronic sufferer, trembling and alone in the darkness, beset by some

great and unnamed sorrow. Thus even here as Nick first panders in whispers of the greatness of Gatsby, the man who makes money is overshadowed by, but never wholly separated from, the romantic hero who longs for--well, for something. (Of course, the green light is, as we will later discover, the object of Gatsby's attention, an

"enchanted object" for Gatsby because it signals the presence of

Daisy. It is also, as Nick suggests on the last page of the text, the artificial object that is associated symbolically with nature, broadening the scope of Gatsby's idealism, and of the text itself.

However, the green light is less a symbol that broadens Gatsby's significance than one that suggests the reduction of the natural world to the artificial, and indeed the absence of nature altogether in Gatsby: specifically, it symbolizes the radical transformation in

America of nature into artifice. Not until the last page of the novel does nature ever enter this text, except as it is incorporated into an artificial landscape reduced to images of wealth or poverty or pretention, and even here nature exists only in Nick's imagination, and only in the past.) Through this continuous double- 94

envisioning of Gatsby, Nick can not only validate his own judgment

and sense of fairness, but separate Gatsby's honest intensity from

the growing list of his less admirable qualities.

Gatsby's name also surfaces at the Buchanans' dinner party, and

when Jordan mentions his name, Daisy responds with surprise:

"'Gatsby?' demanded Daisy. 'What Gatsby?'" Dinner is served

immediately, and the comment is lost. Nick, who at that moment could

not have known of Gatsby's significance for Daisy, does not note her

surprise, nor does Nick intrude as narrator to remark upon it. Later,

Jordan will reveal that Daisy had awakened her that evening to ask

about Gatsby, so, unknown to Nick, Daisy is, or at least may be,

thinking about Gatsby for the rest of the evening, a fact that might

explain some of her erratic behavior and conversation. As narrator,

Nick might have pointed out the significance of Daisy's comment, or reconsidered the assessment he had made of her behavior at the time, but he does neither. In fact, Nick's assessment of Daisy in this chapter sets the ambiguity of her character decisively for the rest of the text: she is purposeless, insubstantial, flirtatious, and

Insincere, and, at the same time, agitated, unhappy, and distressed about Tom's current infidelity, but unwilling or unable to alter the situation. She should, Nick believes, pack up and leave. Nick's characterization of Daisy and his report of her speech and actions here are extremely important, not only because the characterization never changes substantially, but because Nick's description of her highly agitated behavior in combination with his dismissal of her as 95

insincere leaves her character open to intepretation and reveals

Nick's propensity for drawing moralistic and frequently unwarranted

conclusions.

The uncertainty generated here in regard to Daisy's character is

useful for a variety of Fitzgerald's purposes. First, it establishes

her as an emblem of wealth. For every character in the text, with the

possible exception of Jordan, but not excluding Gatsby, Daisy embodies

the luxury, beauty, and grace that money can buy. At the same time,

her cryptic, often irrelevant and disjointed remarks leave open the

possibility that her words screen not only her purposelessness, which

is obvious enough, but unaknowledged anger, confusion, disappointment,

and anxiety.Nick's moralistic response--that Daisy should walk

out--itself suggests that she is a victim of her status not as a

member of a privileged class, but as a symbol of that class, a

decorative object of largely aesthetic value. That status dictates

her emptiness; she can be no more than an image--a superficial

character without the capacity to express real feeling or articulate

real thoughts. She is her restlessness and purposelessness. Daisy's hope that her daughter will be a "beautiful little fool" is the understandable hope that her daughter will be too much of a fool to realize that she has no option to be anything else. Finally, Nick's judgment of Daisy reveals his own inconsistency of judgment, as well as his own attraction to her as a symbol of wealth: Daisy should leave Tom immediately, yet she and Tom belong to a "secret society."

"The instant her voice [the single feature to which she can be 96

reduced] broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt

the basic insincerity of what she said" (18). This complicated

response on Nick's part undercuts his credibility as a judge of

complex human behavior, but only to the extent that he is imperfect in

his judgments, neither wholly right nor wholly wrong--Daisy is

superficial, but his moralisms are irrelevant. Nick's response to

Daisy reveals that he is indeed entrapped by his own prejudices, but

not wholly enchanted by the "inexhaustible charm" of the wealth

Daisy's voice symbolizes--Nick's vision is skewed, but not wholly

inaccurate.

Nick's response to Daisy also sets the stage for Nick's own

ambivalence toward women, which itself serves in several ways to

reveal the text as a complex tragic action. In practical terms of

the need to reveal important information, Nick's affair with Jordan

of course gives him access to her narrative of Daisy's past, but other

instances might have served as well. More importantly, the affair

reveals a good deal about Nick's own character and, in its lack of

enthusiasm and vitality, serves as a stark contrast to the intensity

of Gatsby's commitment to Daisy. Frequently cited as evidence of

Nick's dishonesty, Nick's affair with Jordan is rather evidence of

Nick's growing awareness of loss in his own life, and his growing

sense of the impossibility of love either in the tense glitter of the

East or the enervating provincialism of the West. Nick reveals his fastidious adherence to a certain technical honesty when he refuses to 97

become involved with Jordan because of a tacit commitment to "the girl

back home":

Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow- thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself deliberately out of that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. [Note the reduction of this woman to less than a single body part, to a bodily excretion.] Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free. Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine : I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. (59-60)

Nick is "honest" in his adherence to the explicit more that it's wrong to be seriously involved with two women at the same time, although casual affairs are acceptable (for men). At the same time, these interior rules impede the possibility of actually loving anyone, so that what Nick feels is only the pretense of love. His real feelings have already been described: "I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity" (58).

The more important level of honesty Nick fails to note here has nothing to do with the girl back home; it has rather to do with his inability to care deeply about Jordan, or finally about anyone but

Gatsby, whom he will come to care about precisely because he believes

Gatsby does have the capacity to love. Moreover, Nick's questionable judgment of Daisy is made more questionable by the absence of 98

standards he demands from Jordan, whose dishonesty is not only of no

consequence, but is quickly forgotten: "It made no difference to me.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply--I was

casually sorry, and then I forgot" (59). Nick does not see that

Jordan is a reflection of himself: she is not quite on a par socially

with the Buchanans; she is alone and unable to be anything but

careless and casual in her own relationships; she has to work to make

a living. Nick allows her to believe that he is not careless, but

scrupulous, if not in a passionate commitment to her, at least in

allowing her to believe he is obligated to her, and Jordan's anger at

the end of the text suggests that she had believed him. Nick's

dishonesty in relation to Jordan is not only a matter of his having deceived her, but also a matter of his having deceived himself. By dimissing Jordan's dishonesty, he can pretend to a tolerance that is actually a confirmation of his own superiority.

Nick, although he is almost conscious here of his inability, rather than his disinclination, to love Jordan, does not understand how thoroughly isolated he is from others until nearly the end of the text. Indeed, the passage quoted above does not make full sense except in the context of the latter:

[Jordan:] ". . .1 thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride." "I'm thirty," Nick said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. (179) 99

In fact, Jordan is correct; Nick's honesty had been his secret pride.

Only at the end of the text does Nick realize that being "half in

love" is not a satisfactory reason for continuing to pretend that such

a half-hearted commitment is worth pursuing.

Nick's interest in Jordan is itself sparked only after Jordan

tells Nick about Gatsby's romance with Daisy in Louisville, at the

same moment the magnitude and direction of Gatsby's passion becomes

clear to Nick:

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor. (79)

If the story brings Gatsby to life for Nick, it also kindles a

momentary passion for Jordan:

Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby anymore, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired." . . . Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face. (81)

This is as close as Nick ever comes to passion, a pale copy of

Gatsby's dream of Daisy, even a pale copy of Tom's dream of Myrtle, or

Daisy, or both. What Nick derives from Jordan's narrative is the extent, the passion, and the purpose of Gatsby's heroism, which Nick 100

both admires and emulates; he lets pass without comment Daisy's own

thwarted romanticism and her less than whole-hearted decision to

marry. Nor does he notice or think it peculiar that (like Gatsby)

Daisy alone among her circle never drinks, even though Jordan has

just revealed Daisy's drunken refusal to marry Tom and suggested the

reason for her subsequent sobriety: "'You can hold your tongue, and

moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that

everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care'" (78). Nor

does Nick notice when Jordan remarks that "'Daisy ought to have

something in her life'" (81). In short, Nick is remarkably inept at

seeing beneath the surface of either Jordan or Daisy, but Fitzgerald has given ample evidence to suggest that Nick's "objectivity" is complicated by, if not wholly a function of, his own unacknowledged desires. Nick is quick to attribute high-minded motives to Gatsby on the slimmest of evidence, but he does not do so for Daisy; at the same time the absence of passion in his own life is compensated when he imagines Gatsby.

Nowhere are the gaps and inconsistencies of Nick's narration more clear than when Nick imagines the moment of Gatsby's commitment to following the "grail." If we juxtapose Nick's rewriting of

Gatsby's conversion to love to his interest in Jordan, it becomes clear that Nick's actual interest in her is, again, a pallid imitation of Gatsby's splendor. Moreover, Nick, in language 101

absolutely alien to Gatsby's own crude articulations, shifts the

direction of Gatsby's transcendence^®:

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (112)

Inserted in the narrative just after Daisy attends Gatsby's party,

which had made abundantly clear the irreconcilable differences between

Daisy's world and Gatsby's, and just prior to the scene at the Plaza

Hotel, where Tom confronts Gatsby with his lies, this passage

reorients Nick's understanding of Gatsby's dilemma. Until this point

in his narrative, Nick has insisted that it is Gatsby's single-minded

devotion to Daisy that makes Gatsby different. Here, Nick suggests

the opposite: Daisy becomes the culprit who has reeled Gatsby in from

his cosmic romp with the mind of God, and from here until the end of

the text, Daisy loses whatever sympathy she may have gained in

renewing her romance with Gatsby, and reassumes her role as Tom's

cold-hearted co-conspirator.

In fact, the passage serves as much to reveal Nick as to generate sympathy for Gatsby. If Gatsby's devotion to Daisy is unquestionable, it is nonetheless equally true that Gatsby's mind functions much better romping with Wolfsheim than with God--even the

"Platonic conception of himself" his seventeen-year-old mind had 102

concocted had been less the son of God, than the son of Dan Cody;

whatever tuning-fork he may have heard had been struck not upon a

star, but upon the rudder of a yacht. For Gatsby, the incarnation of

Daisy as the embodiment of his dreams added an element of love to an

otherwise enthusiastic, but hardly transcendental, pursuit of wealth.

It was, after all, Jordan's revelation of Gatsby's single-minded

pursuit of Daisy that had originally elevated Gatsby in Nick's mind to

the status of hero. Daisy is the incarnation not only of money, but

of the grace, self-assurance, and other-worldliness that can come only

from established wealth: Gatsby's "unutterable vision" is not reduced

to, but inextricably intertwined with a dream of access to "the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor" (150). Indeed, it is not Nick but

Gatsby who identifies the elusive and seductive quality of Daisy's voice: "'Her voice,'" Gatsby says, as he and Nick wait to be driven to the scene of Gatsby's demise, '"is full of money'" (120). And, in his by now familiar capacity of tailoring Gatsby's vision to suit his own conception of it, Nick responds:

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. . . . High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. . . . (121; Fitzgerald's ellipses)

Yet up to this point in the text, Fitzgerald has so skillfully woven

Nick's condemnation of Gatsby's motives with his admiration for 103

Gatsby's "romantic readiness" that even so blatantly materialistic a

revelation from Gatsby's own lips cannot negate the sympathy generated

by the following scene, in which Tom, incensed by his perception of

the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby and the challenge to his

right of absolute control over Daisy and the status she symbolizes for

him as well as Gatsby, exposes Gatsby before Daisy as a fraud.

The reasons for Daisy's characterization also become clearer,

given this way of seeing the text as a whole. Fitzgerald has cited

the lack of any specific information about the renewed relationship

between Gatsby and Daisy as the principal weakness of the text,

although he recognized that the omission was unavoidable.^^ In fact

that absence is essential. It leaves Daisy's character and

motivations in a state of uncertainty, so that we can not posit Daisy

as an entirely victimized character, as Sarah Fryer does; nor, given

the facts of Daisy's history and behavior that Nick elides, can we posit her as the superficial and empty-headed debutante Nick and most critics take her to be; nor finally as the clever, conniving murderer that Ernest Lockridge suggests.In short, Nick's characterization of Daisy is as difficult to verify as his characterization of Gatsby, but the uncertainty aroused here is not evidence of Fitzgerald's carelessness or of his own limitations (sexist or otherwise); rather it is an integral part of the way in which Fitzgerald (whether consciously or not) dramatizes Nick's inability to see beneath the surface of things, enhances the credibility of Gatsby's idealization of Daisy, and directs Nick and the reader to recognize the 104

inevitability of Gatsby's defeat. That is, because of the suggestion

that Daisy is more complicated than Nick perceives her to be, Gatsby's

romanticism seems less mindless and superficial than it might

otherwise appear to be. The blame for Gatsby's misplaced idealism can

be shifted away from Daisy herself (even in her function as an emblem

of power and status) and toward the limited possibilities America has

to offer Gatsby's romantic sensibility. Finally, the hope Gatsby

places in Daisy can represent both the possibility of success and the

inevitability of failure. Daisy is also an object of desire, not for

herself as a subject, but as a possession signifying power and status.

It is clear that the power in the Buchanan household belongs not to

Daisy, but to Tom, to whose brutality Daisy acquiesces for the

security of remaining in the only world she knows. Tom and Daisy

seemed to be members of a secret society, Nick says at the beginning

of the text, and they remain so at the end, "conspiring together" over ale and cold chicken as Myrtle's blood mingles with the dust and

Gatsby stands vigil in the shadows. Moreover, if Fitzgerald wants to emphasize the inescapability of the American nightmare that he paints

(an issue treated with considerably less subtlety in An American

Dream), one way to do that is to ensure that the narrator himself is not immune to it. Only a narrator like Nick who feels the same longings Gatsby feels, but who also sees the insubstantiality of

Gatsby's dream, could valorize Gatsby's romanticism at the same time that he deplores everything else about him. More importantly, Nick's own romanticism must be seen also to be his most appealing 105

characteristic, and at the same time to be without an object, and, as

with Gatsby, without an object because of the nature of American

capitalism.

To return to the passage in which Daisy becomes love incarnate

for Gatsby, here as elsewhere, the "gorgeous" quality of Nick's own

discourse elevates Gatsby's experience to a transcendental one, as

Nick recreates an experience from Gatsby's past that is largely a

product of his own imagination. It is true that Nick is speaking for

Gatsby, but he gives no indication that he does not agree with his own

indirect discourse here. Gatsby's own narrative of his experience of

falling in love with Daisy pales in comparison to the passage quoted

above :

"I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her . . . Well, there I was, 'way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?" (150; Fitzgerald's ellipsis)

Gatsby's words here are not revealed by Nick until just before

Gatsby's death, at the point in the chronological order of events when

Nick had himself been converted to Gatsby's cause. "I disliked him so much by this time that I didn't find it necessary to tell him he was wrong," Nick had said when he had found Gatsby the previous evening stalking the shadows at Daisy's house after Myrtle's death (144). If

Gatsby had been "delivered from the womb of his purposeless splendor" 106

after Jordan's narrative, he is delivered still further for Nick here,

as Gatsby reveals his own past, which Nick in his role as narrator has

delivered to his readers in strategically located and rhetorically

transformed bits and pieces throughout the text.

In rewriting Gatsby's story, Nick keeps alive some slender

possibility for romance, idealism, and transcendence--some possibility

of exceeding the confining limits of his own world. At the same time,

Gatsby's own words, delivered with a kind of stupid simplicity, reveal

for Nick Gatsby's capacity for romance. Insisting still on Daisy's

unadulterated devotion to him, Gatsby ponders her actions at the Plaza

Hotel :

"I don't think she ever loved him. . . .He told her those things in a way that frightened her--that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper. And the reult was she hardly knew what she was saying." He sat down gloomily. "Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married--and loved me more even then, do you see?" Suddenly he came out with a curious remark. "In any case, he said, "it was just personal." What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn't be measured? (152)

Clearly, Gatsby is unable to recognize the reality of his circumstances--that Daisy's marriage to Tom is established and permanent, that she was frightened because he is a "cheap sharper," that her world and his are incompatible, that the phone call he awaits will never come. Yet, it is his very inability to recognize his own defeat that makes him exceptional in Nick's eyes; at the same time, it 107

is Nick's transformative interpretation of Gatsby's death that lends

him once again a larger dignity, or at least a much higher level of

self-awareness, than the facts of his case would seem to warrant:

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it [the phone call] would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (162; Fitzgerald's ellipsis)

Nick imagines Gatsby facing the death of his dream in the depth of his

aloneness, but there is no more basis for his judgment than there had

been for believing that Gatsby must have been a little disappointed at

his first meeting with the living, breathing Daisy, who had been for

so long only a part of his dream, or that he had understood the blunt

finality of his defeat at the Plaza Hotel. In both instances, it is

Nick's own premonition of disaster that accounts for his perceptions:

it is Nick who sees an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and

Nick who finds the rose grotesque. Here Gatsby's experience is not embellished or embroidered but created from the whole cloth of Nick's own desire to lift Gatsby--and himself--beyond the inclusive categories he had established early in the text, the "pursued and the pursuing, the busy and the tired." 108

Gatsby's last hope is pinned upon a telephone call from Daisy:

he waits beside his swimming pool not for Daisy herself, but for a

voice already described as disembodied and artificial made genuinely

so by its transformation into an electronic code that would bring him

that voice now disembodied in fact as well as figure. Nick "has an

idea" that Gatsby finally recognized the hopelessness of the dreams he

had built upon the "fairy's wing" that is the inexhaustible charm of

Daisy's voice--Gatsby face to face at last with the despair that

finally can only be attributed to Nick. Nick recreates Gatsby not as he was, but as Nick needs him to be, as a possibility, a "matter of

infinite hope." The act of reconstructing Gatsby as a character of tragic proportions gives Nick an image of his own to contemplate.

This text functions as a revelation of the potential for a particular kind of tragedy inherent in the prevailing ideology of

American capitalism. A man (Fitzgerald limits his sympathy to white males) with a dream in America can finally have only one dream; at all levels of society whatever energy any character can muster is channelled toward the acquisition of money and toward status in a privileged class. Gatsby, who may or may not understand that his own desire is no different from Myrtle Wilson's, nevertheless knows that he loves Daisy Buchanan. But to say that he loves (or pursues) her not for what she is, but for what she represents, is not quite accurate. What she is is. what she represents, to others and to herself. She is inseparable from her own imagined self, but that 109

self is limited by the status parcelled out to her at birth. Daisy's

first and last allegiance can only be to Tom, or rather to the

security that Tom's wealth, power, and even violence afford her.

Keeping Fitzgerald and Nick separated in regard to Daisy's

character is important. Considerable evidence exists in this text to

suggest that Nick's perceptions are distorted in a variety of ways, so

that one can only conclude that Nick, as he says of himself, is both outside looking in and inside looking out, and indeed that perceiving his "unreliability" can best account for the novel's ambiguities and contradictions. I have tried to argue that The Great Gatsby depends for its power upon the reader's discovery that Nick is entrapped in a severely limited world, and that, as part of that world, women are little more than emblems to be exhibited by men as signs of power and status. Even Nick recognizes, in the scene at the Plaza Hotel, that

Daisy had had a certain amount of courage to lose; Nick overlooks too many suggestions of Daisy's victimization to accept the notion that

Fitzgerald did not mean for her to be seen in that way, at least partially. Not that Fitzgerald here shows much interest in women's subjectivity, but the text simply would not work if Daisy were either a clearcut villain or victim. For Gatsby, the image of Daisy that remains after their experience in Louisville is a consequence of living in a world in which the image substitutes for reality, and wealth for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Only a character as unreflective and naive as Gatsby, whose childhood dreams had been built upon a self-improvement list 110

blatantly designed for the crassest sort of self-salesmanship, could

be a tragic figure, or, more accurately, the image of a tragic

figure, in a novel with this sort of thematic message. Fitzgerald

also needs a narrator such as Nick, who is both inside and outside,

caught up in the dream himself, but struggling to escape it in two

ways. First, as a participant in Gatsby's life, Nick is finally able

to commit himself to Gatsby when he assumes responsibility for

Gatsby's funeral;

[I]t grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested--interested I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end. (165)

Here Nick assumes a deeper bond with Gatsby than he has been able to

develop with any other character. Second, through the act of

narrating, Nick is able to rewrite Gatsby's own story and give Gatsby

finally, and more meaningfully, "that intense personal interest to

which everyone has some vague right at the end." If Nick cannot fail

to see the emptiness of Gatsby's dream, he can nonetheless transform

Gatsby's devotion. For himself, imagining Gatsby as a tragic

character is also a recognition of his own aloneness in the world, and his inability finally to posit any value beyond Gatsby himself and the

shadow of a Victorian Christmas, seen from the window of a moving

train.

Finally, much has been made of the last page of Gatsby and the

"mythic" status it is said to confer on Gatsby. Most critics have rightly noted that Fitzgerald here consolidates and broadens the Ill

events, references, and images of the narrative to make them

representative of the American experience in general, but I would

argue that this novel should be understood as Fitzgerld's version of

the American experience from start to finish, and that that

experience is indicative of a larger human problem^^:

I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. . . . Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastc future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (182; second ellipsis Fitzgerald's)

If the rest of this text documents the Dutch sailors' miserable

failure to turn the "fresh, green breast of the new world" into an earthly paradise, Fitzgerald suggests that it was a dream that was doomed from the start. If the sailors are reluctant to have thrust upon them this primal aesthetic experience, it is because, the last lines of the text indicate, they are themselves moving toward an image from the past. If untouched nature is the only object equal to the magnitude of the imagination, then that very moment of confrontation must be a source of beauty and terror. That the Dutch 112

sailors resist that contemplation suggests that the same imaginative

powers that alone are capable of aesthetic wonder are also driven to

substitute an image for direct experience.

It seems to me that the final lines of this text expand Gatsby

not £o the American experience, but well beyond it. Because the

contemplation of beauty and terror is simply too overwhelming--

"neither understood nor desired"--the moment of experience becomes an

image that is already part of the past. Nick attempts on the final

page of the text to step outside his own particular American

experience and to go back to its very origin, but what he finds is not

a beginning, but a continued receding into the past, the importation

of an old dream to a new world, so that even when the sailors meet

untouched nature, they have already begun to reconstruct it to be

commensurate not with their capacity for wonder, but with an idea, an

image from the past. It is toward this image, this frozen moment in

time, that the "we" of Fitzgerald's sentence move, and consequently

the capacity to experience reality, that is, to experience the

present, continually and necessarily eludes us.

As a member of the middle class, Nick, when his disillusion with

the East is complete, is left wihout a dream at all--his own

"romantic readiness" has nowhere to go but into telling Gatsby's story. The Midwest to which Nick returns is no place for dreaming, and the circle is complete: like Gatsby, Nick is only rowing forward into the past, toward an image that he himself recognizes is far from reality. What Gatsby represents for Nick is "an extraordinary 113

capacity for hope," but what Nick understands--and imagines that

Gatsby understands at the moment of death--is that there is nothing

in America worth hoping for--no object, no larger good, no greater

truth than the beauty of many shirts. That Gatsby is incapable of

grasping the hopelessness is a possibility that Nick does not

entertain, and while the reader may doubt that Gatsby ever understood

much of anything, his loss is nevertheless a product of the intensity

of his devotion and the largeness of his dreams. Nick recreates

Gatsby not only to recover Gatsby, but to recover "some idea of

himself" (as he says of Gatsby); in doing so he also records his own

loss. Nick is alienated from others and if he does not admit to

himself or to his readers the dark conclusions about American society

and about the nature of human desire to which his own narrative leads,

it is not because Fitzgerald didn't recognize them, but because he has

Nick cling to his belief in Gatsby as a kind of tenuous symbol of hope. That the novel begins with a clear and direct statement of

Gatsby's heroism and ends with an image of the circular, repetitive nature of desire suggests that Fitzgerald meant to send the reader at the end of the novel back to its beginning, into the past where only the memory of Gatsby stands between Nick and despair. 114

Notes

^ Robert Emmett Long, The Achieving of The Great Gatsby (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1979) 79-118, extending the work of James Miller, E._ Scott Fitzgerald--His Art and His Technique (New York: New York UP, 1964), has undertaken the most extensive and systematic documentation to date of technical, structural, and thematic parallels between Conrad's and Fitzgerald's fiction.

^ The empty materialism that defines the East as it is depicted in The Great Gatsby is so obvious that critics have, it seems to m e , taken it for granted without fully investigating its totalizing effects as a system, its inescapability for all characters, including Nick. Attention has focused instead on Fitzgerald's personal ambivalence toward wealth and on his variations of themes traditionally raised by critics of American literature: East vs. West, the closing of the Frontier, the failure of the American Dream, the search for an American self-identity. See for example, Robert Ornstein, "Scott Fitzgerald's Fable of East and West," Ernest Lockridge, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968) 54-60; Marius Bewley, "Scott Fitzgerald's Criticism of America," Lockridge 37-53, and "Scott Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the American Dream," Harold Bloom, ed. M o d e m Critical Views: F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Chelsea House, 1985) 23-47. One of the few critics seriously to explore Fitzgerald's Marxist sympathies (however ambivalent they may have been) as they are revealed in The Great Gatsbv is Ross Posnock in his essay "'A New World, Material Without Being Real': Fitzgerald's Critique of Capitalism in The Great Gatsbv." Scott Donaldson, ed., Critical Essavs on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984) 201-14.

^ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; New York: Scribner's, 1986) 36. Subsequent references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

^ See Posnock for a discussion of commodification and fetishism in The Great Gatsby.

^ The possibility of separating love from wealth in this novel remains the impossible dream of even very recent critics: Andrew Dillon, "The Great Gatsby: The Vitality of Illusion," Arizona Ouarterly 1 (1988): 49-61, for example, argues that Gatsby abandoned his dreams of wealth for human love.

^ See, for example, Thomas A. Hanzo, "The Theme and the Narrator of The Great Gatsby." Lockridge 61-69; Scott Donaldson, "The Trouble 115

with Nick," Donaldson 131-39; Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965) 91-95.

7 I add "her" over Conrad's and Fitzgerald's ghostly objections. To my knowledge, neither offers any evidence that he would expect women to read his fiction seriously, let alone show any interest in issues of political, social, or cosmic significance, although Fitzgerald did worry about the effect on sales of The Great Gatsby if it were perceived as a "man's book."

® Fitzgerald's linguistic construction of the image as a facsimile of reality fits Walter Benjamin's discussion of the image as a kind of substitute reality in Illuminations. Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1969).

^ Gary Scrimgeour, "Against The Great Gatsby." Lockridge 70-81.

Donaldson, "Trouble," for example, argues that Nick's commitment to Gatsby despite his equivocal approach to life makes the reader want to believe in Gatsby, too.

As Posnock suggests, Lukacs' idea that contradiction is at the heart of capitalism is given expression particularly in the contradictions in Nick's character and in the frequently oxymoronic phrases Nick uses in his descriptions of objects.

Here again Fitzgerald seems ahead of his time in anticipating, at least intuitively, Herbert Marcuse's notion of repressive tolerance.

John R. Chambers, The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), presents as his central thesis that, particularly since Arthur Mizener's influential critical biography. The Far Side of Paradise (New York: Vintage, 1959), the prevailing tendency to analyze Fitzgerald's novels largely in reference to the presumed limitations of his intellectual and perhaps moral capacities has severely curtailed our ability to perceive the subtlety and sophistication of Fitzgerald's best work.

In his description of Wolfsheim, as elsewhere, Fitzgerald wears his racism and his anti-Semitism on his sleeve--his sexism is a little more complicated, though equally disturbing. In any case, it is at least interesting to note that Fitzgerald appears to be almost hypersensitive to class differences among people and utterly blind-- as evidence from his other writings also suggests--to racial and ethnic ones.

For a long overdue and convincing analysis of Daisy as victim, see Sarah Beebe Fryer, "Beneath the Mask: The Plight of Daisy Buchanan," Donaldson, Critical Essays 153-65. Although reading 116

somewhat, but not entirely, against the grain, Fryer argues that Daisy is t o m between her desire for freedom and her need for security.

Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978) 72-100, argues that Daisy, as the unpossessable object of desire becomes the object of the novel's (male) hostility, and that Nick, Gatsby, and Fitzgerald are analogues of each other: all three make unrealistic demands upon women, demands that inevitably generate hostility when, equally inevitably, they remain unfulfilled.

See Scrimgeour 75, for example.

Despite a multitude of evidence within the text that Gatsby has no facility whatsoever with language; critics continue to cite such passages as this as if they were spoken by Gatsby. Chambers, for example, comments on this passage : "it would seem that Gatsby himself produced these images when he recounted the incident for Carraway" (98). In fact, Gatsby's very inarticulateness lends him a quality of innocence that diminishes his culpability.

See letters to Maxwell Perkins, Edmund Wilson, and H. L. Mencken in Andrew J. Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribner's, 1963) 172-73, 341, 480. Fitzgerald says that since he simply did not know what Daisy's reactions would be, he could not include them. However meagre his understanding of Daisy may have been, leaving her motivations open to interpretation seems to me to be a felicitous if unintentional outcome of Fitzgerald's uncertainty.

Ernest Lockridge, "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Trompe 1 'Oeil and The Great Gatsby's Buried Plot," Journal of Narrative Technique 17 (1987): 163-83, argues that Daisy master-minded Myrtle's death. With few exceptions, though, critics have unquestioningly assumed as a given of the novel that Daisy is not only morally bankrupt but completely passive.

Bewley, "Criticism" 56-58, is typical in stating that the American dream began with the pure and uncorrupted vision of the Dutch sailors, who "set out for gold and stumbled on a dream," which only later was trampled into dust by America's turn to materialism. But Fitzgerald suggests that the "transitory moment" of "aesthetic contemplation" was always too terrifying to sustain, that the sailors immediately rejected what was commensurate to their capacity for wonder in favor of an older, tamer, less threatening image from the past. CHAPTER III

QUENTIN AND SHREVE: HISTORY AND TRAGEDY

IN ABSALOM. ABSALOM!

While only a handful of critics call Absalom. Absalom! a

tragedy, an equally small number deny that it conveys a "sense of the

tragic," to borrow Cleanth Brooks's term.^ The reasons for that

assessment are not difficult to discern: the text lacks unity, but is

pervaded by a sense of impending doom; if Sutpen is the protagonist,

he is greatly distanced from the reader and shows little

understanding of his situation, yet he has a certain "innocence" and a

certain courage about him; if Quentin is the protagonist, he is

singularly inactive and plays no role in the Sutpen family demise, yet

he seems to bear the burden of guilt for the past; if the protagonist

of the novel is the South itself, a society is a highly abstract

tragic protagonist, whatever its error and however tragic its effects may be on individuals. Moreover, thematic issues woven into both the discourse and story levels of this narrative, particularly the problematics of history, of narrative, and of historical narrative

(the difficulty of recovering history, the impossibility of objective analysis, the role of the self and desire in producing narrative and in reproducing history) seem incompatible with a unified tragic

117 118

effect. The diffuse nature of the plot as well as the varying

interpretations of multiple narrators would seem to make a reading of

this novel as a tragic action a readerly imposition upon the disrupted

and repetitive discourse that constitutes this text. I want to argue,

however, that viewing Absalom. Absalom! as a tragic action with

Quentin the character/narrator/narratee as its protagonist allows us

to grasp thematic issues arising from both story and discourse

concerning the role of narrative in constructing history, the role of

history in constructing consciousness, and the particular legacy of

the South and of civilization Americans have inherited. Furthermore,

through Quentin's status as a tragic character, we can begin to

understand the psychic burden a revelation of American history places

upon us; Faulkner's discourse is such that what Quentin comes to

understand and feel about the past is transferred through the reader's

sympathetic connection to Quentin.

One of the most persuasive arguments against reading Absalom.

Absalom as tragedy is that the Sutpen story constitutes the text's

principal plot.^ If so, then Quentin's function is necessarily to

dramatize the effects of a deeply flawed social history upon the

present, however much his perspective might alter the reader's

perceptions. Sutpen, whether he is a typical or atypical plantation

owner, in either case represents the South and its tragic failure to

recognize its fundamental flaw as the precipitating cause of its own destruction^: 119

[Sutpen] came just with that sober and quiet bemusement, hoping maybe (if he hoped at all, if he were doing anything but just thinking out loud at all) that the legal mind might perceive and clarify that initial mistake which he still insisted on, which he himself had not been able to find.^

Sutpen is a potentially tragic character, but his tragedy is subsumed

by Quentin's recognition of the error that Sutpen could never

identify. Assuming that the Sutpen story is the central subject of

the text also limits the possibilities of comprehending the thematic

issues Faulkner raises, both in terms of his indictment of the

Southern caste system, which is the principal thematic issue of the

Sutpen story, and in terms of his assessment of the ways in which we apprehend or fail to apprehend history. The content of the Sutpen story raises most powerfully the issue of race as a false category and the necessarily questionable status of a humanistic value system that is both dependent upon and the sustaining structure of a society that cannot exist without fixing race as an essential category. Further, it examines the absence of self characterizing the white male at the center of power in a master/slave relationship. It also examines the ways in which the desire for recognition characteristic of white males excluded from power is diverted from direct competition with those in power. This desire of poor whites for recognition is expressed in unbroken hostility and violence toward blacks, who exist not as subjective selves, but solely as representatives of their owners' power. 120

The significance of these issues in terms of understanding both

the South in particular and racial and class conflict in general can

hardly be overestimated, and the Quentin's response to understanding

these issues intensifies the reader's understanding of the toll such an unconscionable history has taken and continues to take upon individuals. Positing Sutpen's demise as the central subject of the text falls short, however, in its failure to account for Faulkner's attention to the complicated process of recovering history from disparate, incomplete, and heavily self-motivated narratives in conjunction with a handful of undisputed facts, transformed into coherent narrative by an individual subject under the stress of present and altered circumstances and his or her own desire for self- validation and meaning.^ That is, Sutpen's story is pieced together by both Quentin and the reader from fragmentary and contradictory narratives, but the significance of the story becomes apparent only when Quentin and Shreve reconstruct its meaning. It is their recognition of Sutpen's error concerning racial difference that illuminates the repressed content of his narrative. Most important, a focus on Sutpen encourages readers to distance themselves from the

South, much as Shreve does, and the South becomes, as Shreve says, good theater, and little more;

"Jesus, the South is fine, isn't it. It's better than the theatre, isn't it. It's better than Ben Hur, isn't it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn't it." (217) 121

Sutpen is kept at a distance from the reader's sympathy both by

disruptions in the chronology of the story and by the use of narrators

unsympathetic to Sutpen, with the lone exception of the grandfather,

whose own voice might have been used much more extensively to make a

case for Sutpen. Had Faulkner intended to focus his readers' attention

on Sutpen, and thus upon the South, it seems to me that he would have

made Sutpen a much more sympathetic figure than he is, simply by

revealing the deprivation and disenfranchisement of Sutpen's childhood

before the reader so well understands his rigidity and his ruthless

subjugation of everyone in his path in the service of his design.

Positing Sutpen's as the central story of the text allows the reader

to make his or her own category mistake by reifying the metaphor of

North and South, thus justifying the continuation of inessential

categories that perpetuate the blatant racism and regional hostility

Shreve coldly displays in Chapter 9.^ Because Shreve himself does

take the Sutpen story, not Quentin's struggle, as the subject of

interest, he entirely misses the impact of the story's meaning ; for

Shreve, the story merely confirms his preconceived notions about a

degenerate, illiterate South in which everyone is a cousin or an uncle, including, no doubt, the hound on the doorstep. Shreve reveals his quick Northern reflexes most clearly in a question that shows both his awareness of the perversity of the South's old order and his equally perverse inability to use what he has learned to interrogate his own values: "'was it,'" Shreve asks parenthetically at the beginning of Chapter 9, "'your folks that are free and the niggers 122

that lost?'" (361). To ask that question seriously is to assume that

the disarray left in the wake of the Civil War was worse than slavery;

to ask it sarcastically, as he presumably does, is to ignore both

Quentin's pain and the narrative's revelation of the remote causes of

the South's demise--that a monstrous and untenable system grew out of

nothing more complicated or obscure than a twelve-year-old boy's

desire to be recognized by others as a human being.

The entire Sutpen story does function within Absalom. Absalom! as

a repository of causes for the rise and fall of the South represented

by the potentially tragic rise and fall of Sutpen, but more

importantly, the telling of the Sutpen story draws history into the

present in its role as a constitutive agent of individual

consciousness. At the same time, the specific content of this

narrative history, including both its events and the causes of those

events, dooms that individual who becomes conscious of them to the

recognition that an evaluation of history not only destroys any lingering nostalgia, but shakes the foundation of any traditional value system (which is to say any value system at all), and asks readers to interrogate their own values. The particularity of the

Sutpen story--the particularly stark brutality of the South--lends itself to such a recognition, but its significance extends beyond the limits of understanding--and hating--the South. Quentin is debilitated at the end of this text not only because he so closely identifies himself with the South, but because he believes Southern history is unique, not an extreme example of the typical treatment of 123

the Other by Western civilization, and Shreve insists that he continue

to believe just that. Unlike Charles Etienne and Sutpen himself,

Shreve comes from the far reaches of Canada with a word for "nigger";

indeed, one would be hard put to find a child in North America over

the age of five without one. Absalom asks readers to recognize

Quentin as one whose principal act is not only to recover history but

to acknowledge its effects upon their own subjectivity. Further, sympathetic identification with Quentin allows readers to generalize what is learned through him, principally, the need to retell history not from an inert textbook's "objective" account, but from precisely what those textbooks exclude and repress, the "rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking" and most especially the repressed subtexts of those tales.

The question of whether and how Absalom works as a tragedy hinges upon the issue of Quentin's status as character, narrator, and narratee in the novel, and that status is, of course, intimately related to the novel's narrative structure.^ Despite its multiple narrators--Rosa, Mr. Compson, an anonymous narrator, Quentin, and

Shreve--the novel is held together by Quentin's own consciousness, which varies in relative position to the discourse from disengaged listener to panting creator. From the first word to the last,

Quentin is always present, listening, conversing, thinking, narrating, imagining, and even doing or pointedly not doing. The consequences of Quentin's presence for the reader, even though he 124

plays no role at all in the Sutpen-Bon-Henry plot, are profound. From

a heavy presence in the beginning of Chapter 1, Quentin recedes into

the background until the end of Chapter 5, then becomes, with Shreve,

the narrator in Chapters 6-8, and the focalized character for the

anonymous narrator in Chapter 9. Throughout the first five chapters,

the reader is frequently reminded that Quentin is listening (or had

not been listening because he was preoccupied with details) and

becoming more curious about the Sutpen story. In fact, while

Quentin's experience is different from the reader's because he

already knows much of what he is being told, his experience also

parallels the reader's, insofar as he is, in a sense, hearing it for

the first time. Quentin is drawn into the story, not only in terms of

his growing interest and curiosity--again like the reader's--but

literally insofar as he has been asked by Rosa to accompany her to the

crumbling remnant of Sutpen's Hundred. Moreover, the reader's

startling discovery at the end of Chapter 4 and again at the end of

Chapter 5 that Quentin has become so deeply involved in the narrative that he is transfixed by images of Henry just after and just before he killed Charles Bon abruptly redirects the reader's attention from the so far incoherent and fragmentary Sutpen story to Quentin's response to it. In brief, Quentin's presence is foregrounded in a highly personal way: Quentin is not simply a passive or minimally responsive narratee, but a character/narratee whose reactions to the Sutpen story become a significant part of the reader's experience of the whole novel. Faulkner's technique of giving considerable attention to 125

Quentin initially, followed by minimal but occasionally striking

attention throughout Chapters 1-5, culminating in Quentin's evidently

deep absorption in the story, directs at least some part of the

reader's attention to speculation about how Quentin must have been

reacting as the story was told.

Consequently, when the abrupt switch to Cambridge occurs in

Chapter 6, the reader is already perceiving Quentin in two distinct

ways: as a character in the novel and as a narratee who is absorbed in

what still appears to be the subject of the narrative, Sutpen and the

Sutpen family. That Shreve not only summarizes what we already know

(and adds details we do not, including how Sutpen insulted Rosa)

indicates further that Quentin had, between September and February, told the entire story to Shreve, so that he has added the role of narrator to his repertoire. The letter from his father announcing

Rosa's death doesn't renew his interest in a forgotten subject, but rather promises the resolution of a continuing interest. What is unusual about the relationship between Quentin and the reader is that a large part of Quentin's activities as both narrator and narratee take place outside the framework of the text. That is, the reader surmises (with more or less attention) from the occasional comments of the anonymous narrator that something important is happening to

Quentin. Even though the reader is not given enough information to determine exactly what that is, it is clear that Quentin is being affected, and because of the parallel positions of Quentin and the 126

reader, Faulkner is able to involve the reader along with Quentin in

the unfolding of plot.

As Chapters 6-8 continue, the reader's interest in Quentin is

deepened: his physical rigidity, his imperviousness to the mounting

cold, his attempts to guard against Shreve's sarcasm, and his

sincerity (despite occasional sarcasms of his own) all work to garner

the reader's sympathy for Quentin. Moreover, even Shreve, who so

obviously scorns the South, both past and present, eventually

succumbs, in Chapter 8, to an imaginative reconstruction of a heroic

Charles Bon and a chivalric Henry before he again becomes remote and

sarcastic in Chapter 9. It seems to me that in Chapter 9 the reader

is given a choice between Quentin's perspective and Shreve's, but to

adopt Shreve's is to free oneself from the past, to ignore history and

pretend to be unaffected by it, and to remain outside the processes of history, while to adopt Quentin's perspective is not to be debilitated by history, as Quentin is, but to acknowledge the role of history in shaping the present, that is, to acknowledge not merely the axiomatic truth of that statement, but to be affected by it in a very personal way. The reader is invited to understand Quentin as a character who is doomed to live not simply knowing that history is horrible and nostalgic dreams are the stuff of foolish minds, but that the present and the future repeat the horror of the past and that one's own subjectivity is powerfully shaped by that past. Because the reader has listened to, questioned, wondered about, and become engrossed in the Sutpen story in a kind of partnership with Quentin right from the 127

start, only a drastic reversal of the development of that relationship

can allow the reader to share Shreve's perspective in the final pages

of the text. Moreover, the attention paid to Quentin's physical

state--breathing, shivering, convulsing, panting, visualizing,

sweating, and so on--is so extensive in Chapter 9 that Quentin's

physical presence becomes analogous to the three enclosed spaces--heat

and dust in Rosa's airtight office, the heavy scent of wistaria and

cigar smoke on the Compson porch, and the sparse and frigid dormitory

room at Harvard--in which all of the narrating takes place. That is,

Quentin's own body becomes the oppressive space that encloses the

reader along with Quentin as he battles the "djinns and demons" of the

past, the present, and the future. Consequently, even though Quentin

is only peripherally involved in the Sutpen story, and even though

finding Henry at Sutpen's Hundred is a bit anticlimactic, by the end

of the novel, for the reader, what happens to Quentin is profoundly

more important than what happens to Sutpen or Bon or Rosa or any other

character. At the same time, the Sutpen-Henry-Bon story, as well as

Rosa's narrative, because, once understood, it is the very heart of

darkness, becomes so powerful in its own right that it forces Quentin

to recognize his own tragic fate, which is to have to continue to live

in the knowledge that he does hate the South.®

The progression of the plot in this novel is controlled not by

the resolution of the Henry-Bon-Sutpen story, but by the resolution of

Quentin's conflicts with the past.^ Quentin recognizes that the past

is not only not dead, but alive and threatening, not because of the 128

racist fears Shreve exploits, but because every humanistic value that

survived the South's defeat is understood to have originated in order

to perpetuate an indefensible social system. Central to the plot is

Quentin's accumulation of data and the process by which he uses that

data to construct the only history that seems to him to be "true."

Quentin's desire to create a narrative that will validate himself is

no doubt his motivation, yet stubborn facts, cold and hard as

tombstones, deny him that possibility, in fact render his own life a

meaningless burden. Like Bon, who finds himself "doomed to live"

after four years of war, Quentin, too, is doomed to live with a

knowledge of history.

Moreover, because the facts of history are unanalyzed data, they

make no sense apart from the "old tales and talking" within which they

can be arranged and rearranged to suit the purposes of any given narrator. The several narrators of Absalom, as critics have often noted, are far from objective as they narrate their stories, leading many to the conclusion that one of Faulkner's thematic points is that history is not accessible.Others note, however, that there is remarkably little factual data that is genuinely contradictory among their accounts. Rather, as new facts or previously concealed facts are revealed, new possibilities come to light that not only allow but demand, if not specific interpretations, at least severe limitations upon the possibilities of interpretation.^^ As Olga Vickery notes,

Absalom is not so much a series of contradictory tales as a kaleidoscopic view of history.If the whole of Absalom leads the 129

reader to conclude that history is ultimately unknowable, that

conclusion is only true at its most trivial level--that each character

views the world differently. Much more powerfully delivered is the

notion that history is the repository of certain intransigent facts

that refuse to be ignored and that impose themselves upon the

consciousness of the living just as Henry Sutpen's yellow face and Jim

Bond's howls impose themselves upon Quentin, and history becomes the

nightmare from which it is impossible to awake : "waking or sleeping it

was the same and would be the same forever as long as he lived. . .

thinking 'Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore Nevermore

Nevermore'" (373).

Which accounts are subjective or objective, which true and which

false, become irrelevant issues, so closely intertwined are the

narrators' own needs and their interest in truth. What can be known

about history is "probably true enough," as the anonymous narrator

says of Shreve's wholly imagined account of Son's mother. Quentin and

Shreve understand Bon's and Henry's motivations through their own

compulsive effort to relive the past, but they do so within the

context of their knowledge of the present and their own desire. They

are able to incorporate these with what they know of Sutpen to arrive

at the only logical explanation possible of the murder. In doing so, whether they are right or wrong about Bon and Henry, they stumble upon

the artificiality of the idea of racial difference. To recover the past is to lose it, and the loyalty, honor, and love the past was supposed to bequeathe becomes only a dream. Rosa says of the Charles 130

Bon she never once laid eyes upon: "he was absent, and he was: he

returned, and he was not" (153). For Rosa, Bon was the dream more

real than reality; for Sutpen, it was the "design"; and for Quentin it

was the "humane" values of an Old South that never was. Not knowing

history, like not knowing Bon, allows the dream of glory to persist;

knowing it turns the dream to ashes.

Understanding this text as a tragedy, then, requires an

understanding of how and why Quentin changes from puzzled listener to

tragic protagonist, how the Sutpen family's story comes to exert its

tragic power upon Quentin, and how Quentin's presence may affect the

reader. Quentin's adversary in this text is not another character,

not even Sutpen or Henry, but history. What both prevents access to historical truth and at the same time provides the only avenue to its recovery is language, both in its capacity to solidify a certain view of reality to the exclusion of others and specifically in those multi­ dimensional narrative acts to which Quentin must listen and which he is compelled in his turn to create. Each separate narrative within the novel serves several functions for speaker, listener, or interlocutor, but Quentin's presence is central throughout the novel, even when the content of the text has to do not with Quentin but with Sutpen and those within his sphere of influence.

The entire narrative divides itself readily into two parts.

Chapters 1-5 and Chapters 6-9. In the first chapter, we and Quentin learn together how Rosa views her childhood, herself, her family, and 131

Sutpen, and we learn two important facts; that Sutpen is dead, that

Henry killed Bon. From both Mr. Compson and the anonymous narrator,

we l e a m about Sutpen's past from the time of his arrival in Jefferson

in 1833 until his death in 1869. From Mr. Compson we learn more about

Rosa and about the Sutpen family--or rather we are given a different

but not incompatible commentary on Rosa and Sutpen--as well as Mr.

Compson's speculations about why Henry murdered Bon. All of chapter

5, in which Rosa explains why she decided to marry Sutpen and how he

offended her, takes place chronologically before Mr. Compson's

narrative and before Quentin goes with Rosa to Sutpen's Hundred. One

of the difficulties of Chapter 5 concerns its anachronic placement in

the text, since in discourse time it follows Mr. Compson's reading of

Bon's letter, to which Quentin is inattentive, preoccupied as he is with the image of Henry and Bon riding up to the gate of Sutpen's

Hundred for the last time. No textual markers place Chapter 5 as the end of Rosa's narrative of that afternoon. It has even been suggested that it is Rosa speaking on the way to Sutpen's Hundred, but we learn later that she did not speak on that journey. The deliberate ambiguity of Chapter 5's placement in story time suggests the irrelevance of linear time to human desire, a theme heavily reinforced not only by the content of Chapter 5, but by the sheer energy of

Rosa's discourse, neither ameliorated nor reduced over forty-three years of relentless frustration and imprisoned desire.

Chapters 6-9 take place entirely within the enclosed space of

Quentin and Shreve's room at Harvard. Here we l e a m what Quentin had 132

learned, by way of his father, from his grandfather, who in turn had

heard from Sutpen himself the story of Sutpen's life prior to his

arrival in Jefferson, and, in more detail, what happened to him after

he returned from the war. Mr. Compson also provides a narrative about

Bon's son and Sutpen's death at the hands of Wash Jones. In chapter

8, Quentin and Shreve speculate about the reasons for Bon's murder

and, finally, in chapter 9, the anonymous narrator tells us what

happened when Quentin and Rosa went to Sutpen's Hundred. Far from a

careless or haphazard arrangement, or one intended to reveal the

incoherence of history, this narrative is ordered in accordance with

what Quentin needs to know if he is to understand both the questions

raised by the Sutpen story and the way in which the answers to those

questions shape his consciousness.

Quentin's state of mind changes radically over the course of the text as attention focuses more and more on Quentin and as the reader becomes increasingly involved in Quentin's consciousness. Throughout the first five chapters, Quentin remains somewhat puzzled by Rosa's narrative and curious as he and his father attempt to understand what the Sutpen-Coldfield story and the Sutpen-Henry-Bon story mean. Not until the end of Chapter 4 and again at the end of Chapter 5, do we get a direct statement of Quentin's absorption in the tale, with his sudden arrest first upon the vision of Henry and Bon riding up to the gate of Sutpen's Hundred, and, second, upon Henry, smoking gun in hand, telling Judith he has killed her fiance. Beginning with chapter

6, Quentin becomes increasingly sullen and reluctant, but also 133

apparently compelled to proceed with the story. And here, for the

first time, a specific piece of information that Quentin has is

missing completely from the reader's own store of facts, namely

Quentin's discovery of the dying Henry Sutpen at Sutpen's Hundred.

Only at the end of the novel, will the reader know that Quentin has

been troubled by this image throughout, and, indeed, that what he

found/learned/repressed at Sutpen's Hundred is the source of his

tension throughout the last half of the text.^^

At the same time, what Quentin learned at Sutpen's Hundred makes

no sense to him, until he, with Shreve's help, is able to reconstruct

those events of the past that give meaning to his discovery. It is

this process of recovering meaning from the past in order to live in

the present that the entire narrative seeks to set forth. It is not

that Quentin "discovers truth" buried either in history or in his own

memory, but that he is finally able to admit to the horror that all

the "old tales and talking" have steadily refused to acknowledge. The

withholding of any information about what actually happened at

Sutpen's Hundred places the reader as close as possible to Quentin's

own experience; that is, Quentin withholds from himself the image of

Henry, guarded by Clytie in the rotting skeleton of Sutpen's mansion.

Not until the full revelation of the motivation for Bon's murder, which in turn is not accessible without the details of Sutpen's early life and the unearthly, frustrated dream-world of Rosa, can both

Quentin and the reader recognize the extent and the ramifications of

Sutpen's "mistake." In what might have been the climactic scene of 134

the novel, when Quentin imagines Sutpen's home in flames--the end at

last of Sutpen the demon, the purging of the horror that was the real

Old South--Quentin imagines not an end but a new horror. Jim Bond,

rising from the ashes of Sutpen's Hundred like a crippled phoenix

haunts Quentin's consciousness with his mindless human howls. Jim

Bond is not the embodiment of Southern white fears that Shreve takes

him to be; he is, like Benjy Compson, the voice of despair itself, a

human voice dispossessed of any claim to humanity. In fact, it is

less the memory of Henry Sutpen than his own image of Jim Bond that

Quentin cannot acknowledge until the final pages of the text. Not

only is Jim Bond the return of the repressed, he is the return of the oppressed as well: the black man denied any presence of his own either

in white consciousness or in white society becomes the haunting presence that will never, unlike Shreve's prediction, go away, but rather will continue the howls of despair that its designation as permanently alienated and dispossessed other demands.

Right from the start, Quentin is characterized as a young man divided :

Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now--the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard [whose counterpart is Shreve] in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was b o m and bred in the deep South the same as she was--the two separate Quentins now 135

talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage. (9)

This internal division will be made manifest in Shreve and Quentin as

they successively merge and recede throughout their narrative, until

finally they are irrevocably split, leaving only the second Quentin

intact, "'older at twenty than a lot of people who have died'" (377).

Not knowing what she wants from him, Quentin rejects the possibility

that Rosa merely wants her story told and so addresses the first

Quentin because, as she tells him, he may some day write it down.

Faulkner inserts at this point Mr. Compson's speculation that she

chooses Quentin because "she considers [him] partly responsible for

what happened to her and her family through [Quentin's grandfather],"

since the grandfather had been Sutpen's only friend and had indeed

made it possible for Sutpen to remain in Jefferson (13). Not the

first, but the second Quentin, then, is the recipient of her outrage;

he is the living representative of those ghosts whom Mr. Compson, in

the letter he writes to Quentin at Harvard, will come to hope (but not

think) she will find after death and who will be at last forced to

listen to her.

Rosa finds a reluctant listener in the inattentive Quentin, for

whom the voice of the living Rosa continues to vanish, while he brings her words to life through his own image-making capacities:

as though in inverse ratio to the vanishing voice, the invoked ghost of the man whom she could neither forgive nor revenge herself upon began to assume a 136

quality almost of solidity, permanence. . . still irrevocably outside the scope of her hurt or harm. (13)

Very early in the text, then, Quentin is established as the character

designated by Rosa to relive the past, not only to hear her story, but

to make some restitution for all the doors she imagines have barred

her from living and to help her confirm that Sutpen really is the

particular kind of demon she believes him to be. Not until this

complex relationship between Rosa and Quentin and between Quentin and

the reader is established does Quentin recede into the background with

only occasional reminders of his presence.

As Rosa, "cold, implacable, and even ruthless" (10), continues to

reveal the history and sources of her outrage against Sutpen, she

reveals that while her fury had culminated in his insult to her, it

had originated in Sutpen's own lack of origin, his lack of a name and

a past befitting a "gentleman":

He wasn't a gentleman. He wasn't even a gentleman. He came here with a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody ever heard before, knew for certain was his own. . .How he could have approached papa, on what grounds. . .what there could have been between a man like that and papa. (14-15, 20)

It is through Rosa's own desire to salvage the respectability of the

Coldfield name that the reader first learns of Sutpen, whose demonic nature is revealed most fully for Rosa in the fights he stages and participates in with his slaves. 137

The issues Rosa raises in this first restrained outburst of

speaking are, in embryonic form, the same issues with which Quentin

will be forced to contend as he becomes increasingly involved in

unraveling their meaning. Sutpen would not and could not have, she

correctly believes, raised a mansion from a swamp, just for money, not

with so many illicit means of getting rich in frontier Mississippi in

1833. Instead, he must have needed respectability because, she

posits, he must have been hiding from something. Rosa is right here,

too, but for the wrong reasons. Not until Chapter 7 do we discover

that Sutpen is "hiding" not from anything Rosa could imagine, not from

some shady criminal past, but from the spectre of his own negated self

(who will reappear in the form of Wash Jones), the memory of himself

as the little boy turned away from the plantation door in Virginia

(the supposed origin, incidentally, of Rosa's own ancestors). Rosa

posits Sutpen's fights as the most striking evidence of Sutpen's demonic nature ; for Rosa the "wild niggers" are an extension of

Sutpen's own bestiality, proof of his inhuman capacity to degrade whatever he might touch.

Rosa cannot know and we do not learn until Chapter 7 that Sutpen is also hiding from that "laughing balloon-face," the "monkey-nigger" who had turned him away at the planter's door, in the illusory competition of the fighting matches he stages with his own slaves.

Rosa also cannot know that the fights allow him to pretend to be the mountain man who takes care of his own needs, fights his own fights, and depends only upon himself. Because he always wins in what he 138

calls a fair fight, and because his slaves remain extensions of

himself, Sutpen can both continue to objectify them in good

"conscience" and justify his actions as a man who "earns" his role as

the center of power. The slaves in turn protect him from the

competition of poor whites, who can then also be commodified objects

who have neither reason nor energy to challenge his role. When the

boy Sutpen had realized that he could have no message to deliver, then

or ever, that would make any difference to the planter, he realized

that he had no way to compete with the planter as mountain men compete

unless he first acquired those objects--"money, land, slaves, a

family, and incidentally a wife"--that in turn define and legitimize

the planter's existence. It is precisely these issues--the desire for

recognition and the desire to be loved--that are the continuing

subtext of Rosa's narrative, not only in the first chapter, but in her

more impassioned narrative of chapter 5. In chapter 5, the

significance of this perception of blacks will be heightened when Rosa

says that it is Clytie who bars her access to Judith and to Bon's dead

body. In fact, Rosa imagines a privileged inner sanctum of the Sutpen

family, the entry to which she is willing even to mate with a demon to gain. Rosa's willingness to set aside her fear and hatred for the

sake of that peace and respectability she expects to gain aligns her with Sutpen's own desire for self-recognition, for which both Sutpen and Rosa substitute position and power.

Yet if Rosa's two narratives contain within them virtually all the thematic issues Faulkner raises in Absalom, one might question why 139

Rosa's narrative is arrested in midstream at the end of chapter 1 and

not resumed until chapter 5. (These issues include the absence of

self at the center of power within the caste system and the rigidity

and arbitrariness of the definitions of race and gender that determine

the systemic roles to which all human beings are assigned at birth.

Also at issue is the fragility of that system when these definitions

are called into question, most graphically by those like Rosa who are

dispossessed of any role, any reason to exist. Humanistic values

originating in the need to stabilize and support the caste system, as

well as the repression of desire, especially women's desire, become

central to the ability of the system to function.) It would seem more

efficient, if for no other reason than to avoid confusion, to allow

her narrative to continue uninterrupted, particularly since every word

she utters is so clear an expression of the psychic costs of such a

social system upon an individual. The reasons for the disruption are

several. First, while the intensity of Rosa's self-centered version

of events is disrupted, the factual content of her narrative is not.

Disrupting the narrative at the end of chapter 1 focuses attention

away from Rosa and toward the historical past. Early in chapter 1, as

Quentin puzzles over Rosa's reasons for calling upon him, the

anonymous narrator tells us that Quentin already knows much of the

story, and, apart from Mr. Compson's speculations about Henry and Bon, we get very little information in chapters 2-4 that Rosa does not know; given the fact that she speaks to Quentin for some four or five hours, presumably maintaining her furious and repetitive style 140

throughout, the interruption broadens the context of Quentin's

listening and broadens the scope of the novel.

Second, the interruption dramatizes the uncertain epistemological

status of the narrative. That is, if what we "know" about history is

radically informed by the narratives of the people who speak to us

every day, and if we think of Chapters 1-5 as a continuous historical narrative, we can begin to comprehend history as a skeletal structure of facts given flesh by the narratives of others and given breath by one's own imaginative reconstruction, particularly as it is embodied in one's own narrative. The first half of chapter 2 is narrated by the anonymous narrator who gives the reader some sense of Rosa's,

Quentin's grandfather's, and the town's various perspectives, allowing each to correct the other, as it were. Thus we are told, for example, what Rosa would not have known, what Rosa would tell Quentin 75 years or 80 years later, what the town believed about Sutpen, what the grandfather believed, what rumors were afoot, and so on. Sutpen's early history in Jefferson, his never-to-be-specified, but probably underhanded, business dealings with Coldfield, the erroneous speculations about his "band of wild negroes" are all described as part of a relatively unproblematic local history, unproblematic, that is, insofar as certain facts can be agreed upon and others can be conjectured. "Conjectured" is the key term here. It is precisely the rumors, minor disagreements, speculations, uncertainties, blindnesses, and repressions that constitute history as a lived past and a living present. When Rosa's narrative is interrupted and in place of its 141

middle the narratives of others are inserted, dramatizing history as a

domain of fragments, the reader will, throughout the first five

chapters, in a process similar to Quentin's, be asked to weigh one

interpretation against another, to pay attention to a disordered array

of fact and nearly limitless possibilities of interpretation in order

to discover not what really happened, but the configuration of the present moment as one different from but continuous with the past.

This is exactly Quentin's position--vaguely curious at first, but despite his rational, studential inclinations, finding himself implicated and heavily involved in the stories he hears (whether he is

"listening" or not). For the reader, Quentin serves a surrogate function: in addition to his role as a character in the present time of the novel, as a narratee Quentin's question is "What does this story have to do with me?", and that must be the reader's question, as well.

Moreover, everything the anonymous narrator tells us Quentin himself could probably have told us without ever hearing Rosa's narrative. Not until the middle of chapter 2, with Mr. Compson's detailed narrative about Ellen's wedding, does a purposeful attempt at interpretation begin. Even though the time sequence of the Sutpen story has been disrupted, the time sequence of Quentin's story has not; in terms of the progression of his level of involvement in interpretation, the narrative continues without disruption. That is, as Quentin becomes more deeply engaged with the past, the progression of the novel is dictated not by the sequence of events that is the 142

ostensible subject matter of the story, but by the sequence of events

that marks Quentin's growing compulsion to try to wrest from the past

not only meaning, but increasingly, as the horror of the past reveals

itself, to wrest some reason for continuing to live. The time scheme

of Absalom is, indeed, psychological, as many critics have noted, but,

if that is so, the focal center of the novel must be Quentin himself.

The progression of the first five chapters only makes sense when

Quentin is taken as such and chapters 2-4 are taken as the first stage

of Quentin's active involvement in interpreting Rosa's narrative,

which, from Quentin's perspective, is compelling not because of any

interest in or compassion for Rosa herself, but because of his own

doomed pursuit of value in the past. Quentin had assumed the horrors

of that past to be long dead, leaving only honor, loyalty, and love as

their legacy. In chapters 1-5, Quentin awakens to that multitude of ghosts for which he had been, until this September afternoon, the mere

"warehouse." Mr. Compson's narrative is inserted between the two parts of Rosa's less to offer another perspective upon the past than to render the issues she raises in her own highly subjective voice more broadly significant and in need of interpretation, and to fill in some of the gaps made up of what Rosa could not have known. Rosa, for example, is not much interested in why Henry murdered Bon; she assumes it the inevitable effect of Sutpen's poisonously demonic nature. Yet for Quentin, the murder is the central arresting feature of Rosa's narrative and the one about which he would have been most interested in his father's speculation. At the same time, coming as they do 143

before the reader is made aware of Quentin's fascination with Henry,

Mr. Compson's speculations about Henry and Bon both legitimize

Quentin's interest when the reader does discover it, and are

themselves discovered in retrospect to be of central importance, not unlike unremarked historical events.

The placement of Mr. Compson's narrative between the beginning and end of Rosa's thus renders history both communal and in need of interpretation. (Mr. Compson will find history's "unknowability" of some comfort.) The uncertainty of the anonymous narrator's discourse, his reporting of conjecture, and so on, are as close as any narrator ever gets to objectivity in this novel, but following closely upon it is Mr. Compson's discourse, and even though he also admits that he does not know everything, indeed, that Son's murder "just does not explain," he nonetheless betrays a rigid, distant, objectified method of historical analysis that is finally of little help to Quentin.

Mr. Compson believes that the history of the South tragic, yet, unlike Quentin, he finds that history unthreatening; he produces a narrative whose principal function is to suppress those aspects of the past that might threaten him. The past is for him a puzzlement, a matter of accumulating data that can be logically ordered so as to

"explain," to master history as one might read tragedy and set it aside as an interesting, even moving fiction, but without any connection to reality--an essential artwork, a purely aesthetic experience. History can thus be kept at arm's length, its horror 144

evaded simply by calling it vaguely tragic, yet ultimately and

necessarily unknowable :

It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know. . . .just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of à horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs. (100-01)

Mr. Compson's perspective amounts to a dismissal of history and

an evasion of its implications. If the subtext of Rosa's narrative is

her own desire for recognition, the subtext of Mr. Compson's narrative

is his own desire to anaesthetize himself from a painful past; the

godless and cynical Mr. Compson can hardly be believed when he says

we are not meant to know. Moreover, Mr. Compson's narrative is laden

with contradictions, not of fact, but of logic; his analysis of women

is a case in point. On the one hand, he is clearly aware of women's

victimization in their very definition as interchangeable tokens

destined to fill a male-dominated system that depends upon its own

rigidity to validate the worth of the men who created it:

[Women are] separated into three sharp divisions, separated (two of them) by a chasm which could be crossed but one time and in but one direction--ladies, women, females--the virgins whom gentlemen someday married, the courtesans to whom they went while on sabbaticals to the cities, the slave girls and women upon whom that first caste rested and to whom in certain cases it doubtless owed the very fact of its virginity. (109)

Even as Mr. Compson reports the dehumanization this structure necessitates, he undermines its horror by insisting that women are 145

sexless, vain creatures who live in a dream-world and whose identity

rests upon their claims to a spurious "respectability."^^ Remarking

upon Ellen's distress at her humiliating wedding, he notes that her

real distress arose not from having to marry Sutpen, but from the

failure of the ceremony to sanction publicly her marriage :

[Why not believe] that regardless of the living evidence of children and all else, they still have in their minds the image of themselves walking to music and turning heads, in all the symbolical trappings and circumstances of ceremonial surrender of that which they no longer possess? and why not, since to them the actual and authentic surrender can only be (and has been) a ceremony like the breaking of a banknote to buy a ticket for the train. (49)

Later, he attributes this same line of thought to Henry to explain

Henry's rationalization of his own incestuous desire for Judith, to be

voyeuristically satisfied by allowing Bon to marry her:

[Henry] may have been conscious that his fierce provincial's pride in his sister's virginity was a false quantity which must incorporate in itself an inability to endure in order to be precious, to exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all. (96)

Further, Mr. Compson constructs from the emptiness of his own

fatalism a fantasy of the mulatto woman--beautiful, passionate, and bred for love--to explain Son's refusal to renounce his mulatto wife

in order to marry Judith. He imagines a lush, fin de siecle world in

New Orleans, with Bon as the foppish but clever sophisticate revealing to the Puritanical Henry a tragic marketplace of women who exist outside the system of female chattelry Henry knows. Neither wife nor 146

prostitute nor slave, the mulatto woman is the perfectly marginalized

amalgamation of all three: pure in her devotion, passionate in her

love-making, and, should something go awry, still only a nigger after

all and hence as disposable as a banana peel.

This last blow that Mr. Compson imagines Bon delivering to Henry

also contains within it the reason for Eon's murder, his own spot of

black blood, yet it does not occur to Mr. Compson to guess that some

absurdly quantifiable fraction of black blood might be precisely what

finally determines Eon's fate. He overlooks the one explanation of

the murder his own discourse reveals, the single factor that makes

even murder not a crime. Coiled within his own misogyny, his own racism, and his own voyeurism, the fatal blackness is both concealed and revealed within Mr. Compson's fantasy of the octoroon as owned and dispensable femme fatale. The missing ingredient that would explain the murder is turned against itself to explain and exploit Henry's naive and overly fastidious commitment to the "honor" he feels bound to uphold. Henry's sense of honor seems absurd to Mr. Compson not because it is based on abstract or meaningless distinctions among human beings, but precisely because he insists on upholding it when those same distinctions cancel its necessity. That is, Mr. Compson finds Henry absurd because he can't dismiss the octoroon, even though she is so obviously expendable.

At the same time, Mr. Compson realizes that, despite the sophistication of his psychoanalytic techniques (which reveal as much about Mr. Compson as they do about Henry and Eon), things still don't 147

add up. Part of the reason for Mr. Compson's own dissatisfaction with

the incompleteness of his reconstruction of events is the documentary

evidence of Eon's letter to Judith. Placed at the end of Mr.

Compson's narrative, it reveals a very different Bon from the one Mr.

Compson had constructed, although not necessarily one who had been very different before the war. Bon speaks from a nadir of despair to which only the intransigence of the body itself refuses to acquiesce:

to become once more for a period without boundaries or location in time, mindless and irrational companion and inmate of a body which, even after four years. with a sort of dismal and incorruptible fidelity which is. incredibly admirable to me. is still immersed and obliviously bemused in recollections of old peace and contentment the very names of whose scents and sounds I do not know that I remember. which ignores even the presence and threat of a torn arm or leg as though through some secretlv incurred and infallible promise and conviction of immortality. (131)

For Bon, whatever had existed before the war no longer exists; only the desire of the body, without interference from any abstraction or moral law whatsoever, continues, to his own amazement, to exist.

Whatever Bon knows of either his relationship to Sutpen or his racial ancestry is impossible to discover from this, the only documented record of Ben's voice in the entire novel. What it does offer is the certainty that whatever Bon knew or did not know about his own past no longer matters. He interposes the one thing he still believes in-- the integrity of his own body--between its own desire for survival and the moral strictures of a mental system that had ceased to hold meaning. Mr. Compson can fairly adequately (probably) reconstruct 148

Bon the aesthete, Bon the fatalist, Bon for whom the pleasures of the

flesh are all and yet add up to nothing, but in order to understand

the Bon whose genuinely tragic voice (tragic because it will insist on

continuing to live when there is every reason to die) speaks from the

text of this letter, Mr. Compson can only fall back upon the "old

human values," unwilling to accept the possibility that tragedy is not

always second-hand.

Quentin is silent throughout most of Mr. Compson's narrative, but

at the end of Chapter 4, we discover that he has not been listening

(for how long we do not know) to his father; he is instead fixated on

the image of Henry and Bon. It is important to remember that most of what Quentin is listening to he has already heard in one form or another, and whereas his mind had wandered in Chapter 1 to familiar and comforting images of the past, as yet unchallenged, his mind now begins to be preoccupied with the deeply disturbing image of a young

Henry preparing to murder the man he adores in order to preserve the

"purity" of the sister he desires. It is within this context that the reader is returned to the second part of Rosa's narrative, itself a source of varying interpretations. Rosa is generally taken to have produced a wholly subjective interpretation of the past, yet she is very little more so than Mr. Compson, whose own self-defensive fatalism certainly informs his understanding of Henry and Bon.^^ Mr.

Compson's narrative serves, on the one hand, to intensify the reader's perception that Rosa is the vindictive, vain, frustrated woman whose desire, like her aunt's, is to restore the illusion of 149

respectability to the Coldfield name and to herself, and, on the

other, directly to contradict the genuinely passionate Rosa who

emerges in Chapter 5. Rosa is admittedly willing to sell her soul for

a patch of land and a handful of slaves underfoot (albeit land reduced

from one-hundred to one square mile and no slaves save Clytie, who

does not believe she is a slave), but she is also dispossessed of any

other avenue of self-realization, since she is outside the categories

of possible Southern womanhood. Neither woman nor slave, she can

either aspire to be a "lady" or remain on the periphery of the

community: she can marry a clerk, perhaps, or, since most available

young men of any sort are dead, remain a spinster.

Far more than Mr. Compson, Rosa reveals an awareness of the way

in which she has deceived herself, yet again and again, in much the same way that Mr. Compson falls back upon the "old human values" to explain what he himself can't acknowledge, she falls back upon an old dream world that never was:

I. the dreamer clinging vet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order_to. sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and

with the children, and Father and Charles are walking in the garden. Wake up. Aunt Rosa: wake up'? Or not expect perhaps, not even hope: not even dream since dreams dont come in pairs, and had I not come twelve miles drawn not bv mortal mule but bv some chimaera- foal of nightmare's verv self? (141) 150

Rosa refers here to the explosion of her voyeuristic dream of Bon, whom she intended to love through Judith, much as Mr. Compson suggests

Henry would love Judith through Bon. Sewing, in the middle of the night, bits and scraps of satin and lace purloined from her father's store to make a trousseau for Judith, Rosa settles for a voyeurism of her own, but her impassioned narrative is a striking and painful corrective to Mr. Compson's view of women as existing in a dream world that has no physical reality. Rosa's dream world, as Rosa herself is well aware, is rooted in the fertile soil of Rosa's sexual desire:

Once there was (they cannot have told you this either)

springs f et to capitulate condensed into one soring, one .glimmer: the spring and summertime which is every female's who breathed above dust, beholden of all betrayed springs held over from all irrevocable time.

wistaria: vintage year being that sweet conjunction of root and bloom and urge and hour and weather: and I (I was fourteen)--! will not insist on bloom, at whom no man had yet to look--nor would ever--twice, as not as ,<;hil.dJ?at-I$gg.-.hh^n-g.ygiL obild.:_%a_naf_moF# P,h41d_fhan woman but even as less than anv female flesh. Nor do I say leaf--warped bitter pale and crimped half- fl^dgling inhimidaw 9f any sr^?n,.whi.çh,.mighb have drawn to it the tender mavfly childhood sweetheart games or given pause to the male predacious wasps and bees of later lust. But root and urge I do insist and claim, for had I not heired too from all the unsistered Eves since the Snake? Yes, urge I do: warped chrysalis of what blind perfect seed: for who shall say what gnarled forgotten root might not bloom yet with some globed concentrate more globed and concentrate headv-perfect because the neglected root was planted warped and lay not dead but merely slept forgot? (143-44) 151

This embittered outburst, it is important to recall, comes from a

seventy-year-old woman who has hardly spoken for forty-three years. I

quote Rosa at such length here because it is the repetition of images

and the urgency of her voice, rather than her logic or the particular

images she uses, that reveal her state of mind. Rosa poignantly

describes memory as:

sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel--not mind, not thought:.there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls— iust what_the muscles grope for : no more. no less : and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false_and worthy only of the name of dream.. (143)

Unlike Mr. Compson, Rosa realizes that whatever she might say in the

present about that fourteen-year-old girl, who lives but exists

nowhere, will necessarily be an abstract and false reconstruction; hence the heavy reliance in the earlier passage upon sensual imagery, repetition, and metaphor as she attempts to recreate through those tropes a sense of the immensity of a young girl's desire, and, we can infer, the complete absence--not loss, since she had only dreams to lose--of self her narrative demonstrates.

Rosa recognizes, too, for one brief moment her solidarity with

Clytie: "And vou too? And you too, sister, sister?" (140). Like

Rosa, Clytie has no status within the lady-woman-female schema Mr.

Compson defines. She is barred from any recognition of sexual desire other than the pitiful voyeurism she resorts to as Judith's sister who cannot be called a sister, Judith's slave who will not call herself a slave. Rosa recognizes momentarily in Clytie the one person on earth 152

who knows her despair: "during that instant while we stood face to

face (that instant before my still advancing body should brush past

her and reach the stair) she did me more grace, and respect than anyone

else I knew" (139; Faulkner's italics). When Clytie stops her at the

stairway, she recognizes again the power of the body to dissolve

difference and mock categorizations:

Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both--touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-am's private own: not spirit. not soul: the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anvone's

tei3g.pg.Ti.t^.._B.ut-lgt,flggh touch,.with flggh. W v at g h the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. (139)

Yet realizing her closeness to Clytie leaves Rosa free only to feel what she identifies a moment later as "some cumulative over-reach of despair itself" (140; Faulkner's italics), and she falls back upon the conventional outrage and fury of a woman who dares not recognize a black woman as sister:

Yes. I stopped dead--no woman's hand, no negro's hand, but bitted bridle-curb to check and guide the furious and unbending will--I crving not to her, to it: speaking to it through the negro, the woman, only because of the shock which was not vet outrage because it would be terror soon, expecting and receiving no answer because we both knew it was not to her I spoke : "Take vour hand off me. nigger." (140)

In precise counterpoint to Son's letter, Rosa denies the insights that come directly from her own senses; she avoids despair by resorting to 153

those same old shibboleths of caste and color in order to preserve

her status above Clytie and thus maintain some fraction of that same

old dream she knows is "that might-have-been which is the single r o c k

we cling to above the maelstrom of.unbearable reality" (150), even

knowing here that Judith does not need her and knowing later that

Sutpen only wants a son. When Sutpen proposes to treat her as a

disposable entity--a nigger--he only makes literal what she has

already perceived to be true, but repressed, and it is only, after

all, his failure to pretend otherwise that makes her "demonize" him, a

process which in turn allows her to avoid the "over-reach of despair"

that underlies her narrative. Significantly, Rosa, Clytie, and Judith

form a triumvirate as all three cling to the dead dream of Sutpen's design in Sutpen's absence: not until his return do they resume their roles as outsider, slave, and daughter, respectively, so that it is

Sutpen's masculine presence that renews the "devious intricate channels of decorous ordering."

The revelations in Rosa's narrative account for its placement in the text in terms of its relevance to Quentin's understanding. Since

Rosa has no particular interest in why Henry killed Bon, and Quentin has no particular interest in Rosa, what she says late in the afternoon is merely "heard" by Quentin. Following Mr. Compson's speculations about Henry and Bon, and read here in the context of

Bon's letter, Rosa's narrative with its repressed revelations redirects the reader back to Sutpen himself and his role in Bon's murder, a mystery that can't be solved without knowing a good deal 154

more about Sutpen. Some critics have suggested that Rosa's narrative,

especially since it contains language that seems uncharacteristic of

Rosa, is a combination of Rosa's words and Quentin's own manipulation

of her words as he remembers them (we find out at the end of her

narrative that Quentin "had not been listening"),^® But, with one

exception, there is little reason to believe that the words are not

Rosa's. Their italicization suggests internalization by Quentin, and,

as such, a continuing subtext for the remainder of the novel: Rosa's

voice, speaking with some eloquence of her betrayal and her anger,

answers Mr. Compson's and the town's response to her, and its

repressed content provides the key to the murder.

A long passage toward the end of chapter 5 is inserted that is

clearly not Rosa's voice, but some combination of Quentin's and his father's. Set off from Rosa's only by a dash and the phrase, "Yes. they will have told vou." which Rosa repeats a number of times, adds information that Quentin already would have known at the time of

Rosa's narrative, but in this instance what follows refers to Rosa as

"she" and presents a viewpoint sharply divergent from Rosa's own. Its style and tone suggest that it is, in fact, a continuation of Mr.

Compson's discussion of Rosa from chapter 3, which is narrated by Mr.

Compson, but without quotation marks and with speaker tags in italics, suggesting that the information in this chapter reiterates previously known (for Quentin always already known) details. In the earlier conversation, Mr. Compson insists that Rosa agreed to marry Sutpen in return for the food (she helped grow) and the clothing (she helped 155

weave). It was, he says, her hatred of her father that motivated her

"sophisticated and Ironic sterile nature" to despise Sutpen for forty-

three years, as it was a woman's desire to have her father admit he

was wrong that led her to refuse to forgive Sutpen not for insulting

her but for being dead, and hence unable to admit that he was wrong.

Rosa's voice returns midstream, in the following passage:

rshe couldn't forgive Sutpen1 not so much for the saying of it but for having thought it about her so that when she heard it she realized like thunderclap that it must have been in his mind for a day, a week. even a month maybe, he looking at her dailv with that in his mind and she not even knowing it. But I forgave him. They will tell you different, but, I did. (171)

The "But I forgave him" returns the reader to Rosa's voice. In fact,

Rosa does not believe that Sutpen had thought about it at all, but

rather that the notion had struck him like a thunderclap and he had

immediately proposed it. It is not that Rosa does not forgive Sutpen,

but that she mitigates his categorization of her as a commodity by

refusing to believe he is human. Rosa must believe he is a demon

"clinging , trying to cling with vain unsubstantial hands to what he hoped would hold him, save him, arrest him" from his own demise. The

"something" she expects to find hidden in that house is nothing real, but rather some sign, some proof that Sutpen was a demon, so that she will not have to believe that any mere human being could have rendered

incontrovertible the negligibility of her own self.

The insertion of Mr. Compson's voice, speaking here for both himself and the town, indicates that Quentin, even though he "was not 156

listening" to Rosa was nonetheless hearing her, and moreover hearing

her within the context of what he had heard about her before. Rosa's

narrative corrects Mr. Compson's version of her history at Sutpen's,

not in its details, but in its assessment of her motivations. Mr.

Compson's voice is unmarked; other than its content and its consistent

reference to Rosa in the third person, there is no clear indication

that it is not Rosa's own voice. The likelihood that it is Mr.

Compson's voice, however, suggests that Quentin has begun to reject, without yet being aware of it, his father's interpretation of the past. His fixation at the end of chapter 4 upon the image of Bon and

Henry riding up to the gate and again at the end of chapter 5 upon

Henry telling Judith he's killed Bon surround Rosa's narrative. The two images obviously indicate Quentin's interest in the Bon-Henry-

Judith story, but equally important, they are separated by Rosa's narrative ; consequently, just as the reader begins to realize how deeply involved Quentin has become with the stories he's hearing, his own desire to know becomes animated through the relentless sexual and emotional desire of a nineteen-year-old girl flatly and irrevocably rejected by the very traditions she aspires to uphold. Moreover,

Quentin is stopped by the image of Henry confronting Judith at the end of Rosa's narrative, and hence before his conversation with his father, so that, by the end of chapter 5, though not at the end of

Rosa's narrative in story time, Quentin has become engaged with the past not as an onlooker, but as a participant. The italicization of

Rosa's narrative becomes necessary as the principal textual marker of 157

its internalization by Quentin, so that it literally becomes, in

Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, a part of the voice of the Other that

constitutes the unconscious. Moreover, the surreptitious insertion of

Mr. Compson's voice emphasizes that internalization, and "who" is

"speaking" in Chapter 5 becomes an irrelevant question. That is, we

read Rosa's language, but, at the same time, Quentin is "hearing" what

he had not listened to earlier that afternoon. The unbearable

repression of desire the old woman speaks becomes real to Quentin as

he imagines Henry agonizing over his own impossible decision.

As much as anything else, Rosa's narrative is a casebook in the

frustration of the desire for recognition and in the generation of

hatred that serves to keep despair at arm's length. It is not a

message that Quentin is able, at this point in the narrative, to

assimilate, just as his acknowledgment of his own despair (when he

finally understands what he himself had meant when he had called Jim

Bond the "heir apparent (though not obvious)" of Sutpen's Hundred)

cannot occur until he has produced the only account of the murder that will make sense to him. Rosa's narrative brings to the foreground the human price that both Rosa and Clytie are willing to pay to preserve the vestiges of a system that treats them like cattle even as it creates those "humane" values whose function it is to uphold that system, but that nonetheless preserves them both from the absolute zero of despair. 158

The discontinuity and the repetitive nature of the discourse in

Rosa's second narrative, its placement after Bon's despairing letter

and after the first suggestion of Quentin's fixation on Henry, and

its italicization all suggest Quentin's repression of its content, but

also its significance as an important subtext of Quentin and Shreve's

narrative, which comprises the remainder of the text. That is, as a

voice of unacknowledged despair and as a repetitive discourse that is

its own deconstruction--Rosa posits as savior the very system that

necessitates her own marginalization--Rosa's second narrative informs

Quentin and Shreve's as a repressed discourse that demands its own

recognition. Quentin is right to believe that Rosa "wants it told,"

not by having it literally retold, but by having it relived. Quentin

and Shreve both attempt to distance themselves from the knowledge the

Sutpen story reveals, much as Rosa distances herself from the

devastation of Sutpen's insult by demonizing Sutpen.

When Shreve delivers the letter from Quentin's father announcing

Rosa's death, Quentin is compelled to relive the trip to Sutpen's

Hundred; the letter obliterates the space between Cambridge and

Mississippi, bringing with it the cigar smoke and wistaria of that

September evening as he had talked with his father and waited for

darkness to accompany Rosa to the old plantation. Like Rosa's narrative itself, the trip to Sutpen's Hundred has become a part of his own history, inaccessible without a renewed effort not only to remember it, but to recover it as part of a meaningful narrative. To do that, he needs, as Rosa needs, a listener, but more than that, he 159

needs the distance of Shreve (in lieu of the first detached,

studential Quentin, who appears to be incapacitated) to help him

transform his own repressed history into the coherence of

n a r r a t i v e . T h r o u g h o u t the last half of the text, the anonymous

narrator intrudes to describe Quentin, who sits rigid in the

increasingly cold and tomblike room, with Rosa's letter, a "pandora's

box," appearing to float above the open textbook on the table before

him. The repetition of this image suggests that the meaning of

history--its unsettling effects upon the living--is recoverable from

the reassembly of narrative fragments, as the letter rises almost of

its own accord from the inert record of fact the textbook represents;

the mere facts are only the skeleton around which history can take

form.

Throughout chapters 1-5, the story of Quentin's understanding of

the past had remained mostly separate from the stories Rosa and Mr.

Compson tell. That is, Quentin himself does not engage with either

Rosa or his father as anything more than a disinterested (if impressionable) and curious listener and questioner until the end of

Chapter 4, when we discover he had been thinking about Henry as his father spoke, a discovery reinforced at the end of chapter 5, when the depth of his reverie about Henry is disclosed and emphasized. The abrupt switch from Rosa's hermetic, stifling "office" in Mississippi in September to Quentin and Shreve's freezing, monastic cell in

Cambridge in February marks an equally abrupt switch from the familiar and comfortable South to the rigor and asceticism of the 160

North, and with it Quentin's status likewise changes. Because he is

forced by the receipt of his father's letter to act, to begin the

process of narrating certain to ensure his own demise, Quentin's state

of mind and the degree of his engagement with Shreve naturally assumes

a larger role. Shreve himself is a separate character in his own

right, but he also assumes the function of the first Quentin, youthful

and vigorous, with his eyes on the future, not the past.

Upon receipt of the letter, Quentin is immediaely transported

back to the beginning of his trip to Sutpen's Hundred and appears to

be about to tell Shreve what happened when Shreve interrupts his

reverie :

"Wait. Wait. You mean that this old gal, this Aunt Rosa--" "Miss Rosa," Quentin said. "All right all right.--that this old dame, this Aunt Rosa--" "Miss Rosa, I tell you." "All right all right all right.--that this old-- this Aunt R--A11 right all right all right all right. ..." (176)

Shreve, whether out of curiosity, concern, or an anticipation of aesthetic pleasure, insists that Quentin stop and go back to the beginning. The passage suggests that, even if the two are clowning, as the anonymous narrator will later tell us they sometimes are,

Shreve is interested in a good story, a chance to savor the full resolution of all complications. In calling Rosa "Aunt Rosa," he also suggests both a family relationship between Quentin and Rosa--hence a close connection between Quentin and the Sutpen story--and refers obliquely to the Northern stereotype of the South as a kind of 161

degenerate backwater of enlightened civilization (What do they do

there? Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?). These are

the brutal questions with which Quentin is assaulted not only by

Shreve, but by his Northern classmates in general. Quentin's

insistence on "Miss" rather than "Aunt" marks both his own

unwillingness to acknowledge his closeness to what is about to be

told and his persistent challenge to Shreve to understand the South

accurately. Later he will cease to correct Shreve on this or other points of fact until Chapter 9, when he will insist again that Shreve cannot understand the South.

Shreve summarizes everything we have learned up to this point

(and adds a few things we have not heard, including what the insult was that Sutpen had delivered to Rosa). His somewhat sarcastic summary is punctuated by Quentin's repeated "Yes" of agreement, so that Shreve insists upon repeating the story Quentin cannot want to tell from its beginning before he (and the reader) discover its ending. But almost immediately after Shreve's summary, a long italicized passage which, at its beginning, is said to be Quentin's

"thinking" is interrupted by Quentin's "Yes" of agreement; already, and without warning or notice by the anonymous narrator, Shreve and

Quentin have merged into a single voice that need not even speak aloud. Several times in chapter 6, this amalgamated (italicized) voice recurs, marked by the absence of clear cues: Quentin's

"thinking" passes imperceptibly into Shreve's speaking, marked at the 162

end of the passage by Quentin's "Yes" or a continuation of Shreve's

voice.

At the same time, Quentin is characterized as rigid, intense,

almost catatonic, while Shreve is garrulous, provocative, and clearly

without a sign of the crippling anxiety besetting Quentin. At the

beginning of the first such questionably authored passage, Quentin

identifies Shreve's voice as his father's:

He sounds just like father he thought, . . . Just exactly like father if father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back. . . . (181)

Yet in the same passage Shreve is described as

leaning forward into the lamp, his naked torso pink- gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless, the twin moons of his spectacles glinting against his moonlike rubicund face .... (181)

For Quentin, Shreve assumes multiple, contradictory roles: his cynical father, a cherubic innocent, a demanding inquisitor, an impassive, almost cartoon-like reflector, as well as that part of Quentin (the first Quentin) not mired in the South. On the one hand, Shreve provides a mirror within which Quentin can allow the past to engage him; on the other hand, he can count on Shreve to provide the safe distance from the past that his cynicism and his derisive voice ensure. Shreve has a slightly unhealthy (despite deep-breathing exercises) innocence, a slightly degenerate, almost preposterous demeanor that allows him to step naively into questions whose answers 163

may be dangerous, not for him, but for Quentin. Most critics agree

that Shreve insists on the story and, in doing so, makes it possible

for Quentin to tell it.At the same time, it is also true that

Shreve has nothing to lose. Like Mr. Compson, Shreve is able to

distance himself from the story, so that, however moving it may

become, in the end it will not matter. In this light, Quentin, who

has everything to lose, emerges as a much more heroic figure. The

past is a source of danger for Quentin and not at all for Shreve,

making the act of narrating history a self-confrontation for Quentin

rather than a discovery of "objective truth." Finally, like Quentin,

Shreve is young, the same age Henry had been when he met Bon, Judith

had been when she last saw Bon alive, and Rosa had been when she was

insulted by Sutpen. Together the two can incorporate their own desire

for love and for the recognition of the father that motivates them and

that must, Faulkner suggests, have motivated Judith, Bon, Henry, and

Rosa. All of these characteristics provide the perfect interlocutor

for Quentin, one able to avoid emotional involvement, ask piercing

questions, and allow the exuberance of his youth free rein in its own

particular kind of poetic license.

Further complicating the passage is what is apparently Shreve's

recapitulation of events, including information about Wash Jones's murder of Sutpen that does not appear in the text until the end of chapter 7, in which Quentin narrates the story Sutpen himself had told

Quentin's grandfather. Yet when Quentin tells (or retells) that story, Shreve does not know that Milly Jones had given birth to a 164

daughter. Hence the necessity not just of telling, but of repetition

and alertness to detail that seems insignificant the first time it is

heard. Here, too, the entire text imitates the process of historical

analysis, as details dropped "like a joker from a pack of cards" may

at some future point prove crucial.

Also in chapter 6, the anonymous narrator intrudes to narrate an

incident (the only incident in the novel of Quentin's own experience

as it may have occurred outside the present time of the novel) in

which Quentin and Mr. Compson visit the Sutpen graveyard while hunting

quail. It is not clear when this incident had taken place, but

whether it had been years before or sometime after the September

afternoon, its placement here suggests that the memory is crucial to

an understanding of what is yet to come. Here, also, we are given

a direct transcript of Mr. Compson's voice, but interrupted by brief,

italicized passages that are Quentin's thoughts, and these clearly

originate from the novel's present. They constitute a continual

complaint as Quentin begins to realize how little his father is moved

by the story he tells. Quentin's comments are signs of his awareness

of the suffering of the people of whom both his father and Rosa speak as if they were mere characters in a novel.The italicized

interjections here signal Quentin's no longer containable indignation and anger at both his father's and Rosa's failure to engage sympathetically with other characters in the story he's telling.

Thus, Quentin interrupts as Mr. Compson describes, as if it were a 165

scene from Aubrey Beardsley, the (nameless) octoroon, Charles Etienne

(Bon's son), and Judith at Charles Bon's grave:

who, not bereaved, did not have to mourn Quentin thought, thinking Yes. I have had to listen too long. (193)

Quentin's "thinking" signals his growing awareness of Judith's own

suffering, and of Rosa's and his father's different, but equally

effective, propensities for subsuming her suffering within the fabric

of their own narrative ends. Quentin has had to listen too long; he

will not "get it right" until he corrects in his own narrative all of

what he has listened to for longer than he can possibly remember.

Later in Mr. Compson's graveyard narrative, in which he tells

what he knows of Charles Etienne, Quentin's thinking will interrupt

again to reconstruct for himself a scene between Charles Etienne and

Judith which is beyond the limits of Mr. Compson's comprehension.

Remembering that Mr. Compson had assigned love as the reason for

Judith's giving Bon's letter to Quentin's grandmother to keep, the

anonymous narrator returns to remind us of Quentin at Harvard, with

his father's letter before him, then turns again to Quentin's thinking as Mr. Compson speaks. Faulkner purposely leaves ambiguous the time

frame here, since the events described in the italicized passage could have occurred either as Mr. Compson had spoken or later at Harvard, an ambiguity compounded by the absence of an ascertainable time frame for the graveyard narrative. Quentin's thinking here involves the first of a series of recreations that enable him to know what cannot be known; it also signals not only his weariness with his father's voice. 166

but his own desire to add to that voice (and Rosa's) his own

interpretation. Finally, the identification of Shreve's voice with

his father's marks both the necessity of Shreve's disengagement and

Quentin's own mistrust of Shreve's interpretations;

Yes. I have heard too much. I have been told too much. too long thinking Yes. Shreve sounds almost exactly like father: that letter TBon's letter to Judith1. And who to know what moral restoration she mieht have contemplated in the privacy of that house, that room. ■that night..what hurdling of iron old traditions since she had seen almost everything else she had learned to call stable vanish like straws in a gale--she sitting there beside the lamp in a straight chair, erect, in the same calico save that the sunbonnet would be missing now, the head bare now, the once coal-black hair streaked with gray now while he faced her. staadlog., He would not have sat: perhaps she would not have asked him to. and the cold level voice would not be much louder than the sound of the lamp's flame: ytQhS.. I admit it. I believed that there were things which still mattered jiust because they had mattered once. But I was wrong. Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive. . . .' (207)

Quentin imagines here that Judith, whether of her own accord or under

the influence of Bon's letter, has arrived at the same point of

despair revealed in Bon's letter.

Quentin goes on to narrate, but not yet to understand, that the

one "iron old tradition" Judith cannot break is the category of race.

She cannot convince Charles Etienne to agree to pass as white and she cannot accept him as Charles Bon's son unless he repudiates his black wife and his own chimeric "blackness." Quentin goes beyond his father's understanding of Judith's despair, which does no more than 167

acknowledge it in the abstract, and begins to reconstruct without yet

knowing it the grip that the category of race holds over "iron old

tradition." At the end of Quentin's reconstruction, Mr. Compson's

voice returns:

Yes, who to know if he said anything or nothing, turning, going out, she still sitting there, not moving, not stirring, watching him, still seeing him, penetrating walls and darkness too to watch him walk back down the weedy lane between the deserted collapsed cabins toward that one where his wife waited, treading the thorny and flint-paved path toward the Gethsemane which he had decreed and created for himself, where he had crucified himself and come down from his cross for a moment and now returned to it. (209)

The vision Quentin has imagined of what no one knows reveals a contrite and uncertain Judith who cannot grasp the fact that Charles

Etienne refuses to name himself white, a fairly obvious conclusion easily drawn from Mr. Compson's own narrative in which he himself could and did imagine the boy's despair, who had no word for "nigger" and who had always lived in a world where

pigmentation had no more moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colored candle shades, where the very abstractions which he might have observed--monogamy and fidelity and decorum and gentleness and affection--were as purely rooted in the flesh's offices as the digestive processes. (199)

Cast wholly alone into a world whose language, both literally and figuratively, he cannot speak, Charles Etienne must live suspended between Judith's whiteness and Clytie's blackness, not allowed to be either, yet required, like Clytie, to be both. Mr. Compson refers 168

Instead to Charles Etienne's self-crucifixion, fixing his alienation

as a self-imposed sacrifice, but not as a product of Judith's and

Clytie's failure ever once to see him as a human being, but to see him

always as a contradiction in terms.Quentin perceives that Charles

Etienne's problem is, like Joe Christmas's, the despair that arises

from the impasse between the knowledge that he is human and from the

desire for self-recognition that can arise only by becoming the

nigger he has been told he is. Thus, while Mr. Compson provides the

data of history, he reads the data in such a way that the source of

despair is evaded, and Charles Etienne himself becomes responsible for

his seemingly purposeless self-punishment.

The ambiguity of who is speaking arises early in Mr. Compson's

narrative in a second long italicized passage as Quentin realizes

without having to ask who had composed the "harsh and unforgiving

message" on Judith's headstone:

thinking Yes, too much, too long. _J didn't need to listen then but I had to hear it and now I am having to_hear it all over again because he sounds just like father: Beautiful lives women live--women do. In very breathing they draw meat and drink from some beautiful attenuation of unrealitv i,n wbj,<:h J:M_5W,SS_.an4 shapes of facts--of birth and bereavement, of suffering and bewilderment and despair--move with the substanceless decorum of lawn partv charades, perfect in gesture and without significance or anv ability to huTL, Mies. B,9?a.,9.r.4,grg.4,.,tliat;...png(211)

Quentin's remembering, Mr. Compson's telling, Shreve's retelling all merge here, beginning with "Beautiful lives." but Rosa's passionate narrative of pain, dispossession, and loss mocks this characterization 169

of women. The information that follows, still italicized, concerns

the disposition of Goodhue Coldfield's estate, and could only have come from Mr. Compson, yet what can only be Shreve's voice then

intrudes :

But you were not listening, because vou knew it all alreadv. had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been b o m and living beside it. with it. as children will and do: so that what your father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck, word bv word, the resonant strings of remembering. Yo.u, h M .bfte.n.hgJr9 before .... (212-13)

Shreve strikes those "strings of remembering" to engage Quentin's own childhood terror when he and Luster had wandered to Sutpen's Hundred to be startled not by ghosts but by Clytie's white woman's voice speaking from a coffee-colored body, interposing herself between a white Quentin and a black Luster on the one hand, and a not white, not black, logically impossible, but nonetheless real Jim Bond on the other.

At the end of this passage, Quentin says, "Yes" (215), and Shreve continues in romanized text. Without any signals from the anonymous narrator, the italicized text moves from Judith's epitaph (Rosa's voice), to Quentin's thinking, to father's voice, to Shreve and/or father's voice, to Shreve's speaking, and moves from the Sutpen graveyard to the room at Harvard. The complex array of speakers in this passage collapses both the spatial and temporal distances that ordinarily form the boundaries of subject and object, self and other, in what is not so much a transcendence of time or space as an 170

implosion or concentration of voices and places that overlap,

contradict, and merge with one another. The absence of signals of

such merging is important because in the chapters that follow, the

anonymous narrator intrudes to report the congruity of Quentin's and

Shreve's thoughts and voices, their "marriage" of views, their merging

with Henry and Bon. The absence of such signals at this early stage

of their narrative suggests the instability of the process of

recovering history itself, the need to suspend the ordinary

expectations of linguistic exchange, and the immersion of Quentin and

Shreve in a timeless world where effects are known, but causes are

speculative. In a process that imitates the recovery of historical

causes, the summarized data in this chapter won't become clear, nor

will the merging of voices be made clear, until later.

Much of the Chapter 6 is devoted to the painful story of the

effects on Charles Etienne of Judith's and Clytie's "protection" of

this child raised in Clytie's own image of herself as not-black and

not-white, living in the absence of her own body for and through the pure white Sutpen family and insisting that Charles Etienne do the

same when a pure white Sutpen family no longer existed. In addition, we are given the outlines of Wash Jones's relationship to Sutpen.

Given this, when Quentin narrates in the following chapter Sutpen's history prior to his arrival in Jefferson, the reader should be particularly aware of Sutpen's characterization of the "monkey- nigger," of the similarity between Wash Jones and Sutpen's own father, and of the similarity between Sutpen and Charles Etienne. What Sutpen 171

the boy perceives when he is turned away from the planter's door is a

working model of Hegel's master/slave dialectic, in which the slave is

the controlling factor in the relationship because he renders

superfluous the master's existence. Coming from a masculine,

Rousseauean--though not Edenic--world where doing one's own work was

as natural as breathing, where the acuity of one's skills were the

principal means of self-validation, and where one's possessions were a

matter of luck, not a sign of superiority, Sutpen "discovers," i.e.,

"loses," his innocence when he sees himself as the same Other the

planter sees--a negligible being of no more importance than a cow or a

fencepost. At the same time, he sees that while the planter himself

has no function at all--is absent in fact as well as in theory--he is

present everywhere, in his land, his home, and his slaves. Sutpen

takes the further step of rejecting himself as that Other the planter

sees and instead projects himself as the planter himself; he becomes

the superfluous and absent center whose self exists everywhere and nowhere. Hence, Sutpen imagines his "innocence" rising like a stone monument upon a vast and empty plane. His past ceases to exist for him; there is nothing in it, and the future becomes his "design," in which he simply, directly, and in a one-to-one correspondence, posits himself as the god who will disperse himself in a world of his own creation, a world that will make him useless. In order to exist at all, since he exists only insofar as his design exists, it becomes imperative that he fulfill that design. 172

Sutpen also accepts, without acknowledging or particularly

noticing, the fact that his design depends upon racial difference as

the ordering principle of the entire scheme, since it establishes

master and slave as necessarily hereditary categories, rather than

arbitrary ones. But, as both Rosa's momentary revelation of her own

similarity to Clytie and the existence of Charles Etienne demonstrate

in the narratives preceding this one, black and white are untenable as

essential categories. The boundaries between black and white are

unspecifiable, and hence decenter and destabilize the entire edifice

of racial difference without which the caste system cannot function.

Speaking to Quentin's grandfather thirty years after he had told

grandfather of his childhood, but immediately following that account

in discourse time, Sutpen is perplexed by the failure of his design:

either I destroy my design with my own hand, which will happen if I am forced to play my last trump card, or do nothing, let matters take the course which I know they will take and see my design complete itself quite normally and naturally and successfully to the public eye, yet to my own in such fashion as to be a mockery and a betrayal of that little boy who approached that door fifty years ago and was turned away .... (274)

Although the grandfather doesn't know (as Shreve points out a few lines later) that Sutpen's "trump" is that Bon is black, Sutpen understands very clearly (assuming that Quentin and Shreve are "right" in their reconstruction) that he is "morally" unable to recognize Bon as his son because he is black. It is not the possibility of incest that bothers him, but the possibility that Bon's supposed blackness 173

will taint the presumed whiteness of Sutpen's family that must by

definition be preserved, else the "design," which is equivalent to

self for Sutpen, will lose its integrity.

Once Sutpen, after his arrival in Virginia, understands the

relationship between the planter and his slaves, the slaves

automatically cease to be defined as human, so that it becomes

logically and morally inconsistent so to define them, as he would have

to do were he to acknowledge Bon as his son:

[Sutpen] had not yet discovered his innocence: no actual nigger, living creature, living flesh to feel pain and writhe and cry out. He could even seem to see them: the torch-disturbed darkness among trees, the fierce hysterical faces of the white men, the balloon face of the nigger. Maybe the nigger's hands would be tied or held but that would be all right because they were not the hands with which the balloon face would struggle and writhe for freedom, not the balloon face: it was just poised among them, levitate and slick with paper-thin distension. Then someone would strike the balloon one single desperate and despairing blow and then he would seem to see them fleeing, running, with all about them, overtaking them and passing and going on and then returning to overwhelm them again, the roaring waves of mellow laughter meaningless and terrifying and loud. (232)

What had been an arbitrary, inessential distinction becomes abstract and essential--the single definitive factor justifying the planter's position as a kind of absent god who, having set his creation in motion, need only retire to his hammock. Hence, blacks are reduced to

"nigger laughter," the "balloon-face" existing without flesh and blood, who can be beaten and killed without pain, without terror, indeed, without ever ceasing to laugh. In Sutpen's mind, blacks must 174

exist solely to love, honor, serve, and especially to protect the

planter from any competition from the likes of Sutpen's mountain

family--or from the likes of Wash and Milly Jones. And, hence,

Sutpen's logic makes it impossible for him to recognize Charles Bon

(assuming that Bon was black and was Sutpen's son, and there is no

definitive proof of either in the novel apart from Faulkner's appendix

naming Bon as Sutpen's son), since to do so would be to acknowledge

the arbitrariness of racial difference, making, as Sutpen correctly

perceives, a mockery of his "design."

The story of Sutpen's childhood is, as critics generally agree,

the crux of the entire novel. Faulkner, in effect, deconstructs the

concept of racial difference as the mistaken origin of the entire

structure of Southern society; it is this "mistake" that Sutpen knows

he has made, but cannot identify. The entire edifice of the master-

slave relationship crumbles once it is exposed. Moreover the system

automatically excludes other poor whites, yet exploits them like dogs

to maintain a continual reign of terror against the blacks who not

only represent, but are extensions of the planter's self. Thus blacks

cease to be real to the whites who themselves live in abject poverty, even though the only difference between themselves and the slaves is the "aura of freedom" around the crumbling shanties they inhabit at

the planter's pleasure amid the mocking laughter of the planter himself.

The placement of Sutpen's own story, even as it is filtered through the grandfather and the father before it reaches Quentin, is 175

significant in part because it precedes chronologically everything

else in the text. That is, it contains within it not only the

ostensible solution to the murder, but a clear summation of the single

possible factor--skin pigmentation--that could account for a father's

(and only a father's, since a white woman had no sexual access to a black man) denial of his own child's birthright. Moreover, the story of Sutpen's childhood is not new; it had been known since 1835, when

Sutpen revealed it to the grandfather, and Sutpen's dilemma had been known since 1865, when Sutpen revealed it also to the grandfather.

But Sutpen, Quentin says, did not tell grandfather everything, apparently failing to reveal Bon's blackness. Yet it seems clear, despite much critical judgment to the contrary, that Sutpen must have revealed that Bon was his son (the grandfather says it was out of some delicacy for his wife's memory that he did not say why he rejected his first wife), and that fact was in turn withheld by the grandfather from Mr. Compson. The key, then, to the murder is buried in a partially suppressed narrative within which each transmitter has suppressed one of the two key elements--that Bon was black and that

Bon was Sutpen's son--that alone could explain the murder. It is no accident that the two elements are not only explanatory but contradictory: by definition Bon cannot be both black and Sutpen's son

(just as Clytie cannot be both black and Sutpen's daughter); hence, the grandfather could not have guessed Bon's blackness and would have omitted the fact of his paternity out of loyalty to his friend and compatriot. What Quentin and Shreve "discover," then, is what Sutpen 176

and the grandfather had both known all along, but remained repressed

by the grandfather and suppressed by Sutpen. Even Mr. Compson might

have discovered the same thing had he had the will to confront his own

despair rather than ignore it by converting it into cynicism.

Faulkner leaves Bon's blackness and even his paternity uncertain

and unprovable in part because it must be shown not to matter whether

it is "objectively" true or not, since blackness is a matter of

definition, not a matter of factuality (Bon looks white), and as such

exceeds in importance even the incest taboo, the one aspect of human

culture outside language itself that is so universal a concept that it

deconstructs the nature/culture dichotomy.Furthermore, if either

fact were "provable," the novel would become the detective story it

has so often been accused of being. As long as these "facts" remain

conjectural, they cannot be taken as fateful coincidences that solve a

mystery, but rather as the only necessary and sufficient causes

logically derivable from the untenable categories the system itself

requires in order to function. In terms of recovering history,

suppressed data (hence unknowable data, since history is only

accessible by means of texts) can be recovered, at least

theoretically, given what is known, but it cannot be so recovered without a willingness to suspend the very structure of belief the past bequeathes. That process, as Quentin discovers, may result in the destruction of self and, to complicate matters further, cannot be undertaken outside the realm of the body's own desire. 177

As Quentin retells this part of the story (and chapter 7

comprises almost all of what Quentin himself narrates), italicized

passages suggest Quentin's growing perception of the

indistinguishability among himself, his father, Shreve, and Sutpen;

Quentin . . . thinking Yes. Maybe we are both Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happens is never once but like ripples mavbe on water after the pebble sinks, the riooles moving on- spreading. the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain

molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect fhg inËinLts-wçhangîES ?ky. it doesn't matter: that pebble's watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original riople-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm thinking Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve. mavbe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutoen to make all of us. (261-62)

Thomas Sutpen's mistake, the pebble in the water, has made all of them

what they are. All four are subject to the mistake Sutpen cannot

identify, but believes he could correct if only he could identify it.

What Quentin is coming to understand is that it is no more possible to correct that mistake than it is to have that pebble back in hand once

it's thrown or to stop the ripples or alter the "ripple-space" once it has been set in motion or to unlynch a dead man or return a sold child to its dead mother.

The reader who takes Shreve and not Quentin as his or her

"surrogate" makes an additional mistake in thinking that Shreve can 178

withdraw unscathed from the telling of this story/history. Much has

been made of Quentin's unwillingness to tell the story, Shreve's

goading to get him to do it, and the need of both to distance

themselves from the story by clowning. As Quentin begins the story of

Wash's murder, he insists on telling it himself, and given his

impatience with his father's interpretation as well as his

realization that he cannot easily distinguish himself from Sutpen, his

father, and Shreve, Quentin seems here to be more concerned with

getting the story right than with avoiding it:

"Wait, I tell you!" Quentin said, though still he did not move nor even raise his voice--that voice with its tense suffused restrained quality: "I am telling" Am I going to have to hear it all again he thought I am going to have to hear it all over again I am already he_aring__it _all_over_ again I am listening to it all over again I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do. (277)

At this point, the anonymous narrator picks up the story of Sutpen's return home after the war, then quotes, in italics, Mr. Compson's interpretation of Sutpen's state of mind after the war, describing

Sutpen in terms of his shrewdness, his arithmetic logic, and his equally arithmetic morality. This passage is clearly heard only within Quentin's mind, since at its end, Shreve picks up the previous exchange: "No," Shreve said; "you wait. Let me play a while now"

(280). Shreve jokes about Wash as a Shakespearean gravedigger, and the anonymous narrator comments : 179

This was not flippancy either. It too was just that protective coloring of levity behind which the youthful shame of being moved hid itself, out of which Quentin also spoke, the reason for Quentin's sullen bemusement, the (on both their parts) flipness, the strained clowning: the two of them, whether they knew it or not, in the cold room (it was quite cold now) dedicated to that best of ratiocination which after all was a good deal like Sutpen's morality and Miss Coldfield's demonizing--this room not only dedicated to it but set aside for it and suitably so since it would be here above any other place that it (the logic and the morality) could do the least amount of harm-- the two of them back to back as though at the last ditch, saying No to Quentin's Mississippi shade who in life had acted and reacted to the minimum of logic and morality, who dying had escaped it completely, who dead remained not only indifferent but impervious to it, somehow a thousand times more potent and alive. There was no harm intended by Shreve and no harm taken, since Quentin did not even stop. He did not even falter, taking Shreve up in stride without comma or colon or paragraph. (280)

Often cited as evidence of the congruity of Quentin's and Shreve's thoughts, the passage suggests rather that Quentin insists on the seriousness of the endeavor, that if they are both in turn clowning and overly ratiocinative, it is just those qualities that Quentin is increasingly aware will align him with his father's distant assessment and leave the truth withheld. At this point in the novel, Quentin takes up Shreve "without comma or colon or paragraph" in order to pass beyond Shreve's and his own flippancy, not because he is attuned to it.

Moreover, as Quentin persists in telling about Wash's murder of

Sutpen, he refuses again and again to be interrupted by Shreve; he takes himself up without "comma or colon or paragraph" despite several attempts by Shreve to make him "Wait, . . . For Christ's sake wait" 180

(289), culminating in the only sentence in the book (I think)

italicized solely for emphasis; "Will you wait?" (292). Shreve,

assuming throughout that Milly had given birth to the son Sutpen

wanted, finally succeeds in stopping Quentin, who finally responds as

if waking from a trance :

" What?" Quentin said. "It wasn't a son. It was a girl." "Oh," Shreve said. " Come on. Let's get out of this damn icebox and go to bed." (292)

For Shreve, this bizarre story of an equally bizarre South is just a

story to be resolved for the pleasure of the resolution, but given

Quentin's complete absorption in its telling and his uneasiness with

the inadequacy of his father's interpretation. Wash Jones's murder of

Sutpen is more than just a story. Wash Jones and Milly represent the poor white origins Sutpen had abandoned and denied for fifty years, a fact not lost on Sutpen, who, Quentin's narrative reveals, was aware that Jones expected Sutpen, in return for his use of Milly, to allow him entry into the house. If there is anything tragic about Sutpen's own story it is that he is murdered by an avatar (to borrow one of

Faulkner's favorite words) of his own father and murdered, moreover, for the same reason he might have shot the planter to begin with, but did not. Wash's thoughts are the thoughts of the boy Sutpen grown old without a design:

Better if his kind and mine too had never drawn the breath of life on this earth. Better that all who tbmain ,

from him and shrivel away like a dried shuck thrown onto the fire. (290-91)

Shreve has no interest in Wash Jones himself or in his motivations,

any more than he has any interest in Coldfield, his own ancestor,

equally complicit with General Compson in embracing Sutpen. Only

after this rehearsal of Sutpen's rise and fall, which contains the

keys to understanding Bon's murder, keys made understandable and

unmistakable only after the Charles Etienne story, can Quentin and

Shreve begin to unravel the mystery surrounding Henry and Bon.

Indeed, we are not told why Shreve suddenly decides against deep

breathing and bed, and chooses instead to pursue the Henry-Bon story.

The absence of any transition between chapters 7 and 8, that is, between the resolution of the Sutpen-Wash Jones story and the beginning of the resolution of the Henry-Bon-Sutpen story, reinforces the reader's sense of Quentin's single-minded, compulsive pursuit of a resolution, since the only plausible explanation for the continuation is Quentin's refusal (or inability) to budge from his position at the table. Moreover, the narrator's continued attention to the passage of time and to the enclosed Harvard environment contrasts sharply with

Quentin's and Shreve's forays into the past, spanning decades between the hourly ringing of bells and the presence of the letter from Mr.

Compson, which carries with it not only the words but the smells and sounds of Mississippi. Shreve and Quentin are entering a world in which time and space are irrelevant. At this point in the novel, both 182

Quentin and Shreve have at their disposal every relevant fact that

they can glean from the narratives they've heard ; what they need now

is to create a new world that will satisfy their own youthful desires.

As Shreve speculates about Bon's past--about his mother's and the

lawyer's separate designs upon him, his attempts to understand what

those designs are, and puzzlement over his connection to the Sutpen

family--Shreve creates a sympathetic and baffled Bon, only a bit

spoiled and a bit degenerate, attempting particularly to sever himself from his mother's and the lawyer's plotting, and gradually uncovering the truth about not only the lawyer and his mother, but also about

Sutpen. Yet all of this is mere preparation for the real subject :

"And now," Shreve said, "we're going to talk about love." But he didn't need to say that either, any more than he had needed to specify which he meant by he, since neither of them had been thinking about anything else; all that had gone before just so much that had to be overpassed and none else present to overpass it but them, as someone always has to rake the leaves up before you can have the bonfire. That was why it did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other--faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived-- in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false. (316)

Continuing to reconstruct Bon's motives in terms of what they want most for themselves--love and recognition--Shreve (and Quentin is 183

complicit here, since at this point in the novel it doesn't matter who

is speaking) speculates that this is also what Bon wants. But falling

in love with Judith just happens;

It would be no question of choosing, having to choose between the champagne or whiskey and the sherbet, but all of a sudden (it would be spring then, in that country where he had never spent a spring before and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girls' nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something young in the cedars like he never saw before) you find that you dont want anything else but that and you have been wanting that pretty hard for some time--besides knowing that that sherbet is there for you to take. (323)

Even the question of incest can be evaded by Shreve, who calls it first a sin to intensify the love, and, when Quentin is skeptical, makes it an obstacle for Bon the hero to conquer in his quest for love, which he does in fact conquer, with the help of four years of war, by ignoring.In Shreve and Quentin's view, Bon's desire for his father's recognition becomes all the more powerful and heroic, because, they speculate, he is willing to renounce a love so profound that even the threat of incest cannot cut it short. And Henry, too, emerges as Quentin had imagined him early in the text--Hamlet-like, forced finally to act, to kill Bon also because he loves him and loves

Judith more and wants to believe that something--time or the war--will make the incest cease to matter so that Bon can marry their sister.

In short, Shreve and Quentin create a Bon-Henry-Judith conspiracy to gain Sutpen's recognition by transgressing his law; they attempt to 184

shed the law of the father in a single act of outrageous desire,

which is yet innocent in their eyes because it is done in the name of

love. At the same time, the four years of war have done their work.

Quentin and Shreve imagine Bon's words, but in strict accord with the

sentiments of his letter:

'if you don't have God and vou don't need food and clothes and shelter, there isn't anything for honor and pride to climb on and hold to and flourish. And if ypv havgnlt-frftt honoF_W_p%i<^g.j_l:h@n._ho.thing Only there is something in you that doesn't care about honor and pride yet that lives, that even walks backward for a whole year just to live: that probably when this is over and there is not even defeat left, will still decline to sit still in the sun and die, but will be out in the woods, moving. grubbing for roots and such--the old mindless sentient undreaming-meat that doesn't even know any difference between despair and victory. Henrv.' (349)

Despite this imagined reconstruction of Bon's thoughts, all that is

required to stop the conspiracy is a word from Sutpen, and if not a

word a gesture, and if not a gesture a sign--a fingernail clipping,

Shreve had speculated earlier, would do. Once all of this has been

theorized--that the body continues to desire, even in the depths of the mind's despair--Quentin and Shreve still have no answer to the question of why Henry killed Bon, since Quentin and Shreve assume

Henry had finally agreed to allow Bon to marry Judith. The leap to

Bon's blackness is not only the one answer that fits their particular positing of the problem, but it solves every other riddle of the novel as well: the mulatto, by definition, cannot exist; if the mulatto can exist, there can be no essential difference between the races. The 185

only way open to Bon to gain Sutpen's recognition is to become what

his father insists he is and force Henry either to accept or deny

Sutpen's "moral" law of racial difference:

--You are my brother. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me. Henry. (357- 58)

The charge that Faulkner is pandering here to racist fears is a

preposterous one; rather the exchange between Bon and Henry is a

dramatization of the first principle of racism--the objectification of

the Other on the basis of groundless difference--and the culmination

of a series of confrontations that occur throughout the text. Early

in the text, the anonymous narrator reveals the townspeople's fear of

Sutpen's "wild niggers" who speak in a savage tongue that turns out to

be French. In Rosa's second narrative, Rosa's moment of insight into the "shibboleth of caste and color" is immediately obliterated by the despair Rosa had felt when she found herself sistered to the definitively marginalized Clytie. In the following chapter, Charles

Etienne spends hours staring at his own reflection in a broken mirror, trying to determine what it is that makes him "nigger," while

Quentin's reconstruction of Judith's confrontation with Charles

Etienne centers upon Judith's inability to sever the bonds of that tradition even as the living proof of its falsehood stands before her.

Following Charles Etienne's story, Quentin's narrative reveals that the boy Sutpen's radical reordering of the people around him reduces what had been people with dark skin to "nigger-laughter," and his own 186

family to the object of that laughter. In Shreve and Quentin's

reconstruction here, Henry flings away the pistol Bon gives him as Bon

poses in its starkest terms the issue Henry must resolve: the mutual

exclusivity of the terms brother and nigger. According to Quentin and

Shreve, Henry and Bon have together cast aside the question of Bon's

paternity, so that when Henry goes to see Sutpen, he will argue for

sweeping away all kinship distinctions in favor of the body's own

primal, indefatigable desire (reinforced by Rosa's narrative), which

Quentin and Shreve call love. The two narrators posit the conflict

between Henry and Bon as one of heroic love opposed to the familial

taboos they have come to believe, after four years of deprivation and

the decimation of the material and structural accommodation we call

culture, are no longer important or meaningful.

Moreover, the brotherhood between Henry and Bon exceeds that

bestowed by a common parent ; it is rather a bond suggested earlier by

Mr. Compson, the brotherhood of two men surviving together and in turn

depending upon each other for survival. That Quentin and Shreve

insist that it was not Henry who saved Bon when he was wounded, but

rather Bon who saved Henry when hê was wounded merely underscores the

intensity of the bond between the two. For Quentin and Shreve the reinterpretation adds to Bon's heroism, but the acceptability of either interpretation suggests the potential power of the bond the body's desire for survival is capable of creating in the absence of any ethical structure, that is, when all else has ceased to matter.

For Henry, the spectre of Bon as nigger is threatening enough to 187

overcome even so powerful a bond as this. The threat of

miscegenation exceeds not only the threat of incest, but the desire to

love and even the desire to survive. The four long years of imagining

Bon as the epitome of manhood, the single person he would, for

whatever reasons, forsake his own future to accommodate, are rendered

meaningless by definition. If he kills Bon, he kills his brother; if

he doesn't, he lets a nigger sleep with his sister, and Henry, like

Rosa, Judith, and Sutpen, undergoes a revelation that serves only to

reassert its opposite--the old shibboleth of caste and color in all

its virulence. The choice for Henry is painful, but not difficult.

Shreve neatly resolves the last detail of his and Quentin's

text--the picture of the octoroon and Charles Etienne that Bon carries in place of Judith's--as Bon's heroic posthumous message to

Judith: "I was no good. Do not grieve for me." that is, "I am no good because I mistook this nigger and her nigger son for human beings"

(359). For Shreve, the story is over. As at the end of Chapter 7, when Shreve's discovery that Milly's child had been a girl had resolved that story, the exposure of Henry's reason for murdering Bon resolves the rest, and once again Shreve is ready to quit: "'Come on,' Shreve said, 'Let's get out of this refrigerator and go to bed'"

(359).

But the story is not over. As the evening had progressed, the anonymous narrator, who is uncertain and répertoriai in regard to the

Sutpen story but omniscient in regard to the present time of the novel, points out that the alterations in Quentin's and Shreve's 188

communications are profound. On the one hand, they are tightly bound

to one another, but on the other, they are alien beings, just as Henry

and Bon are both brothers and deadly enemies. In Chapter 9, the rift

between them widens, and, while most critics agree that Quentin bears

the burden of guilt for the past, most also agree that Shreve, however

he may exploit racist fears, is able safely to withdraw from any

implications the telling of the story may have for him, as is the

reader. Such an explanation, however, misses the impact of the ending

and allows readers too easily to exonerate themselves from the racism

embedded in the very fabric of American culture. The reader who can

put down Absalom and walk away from it as unscathed as Shreve has, I

believe, misread the book, and becomes the Brahmin who will never

"believe that that situation can conceivably arise in which he will

eat dog" (258).

A pervasive symptom of this kind of misreading is the tendency,

again like Shreve's, to see Absalom as a novel only about the South.

In fact, while Shreve, both as narratee and co-narrator, does provide

the distance Quentin needs in order to tell his story, he functions

even more importantly as the representative of a Northern attitude of

general superiority to the South and a Northern presumption of

egalitarianism that can no more accept Jim Bond's voice of despair

than can the South. Consequently, throughout chapters 6-8, the closeness of Quentin and Shreve is emphasized--their youthfulness, their similar sensibilities, their desire to recover the past, but at the same time their differences undercut that closeness, particularly 189

insofar as each one's own stake in the story is completely

incongruent. Both try, as the anonymous narrator tells us, to

distance themselves by clowning; both undergo a kind of "marriage,"

so attuned are they to each other's storytelling; both even "become"

Henry and Bon, as they reconstruct what probably happened, indeed,

what must have happened, whether the details they supply are accurate

or not; finally, both share the same history:

the two of them not moving except to breathe, both young, both b o m within the same year: the one in Alberta, the other in Mississippi; born half a continent apart yet joined, connected after a fashion in a sort of geographical transubstantiation by that Continental Trough, that River which runs not only through the physical land of which it is the geologic umbilical, not only runs through the spiritual lives of the beings within its scope, but is very Environment itself which laughs at degrees of latitude and temperature, though some of these beings, like Shreve, have never seen it--the two of them who four months ago had never laid eyes on one another yet who since had slept in the same room and eaten side by side of the same food and used the same books from which to prepare to recite in the same freshman courses, facing one another across the lamplit table on which lay the fragile pandora's box of scrawled paper which had filled with violent and unratiocinative djinns and demons this snug monastic coign, this dreamy and heatless alcove of what we call the best of thought, (258)

In establishing the closeness of Quentin and Shreve, this passage, which occurs as Quentin narrates Sutpen's story in Chapter 7, contains within it the principal difficulties of understanding Quentin's and

Shreve's roles in the last half of the text. Faulkner unmistakably ties the two together in the rather remarkable statement that there is no real difference between being born in Alberta and being b o m in 190

Mississippi. Yet Shreve, unlike Quentin, has never seen the river

that "laughs at degrees of latitude and temperature." What Quentin

brings to Shreve is a vision of that river, of the "djinns and demons"

of their common North American past. Quentin may need Shreve's

distancing techniques and even, although this is arguable, his

prodding to tell his story, but Shreve himself believes that that

vision does not and need not concern him because, as he says at the

beginning of Chapter 9, history is irrelevant to him^^:

"Jesus, if I was going to have to spend nine months in this climate, I would sure hate to have come from the South. Maybe I wouldn't come from the South anyway, even if I could stay there. Wait. Listen. I'm not tryng to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because it’s something my people haven't got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as childrens' children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas?" "Gettysburg," Quentin said. "You cant understand it. You would have to be born there." (361)

While the earlier passage suggests that Shreve's and Quentin's pasts are both vitally connected to each other and to the American past, Shreve here severs that connection with brutal clarity, and in 191

doing so allows Quentin to shoulder the burden of responsibility for

the past. Shreve manufactures difference between himself and Quentin

by emphasizing the differences between North and South. The North,

Shreve insists, has no history, hence no responsibility for the past

and no reason to be affected by it. The South, on the other hand,

whether from perversity or weakness, is unable to cease dwelling in

the past and to sever itself from history. As a Southerner, Quentin

accepts Shreve's withdrawal and with it the entire burden of guilt.

He does not recognize Shreve's complicity in the story or the North's

complicity in history.

Shreve retreats from the merging of consciousness that occurs in

Chapter 8, and returns to his earlier position of distancing himself

from the South and from the extreme pain the Sutpen story so obviously

arouses in Quentin. Shreve, for example, has no interest whatsoever

in Goodhue Coldfield beyond wanting to know what nefarious deal he had been involved in with Sutpen. When Quentin begins to explain

Coldfield's action in terms of the limits of his hypocritical and self-serving Puritan "conscience,"--Coldfield, who granted his own slaves their freedom, then had them work for wages to repay him for his loss of property, withholding their wages and charging them for the food they would eat when he was not at home to be served lunch, whose "free workers" disappeared along with Sutpen's and General

Compson's slaves--Shreve cuts Quentin short: "'Sure,' Shreve said.

'That's fine. But Sutpen. The design. Get on, now'" (260).

Coldfield despised the South, Mr. Compson tells us, not because of 192

moral outrage against slavery, but because of his own inability to

overcome the "conscience" that kept him from profiting from it as he

saw his "moral inferiors," especially Sutpen, doing. This position

has its counterpart in Shreve himself, who despises the South and who

believes that he is innocent of its evils. He believes that time and

distance both have freed him from history, just as Coldfield believes

his moral rectitude sets him above Sutpen. Yet it was not only

General Compson, but Coldfield himself who did in fact lend Sutpen the

"respectability" (both in his business dealings with him and in the

deliverance of his own daughter to him) that made it possible for him

to stay in Jefferson. Nor was it slaveowners who bought the cotton

and sugar cane produced on the soil nourished by the blood of slaves ;

nor were Northern manufacturers and French stationers loathe to sell

cases of the best stove polish and the best writing paper to those

same slaveowners. That moral indignation hovering just beneath the

surface of Shreve's narrative, and which Shreve believes to be his

birthright, is belied not only by such details "dropped like a joker

from a pack of cards" throughout the text, but by the transcendence of

time and space Shreve so easily navigates when he and Quentin

construct their narrative.

Seen in this light, the perfect congruity and "brotherhood" of

Quentin and Shreve's narrating carries within it a continuing animosity that obtrudes from time to time in Chapters 6-7, recedes in

Chapter 8, and flourishes in complete estrangement in Chapter 9.

Their narrating implicates Shreve as surely as Quentin in the story 193

they imagine; so closely aligned are they that they need not even

narrate at all:

Shreve ceased again. It was just as well, since he had no listener. Perhaps he was aware of it. Then suddenly he had no talker either, though possibly he was not aware of this. Because now neither of them were there. They were both in Carolina and the time was forty-six years ago, and it was not even four now but compounded still further, since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both yet either neither, smelling the very smoke which had blown and faded away forty- six years ago .... (351)

The italicization of the bivouac scenes that follow suggests further

that they are unnarrated, that is, that they are internal

reconstructions by each so closely attuned that they need not be

spoken. Just as Mr. Compson evades the import of the Charles Etienne

story by positing Charles Etienne as choosing to crucify himself,

Shreve evades the issue of Bon's insistence that he be recognized as

both black and human by emphasizing his heroism:

"And he never slipped away," Shreve said. "He could have, but he never even tried. Jesus, maybe he even went to Henry and said, 'I'm going, Henry' . . . ." (358)

Significantly, the shared vision (italicized text) ceases when

Bon says, "You will have to stop me. Henrv." so that it is Shreve who posits the explanation of the octoroon's picture, although Quentin agrees with his usual "Yes" that Shreve is right. The final split between Quentin and Shreve has already begun with the change in typeface and the reassertion of Shreve's voice. Moreover, the 194

anonymous narrator intrudes as Shreve speaks to emphasize the rift

about to develop as Shreve badgers Quentin:

He glared at Quentin, leaning forward over the table now, looking huge and shapeless as a bear in his swaddling of garments. "Don't you know? . . .Aint that right? Aint it? By God, aint it?" "Yes," Quentin said. (359)

Here again, the incongruity of the two reasserts itself. Shreve is

huge and ominous, yet infantile in his "swaddling" clothes, glaring at

Quentin, no longer attuned, cajoling and reprimanding Quentin for his

silence, but requiring the exoneration Quentin confers with his "Yes."

Like the transition between Chapters 7 and 8, the transition

between Chapters 8 and 9 is abrupt. Quentin and Shreve do go to bed,

but the frigid darkness of the room only contrasts with the heat and

fiery images, both remembered and imagined, which Quentin brings to

mind as the warmth his own body generates in the freezing darkness is

punctuated by shivering so convulsive that it alarms even Shreve. In

fact, the contrast between Quentin's indifference to temperature as

the room grows colder throughout the evening and Shreve's need to

bundle himself in layers of clothing underscores the difference

between their separate immersions in the story they tell. Shreve

figuratively isolates and protects himself from the ossifying cold

that pervades the atmosphere, while Quentin's spasms are in accord with his compulsive effort to engage the past. He is literally as 195

well as figuratively shaken by history's assault upon his

consciousness.

Much of the content of Chapter 9, the anonymous narrator's

account of Quentin's trip to Sutpen's Hundred with Rosa, consists of

revealing what has been withheld throughout the novel. The trip of

course had been made following Mr. Compson's narrative in Chapter 4, so that the reader is well aware of his or her own lack of knowledge about what happened at Sutpen's Hundred. Indeed, that Quentin is preparing throughout his father's narrative to go with Rosa is a fact that is mentioned from time to time, and Rosa's narrative ends with

Rosa's insistence that Clytie is hiding something there. The withholding of information about the trip has initiated much discussion, but it seems to me that it can best be explained in terms of Quentin's ability not so much to understand as to confront his own memory and accept its implications.^® Indeed, in the confusion of

Chapter 6, the anonymous narrator tells us that Mr. Compson's letter transports Quentin back to that September evening as he remembers a determined Rosa in the wagon beside him and the ominous dust with its message of death announcing that it will precede their arrival at

Sutpen's Hundred. Moreover, it is obvious that Shreve has heard this part of the story before, and their attempt to retell it is directly connected both to the Northern fascination with and contempt for the

South and the desire not to be implicated in its horrors:

[Quentin] soon needing, required, to say "No, neither aunt, cousin, nor uncle, Rosa. Miss Rosa Coldfield, an old lady that died young of outrage in 1866 one summer" and then Shreve said, "You mean she was no 196

kin to you, no kin to you at all, that there was actually one Southern Bayard or Guinevere who was no kin to you? then what did she die for?" and that not Shreve's first time, nobody's first time in Cambridge since September: Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. (174)

However immersed he may subsequently become in the story, this

attitude on Shreve's part will vary only in Chapter 8, when he and

Quentin "discover" Bon's blackness; thus Quentin, the Southerner who,

from the Northern perspective, has no reason to live at all, is put in

the position of having to justify his own existence, which, as

everything in this text suggests, is intimately bound to the values

the South boasts in claiming itself a superior, if defeated,

civilization. In Chapter 9, Quentin, reduced to a last-ditch effort

to salvage those values, now unmistakably revealed as indispensable to

the continuous brutality of the South, and without which that brutality could never have been justified, finds Shreve turning upon him with a ruthlessness equal to Sutpen's own.

Chapter 9 is narrated by the anonymous narrator, whose voice is focalized through Quentin's consciousness; the narrator does not tell us what Shreve is thinking or what his motivations are. Once Shreve establishes that Quentin does not understand his discovery at Sutpen’s

Hundred, the narrator describes Quentin and Rosa's trip, picking up where Quentin had left off in Chapter 6, from the time of their arrival at the gate until Quentin's return to his own home, where he lies in his own bed sweating and panting in the September heat just as he does now in the February cold. Even within this short narrative. 197

his encounter with Henry Sutpen is briefly withheld, so that the story

of the trip ends not with Quentin's return to Jefferson, but with his

terse conversation with Henry, who reveals that he has been "home" for

four years and that he had come home to die. Quentin's memory of the

corpse-like figure and the almost absurdly repetitive "conversation"

is, in many critics' view, the climax of the novel. Quentin's

apparently permanent fixation upon Henry thus becomes the sign of his

realization that the South is dead, a view buttressed by the content

of the conversation itself. While what follows does depend upon

Quentin's willingness to remember seeing Henry on his deathbed, it is

rather Quentin's willingness to imagine the house in flames as Rosa

struggles to "save" Henry that seals his fate as a tragic character,

"older at twenty than a lot of people who have died," as Quentin

describes himself.

In this final chapter the reader is presented with clear

choices, and these depend upon whether the reader allows Quentin or

Shreve to stand in as his or her surrogate. Most critics who discuss the issue have seized upon Shreve as the surrogate reader because of his distance from the content of the story, and his readerly search for and acceptance of the resolution of the story. Readers who identify themselves with Shreve, however, exonerate themselves from the burden of the past by relegating it to another place and another time. In fact, the text suggests throughout, though not strongly in

Chapter 9, that Faulkner intended readers to participate in this text in much the same way Quentin and Shreve participate in the 198

reconstruction of the Henry-Bon story in Chapter 8. To do so is to be

shaken by an interrogation of the roots of one's own value system,

particularly by recognizing the dependence of humanistic values upon

gender and racial difference, that is, upon racism and sexism.

Throughout Chapter 9, readers are drawn into Quentin's consciousness

by a narrator who repeatedly describes Quentin's agitation--his

convulsive shivering, his physical heat in the freezing room, his

belief that all the tomorrows and tomorrows yet to come will be

haunted by the vision of Henry Sutpen and the voice of Jim Bond. What

is peculiar about the narrator's position here is that he tells the

reader very little of what the story means to Quentin. That is, he

clearly has access to Quentin's physical state and to his thoughts, but refrains from any interpretation of either; we are not told what

Quentin understands intellectually about the past, about the South, or about himself. Rather, he describes the terror and despair that are the effects of the Sutpen story upon Quentin.

Quentin and Shreve may or may not have been factually right about why Henry killed Bon, but they were certainly logically right in doing so. Not only does the false concept of blackness as a differentiating sign render meaningless the humanistic values that make Quentin what he is--honor, love, loyalty, but those very humanistic values have as their principal function the maintenance of a caste system. The "tragic flaw" of the South is not slavery or ruthlessness or "innocence" or moral simplicity but a category error-- an inessential difference made essential by definition. Moreover, any 199

act of violence, including fratricide, becomes justifiable without

regard to any other factor of character, behavior, or belief; even

incest can be tolerated before miscegenation. What Quentin comes to

understand about the South is that his own dream of a humane and

glorious past, however deeply flawed, is both a product and a

justification of the flaw itself.

Nor can Shreve be easily dismissed as the innocent Northerner.

His and Quentin's collusion is required before the reason for Bon's

murder can be deduced: Quentin and Shreve functioning as one mind and

one imagination put together a handful of historical facts and the

"rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking" to arrive at the only

possible conclusion that logic will allow. As a Canadian, Shreve is

able to deny his own complicity in the story they produce, and taunts

Quentin with what he supposes are Southern fears of the black man.

But Shreve, in completing the tale with Quentin, has already made

himself a party to the understanding, and only his own fear of

blackness allows his cruelty toward Quentin at the end of the text.

Blacks, he says, will "bleach out"; that is, the black race, not the white, will be obliterated. Shreve points out that "we will all have

sprung from the loins of African kings," but there will be no evidence of the fact; Shreve remains untouched by the horror of the past. He fails to make meaningful his own discovery, and hoists the entire burden of guilt upon Quentin's taut shoulders, while Quentin's denial carries within it the seeds of its own futility. Quentin is not frightened by Jim Bond's howls, he is haunted by them, and, like 200

Henry, who waits for four years for something to intervene between his

knowledge that he must kill Bon and his unwillingness to do so,

Quentin is similarly suspended with no hope of a Civil War to settle

the issue, since it is himself against whom he is contending.

The narrator's concentration upon Quentin's remembering his own

past within the context of his and Shreve's reconstructed history,

upon Quentin's imagining the ending of the Sutpen story in the flaming

house and Jim Bond's voice of unmitigated despair, and upon Quentin's

physical agitation and near paralysis all align the reader with

Quentin, not with Shreve. The extraordinary effect of the last

chapter depends upon the reader's growing closeness to Quentin from

the first pages of the text, sharing with him the roles of listener

and interrogator of texts and solving with him and Shreve the mystery

of Bon's murder. To share Shreve's role in this crucial chapter would

be to abandon Quentin to his djinns and demons. Moreover, the

anonymous narrator, not a character/narrator, is in control of this

part of the text for the first time since the beginning of Chapter 2.

The result is that the focus upon Quentin's experience of the story becomes the central issue; that is, what happens to Quentin subsumes the final resolution of the Sutpen story. At the same time, it is

Quentin's internalization of the Sutpen story--that is, of history-- that leads him to the stalemate with which the text ends--his insisting that he does not hate the South that has robbed him of peace and that haunts him in the night. Quentin's panting assertion that he does not hate the South is what finally makes him a tragic character. 201

as he recognizes that what he has come to understand about the past

sweeps away everything that he most values, leaving him, at the end of

the text, saying, then thinking, the tenuous assertion that

contradicts exactly what he has just discovered. The final statement

of the text is meant to reveal precisely its own opposite, by virtue

of Quentin's extreme agitation, as well as its (italicized)

internalization:

"I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it! (378)

Quentin chooses to bear the burden of history, to confront the horrors

of the past, and to go on living in the knowledge that those horrors

will never depart.

By far the easiest and most comforting way to read this text is

to read it as Shreve does, as a story about a barbaric anachronism

called the South, a little blot of horrors sullying the American past

and rightfully defeated by its own tragic flaw. Much more disturbing

are the implications of reading Absalom as a tragedy about American

history in particular and about the march of "civilization" across the

globe in general. To understand Quentin as a tragic character is to

understand that history is not a progressive story of the expansion of

enlightened civilization blighted by occasional backslides into barbarism, but a state of mind originating in the desire of the dead and made material by means of those strategies they devised to satisfy that desire. In Rosa's first narrative, she encapsulates, without 202

knowing it, an American history at odds with the textbook past we've

all learned:

just the face of a man who contrived somehow to swagger even on a horse--a man who so far as anyone (including the father who was to give him a daughter in marriage) knew either had no past at all or did not dare reveal it--a man who rode into town out of nowhere with a horse and two pistols and a herd of wild beasts that he had hunted down singlehanded because he was stronger in fear than even they were in whatever heathen place he had fled from, and that French architect who looked like he had been hunted down and caught in turn by the negroes--a man who fled here and hid, concealed himself behind respectability, behind that hundred miles of land which he took from a tribe of ignorant Indians, nobody knows how, and a house the size of a courthouse where he lived for three years without a window or door or bedstead in it and still called it Sutpen's Hundred as if it had been a king's grant in unbroken perpetuity from his great grandfather--a home, position: a wife and family which, being necessary to concealment, he accepted along with the rest of respectability as he would have accepted the necessary discomfort and even pain of the briers and thorns in a thicket if the thicket could have given him the protection he sought. (16)

To participate imaginatively in Quentin's fate is to accept American history as the inevitable consequence of some older "mistake" concretized in Absalom. Absalom! as Sutpen's error. Whatever impossible search--whether for respectability or recognition or gold-- brought Sutpen to Jefferson also brought Europeans to America. If we take Sutpen's story as the center of the novel, the meaning of history will remain, as it does for Shreve, impersonal and remote with consequences that do not and cannot touch us. History becomes only a story to be read, not a functional part of the structure of consciousness. 203

Notes

^ From "History and the Sense of the Tragic: Absalom. Absalom!" The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963) 295-324.

^ Faulkner states unequivocally that Sutpen is the central character of the novel, which is only "incidentally the story of Quentin Compson's hatred of the bad qualities of the country he loves," Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the Universitv (New York: Vintage, 1959) 71. Of course, without the Sutpen story there would be no novel, but it is only through its effects on Quentin that the Sutpen story makes its powerful impact on the consciousness of the reader.

^ When critics began to take the novel seriously in the 1950s, most focused on Sutpen's story and the thematic issues it raises. Most early critics identified Sutpen as an embodiment of the rise and fall of the South. See, for example, Olga W. Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation (1959; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1964), and Irving Howe, William Faulkner : A Critical Study (1952; New York: Vintage, 1962). Cleanth Brooks, on the contrary, identified him as an atypical, unique case in The Yoknatawpha Country 295-303. Until recently, thematic criticism has focused especially on the nature of Sutpen's "innocence" or on his own rigidity and ruthlessness as the flaws that doomed both him and the Southern caste system. Melvin Backman, "Absalom. Absalom!." Arnold Goldman, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Absalom. Absalom! (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971) 88-112, demythologizes the Southern mystique that these positions assume, noting that the sole claim to aristocracy in Mississippi before 1860 was the ownership of slaves and that the post-Civil War pretense to a fallen aristocracy was a groundless defense against the reality of defeat. Interpretations based on Sutpen's guilt or innocence and his identification with the South tend to view the text as having tragic dimensions of some kind, while other critics have found those tragic dimensions so diffuse as not to be taken very seriously. James H. Justus, "The Epic Design of Absalom. Absalom!." Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, ed., William Faulkner's Absalom. Absalom!: A Critical Casebook (New York: Garland, 1984) 35-54, for example, accounts for the novel's "grandeur" by concluding that it is an epic rather than a tragedy.

^ William Faulkner, Absalom. Absalom! (1936; New York: Vintage, 1972) 273. All subsequent references refer to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

^ More recent approaches do focus on narrative as history, in particular on the multiplicity of narrative voices that undercut each 204

other and appear to rule out any possibility of ascertaining the "truth" about history. See, for example, Duncan Aswell, "The Puzzling Design of Absalom. Absalom!." Muhlenfeld, Casebook 93-107; Carolyn Porter, "William Faulkner: Innocence Historicized," Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: William Faulkner's Absalom. Absalom! (New York, New Haven, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1987) 57-73; Carl Rollyson, "Absalom. Absalom!: The Novel as Historiography," Muhlenfeld, Casebook 157-72; John E. Bossett, "The Limits of Narrative Form," M o d e m Language Quarterly 46 (1985): 276-92; Gerhard Hoffman, "Absalom. Absalom!: A Postmodernist Approach," Lothar Honnighausen, ed., Faulkner's Discourse: An International Symposium (Tubingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989) 276-92. In fact, the relativity of truth and the status of reality in an inevitably interpreted world constitute the principal and essentially unchanged conclusion of critics who identify some part of the Sutpen family's downfall as the subject of the text and those who are more concerned with the many narrative acts that constitute the novel's complicated structure; a corollary of this theme is that specifically historical truth is elusive or that history cannot be conceived without recourse to imaginative reconstruction, which is necessarily subjective and unreliable. While not disagreeing, I want to emphasize here that, while the "truth" is not evidentially available because facts are lost or repressed, it is logically available through imaginative reconstruction, and such logically derived "truth" has profound consequences for our understanding of the present in relation to the past. Mr. Compson's insistence that "It's just incredible. It just does not explain" (100), says more about Mr. Compson than about our ability to recover the past, or at least the meaning of the past for the present.

^ Because criticism since the 1960s has tended to focus on the discourse of the novel, Shreve's role as a character/narrator has been scrutinized more carefully in recent years. Despite a variety of analyses of Shreve, most critics agree that he provides the distance from the Sutpen story and from the South that Quentin needs in order to tell the story or serves as a surrogate for the reader. See, for example, Francois Pitavy, "The Narrative Voice and Function of Shreve: Remarks on the Production of Meaning in Absalom. Absalom!." Muhlenfeld, Casebook 189-205; Steve Price, "Shreve's Bon in Absalom. Absalom!." Mississippi Quarterly 39 (1986): 325-35; Terrence Doody, "Quentin and Shreve, Sutpen and Bon," Confession and Communitv in the Novel (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980) 163-83; and James D. Cray, "Shreve's Lesson of Love: Power of the Unsaid in Absalom. Absalom!." New Orleans Review 14.4 (1987): 24-35.

^ A number of critics have discussed the text as a specifically tragic action, some finding it successful, others not. For example, Richard B. Sewall, "Absalom. Absalom!." The Vision of Tragedy. 3rd ed. (1959; New York: Paragon House, 1990) 133-47, grants tragic status to Quentin, who, more painfully than Sutpen, must bear the burden of 205

Sutpen's "error." John Paterson, "Hardy, Faulkner, and the Prosaics of Tragedy," Goldman, Interpretations 32-41, argues that, while Hardy's limitations work to the benefit of tragedy, Faulkner's sophisticated narrative strategies are so distracting that the novel cannot be read as tragedy, even though Faulkner intended it to be. Harold Bloom, "Introduction," Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations 2-7, calls the novel a "tragic farce," Sutpen a "blind will in a cognitive vacuum." Dinnah Pladott, "William Faulkner: The Tragic Enigma," Journal of Narrative Technique 15 (1985): 97-119, relying upon Northrop Frye's discussion of ironic tragedy, sees the novel as a "coherent tragic system" that reenacts the sacrificial story of God and Christ. Warwick Wadlington, Reading Faulknerian Tragedy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987), argues persuasively that the reader's "enactment" or internal voicing of several heteroglossic Faulknerian texts, including Absalom, brings these works to life as tragedies. In direct opposition to Paterson and others, for Wadlington, Faulkner's technique of using multiple, contradictory voices doesn't derail, but rather intensifies the power of these novels as tragic actions. Most closely aligned with my own perspective here is Donald Kartiganer's argument, in The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979) 69-106, that Absalom represents a conception of tragedy more Nietzschean than Aristotelean, that is, that the novel does not represent a clearly motivated tragic action, but rather has to do with the triumph of a chaotic life force over the human imposition of form.

® Francois Pitavy, "Some Remarks on Negation and Denegation in William Faulkner's Absalom. Absalom!." Honnighausen, Faulkner's Discourse 25-37, discusses Faulkner's use of negation as confirmation of what it denies; that insight becomes particularly poignant in Quentin's desperate denial of his hatred of the South.

^ Richard Poirier, "Strange Gods in Jefferson, Mississippi: Analysis of Absalom. Absalom!." Muhlenfeld, Casebook 1-22, was one of the first to note that the subject of the novel is not Thomas Sutpen or the South or the meaning of the Sutpen story for Quentin, but the meaning of history for Quentin, who, Poirier says, discovers not the essence of his own past, but a "force which disrupts all that was possibly coherent, orderly, humane in the past."

Aswell 100-01, for example, argues that Quentin and Shreve are concerned with the present and cannot, even through imaginative reconstruction, recover the past. James Guetti, "Absalom. Absalom!: The Extended Simile," Goldman, Interpretations 76-100, concludes that Quentin's reconstruction of Henry's motives for killing Bon is based on what he cannot know, leaving both Quentin and the reader in a state of uncertainty. Correctly identifying race as the "tragic ingredient," Frederick Karl, "Race, History, and Technique in Absalom. Absalom!." Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie, eds., Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknanatawnha. 1986 (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1987) 206

209-21, goes on to suggest that Faulkner's narrative strategies make history, like race, subjective.

Calling upon Hegel's view that the thought behind empirical events makes history compresensible as a chain of causally connected events, Rollyson 159-67, argues that Absalom. Absalom! shows that there is a historical meaning that eludes a logical, analytical approach but that is available through imaginative reconstruction. Porter 57-58 argues that the Faulkner's narrative strategies block, for both Quentin and the reader, both subjective and objective escapes from history.

Vickery 84.

Much critical discussion has revolved around the terse conversation between Henry and Quentin and around what actually transpired at Sutpen's Hundred that led Quentin to believe that Bon was Henry's son. For example, Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978) 320-22, reasons that the conversation is only partially recorded in the novel or that Clytie or Rosa revealed Bon's parentage to Quentin. James Guetti 81-83, remarks that the lack of information in the conversation illustrates that Quentin's "seeing" or understanding is not real, that he does not "leam" any new facts at Sutpen's Hundred except the reality of his own despair. Aswell 95-96, suggests that Quentin may have realized Bon's parentage in a revelatory moment either when he saw Clytie or commented about Jim Bond, but that Faulkner purposely leaves the question unanswered.

See James A. Snead, "The 'Joint' of Racism: Withholding the Black in Absalom. Absalom!." Bloom, Interpretations 129-41. As Snead points out the "joint" between the categories of black and white can never be "objectively" established and can only be maintained as essential categories by denying black subjectivity. Snead's article is essential for understanding why Quentin and Shreve are able to discover the "truth" about history, whether their "discovery" of Bon's blackness is correct or not.

Hugh Ruppersburg, Voice and Eye in Faulkner's Fiction (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983) 81-86, is typical of a number of critics who essentially adopt Mr. Compson's cynical perspective : all narrators are inadequately informed or overly subjective; therefore the past is unknowable or uncertain. Or, as Hoffman 282, has more recently maintained, the perspective of the fourteenth blackbird Faulkner identified as the reader's "truth" is to the postmodernist reader also an illusion. The point, it seems to me, is that we want the past to remain unknowable, to avoid its repressed content.

Judith Bryant Wittenberg, "Gender and Linguistic Strategies in Absalom. Absalom!■" Honnighausen, Faulkner's Discourse 99 argues 207

that "the novel manages to encode and critique the prevailing masculinist discourse and culture," but it seems to me that the critiquing far outweighs the encoding. Mr. Compson's encoding, for example, is so contradictory that it is its own critique, even without Rosa's monologue.

Rollyson 158-61, for example, argues that Rosa's narrative, like Sutpen's, is simplistic insofar as neither character can, having once transformed experience into language, reinterpret that experience. Wittenberg 106, on the contrary, finds Rosa's impassioned narrative "radical, thrilling, kaleidoscopic, deconstructing the 'normal' processes of narrative and interpretation."

David Paul Ragan, William Faulkner's Absalom. A b s a l o m ! ^ Critical Study (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1987) 72, following Ruppersburg, states without argument that Rosa's voice is reflected through Quentin's perception. If so, the only indication of that reflection is the chapter's italicization, which seems rather to indicate Quentin's more or less verbatim absorption of her monologue. In any case, the outrageously sensual diatribe she unleashes seems utterly alien to the fastidious Quentin.

Kartiganer argues that Quentin and Shreve's identification of Bon's blackness is "the great imaginative leap" of the novel, one that makes inescapable for Quentin the conclusion that all Southern values rest upon the distinction between black and white. In recognizing this original and fatal error of the South, Quentin and Shreve undergo a kind of tragic recognition from which both retreat in the final chapter to the separate silences of their own isolation, Shreve to the safe distance of his Northern origin, Quentin to the continued torment of loving the South despite what he knows about it. The recognition of Bon's blackness as the motivating factor for the murder becomes a fulfillment, Kartiganer says, of Burke's notion of art as symbolic form--art as the means by which Quentin and Shreve are able to perceive and be immeasurably moved by the tragic flaw of the South as it plays itself out in the murder of Bon. The final chapter of Absalom, especially the sparse, unimaginative conversation between Henry and Quentin, marks the return of Quentin and Shreve to the blunt actuality of daily life. Kartiganer's argument, however, accepts too easily the sharp and brutal division that arises between Quentin and Shreve in the final chapter. Quentin's act of imagining Sutpen's house in flames andJim Bond's howls condemn him to a life without redemption from the past. While it would be inaccurate to say Quentin chooses his fate, he at the very least does not withdraw, as Shreve so easily does, from the implications of their discovery.

This view of Shreve is virtually universally accepted as fact among Faulkner's critics. 208

Brooks, Toward Yoknapatawpha 304-05, sets the graveyard narrative one or two years prior to the present time of the novel.

Which, of course, they are, and part of what Faulkner is doing here is making reading history analogous to reading his novel : we attain historical knowledge from fragmented narratives; we synthesize those fragments in ways that can account for both indisputable facts and our own desire; we attribute to the dead those motives that make sense to the living; most important, we make choices about the level of involvement we wish to invest.

Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, "We Have Waited Long Enough: Judith Sutpen and Charles Bon," Muhlenfeld, Casebook 173-88, is one of the few critics who argue for Judith's strength of character and genuine devotion to Charles Bon.

As Snead, "Racism" 131, notes "black Caucasian" and "white Negro" are oxymorons; so, indeed, is "Judith's sister Clytie."

See Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978) 278-93.

In his book-length study of Absalom. Absalom!. Ragan's central thesis is that Quentin, as the focal center of the novel, cannot be fully understood apart from the development of his character inThe Sound and the Fury. Perhaps not, but the subject of the earlier book is the effects of the dissolution of a family on its members within a destabilized social structure. The subject of Absalom is rather the recovery of the reasons for that destabilization and the direct effects of that recovery upon individual consciousness. An emphasis upon Quentin's particular psychological quirks--his obsession with his sister--would detract from the much broader historical scope of Absalom. Similarly, John Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Revenge : A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975), while noting the broader significance of incest and its connection to miscegenation in Absalom. Absalom! than in The Sound and the Furv. in fact draws attention away from the centrality of the impact of history upon Quentin and upon the reader.

Critics frequently cite this passage partially (from "Wait" to "better") to establish Shreve's absence of malice, but the passage in its entirety, if it does not establish malice, does establish Shreve's conviction that the South is absolutely Other, depraved and inaccessible to the Northerner, whose own history has become irrelevant. Indeed, the conventional critical wisdom about Shreve has changed little since Brooks' influential essay in Yoknapatawpha Country. 317: "we can see him drawing back from the tragic problem and 209 becoming again the cheery, cynical, common-sense man of the present day. In the long perspective of history, how few issues really matter !"

See Note 13. CHAPTER IV

WRITING TRAGEDY: ART AS FAILURE IN LOLITA

One of the greatest difficulties in reading Lolita as a tragic

action has to do with the novel's precarious balance between its own

suggested worlds of mimetic fiction on the one hand and self-

reflexive fiction on the other. A text that is primarily self-

reflexive or "parodie," as Lolita has frequently been called, would

seem unlikely to generate the strong emotions we generally associate

with tragedy. Further complicating the issue is the question of

whether--even assuming that Lolita is more mimetic than self­

reflexive- -Humbert is devastated when he understands the depth and

seriousness of his crime or whether his narrative is rather a cynical

attempt to exonerate himself in the minds of his jurors/readers. The

reader can never be quite certain that Humbert's abuse of Lolita has

tragic consequences for him or even that Nabokov presents Humbert as

a primarily mimetic character, whether sincere or insincere, who is

intended to evoke an emotional response in readers. Unlike Nabokov's

other novels, however, no elements of Lolita seriously undermine the

fictional world by drawing unambiguous attention to the text's

fictionality; self-reflexive elements in this text can be more easily accounted for as elements of mimesis than can mimetic elements be

210 211

accounted for as parodie or self-reflexive. At the same time, too

sharp a division between the two is finally counter-productive;

rather, attention might better be focused on the interplay between

mimesis and self-reflexivity in Lolita as it affects readers and

raises thematic issues concerning the complexity of the relationships

among art, experience, and reality, and the constitutive role of

language in determining the nature of all three.

As a character in Nabokov's novel, Humbert creates a fictional

Lolita to satisfy his own desire, but the "reality" of Lolita's subjective self refuses to remain fictionalized, with tragic consequences for Humbert. Lolita is a tragedy within a tragedy; that is, Nabokov has written a novel in which a character, Humbert

Humbert, writes a tragedy in which his own former self discovers the magnitude of his crime and is destroyed by the recognition, but, beyond that, Humbert the narrator becomes a tragic character through the act of narrating. Humbert persists in the attempt to create a work of art that will make restitution to Lolita, but that act is inevitably a failure. However enshrined Lolita may become in the narrative, Humbert is aware that he has only words to play with, and those words can never restore the childhood--and for Nabokov childhood provides the memories without which the imagination cannot function--Humbert has destroyed. Humbert's error is to "solipsize"

Lolita the child, to transform her subjectivity into an aesthetic/sexual object of pleasure. As the narrator/confessor of his own story, Humbert comes to understand not the magnitude of his 212

crime against Lolita--he understands that even as he begins to

write--but the inadequacy of art and the solipsistic aesthetic vision

as a seductive and dangerous imposition upon experience. Only when

"reality," in the form of Lolita--no longer the nymphet, but the

forlorn, abused, alienated child--intrudes upon his consciousness can

Humbert grasp the fact that he has always had only words to play

with, using language to recreate the world to fulfill his own desire.

Lolita is a tragedy at both the mimetic and self-reflexive levels,

revealing finally the desire inherent in narrative as inevitably

unfulfillable.

Not surprisingly, criticism of Lolita has tended to fall into

two broad categories: mimetic readings and aesthetic/thematic

readings, but this dichotomy has tended to obscure the ways in which

mimetic and self-reflexive elements work together in the novel.^

Mimetic readings have accounted for our final sympathy for Humbert as

a concomitant of the moral regeneration he appears to undergo at the end of the text (he takes responsibility for having harmed Lolita more than even she will ever understand). But such readings have not accounted for the elaborate linguistic, literary, and aesthetic effects that are clearly functioning in Lolita.^ In this kind of reading, critics must assume that readers who see the text as largely self-reflexive are ignoring the moral issues raised by Humbert's sexual abuse of Lolita. On the other hand, reading the novel as a self-reflexive text or as a fantasy has allowed readers to eliminate or to suppress or at least to defer the impact of their emotional 213

response to the highly seductive language that overtly glorifies

sexual and psychological abuse in Lolita.^ That is, when the text is

assumed not to be mimetic, Humbert and Lolita must be seen as

pointedly fictional characters, and, consequently, Nabokov must be

concerned primarily with questions of art (or with other thematic

issues) and his novel must be meant primarily to dramatize fiction's

non-referentiality or the role of consciousness and/or language in

the construction of reality. Hence, in this view, the reader who

takes Humbert at his word, has read incorrectly, has been too

readerly a reader, has been tricked by Nabokov. Neither approach has

resulted in an adequate account of both the mimetic traits of the

characters and Nabokov's obvious concern for the complexity of the

interrelationships among art, experience, language, and reality.

Viewing Lolita as a postmodern tragic action allows us to ask

questions about the particular problems of aesthetics and language

that are intimately involved in the unfolding of Humbert's fate.

Reading Lolita as a tragic action appears questionable both

because of Nabokov's apparent undercutting of the mimetic qualities

of the text and because of the nature and deliberateness of Humbert's crimes. Doing so, however, may provide a way of unraveling some of the connections between the mimetic and self-reflexive or fantastic components of the novel. Humbert's fate is a direct result of the way in which he perceives and constructs reality from language, and

Lolita calls upon readers to question their own relationship to the seductive powers of language in general and of this text in 214

particular. Readers may finally sympathize with Humbert because--

within the context of the frightening world he creates for himself

from language--Humbert recognizes his own failure to comply with the

ethical strictures that world imposes upon him. That is, he fails to

accept the limitations the existence others imposes on his ability to

objectify them, which in turn allows him to construct reality to

conform to his own desire. Moreover, because of the aesthetic value

and the self-reflexive qualities of the discourse, the status of our

involvement with Humbert is such that we cannot escape confronting

the power of language to mold and manipulate our own judgments and

emotions: to sympathize with Humbert may well be to take as real a

text that announces itself as unreal, but it is also true that to

deny our response to Humbert as a mimetic character is to sidestep

the issue of our own response to the seductive language of the text.

Stripped of his fancy phrasings, the Humbert of Part I is and

extraordinarily single-minded child rapist; it is his virtuoso

linguistic performance that disguises pedophilia into as artistic endeavor. To see Humbert emerge as a tragic character in Part II and to understand the nature of his actions as both a rapist and an artist can illuminate the complex, but not finally contradictory, response the text requires. In particular, such an inquiry will help explain how both mimetic and self-reflexive components are interwoven in this text to evoke an emotional response to characters, but also to dramatize the reader's own vulnerability to language. Seeing

Humbert as a tragic character is necessarily contingent upon the 215

reader's having some sympathy for him; at the same time, the reader's

sympathy is at least partially contingent upon the reader's

vulnerability to Humbert's skillful manipulation of language.

Humbert's reprehensible actions and the seductive language in which

he narrates them are fundamental to our understanding of the peculiar

kind of tragedy Lolita is; the doubly tragic fate of Humbert is,

first, a result of his own manipulation of language and construction

of reality and, second, a result of his failure to absolve himself

through his own artistry.

Early reviewers of Lolita were shocked by its subject, and

dismissed Nabokov's novel as pretentious, irresponsible, and

pornographic, although even in those benighted, gray-flannel days,

some critics saw that such criticism was unwarranted and missed

altogether Nabokov's purpose, which they believed to be a serious

exploration of the relationship between art and reality.^ Among

those who analyzed the text on largely aesthetic grounds, Alfred

Appel, whose commentary in The Annotated Lolita and elsewhere is still very much the most widely accepted of any criticism of this text, argues that Lolita is a "springboard of parody," an example par excellence of the deadly serious games Nabokov created as his own means of confronting the void.^ Appel contends that parodie elements in Lolita prevent the reader's taking Humbert as a real character, but also that Nabokov gives Humbert such verisimilitude that despite the comic nature of his exploits (Lolita is not real either) the reader is nonetheless moved by Humbert's despair. Appel's analysis thus 216

attempts to account for the emotional appeal of the represented world

of the novel in a way that most critics who deem the novel self-

reflexive do not, but it seems to me that Humbert's fate and Lolita's

do more than add a dimension of humanity to an otherwise purely

aesthetic performance. Beginning with those early critics who

condemned the novel as pornographic, a second line of analysis has

developed that focuses on Humbert as a mimetic character of tragic or

nearly tragic proportions, but without adequately reconciling the

aesthetic dimensions of the text. Neither line of criticism has dealt

with the complexity of response the text requires of the reader.

In fact, the reader is asked to respond at the mimetic level

to Humbert's tragic fate, both as a character within his own

narrative and as a character/narrator within the novel. Such a

response is complicated somewhat by the complexity of Humbert's

character: he is witty, erudite, and astonishingly skillful in his

absolute control of the discourse, but the story reveals his own

myopia in regard to Lolita. Moreover, the elaborate games, cross-

references, allusions, and parodie and satiric elements Nabokov

builds into the text do seem to point to the text's fictionality.

If, however, we take seriously the obvious fact that Humbert is

himself the author of his own narrative, then far from being either

an unaccountable element or an object lesson on empty aestheticism

(however elegant), those elements that seem either superfluous to the mimesis or a subversion of it are in fact essential to it. Humbert's failed attempt to redeem himself through art is all the more moving-- 217

and disturbing--to readers who find that they themselves have been in

some sense seduced by Humbert's language. As a tragedy, Lolita

involves the reader in a labyrinth of linguistic effects that lead

finally back to the ruined lives of Humbert and Lolita as mimetic

characters. These pointedly fictional elements lead the reader only

occasionally and only indirectly to Nabokov, whose signature in the

text does little more, it seems to me, than underscore his concern to

establish the limitations of art; for the most part, they lead back

to Humbert and Lolita.

Lolita, then, cannot be read simply as a self-reflexive text, even, as Appel suggests, a profoundly humane one; rather, the text's self-reflexivity bears a complex relationship to the story of Humbert and Lolita. Apart from John Ray's convoluted directions to the reader (which I shall return to later), those elements that direct the reader's attention to Nabokov the "puppeteer" are not intrusive within the represented world of the novel. The hints Nabokov drops about Humbert's fictionality are always minimal, and never do they directly contradict the assumptions the reader makes about the represented world of the novel. Humbert narrates his own story in its entirety, and whether Humbert is ever telling the truth or not,

Nabokov never intrudes upon Humbert's own freedom to tell the story as he sees fit, nor does he ever directly indicate that, again within the represented world, Humbert is a product of the fiction rather than the represented author of his own narrative. 218

One of the most frequently cited instances of Nabokov's

intrusions is his use of "Vivian Darkbloom," an anagram of Vladimir

Nabokov who does reappear some years later to write notes to Ada.

While it is true that the reader of Lolita can hardly avoid

unscrambling Vivian, it is equally true that Vivian also functions

nicely as a mimetic detail. Her first appearance is in John Ray's

Preface, where she is identified as the author of My Cue, presumably

the story of her relationship to Quilty. The similarity between the

title "My Cue" and Humbert's much repeated phrase "my Lolita" leads

the reader to posit an unsavory relationship between Vivian Darkbloom

and Clare Quilty, further suggested by their assocation within

Humbert's narrative. Moreover, the name itself connotes fin de siecle

aestheticism, both in the lush, velvety y's of "Vivian" and in the

flowers of evil suggested by "Darkbloom." In other words, Nabokov's

anagram functions mimetically; at the same time it also functions in

much the same way an artist's signature functions on a painting. It

is Nabokov's signature, an identificaton of his work as his own

creation, or at least as the creation of some avatar of himself, as well as a reminder of the text's fictionality. Vivian Darkbloom points less to the separabililty of fiction and reality than to the

inseparability of aesthetics and experience. ("I am," Nabokov has said, "an absolute monist," meaning, I think, that the fictional, imaginary worlds we all create and within which we live are not fixed, but exist as continually interactive processes with the "other" that constitutes "reality.") The fingerprints Nabokov scatters throughout 219

the text do not justify the reader's viewing fiction--or at least this

fiction--as a construct upon which reality does not intrude. To

concentrate on the fictionality of the text at the expense of mimesis

is to treat the text in precisely the same way that Humbert treats

Lolita; as an aesthetic object without a "reality" of its own. What

is lost is the human predicament of Humbert and Lolita along with any emotional response their story might engender.

Critics have also viewed the many references to butterflies in

Lolita as an obvious intrusion by the author, but the butterfly motif is only non-mimetic if the reader already knows that Nabokov is a semi-professional lepidopterist; indeed, one would have to be a lepidopterist to realize that many of the references Humbert makes are incorrect.^ Here Nabokov's particular interest and expertise is clearly put to use, but not in a way fundamentally different from the way any authors might draw upon their own experience to enrich their imagery. Again, the author is present, but only obliquely, and it would require not only considerable poring over entomological texts but considerable ingenuity to conclude that Humbert's passion for

Lolita is an analogue of Nabokov's pursuit of rare and elusive butterflies. Such a pursuit of textual allusions not only reveals little about the text (or I should say it reveals only a little about the text), but trivializes Humbert's and Lolita's experience (not to mention Nabokov's passion for butterflies--lepidolepsy?). The references to butterflies in Lolita would seem rather to serve several somewhat less ingenious purposes. In particular, for those 220

readers who do know something about lepidoptery, Humbert's errors

undermine his conception of himself as an erudite possessor of a

great deal more knowledge than most people possess, a conception that

contributes to his ability to satirize everything and everyone around

him and to distance himself from all human contact.^ In relation to

Nabokov's own interest in butterflies, Humbert's is not only random

and ill-informed, but he fails to see them either aesthetically or as

analogues of Lolita.

It is important to remember here that Humbert is retelling his

own past experience, and as the writer of that narrative he

understands much more than the past Humbert had understood as the

events occurred. After describing Lolita's tennis playing--and the

past Humbert sees that she and her game are perfect aesthetic objects, while the Humbert who is writing sees also that she had been crippled

in spirit--he remarks that "An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us," then continues with his description (236).® The butterfly, barely noticed by Humbert, is meant to represent the same aesthetic beauty Humbert describes in Lolita, as well as the sharp contrast between its own unbroken, "inquisitive" spirit and Lolita's.

Moments before the butterfly flits between him and Lolita, Humbert has remarked.

I insist that had not something within her been broken by me--not that I realized it then!--she would have had on top of her perfect form the will to win (234). 221

The wiser Humbert writing the text places the butterfly between Lolita

and his former self to make an implicit comparison between the

anthropomorphized butterfly's free spirit and Lolita's broken one, but

the phrase "not that I realized it then" indicates that in the past,

when Humbert had been watching the tennis match, he could not have

made that comparison. Such references serve less to remind us of

Nabokov's presence in the text (even though they may do that, too)

than to enrich our understanding of Humbert's character, in this case

of his failure to recognize or even notice the reality of the world

around him, and of the great but narrowing gap between the Humbert who

is writing and the Humbert of earlier years. Pretensions of knowledge

in the face of his ineptness in entomology and his willful neglect of

reality--during the time when he was living with Lolita, he could see

neither real butterflies nor the real Lolita--are at the heart of

Humbert's treachery.

In much the same vein, the "cryptogrammic paper chase," which

refers to the innumerable clues that should lead the reader and

Humbert to Quilty's identity, is a game that directs the reader to

Humbert's own artistry in the construction of the text and also to

greater insight into Humbert's character.^ Like Lolita, Quilty

appears as shadow, as anagram, as present and absent character

throughout the text. The references to Quilty are so many and so varied that they do point to the deliberate patterning of an authorial presence, but that presence is Humbert's, not Nabokov's. In fact,

Humbert bluntly tells us that he has planted all of these clues 222

himself. Furthermore, it is a game that underscores once again

Humbert's own inability to recognize the obvious. While it may seem

unbelievable, given that his story has been written partly in a

psychiatric ward and partly in jail and all in a hasty fifty-six days,

that Humbert could have created so elaborate a pattern on his own, it

should also be remembered that Humbert is re-writing rather than

simply remembering the past.He has just murdered (or at least

imagined he murdered) Quilty and Quilty is foremost in his mind at the

time of writing; consequently, from his position in the present (at

the time of writing), details that had gone unnoticed in the past, but

that can be seen in retrospect to have formed a significant pattern

that only now appears as a pattern, necessarily will assume a much

larger part in retelling the story than they had assumed in living it.

In fact, Humbert says as much:

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics [and the observant reader will notice that the "now" in this paragraph is itself italicized]; but that is not McFate's way-- even if one does l e a m to recognize certain obscure indications (213).

The real story in Lolita is not in its intricate structure, which only becomes a structure in retrospect, but in the lives it represents, in Humbert's sick heart and Lolita's stillborn spirit.

The cryptogrammic paper chase is itself a dead end, a seductive ploy 223

that goes nowhere. Nabokov tricks the reader (and perhaps the zealous

literary critic) into reconstructing an elaborate set of clues that do

lead finally to Quilty. Equally true, though, Humbert the writer

reminds us that the pattern of a life offers only a retrospective and

not a predictive understanding. In living out the destiny he now

retells, Humbert had never recognized a single one of the clues that

would have led him quite quickly to Quilty. When Humbert turns over

to a detective the list of Quilty's presumed pseudonyms culled from

motel registers across the country--a list honed, by the way, to only

those names and license numbers that had seemed relevant to the astute

Humbert--the detective, not unlike the Quilty-hunting reader, turns up after a two-year search "with the triumphant information that an

eighty-year old Indian by the name of Bill Brown lived near Dolores,

Colo." (255). Indeed, Humbert only 1earns Quilty's identity from

Lolita herself, and even then recalls none of the obvious clues, but only the word "Waterproof," a reference Charlotte had once made to

Humbert's watch at Hourglass (Our Glass) Lake. The word comes to

Humbert's mind presumably because at that moment years before when

Charlotte had said, "Waterproof," Humbert had been thinking about murdering her and because also at that moment the name of the dentist,

Ivor Quilty, had been mentioned, and a story about his nephew was about to be told when the conversation turned. The nephew is, of course, Clare Quilty, whose name was not mentioned at all in that conversation, but whom Humbert is now planning to murder. And, of course, the Hourglass-Our Glass word play suggests a variety of 224

possible connections between the passage of time and self-reflection.

In other words, the first association Humbert makes, despite the

dozens of obvious clues to Quilty's identity, is not only an obscure

one, but an associative one, having far more to do with his desire to

murder than with his deductive skills.

If these and other subterfuges are meant to point not to but

through the intricate patterning of the text to the represented world

of the text, Humbert's humor and satirical gibes do seem more clearly

to attest to a comic vision that overrides "the circumscribing

sadness, absurdity and terror of everyday life. Lolita is, after

all, and for many above all, a very funny book.^^ Humbert presents

an almost continual barrage throughout the text of sharply satirical

comments about a variety of characters and character types, about the

banality and vulgarity of American culture, about psychoanalytic and

psychiatric quackery, about trendy movements in education, even about

the poverty of spirit in the tawdry adolescent world from which Lolita

is brutally excluded. Most of us cannot but agree that Humbert's

assessments of modern America often reflect our own, and we admire the

lilt of his well-chosen words and the wit of his incisive comments.

On the other hand, Humbert is utterly indiscriminate in his satirical

remarks. Nothing, including Lolita, lies beyond his wit; indeed, his very ability to "solipsize" Lolita depends upon his capacity to convert reality into an object of scorn. Humbert's satire allows him to distance himself from actual human contact, including Lolita's.

And, as he finally realizes, Lolita's crude world of movie magazines 225

and roller rinks was, after all, "real to her" (286). Nabokov thus

dramatizes both sides of the satiric coin: literary scholar and social

critic Humbert offers half-truths--Americans and American culture and,

indeed, Lolita herself, are crude, vulgar, and anti-aesthetic, but

Humbert's satire also ensures his own isolation and entices the

reader, who, of course is also not crude, vulgar, and anti-aesthetic

to side with him. Lolita's obvious imperfections are seized upon by

Humbert in order that he can be justified in creating a new and better, a much-improved Lolita that excludes Lo, Lola, Dolly, and

Dolores Haze. Humbert's satirization of these other versions of

Lolita allows him to preserve his own Lolita intact, while readers must contend with the disjunction between their delight in Humbert's wit and the grim reality of the actions it obscures.

Early in the text, as Humbert explains his as yet unsatisfied passion for nymphets, he speaks of his own unspeakably blissful imaginings compared to his copulations with "normal big mates":

The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine (20).

The virile writer, the impotent, and Humbert all remove themselves from the dreariness and boredom and pain of reality because the dream is a thousand times better than reality. It is a commonplace of

Nabokov criticism to point out Nabokov's concern in much of his work with the ways in which we each construct our own "reality," a word that, Nabokov says in his afterword to Lolita, should always appear 226

within quotation marks. In Lolita, it seems to me, Nabokov is also

concerned with the gap between what is and what is imagined to be and

the potentially tragic eventualities that gap engenders as it narrows.

Humbert's fate turns on his inability or unwillingness to accept any

reality outside his own imagination. For Humbert, what is imagined is

itself a kind of parody of reality, just as his Lolita is less an

idealized image than a parody of Dolores Haze.

And Lolita is aburst, as Appel notes, with parody. Indeed, it is

Lolita as parody, above all else, that Appel and others believe

necessitates a subordination of the mimetic to the aesthetic content

of the text. Lolita has been said, at the very least, to parody

romantic poetry (most blatantly in "Annabel Leigh"), the romantic novel, the confessional, the detective story, the western, the case history, and the fairy tale, and critics are correct to point this out.For the most part, though, the parodies are not very subtle;

Humbert again and again pre-empts the reader's discovery of parody by announcing it, as when he describes within the same paragraph the typically incredible fight scene of westerns and his own similar fight with Quilty, pointing out that "both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle" (301). And the murder scene that follows is far more fraudulent than the most poorly directed and acted Western gunfight. Literary forms are parodied in

Lolita, but Humbert's awareness so undercuts the power of the parody as parody that it becomes less a parody of literary forms than a means Humbert uses, once again, to reinforce his own solipistic world 227

and to avoid what the reader can see clearly as a gap between

Humbert's perception of reality and the consequences of that

perception for others and ultimately for himself. As Humbert walks

toward his room in The Enchanted Hunters where the still unviolated

Lolita dozes, he remarks, "Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of

death," and later notes that all he had to offer the "poor orphaned

waif" was the "parody of incest." Such terms suggest that the

principal parody in Lolita is Humbert's own character and actions.

One consequence of that is the possibility that he is not meant to be

taken as a mimetic character, but if we conclude instead that Humbert

the narrator is parodying his own former self, the many references to

parody within the text become less problematic. The context within

which Humbert uses these terms suggests that the Humbert who is

writing sees his own past self as a parody precisely because the old

Humbert excludes so much of the real world from his own imaginings;

the world he creates for his pleasure does not represent reality, but avoids it. Parody within this text, like other elements that might,

in other contexts, point to the text's self-reflexivity, appears rather to deepen our understanding of Humbert's distorted manner of confronting the world.

I have tried to argue so far that Lolita's self-reflexivity is of a very unusual kind, directing the reader to the represented world of the novel, rather than to the fictional construction or purely aesthetic functions of the text. If I am wrong, that is, if the text is largely self-reflexive and both Humbert's nympholepsy and Lolita's 228

nymphethood are to be taken figuratively so that the text is more

properly an aesthetic allegory, then Humbert's confession becomes

straightforward parody, allowing readers to distance themselves from

the subject matter of the text. Apart from the vast and obvious

distance between Nabokov and Humbert, the extent of Humbert's

unreliability, the way in which he does or does not manipulate his

story to serve his own ends, is central to an understanding of the way

in which Humbert's narrative as a whole functions. The question is whether Humbert is for the most part telling the truth, or whether his dissembling and his apparent contrition are meant only to gain the sympathy of the reader. If the latter is true, and Humbert's cries of mea culpa are thoroughly contrived, the reader is free to allow

Humbert to merge with Quilty (or Larry Flynt or whatever sundry and sadistic serial murderers make the front page of today's or tomorrow's newspaper). If this is the case, the seductive power and eloquence of his language can be dismissed as a deliberate trap, a means of implicating the reader that can be seen through. If, on the other hand, Humbert is to be believed, if his recognition of his crimes against Lolita does give him pain (if, that is, he is taken as a tragic character), the reader's position is somewhat complicated.

Because the reader finally sympathizes with Humbert (and even if we retain the lingering suspicion that we have been duped by Humbert, that he really is simply pretending contrition, the mere possibility that he is telling the truth ensures the same complications), the vulnerability of the reader to the power of language becomes clear. 229

Moreover, if we focus attention on Humbert's role as narrator, both

the mimetic and self-reflexive elements of the text can be seen to

work together to create a work of art that is an attempt, albeit a

failed one, to make amends of some kind to Lolita. If Humbert had

told his story with less eloquence, less humor, less pathos, less art,

he could not, I think, have gained our sympathy. We might agree, as

Humbert does, with Lolita's assessment from her own perspective: "if

somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it" (275). Only

by accepting Humbert as a believable, tragic character are readers

forced to acknowledge the extent to which their own pleasure in the

text bears upon their judgment of Humbert. The tale is a horror, the

telling a delight, and separating the truth from the telling becomes a

task the reader is asked to perform.

That Humbert cannot be dismissed either as an aesthetic construct or as a complete villain is made clear when we consider Humbert's position as the narrator of his own story. In re-writing his story,

Humbert faces the difficulties of any autobiographer" he has to transform into coherent narrative the disorderly and disparate fragments of his own past self and do so from the perspective of the present. As is the case with the real autobiographer, the Humbert writing the text is not the same Humbert whose actions and thoughts are described, and, consequently, the story told necessarily deviates from the life itself. Humbert's present-tense interjections throughout underscore that deviation. If autobiography is never quite truthful, the writer of autobiography does have the advantage of 230

distance, and with it the possibility of seeing patterns that were not

clear as the life was being lived. In fact, the real detective story

in Lolita may be less the past Humbert's search for the real Quilty

than for the real Lolita and the reader's search for the real Humbert.

The pattern of Quilty's presence, so carefully woven into the text by

Humbert, becomes clear to the reader only in retrospect, and so, for for the past Humbert, had the pattern of Lolita's pain. For the present Humbert, what will become clear, again in retrospect, is the failure of his own narrative to redeem himself or to make amends to

Lolita--his final judgment upon his own linguistic virtuosity is that it is only, after all, a "local palliative."

Significantly, it is not until the final pages of the novel that

Humbert tells us of his recognition on a Colorado mountainside of the absence of Lolita's voice from the concord of children's voices below, yet this had occurred years earlier, shortly after Lolita's disappearance and long before the narrative was begun. As the text progresses, the purpose of Humbert's narrative seems to change, as does the rhetorical stance he assumes. Those changes can be explained in two possible ways: either Humbert comes to realize the nature and depth of his crime against Lolita only in the process of writing his story, or he understands his crime right from the start, and the rhetorical and narrative changes that occur as the text progresses are part of the aesthetic choices Humbert makes in order to reenact his crime and to produce a work of art that honors Lolita. Early in the text, Humbert's avowed intention is to prepare a defense that can be 231

used at his murder trial, but, he points out at the end of the text,

he decided in mid-composition that he "could not parade the living

Lolita," and decided to turn the defense into a work of art. The

possibility that Humbert does know what he is doing even as he begins

to write seems to offer the better explanation, because it can account

not only for the ways in which the narrative purpose appears to

change, but also for the elaborate aesthetic structure of the text,

which begins early and continues throughout.^4 The Humbert who is

presented to us at the beginning of the text changes radically as the

text progresses and does not merge with the Humbert who is writing

until the final pages of the book. Similarly, in the famous opening

passage, Lolita is introduced as a purely aesthetic/sexual object; not

until the final pages of the text does Humbert give us a subjective

Lolita, desolipsized at last.

Because Humbert intends to dramatize the change in his own

understanding of himself and of Lolita, he makes the purpose of his writing appear to change as the former Humbert's awareness increases.

That change is reflected in a number of ways as the text unfolds: in the increasing frequency, intensity, and apparent sincerity of

Humbert's self-accusations; in the decreasing frequency of cynical and satiric commentary; in more frequent and more detailed recollections of Lolita's intense and transparent pain; in an increasing sense of desperation and paranoia in Humbert's actions; in the cessation of direct pleas to the "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" and more to the reader; in the shift of focus from his own loss of Lolita to what 232

Lolita herself has lost; and finally in Humbert's statement that he

will withhold publication of the text until after Lolita's death, a

decision that reveals Humbert's realization that the story of her

life--the "local palliative" of art--is all he can finally offer in

payment for having deprived her of her childhood, and hence of the

capacity to imagine.("Imagination," Nabokov has said, "is a form

of memory"; to objectify--or solipsize, to use Humbert's term--Lolita

is to deny her subjectivity, to fill her consciousness with himself,

and to deprive her of memory that does not include himself.) In

short, the present Humbert creates a narrative in which the past

Humbert begins writing an elaborate trial defense that reveals a much

greater crime than the one for which he is being tried, a crime that

would only be compounded by publication of the text. The point is not

that Humbert the nympholept marches to his doom, but that Humbert the

writer creates a work of art in which Humbert the nympholept comes to

understand the nature of his crime, and consequently one in which the

elements of the text work toward the end of having the reader understand the nature of that crime, as well. In addition, Nabokov creates a work of art that involves us in an interrogation of the ways in which the language of others manipulates our own particular constructions of reality, but such an interrogation is only possible if the reader responds at some level to the mimetic rendering of

Humbert's story.

John Ray's preface is significant here. Ray's instructions are such that readers are given absolute license to interpret the text as 233

they please: as defense, as confession, as novel, as tragedy, as case

study, as detective story--it may be all, any, some, or none of these

things. Dr. Ray, author of the learned treatise, "Do the Senses Make

Sense?," makes absolutely no sense at all. Taken at face value, the

preface suggests that readers are free to interpret the text however

they please and will in any case have a very pleasant, as well as

informative, time of it. When we read a bit more sceptically, the

incoherence of the preface and the questionable status of Ray's

ability to judge anything at all suggest that the reader does, in

fact, need to discover how these disparate possibilities of

interpretation are related to each other. The only plausible way to

do that is to consider the rhetorical and narrative strategies Humbert

adopts in his role as narrator and decide whether they are coherent,

given that Humbert's purpose is, in fact, to create a work of art of

some significance.

The dramatized Humbert's strategies change considerably as he moves from self-indulgent pedophile in Part I to tragic protagonist in Part II. At the beginning of Part I (which recounts the period through Humbert's first rape of Lolita), Humbert's self-accusations are largely self-serving. He gives the reasons (ostensibly as an objective observer of the past) for his nympholepsy, and his purpose

(Exhibit I) is to convince the "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" that he is remorseful and that his nympholepsy is simply a fact, a given of his existence which was, despite all his considerable efforts, finally 234

beyond his power to control. His tactic is to pretend to work with

the reader to uncover the root causes of his obsession with Lolita

that led him finally to murder Clare Quilty. By carefully pointing

out that his frustrated childhood affair with "Annabel Leigh" is only

a possible or at best a partial explanation for his attraction to

little girls, he establishes himself as a disinterested investigator

into the web of his own shameful past; Humbert's underlying message is

that, like the jury, he just wants the facts so that the truth can

finally reveal itself. Humbert's attempt is clearly to win the

reader's sympathy by pretending that he is not, in fact, trying to win

it:

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel (15-16).

This passage follows immediately the information that Annabel had died

at twelve. As any disinterested party can see, Humbert suggests, this

childhood trauma is instrumental in the development of adolescent

Humbert's diseased mind. Humbert surreptitiously invokes Freudian

theory to explain his actions, even as, overtly, he ridicules it and brags of fooling and misleading psychiatrists.^® 235

Similarly, Humbert weaves into his narrative literary,

anthropological, and historical references--frequently distorted or

simply spurious--that suggest that sexual intercourse and marriage at

twelve or younger is and always has been an accepted and legitimate

practice in other cultures. Again Humbert insists that far from

excusing himself on these grounds he had, in fact, tried very hard to

be "prim and civilized," but the suggestion remains that moral value

is, when all is said and done, a relative thing, a matter of

convention, and indeed, the mocking tone of his insistence, along

with the suggestion that only the "risk of a row" prevented his

interference with "the innocence of a child," completely undercuts the

sincerity of his disavowal:

Humbert Humbert tried very hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row (21-2).

The cornerstone of Humbert's defense presents the trickiest of

all Humbert's rhetorical tasks: "to fix once for all the perilous

magic of nymphets." Throughout Part I, Humbert's principal line of

defense is, the magical explanation that he is enchanted; it is finally

the demonic nature of nymphets that is responsible for Humbert's disease. Humbert's tactic here is to draw the reader gradually into his camp through the sensuous, almost ethereal descriptions of increasingly repugnant sexual encounters, making of the reader a voyeur, whatever moralistic judgment that reader may make about 236

Humbert. Punctuating those descriptions is Humbert's continual barrage of disclaimers: first, that he so precisely and conscientiously controls his illicit desires that he never does any real harm to any real child; second, that he is nevertheless plagued with guilt because of his actions; and finally, that helpless Humbert is at the mercy of the demonic nymphet. With great skill, Humbert manipulates the reader (and throughout Fart I his narratees remain primarily the intratextual "ladies and gentlemen of the jury," rather than the general extratextual "reader" he usually addresses in Part

II) into an awkward and contradictory position. By painting himself as a character who recognizes his own guilt, but who has done his utmost to control his perversion--or rather, his enchantment--he attempts to arouse sympathy by maintaining that his motives were absolutely untarnished. Taken at face value, such an explanation would surely be dubious; the reader has, in addition, to be enchanted by the purely aesthetic pleasure Humbert offers in his narrative, and that pleasure is meant to be an analogue of Humbert's own illicit sexual pleasure. The reader is, in a sense, mesmerized or enchanted--

"Mesmer Mesmer" is one of the pseudonyms Humbert had considered using-

-just as Humbert is enchanted by the "perilous magic of nymphets":

I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, "impartial sympathy." So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me (59). 237

And, indeed, most readers, learned or otherwise, would be hard put not

to "participate" in the lengthy scene that follows of Humbert's first

surreptitious orgasm in the presence of his "safely solipsized"

Lolita. Ostensibly, Humbert claims that he is appealing to the

fairmindedness and "impartial sympathy" of the jurors who will render

their decision for or against him. But, in fact, by giving readers

pleasure as he describes his admittedly monstrous deeds, he subtly

encourages sympathy for himself, and not solely on the basis of their

fairmindedness or of his purity of motive. Rather, whether admitted

or not, readers have in some way shared in Humbert's illicit pleasure,

just as they have already shared Humbert's general scorn for vulgarity and crudity, and stand, with Humbert, above the crowd in their aesthetic sensitivity. In short, readers are bombarded with all the rhetorical devices in Humbert's arsenal to arouse our sympathy.

At the same time, Humbert gives us very little evidence that he even realizes Lolita has a life of her own. Only occasionally, and well into Part I, does Humbert hint that Lolita's pain is real or that he has any choice in his own behavior. As he retrieves her from camp to begin his nefarious journey with her, for a fleeting moment he recognizes what he should do:

All widower Humbert had to do, wanted to do, or would do, was to give this wan-looking though sun-colored little orphan aux veux battus (and even those plumbaceous umbrae under her eyes bore freckles) a sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home, nice girl-friends of her age among whom (if the fates deigned to repay me) I might find, perhaps, a pretty little Magdlein for Herr Doktor Humbert alone. But "in a wink," as the Germans say, the angelic line 238

of conduct was erased, and I overtook my prey (time moves ahead of our fancies!), and she was my Lolita again--in fact, more of my Lolita than ever (113).

Since we already have a reasonably good idea of what Humbert believes

about a "sound education, a healthy and happy girlhood, a clean home,"

etc., and since to some extent, at least, we probably agree with him,

the mocking tone Humbert assumes here, as in much of Part I, makes

what Humbert should do sound almost as abhorrent as what he does do,

and Lolita remains safely solipsized. Only as the moment of Humbert's

rape of Lolita draws closer and passes (Humbert is careful not to

describe in sensuous terms the consummation of his desires,

concentrating instead on his own scrupulous hesitations) does Lolita's

pain begin to surface in Humbert's consciousness as something real,

although, "'in a wink,' as the Germans say," it is quickly

suppressed. The general picture we get of Lolita in Part I is that of

a sexually curious, typically obstinate, thoroughly ordinary pre­

adolescent who is acutely bored by anyone over twenty, with the

exception of Humbert and Quilty. Fatherless, Lolita flirts with handsome Humbert and dreams of handsomer Quilty, both of whose pictures grace her bedroom wall. Insisting that Lolita had seduced him, Humbert recognizes her perspective only parenthetically, and, not surprisingly, he avoids relating any subsequent sexual encounters for his r e a d e r s . 17 Not until nearly the end of Part II does Humbert begin to recall some of those scenes, and only then does he openly admit his brutality. 239

Standing in sharp contrast to the precision, wit, beauty, and

control of virtually every sentence in Part I is a one-paragraph

chapter (Chapter 26) that interrupts Humbert's discourse and

encourages the reader to recognize the gap between Humbert as he is when he writes and as he was when he was debauching twelve-year-olds.

The interruption reveals the increasing difficulty of his task as he relives each detail of his past:

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head--everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.

This chapter is more than the brief dropping of Humbert's mask. It suggests as well that the telling of the story is a grueling task, and tells us outright that the real story is yet to come. It reveals, moreover, Humbert the writer's concern that the reader may in fact be taken in by Humbert's rhetoric and excuse his unforgivable crimes. It suggests also the purpose that will overtake the narrative as it accelerates to its conclusion, not at Coalmont or Pavor Manor, but on a remembered Colorado mountainside. While the book up to this point is solely about the past Humbert, his fanciful instructions to the printer he figuratively carries out himself, as with great reluctance and increasing difficulty, Humbert turns his attention to Lolita. 240

In Part II, Humbert's role of depraved lover merges with the role

of father that he cannot avoid assuming, a role from which he begins

to love the real Lolita entombed, to invert Humbert's metaphor, in the

coffin of flesh of the nymphet. Also Humbert's narratees change as he

now rarely addresses the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, but, for

the most part, addresses only his "readers," a move that shifts his

audience outside the text, extradiegetic discourse thus displacing the

largely intradiegetic discourse of Part I. He begins also to refer to

his writings as confessions, increasingly turns his satirical wrath

against himself, and is no longer careful to hide from the reader the

desperation of Lolita's situation or his own cruelty in maintaining

it:

We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep (178).

And, settled at Beardsley, Humbert resorts to paying Lolita for her cooperation:

0 Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dolls like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in the margin of that leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot. . . .because what I feared most was . . . that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. . . .she might 241

somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood--or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex­ prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead (186-87).

The humor, the satirical gibes at vulgarity, the general

celebration of language are maintained in Part II, but only as a

means of vindicating Lolita and condemning Humbert. Humbert's

linguistic and rhetorical skills serve also to maintain the reader's

sympathy, but instead of the intricate interplay of self-justification

and sham self-condemnation of Part I, Humbert now relies on the pain

of his own loss and his genuine love for Lolita, and does not hesitate

to assert, along with Lolita's perspective, his own unrelieved

brutalization of her without elaborate stylistic adornments.

Believing that she had had intercourse with a haggard fellow tourist

(he is half right--she has dawdled with Quilty), Humbert reports:

I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her. I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I travelled upon was so slight as to be practically indistinguishable from a madman's fancy (217).

Sometimes he combines bluntness and eloquence:

I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;--a salutary storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year! I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of blind impatient passion, and there she was sprawling and sobbing, and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the atrocious, unbelievable. 242

unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss (171).

And sometimes he lingers with metaphor. Whisking her away as they are

about to be discovered in this scene, Humbert describes his actions

and Lolita:

With the quiet murmured order one gives a sweat- stained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast's flanks pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up, and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car (171).

Finally, the scenes at Coalmont and at Favor Manor illustrate

Humbert's desire to immortalize Lolita in art, a realm from which

Lolita the nymphet should never have been allowed to escape. When

Humbert visits Lolita and her Dick in Coalmont, Humbert undercuts with

humor his own pathetic situation. He has three reasons for the

visit: to kill her lover, to give her Charlotte's money, and to see

her whom he realizes he loves in all her veined and pregnant post-

nymphancy. The scene at Lolita's ramshackle home in Coalmont, despite

its pathos, is a very funny one. The humor Humbert engages in here is not the sharp and bitter humor of the earlier Humbert : nearly deaf

Dick's vocabulary does not go much beyond "gee" and "swell," one- armed Bill injures one of his "few thumbs" trying to open a can of beer, Humbert upbraids the foolish reader who thinks he's going to pull out his automatic and shoot Lolita. The scene does parody the melodrama of a romantic novel, but the parody does less to undercut 243

mimesis than to minimize Humbert's own loss, which is necessarily the

central focus of the scene, and maximize Lolita's. He reminds us also

of the seriousness of the charge against him, compared to the charge

against Quilty, as Humbert supplies Lolita's unspoken thought: "'He

broke my heart. You merely broke my life'" (281; Nabokov's italics).

Humbert recognizes fully that their romance had been for her a

"humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood" (274).

Humbert also takes credit here for his creative work:

Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering--she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace--of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now (174).

This passage is a clear reminder of the artistry, though not, I think,

of the artificiality of the text. Humbert's representation of himself

as artist is wholly in keeping with the purpose of his narrative and

the immortalization of Lolita in art, the only medium through which

both his own pain and Lolita's can be communicated.

Similarly, the scene of Quilty's murder is written as a burlesque less because it is to be seen as a parody of the double in literature than because it is to be seen as a failed attempt on Humbert's part to rid himself of guilt. Clues to Quilty's identity, scattered throughout the text, are an indication of Humbert's own artistry, a means finally, of pointing once again to the represented world, and a 244

means for Humbert of finalizing his work of art. By making the Quilty

scene a burlesque, Humbert reinforces the futility of the murder;

after killing Quilty, Humbert feels worse than he had before; "I was

all covered with Quilty" (308). In fact, all that is left to Humbert

after the murder is the memory of Lolita past and some meagre hope for

Lolita future. In the closing pages of Lolita. Humbert reveals the

purpose of this particular work of art--to establish once and for all

the reality of Lolita and of her loss. Humbert recalls hearing from

the side of a mountain in Colorado just after Lolita's disappearance

the sound of children playing in the valley below:

I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord (310).

Significantly, this scene had actually taken place long before Humbert

had found Lolita. If Humbert the writer is to be believed, then,

Humbert had realized the gravity of his crimes long before it is

revealed so directly in the narrative. If Humbert's purpose were to

deceive, he could have revealed his remorse long before he does. As

he has with increasing frequency in Part II, Humbert recalls and

reinterprets events elided or skimmed over or not reported at all as

they had occurred in order to underscore not his own loss, but

Lolita's. In the last four paragraphs, Humbert reveals in simple, direct sentences his changing purpose in writing the text, his recommendation for his own sentencing (35 years for rape, nothing for 245

murder), and his homiletic and thoroughly conventional advice to

Lolita. Only in the flourish of the last two sentences do the past

and present Humbert completely merge to reveal their now common

purpose to immortalize Lolita and to insist at the same time that art

is only a poor imitation of immortality in any case. In the second

paragraph of the text, Humbert inserts among an otherwise elegant

piece of writing, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style," and later says, "Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with." Humbert's tragedy is moved by McFate (fate created from language at its random best); Humbert's fatal flaw, it seems to me, was to play with language too well, to create a world from which neither he nor Lolita could escape. But if language had originally imprisoned Humbert in his own solipsism, language also offered him the means to redeem himself in an aesthetic work that transcends solipsism, not in parodies, games, or aestheticism itself, but in his ability finally to communicate the reality of Lolita's loss and his own. At the same time, as Humbert himself recognizes, his narrative is a poor substitute for Lolita's shattered subjectivity, however trite and Charlotte-like it may have become had he not intruded upon it. If Humbert's recognition of the horror of what he had done to

Lolita is one kind of tragedy, the inevitable fate of the artist has its tragic component as well:

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita (313). 246

Notes

^ It is safe to say, I think, that few actual readers have read or could read Loiita without at least noting both the problems inherent in its overt content and the elaborate linguistic playfulness of its discourse. The sharp distinction I make here between mimetic and self-reflexive readings, while made largely for the sake of argument, is nevertheless justified by the overall interpretations of the novel various critics have offered. As Phyllis Roth, "Introduction," Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov (Boston; G. K. Hall, 1984) 9, notes, Nabokov criticism in general, and Lolita criticism in particular, has been characterized by extremes, especially by charges of pornography or empty aestheticism.

^ Recent critics of this persuasion include Julia Bader, Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels (Berkeley and Los Angeles : U of California P, 1972) 73, 76-77, who argues that the novel is a metaphor for the act of artistic creation: "Humbert's 'sense of beauty' is heightened and purified after he has completed and 'lost' his creation"; "[Quilty's] pseudo-art . . . has defiled his own passionately loved art object." Lucy Maddox, Nabokov's Novels in English (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983), sees murder and rape as metaphors of the innocent desire for moral and aesthetic perfection; through his confession, Humbert merges the moral and the aesthetic. David Packman, Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1982), argues that realistic elements are "false leads" and that Humbert's sexual desire "mirrors" the reader's desire for plot resolution.

^ Among those who read Lolita as a realistic work are Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), who argues that Humbert's moral regeneration allows him to "blossom" as an artist. David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), argues that the real plot of Lolita is not in its gaps and holes, but in its ostensible content. Ellen Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980), focuses on the moral issues Humbert's behavior raises. Robert Merrill, "Nabokov and Fictional Artifice," M o d e m Fiction Studies 25 (1979) 439-62 argues that elements pointing to the text's artificiality are insignificant in the generally realistically renedered world of the novel.

^ Perhaps most influential in this regard was Lionel Trilling, "The Last Lover: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita." Harold Bloom, ed., M o d e m Critical Interpretations: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (New York, New Haven, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1987) 5-12, who discussed Humbert in terms of Denis de Rougemont's notion of passionate love. 247

^ Alfred Appel, Jr., Vladimir Nabokov: The Annotated Lolita (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970) i-lxiii. See also "Lolita: The Springboard of Parody." L. S. Dembo, ed., Nabokov: The Man and His Work (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1967) 109-43. James M. Rambeau, "Nabokov's Critical Strategy," J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol, eds., Nabokov's Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on his Life's Work (Austin: U of Texas P, 1982) 22-34, objects strenuously to Appel's annotations, aligning Appel with Kinbote as the egocentric artist whose criticism attempts to outshine rather than illuminate its subject.

^ See Diana Butler, "Lolita Lepidoptera," Roth, Essavs 59-73, a much-cited essay that originally appeared in 1960.

^ Nomi Tamir-Ghez, "The Art of Persuasion in Nabokov's Lolita." Roth, Essays 158-59, argues that Nabokov controls the rhetorical effects of Humbert's prose by ensuring that Humbert's arguments are not airtight. My own contention that Humbert the narrator controls his rhetoric merely adds a third level to Tamir-Ghez's argument, insofar as Nabokov creates a narrator who is motivated for purposes of his own to build arguments that are not entirely sound. Tamir-Ghez's essay is written in response to critics (particularly Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983] 390-91) who question the morality of an author who allows a pedophile to make his case not only persuasively but appealingly.

^ Appel, Annotated Lolita 236. All references are to Appel's annotated edition of Nabokov's novel. Further references will appear parenthetically within the text.

^ Packman 27-28 is not alone in arguing that the cryptogrammic paper chase is a synecdoche for the whole narrative.

Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Status of a Literarv Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 128-60, discusses Lolita as the parody of an autobiography.

Appel, "Springboard" 143.

Gladys M. Clifton, "Humbert Humbert and the Limits of Artistic License," Rivers and Nicol 156, writes: "A great comic irony is that the demands [Lolita] most bitterly resents are not [sexual]; they are the demands of a strict parent on a rebellious teen-age child," and further, "Humbert is never seen as more comically helpless than when he tries to deal with Lolita as a daughter." While Clifton does go on to castigate other critics for their lack of appreciation for Lolita's point of view regarding her "love" for Quilty, it is incredible to me that anyone could find Humbert's sexual demands unrelated to Lolita's role as a "rebellious teen-age child." Humbert's descriptions of mundane Americana and his choice of diction and syntax throughout may be funny, but his descriptions of his relations with Lolita strike me 248

as something other than "deliciously perverse"; Humbert's humor is rather a translucent window through which readers may discover, much to their own discomfort, the horror of Lolita's permanently violated existence.

See, for example, Thomas R. Frosch, "Parody and Authenticity in Lolita." Rivers and Nicol, Fifth Arc 171-87.

Bruss, Autobiographical Acts 145-46, noting that Humbert says he begins his frantic drive to Coalmonton Sept. 22, the same day he received Lolita's letter and the same day he claims to have begun his narrative, suggests that the Coalmont and Favor Manor episodes may never have occurred at all. Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mysterv of Literary Structures (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989) 209-22, mistakenly attributing this insight to Christina Tekiner, "Time in Lolita." M o d e m Fiction Studies 25 (1979) 463-69, assumes the imaginary status of these last episodes and argues for their function as part of the novel's "rhetoric of reader entrapment." However, a less literal interpretation is more appropriate : if Humbert begins his trip to Coalmont the same day (or the day after) he begins his narrative, we have a clear indication of his frame of mind when he begins to write, since the latter events would be occurring at precisely the same time the narrative was being written. The likelihood that they are imagined events does not in the least detract from their "reality," insofar as they affect Humbert and provide a resolution for his narrative. Indeed, given the illicit ecstasy to which Humbert's imagination has repeatedly led him, his vision of Lolita at Coalmont and his own reaction to her there powerfully illustrate the depth of the transformation Humbert has undergone.

For an excellent analysis of Nabokov's and Humbert's rhetorical strategies that assumes Humbert's perception of his relationship to Lolita does change over the course of the narrative, see Tamir-Ghez's article.

As J. P. Shute, "Nabokov and Freud: The Play of Power," Modern Fiction Studies 30 (1984) 648, notes, psychoanalytic structures are inscribed, then effaced by parody, yet remain intact.

Incredibly (or, sad to say, not so incredibly), even Nabokov's most sensitive early reviewers and critics who defended Lolita against absurd charges of immorality frequently agreed to one degree or another with Humbert's equally absurd position that Lolita was in some way responsible for two years of her own sexual abuse. See, for example, Lionel Trilling, "The Last Lover" and Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1967) 331-45. Not until Robert Levine's "My Ultraviolet Darling: The Loss of Lolita's Childhood," M o d e m Fiction Studies 25 (1979) 471-79, appeared did Lolita's subjectivity become an issue in Nabokov criticism. CHAPTER V

FEMINISM AND AESTHETICS : THE FAILURE OF

AN AMERICAN DREAM

Stephen Rojack, the protagonist of An American Dream would appear

to be an even less likely candidate for tragic status than Humbert

Humbert. His propensity for physical, sexual, and psychological violence assaults the reader's capacity for sympathy, a necessary component of tragic effects. Moreover, unlike Humbert, who finally comes to regret the violence done to Lolita, Rojack finds in violence a means to accomplish the self-liberation he desperately seeks and fails to find. Yet, like Humbert, he tells his own story and uses the many devices of his rhetorical arsenal to create for the reader at least a sense of the tragic regarding his own failed efforts to live authentically outside the confinements of political, sexual, and economic power structures that, for him, define America. However crazed Rojack's attempt. Mailer would have us believe, to summon forth an American dream that can--at least for himself--displace the

American nightmare he believes exists, is not a mere failure, but a tragic one. Yet Mailer's efforts to write a tragic action are sabotaged by an anti-feminist nostalgia that is not only offensive, but unconvincing and intellectually indefensible. Despite his

249 250

considerable rhetorical skills, Rojack's presentation of himself as a

tragic character can only succeed for that reader who shares Mailer's

insistence upon an archaic dichotomy of gender stereotypes we all know

by heart--women are passive, receptive, submissive, etc.; men are

aggressive, creative, dominant, etc. An American Dream fails as a

tragic action because of the anti-feminism upon which plot

progression, character development, and thematic issues are

constructed.

Like Lolita. An American Dream has been the subject of

controversy since its publication and for similar reasons, primarily

the charge of immorality. An American Dream is also susceptible to

metaphorical readings that allow the reader to view the overt content

symbolically, rather than as a representation of actual violence.

Some critics, particularly feminists, have denounced the text as a

glorification of violence against women and have labeled its main

character morally deficient. Judith Fetterley, for example, argues

that Mailer obscures the insidious power of patriarchy by inverting

it: women are feared by Rojack, while men are envisioned as powerless victims of powerful women.^ More favorable critics, on the other hand, typically read An American Dream metaphorically. In this view the title alone is meant to be taken literally, whether the text is seen as a fantasy through which Rojack attempts somehow to forge an authentic self in an inauthentic world, a journey into the unconscious, or an enactment of Rojack's attempt to secure an identity through writing or to achieve some level of integration with the 251

coextensive worlds of demonism and normality.^ Tony Tanner is

perhaps the most persuasive among those critics who read the novel as

metaphor or allegory, arguing that Rojack attempts to free himself

from the bondage of power structures of all kinds but finds that

American society simply has no place for anyone who makes such an

attempt; Rojack must retreat to the imaginary deserts of Yucatan or

jungles of Guatemala, because to live in America without participating

in its power structures simply is not possible.^

While most such analyses point to thematic issues that are

central to Mailer's concerns, they neglect a significant feature of

Mailer's rhetoric; the recurrent language of violence in this text.^

Just as reading Lolita as metaphor allows readers to avoid confronting

their own responses to Humbert's erotic language as he fondles and

repeatedly rapes a twelve-year-old child, so, too, does reading An

American Dream as metaphor allow readers to avoid confronting their

own responses to the eroticized violence of this novel. From the

earliest pages of Mailer's text (page 4: "I pulled the trigger as if I were squeezing the softest breast of the softest pigeon which ever

flew, still a woman's breast takes me now and then to the pigeon on that trigger," Rojack says, as he recalls shooting a German soldier in the face), rape, assault, and murder are all closely and unambiguously tied not merely to eroticism, but to euphoria and spiritual enlightenment.^ As he strangles Deborah, he knows that "heaven was there, some quiver of jeweled cities shining in the glow of a tropical dusk," waiting behind the door that will open once the wire snaps in 252

Deborah's neck (31). "I had not felt so nice," Rojack says, "since I

was twelve" (32).

The connection between violence and euphoria is necessary because

the episodes of violence, particularly against Deborah and Ruta are

steps that lead Rojack to the system of beliefs and values he develops

as the novel progresses, a belief system that is based on nostalgia

for a primitive, magical, "natural" past.^ Clearly, part of Mailer's

intention is to expose the conspiratorial connections of power he

believes exist among American corporations and the various agencies of government and law enforcement, to articulate the relationship between

sexuality and violence he sees in American society, to argue against rationalism and for a kind of Manichean cosmos of good and evil influences, and to argue for a spiritual rejuvenation that would result in his own particular version of a loving relationship between men and women. Mailer no doubt intends Rojack's violence to be understood metaphorically, and the events of his narrative as psychological stages that move him closer to establishing a spiritually enriching foundation upon which he can construct a better self.

Yet, despite its title. An American Dream is a remarkably linear narrative, the events of Rojack's evening being narrated in strict chronological order with analepses and prolapses clearly marked.

Moreover, the quasi-supernatural elements that invade Rojack's consciousness from time to time may seem mystical--and part of

Rojack's goal in redefining himself is to free himself from a 253

rational worldview--but Mailer's rhetoric leans heavily upon the

traditional techniques of realism. Nothing even remotely approaching

the impossibility of, for example, Jane Eyre hearing Rochester call to

her intrudes upon the narrative; supernatural events or presences

(such as the moon's speaking to Rojack or the "it" that empowers him)

are easily explicable as projections of Rojack’s state of mind.

Indeed, Mailer lends credibility to Rojack's excesses by keeping him

energized with alcohol throughout much of the text, a fact which alone

goes far toward explaining the somewhat fantastic nature of many of

the events that occur. (His abstention later in the text is a show of his strength and his commitment to meet Kelly's challenge.) In short, the rhetoric of An American Dream is not very dreamlike.

Clearly, readers are meant to sympathize with Rojack: he abandons successful careers in television, politics, and academia in order to pursue the promise of a more meaningful life. On the other hand, the path Rojack chooses to tread is strewn with carnage, his brutality dramatized in striking metaphors that describe physical and sexual violence in seductive and erotic terms. Of his own acts of violence Rojack has few regrets or even second thoughts, continuing instead to believe that those acts are necessary steps toward his goal of spiritual enlightenment. The reader is thus left in conflict between sympathy for Rojack's ultimate goal (even if Rojack's beliefs seem untenable, his intention is clearly to define a better self) and condemnation of his unconscionable means of attaining it. The issue is further complicated by the sheer pleasure Rojack's violence engenders (especially in his murder of Deborah), by the virtuosity of his

linguistic performance as he describes his acts of violence, and by

his failure to experience (except in the case of Shago) any remorse

for those acts.

The extremity of Rojack's actions reflects the omnipresence of

corruption and the absence of spiritual value in American society and

culture, the magnitude of power in the mysterious natural and psychic

forces Rojack discovers, and, metaphorically, the need for radical

alterations in our habits of mind in order to sustain spiritual

growth. In this respect, Rojack's brutality against Deborah and Ruta

is symbolic : passive resistance is not sufficient to withstand the

powerful forces against which Rojack contends. Thus, Rojack's extreme

violence is a symbolic rendering of Rojack's desperate attempt to

sever his dependence upon the corrupt and morally bankrupt power

structure that Deborah, Ruta, and Kelly represent. More specifically,

the past sexual relationship between Rojack and Deborah, demonstrated

with such vigor in Rojack's encounter with Ruta, is paradigmatic of

the state of heterosexuality posited in this text, based as it

invariably is upon a struggle for power, domination, and control. The natural expression of emotion and sexuality in such a relationship is

bound to be violent. (Rojack's version of genuine love will be

defined only later by his relationship to the much more compliant

Cherry.) Rojack and Deborah together are like a pair of pit bulls, unnatural beasts bred for sharp teeth, strong jaws, and tenacity;

Rojack and Ruta are worse, adding pleasures of sado-masochism that are 255

well beyond the capabilities of the stunted imagination of a mere pit

bull. Through his brutal encounters with Deborah and Ruta, Rojack

ostensibly begins actively to extricate himself from his own

entanglement in this web of power relationships.

It seems to me, however, that a metaphoric interpretation cannot negate the reader's response to mimetically rendered violence.^

Indeed, much of Mailer's purpose in dwelling upon the details of violence seems to be to place the reader in a position that has some similarity to that of the reader of the davenport scene in Lolita: the reader is meant to be discomfited by these scenes, which are characterized by an extreme discrepancy between the eroticism of the language on the one hand and the violence of the subject matter on the other. While Nabokov finally distances himself from Humbert by having

Humbert understand and acknowledge the horror of his actions, Mailer is in a somewhat more difficult position. Rojack can never wholly reject his past actions because they are, within the context of the narrative, genuinely liberating. Further, the eroticism of Rojack's violence is necessary in order for Mailer to establish the thematic connections he wants to make between sexuality and violence in

America, and, symbolically, to illustrate the psychological liberation of freeing oneself from the influence of corrupt power. Consequently, in order to distance himself from Rojack, Mailer must rely upon the strength of the alternative sexual relationship Rojack develops with

Cherry and upon our sympathy for Rojack's attempts to disengage from the corrosive structures of power in which he is enmeshed. Rojack can 256

reject violence only partially and indirectly by showing remorse for

unproductive or misplaced violence (as in his treatment of Shago), by

deflecting the desire for violence to ritual tests of physical courage

(as when he walks the parapet to meet Kelly's challenge), and most

significantly by developing a love-relationship devoid, at least in

his own mind, of power plays.

Within the context of the represented world of the novel, Rojack

is potentially a tragic character who gains our partial sympathy by

trying to divest himself of superficiality in order to create an

identity that is somehow real to him. Rojack is unsuccessful because he reverts to rationality and hence fails to do what is required of him--walk the parapet a second time--in order to be worthy of Cherry's love, thereby losing the possibility of a meaningful life outside the confines of the power structures Rojack envisions at the heart of

American life. By making Rojack's fate a tragic one. Mailer is able to imbue a series of thematic issues with emotional force: (1) Deeply insidious and probably inescapable inroads of corruption in American society are revealed: Rojack can finally only remove himself from

America. (2) The promise of meaningful love appears impossible to achieve: Rojack makes only one large and one small error in his attempts, yet Cherry dies. (3) The forces of good and evil are grounded in magic and mystery and cannot be understood or upheld by rational thought or action: no logical connection can be made between

Rojack's failure to walk the parapet and Cherry's death, nor does

Kelly's attraction for evil or Rojack's striving for good have any 257

explanation other than a firm belief in the immortality of the soul.

(4) Good and evil present clear ethical alternatives that people must

choose between and defend intuitively but uncompromisingly: Rojack

walks the parapet the first time to make himself equal to Kelly; only

a second walk would have allowed him to defeat Kelly.^

By creating a protagonist of tragic proportions who tells his own

story without apology or hesitation, Mailer is able to revive well-

worn romantic themes, modernized by little more than the historical

details of setting that Rojack describes with ready wit and inventive

metaphor, and at the same time avoid possible charges of being overly

idealistic. Yet only a reader who accepts Mailer's idealization of

Cherry and the ideas about men and women Mailer posits as the basis of her relationship to Rojack would not be troubled by this text.^ For other readers, the valorization of the Cherry/Rojack relationship as

"natural" must be highly problematic; the antagonism of the thematic content to even the most modest of feminist concerns undermines at least this reader's ability to sympathize with Rojack. In short,

Mailer's text fails to accomplish its purposes because of the inadequacy of the thematic content. In particular, the model of male and female identities and relationships Rojack develops as ideal are functional only in a world that is in fact constituted by dichotomies--good and evil, power and weakness, courage and fear, male and female, aggression and passivity.Rojack's dilemma is compelling insofar as he does try to establish some system of beliefs that can account for his fears and that establishes some spiritual 258

connection between himself and the natural functions of birth, sex,

and death, but the world he creates reproduces its own set of

relationships that, like the world he rejects, is based upon rigid

definitions of masculinity as positive, active, and powerful and of

femininity as negative, passive, and submissive. The sharp

distinction he makes between the roles of men and women results in the

need for violence against women as a necessary step toward self-

awareness and authenticity. The representation of that violence in

the novel may be understood symbolically, yet Rojack's descriptions of

both the violence and the euphoria that follows it are rendered with

such immediacy and realism that it is difficult to dissociate physical

violence as metaphor from actual physical violence. Mailer's anti-

feminism results in the partial failure of the text to accomplish its

purposes, a point I will return to later.

The principal objection to interpreting An American Dream as a

tragic action arises once again from what many critics view as the

fantastic nature of this text. Once the novel is posited dream,

Rojack's actions become largely symbolic: Rojack's brutal murder of

the "great bitch, Deborah, a lioness," and his acrobatic assault upon

Ruta, the wily Nazi (in spirit if not in fact), become unqualifiedly

liberating moves toward freedom and authenticity, while poor, dumb

Cherry, the tough blonde with a heart of gold, can be legitimized as an idealized character, rather than simply a poorly conceived realistic one. The reasons for viewing the book in this way are 259

compelling, not least because a metaphorical reading would clarify

and expand the distance between Mailer and Rojack, and remove any

suspicion that Mailer is condoning Rojack's actions or advocating his

methods of defining a self. Finally, though, a metaphorical reading

cannot account for the preponderance of realistic detail on every page

of this text, and, moreover, such a reading must remain silent not

only in regard to the emotional response elicited by Rojack's story,

but also in regard to the complexity of the specific thematic issues

raised in the text. To accept An American Dream as dream is to offer

a reading that cannot account for the novel's realistic style or

linear progression. Viewing An American Dream as a tragic action,

even a failed one, can better account both for our response to

Rojack's fate and for the important issues of power Mailer attempts to

address.

An American Dream is, admittedly, about a character who is on the

verge of madness, but, I would emphasize, to be on the verge of

madness is not to be mad. In fact, Rojack repeatedly reminds the

reader throughout the novel that he is fully aware of the difference

between his own highly agitated state of mind and what I will call for

the moment "ordinary reality." It is true that Rojack is narrating

past events, and it is conceivable that his understanding of that difference is only clear from his vantage point in the present.

Unlike Humbert, though, whose present-tense interjections indicate clearly that he had not fully understood either the extent of his self-delusion or the impact of his actions upon Lolita, Rojack always 260

appears to be immediately and keenly aware of the extraordinary nature

of what is happening to him and the need to interpret those events

within the context of his changing understanding of himself and the

world he inhabits. Also, unlike Humbert, he believes as he is

retelling his story that his actions (with the exception of beating

Shago and not walking the parapet a second time) were the only morally

right actions he could have taken. While Rojack reports having been

overwhelmed physically, emotionally, and intellectually as those

significant events had occurred (the German soldiers episode, the

"voice" of the moon on the balcony, the murder of Deborah, etc.), he

gives no indication that he ever loses contact with ordinary reality beyond the momentary loss of control anyone might undergo at the moment of any intensely subjective and powerful experience.

As Rojack frees himself from the evil power that Deborah, Kelly, and Ruta represent and comes increasingly to value the kind of love

Cherry seems to offer, his actions demonstrate a logic that is fundamental to his new understanding of himself and the forces at work in his world. That logic proceeds from the premise that he must always do what he knows intuitively to be the correct action (correct in that it will move him closer to authenticity and finally to

Cherry), not what he knows rationally to be the sensible, reasonable, and obvious action. Again and again Rojack chooses to follow not the voice of reason but the voice of intuition, and he does so not because he is mad but because he wants to reorient himself toward what he 261

takes to be a kind of "natural" goodness, obscured by the evil powers

of the likes of Kelly.

The first step he takes in his quest to extricate himself from

malignant power, for example, is to remove himself from politics, and

he does so in full awareness of the consequences of his move;

I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to believe that death was zero, death was everyone's emptiness. But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. Thus I quit my place in politics almost as quickly as I gained it, . . . 1 had reasons for the choice, some honorable, some spurious, but one motive now seems clear--I wanted to depart from politics before I was separated from myself forever by the distance between my public appearance which had become vital on television, indeed nearly robust, and my secret frightened romance with the phases of the moon. About the month you decide not to make a speech because it is the week of the full lunar face you also know if still you are sane that politics is not for you and you are not for politics. (7)

If the incompatibility of politics and an occult interest in the phases of the moon is not always immediately apparent to all politicians (at least not to all actor/politician ex-Presidents and/or their wives), it is so to Rojack; in fact, Rojack acts in a deliberate, calculated manner throughout the text, in full knowledge of what is at stake in terms of enjoying a conventionally, even spectacularly, successful career, and he does so precisely in order to replace the void at the center of his personality with spiritual meaning.

Also working against a metaphorical or fantastic reading of the text is the progression of the story by means of a strict and self- 262

consciously documented chronological order. However unrealistically

large the number and intensity of events Mailer has Rojack undergo in

a scant thirty-two hours, Rojack is careful to account for virtually

every moment that passes: he repeatedly tells us what time it is, what

time his appointments are, whether he will arrive late or early, how

long it takes to get from one place to another, and so on. In short,

while the discourse of a novel that is meant to describe a dream-state

might be expected to display at least some disjunctions in its

chronological or physical movement forward, throughout An American

Dream neither time nor space is fractured or exploded in any way that

is inconsistent with the usual conventions of the realistic novel. As in any conventionally mimetic text, discourse and story time may or may not coincide, but that coincidence or the lack of it is wholly dependent upon the significance of the particular events being narrated. In fact, Rojack remains remarkably lucid, witty, and alert throughout the story, understands what he must do at each critical juncture, and understands when he succeeds in making the right moves and when he fails to do so. Indeed, Mailer could hardly do otherwise than make the events of the story somewhat incredible, given his purpose of arguing for a quasi-religious, neo-romantic world view to replace a rational one.

Neither a chronological progression nor Rojack's awareness, of course, works against the possibility that Rojack's actions are a metaphor for Mailer's own search for an adequate aesthetic.If that is the case, however, it seems to me that it is neither more nor 263

less convincing than the case that could be made for such a reading

of, for example, Great Expectations or, with a little ingenuity, any

novel--as Genette notes, all narratives are first-person narratives, a

statement I would revise by saying that all narratives can be read as

if they were. In An American Dream, however, Rojack's concern is

not with aesthetics, but principally with politics, personal religion,

and sexuality. To see Rojack's actions only or even primarily in

aesthetic terms obscures the thematic issues that are explicitly

raised by the text and obscures also the reader's emotional response

to characters and their fates.

If the discourse of this novel appears to support a mimetic

reading, the preponderance of irrational powers with which Rojack

contends would seem, on the contrary, to indicate that Rojack's

actions are indeed to be taken as metaphors of a mental struggle.

Before making such a judgment, however, it would be well to consider

more carefully the system of beliefs Rojack articulates in this text.

As Tanner and others have indicated, Rojack's persistent task is to

free himself from the power structures of American society. Rojack

wishes to do so largely because of a single war-time incident in which he, acting the part of a fearless hero, charges directly into the fire

of two German machine guns, hurls grenades into each bunker, and

single-handedly kills the four soldiers who somehow survive the ensuing explosion. The eyes of the fourth soldier, however, leave

Rojack in a state of fear because he recognizes there the possibility 264

that death may entail more than the mere extinction of life and the

promise of eternal oblivion.

If Rojack has read the soldier's eyes correctly, the next logical

step is, of course, to posit an eternal soul and with it the likelihood that what one does with one's life must therefore make some difference :

[He had] eyes of blue, so perfectly blue and mad they go all the way to God is the way I think I heard it said once in the South, and I faltered before that stare, clear as ice in the moonlight, and hung on one knee, not knowing if I could push my wound, and suddenly it was all gone, the clean presence of i£, the grace, had deserted me in the instant I hesitated, and now I had no stomach to go, I could charge his bayonet no more. . . . I could not forget the fourth solder. His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side, and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life (5, 7)

The "it" Rojack refers to is never clearly defined, but seems to refer to a kind of mindless, impersonal energy Rojack identifies as the impetus and catalyst for his act of bravery. Rojack, in fact, never takes personal credit for that act, and characterizes himself rather as having been fearless and hence effective largely because of his own indifference to death, which had been for Rojack preferable at that point to the misery of life, "li" is the force that fills the void of

Rojack's prior ignorance of any spiritual dimension of life.

"It" is, appropriately enough, a generic term for whatever mystical forces impinge upon Rojack's psyche as the story progresses.

It deserts him precisely at the moment fear returns to him, transmitted by the cold, blue eye of the fourth soldier; hence "it" is 265

an ever-present potential energy, whether one is conscious of it or

not. It is both the voice that speaks from the moon and the source of

Rojack's intuition: Rojack calls it "grace," and, like Wordsworth's

"presence," "i£" is present in nature and within the human soul, the

source and consequence of interaction between the deepest self and the

mystery of nature. Without ethical grounding in itself ("Ü" is no

Jehovah), it is the power Rojack taps for good and Kelly taps for evil

purposes. At the same time, "it" always remains explicable in terms

of Rojack's state of mind, which revolves around his desire to bring

his own soul into being, to deliver himself from what he sees as the

superficiality and inauthenticity of his life. Rojack is not

overwhelmed by magical powers, but rather chooses--rationally--to

pursue the intuitions he has that tell him how to act. The soldier's

stare remains with Rojack, working its own peculiar power upon him

until he leaves politics and becomes a professor of psychology--a kind

of occultish version of psychology based on the "not inconsiderable

thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation" (8)--and finally culminates in his telepathic conversation with the moon on a balcony several floors above a New

York sidewalk. Rejecting " Ü " in its evil incarnation (he later identifies the moon's voice in this instance with Deborah's), Rojack disobeys the moon's injunction to commit suicide and chooses instead to devote himself to the promise of life:

"Come now," said the moon, "now is your moment. What joy in the flight." And I actually let one hand go. It was my left. Instinct was telling me to die. . . 266

"Yes," said the moon, you haven't done your work, but you've lived your life, and you are dead with it." "Let me be not all dead," I cried to myself, and slipped back over the rail, and dropped into a chair. (12-13)

This is the turning point for Rojack, the moment when he

understands that he needs to reject rationality and follow his

intuition until he is free of the fear that he had not, until then,

fully acknowledged. This incident leaves Rojack sick--so sick that he

believes it has spawned cancer in his cells--with the fear that he has

not lived properly, and that, as a consequence, his soul will be

eternally condemned. Rojack clings to life in order to prepare

himself to die in the knowledge that he has done his work. All of

Rojack's actions proceed directly and logically from the intuition of death he sees in the soldier's blue eyes, beginning with his original attempt to ignore that intuition by capitalizing on his Medal of Honor and his influential wife to gain a seat in Congress and ending with his lighting out for Yucatan and Guatemala, leaving civilization behind forever.

In short, while it is tempting to read An American Dream metaphorically, Rojack's thorough control of the discourse and the coherence and single-pointedness of his actions, as well as the preponderance of realistic detail throughout the text, all argue against doing so. Moreover, viewing the text as a tragedy makes the causes of Rojack's failure more easily identifiable and understandable within the logic of the world Mailer creates. And, indeed. Mailer is uncompromising in his efforts to generate sympathy for Rojack and his 267

enterprise. The reader's willingness to accept the thematic issues as

Mailer presents them is crucial to that sympathy, because the only

remorse Rojack ever shows is for those actions that violate the

ethical standards of the quasi-religious world he establishes as

fundamental to the development of his soul.

Reading An American Dream as tragedy also clarifies some of the

difficulties Mailer faced in writing this text. Those difficulties

are formidable and arise particularly in two kinds of scenes: those

involving physical and sexual violence and those involving Rojack's

reliance on intuitive (or magical) powers. In the scenes of violence,

Mailer must maintain a balance among our sympathy for Rojack's

predicament and abhorrence of his actions, our understanding of the

general alliance of sex and violence Mailer posits, and our emotional

response to the acknowledgment of that alliance in Rojack, and, at

least potentially, in society and in ourselves. Unlike Nabokov, who

is concerned to show the power of language to obscure the repulsiveness of Humbert's actions. Mailer attempts to persuade the reader that, in the scenes of violence, Rojack is at least partially justified in his actions and that the pleasure he derives from them serves some larger purpose, in order to ensure that Rojack remain at least a marginally sympathetic character. That is, our understanding that Rojack's violence is a symbolic representation of his desperate need to escape the evil power associated with Deborah and Ruta allows us to sympathize with his motives, even as we condemn his actions.

Our sympathy, in other words, depends upon the extent to which we 268

have been convinced that Rojack's reasons for acting as he does

outweigh, or at least explain, the horror of these scenes: when

Rojack resists rationality, it must be clear that he is doing soby

choice and doing so for sound, ethical reasons, not simply because he

is incapable of being rational or because he is pathologically

violent. While these problems disappear for the critic/reader who

chooses to read the text as metaphor, it seems to me extremely

unlikely that many readers can read through the scene of Deborah's

murder or Ruta's assault without some emotional response to the

violence done to these women and to the eroticism Rojack attempts to

evoke in both scenes. In contrast to the davenport scene in Lolita, here the reader's disgust is deliberately evoked by Mailer in order to dramatize Rojack's desperate need to sever the bonds between violence and sexuality by pushing both to their outer limits.

Moreover, Rojack's failure to walk around the parapet a second time is only significant if the reader is willing to accept Rojack's intuition that his failure has somehow caused Cherry's death.

Rationally, of course, the connection cannot be made; Mailer relies here on the careful stage-setting of previous episodes to lend credibility to Rojack's intuition, beginning with the not entirely unbelievable "it" of the German soldiers episode. This episode follows three pages of a kind of cynical, naturalistic sketch of

Rojack's history up to that time, a sketch in which he notes in passing that the only real difference between himself and Jack Kennedy was that Kennedy had not "looked down the abyss" and hence had less 269

appreciation than Rojack had for the moon. The statement is neither

cryptic nor exceptional; Rojack separates himself from other

politicians by his interest in spiritual matters and otherwise merely

states the commonplace that politicians are worldly practical folk who

are not much interested in the moon, except perhaps as unclaimed

territory that, once claimed, promises to boost the national ego.

Indeed, Rojack's intuition that he is responsible for Cherry's death

does make sense; at the very least, it is clearly a logical conclusion

for Rojack, who does in fact believe in good and evil powers. Like

Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. Mailer--and Rojack as he retells his

story--never allows a supernatural explanation to stand as the sole

possible explanation, so that, in any given instance, Rojack is only

aware of other powers to the extent that he is receptive to them, and

he remains receptive through an act of will:

. . . mystery revolved about me now, and I did not know if it was hard precise mystery with a detailed solution, or a mystery fathered by the collision of larger mysteries, . . . And I had a sudden hatred of mystery, a moment when I wanted to be in a cell, my life burned down to the bare lines of a legal defense. I did not want to see Barney Oswald Kelly later tonight, and yet I knew I must for that was part of the contract I had made on the morning air. I would not be permitted to flee the mystery. I was close to prayer then, I was very close, for what was prayer but a beseechment not to pursue the mystery. (162)

Far from being insane, Rojack pursues what he believes is a path to truth and to love, and resists, often--as here--convincingly and with some eloquence, the temptation not to pursue that path. 270

Unlike Humbert, whose most basic assumptions about life and about

himself shatter as the text proceeds, Rojack does not gain new

knowledge that calls his assumptions into question, but rather,

working deductively from the premise that the soul is immortal, Rojack

comes to understand that he does not possess the requisite courage to

overcome his fear of death. As a result of his own cowardice he

proves himself unworthy of Cherry's love and the vision of goodness

that love had seemed to promise. Rojack's murder of Deborah and

assault of Ruta release him from the extreme nausea his encounter with

the moon had aroused in him, but those incidents do not remove either

his fear of death or his fear of women. Speaking with Cherry before

they go for the first time to her apartment, he tells the reader, but

not Cherry, of both:

To be not afraid of death, to be ready to engage it-- sometimes I thought I had more of a horror of dying than anyone I knew. I was so unfit for the moment. .

I did not go on to say that when I was in bed with a woman, I rarely felt as if I were making life, and so somewhere inside myself--yes, there was a large part of the fear--I had dread of the judgment which must rest behind the womb of a woman. A small perspiration came out along my back. (119)

In sharp contrast to his encounters with both Ruta and Deborah, in his encounter with Cherry he reaches the proper sort of orgasm--love flies in with a beating of wings like some great winged bird--and Rojack need no longer fear women.

His encounter with Cherry, however, does not release him from his fear of death; only a confrontation with Kelly, who, counter to 271

Rojack, has tapped the power of "it" for evil purposes, can exorcise

that fear. When Rojack leaves Cherry's apartment, already remorseful

and humiliated after assaulting Shago (he cleans with his own hands

the landing where Shago had vomited after being thrown down the

stairs), Rojack faces Kelly reluctantly as a final test of courage.

Kelly remains a shadowy, unrevealed presence throughout most of the text, a figure of large and evil proportions whom Rojack fears and despises. Having transcended the evil influences of Deborah and Ruta by combatting them on their own terms of death and sexual aggression and by choosing instead the bright wings and sea-washed roses of love,

Rojack has, when he reaches Kelly's penthouse (metaphorically the depths of hell), come to represent absolute goodness just as Kelly represents sheer evil, and the ensuing battle of nerve between the two represents symbolically a romantic casting of good and evil in opposite corners. Kelly's encapsulated narrative of his life parallels Rojack's own: the two have clearly and simply moved in precisely opposite directions, Kelly toward hatred and spitefulness,

Rojack toward love and serenity. Nowhere is this clearer than in

Rojack's tender affection for his stepdaughter, Deirdre, in obvious contrast to Kelly's incestuous abuse of Deborah, a fact that increases our sympathy for Rojack, underscores Rojack's commitment to his new understanding of love, and illustrates that women are the instruments of male power rather than a source of power in their own right.

Rojack's failure to walk the parapet a second time leaves the symbolic battle between good and evil at stalemate. The matter is 272

somewhat complicated by Rojack's rejection of the alternative choice

of going to Harlem to avert Shago's death. He chooses instead to

confront Kelly because his fear of Kelly is greater than his fear of

Harlem, and in doing so he chooses, as tragic proagonists must, the

most noble path available, but also the one that leads to inevitable

defeat. Rojack's doom, then, is to understand that in attempting to

rid himself of the fear of death he has lost the possibility of love.

And, given that it was the fear of death that had originally awakened

Rojack from his spiritual slumber, it is presumably the fear of death

that makes love possible at all. The only choice remaining to him is

between the jewelled artificiality of the city in the desert and the

remote possibility of a new beginning in the perhaps uncorrupted

wilderness.

Rojack's narrative is thus intended to symbolize the necessity of

rebelling against the artificial order of a society in which

individual relationships are based on fear and the desire for power,

whatever the risks and whatever the cost. This meaning is clear and not difficult to discern, but, unless the reader is moved by Rojack's

fate, the power of Mailer's message disappears in a warmed-over romanticism that posits rigid and unexamined difference between men

and women: women are explicitly objectified as reflections of male power and creativity, without subjectivity of their own, and herein lies the problem of An American Dream.

Mailer's sexism poses the largest of this text's problems, and this shortcoming is most obvious as it is revealed in his 273

characterizations of women. While Deborah remains a ghostly presence

throughout the text, she is actually present only during the murder

scene, and, again, Mailer faces a number of difficulties in creating

Deborah. She must be seen as an embodiment of evil so that Rojack's murder of her can be justified to the reader, and she must be strong enough to make Rojack's fear of her and the threat she poses to him believable.This Mailer accomplishes by deftly associating Deborah with vindictiveness in contrast to Rojack"s sincerity, enclosing the simple gesture of his taking her hand with the sensual evocation of her poisonousness:

. . . ugly smears and patches [on her skin] radiated a detestation so palpable that my body began to race as if a foreign element, a poison altogether suffocating, were beginning to seep through me. Did you ever feel the malignity of a swamp? It is real, I could swear it. . . . I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me. . . .She did not wish to tear the body, she was out to spoil the light [the soul], and in an epidemic of fear, . . . I knelt beside her and tried to take her hand. It was soft now as a jellyfish, and almost as repugnant--the touch shot my palm with a thousand needles which stung into my arm exactly as if I had been swimming at night and lashed onto a Portuguese man o'war. (25-26)

Next, Rojack tells us that Deborah's miscarriage, which had occurred immediately following a grand quarrel, had left Deborah barren and both of them full of vengeance. Still in love with her despite his fear, Rojack attempts reconciliation:

But compassion, the trapped bird of compassion, struggled up from my chest and flew to my throat. "Deborah, I love you," I said. I did not know at that 274

instant if I meant it truly, or was some monster of deception, hiding myself from myself. And having said it, knew the mistake. For all feeling departed from her hand, even that tingling so evil to my flesh, and left instead a cool empty touch. I could have been holding a tiny casket in my palm. (27)

When Deborah insists quietly that she does not love him, Rojack says,

"I had opened a void--I was now without center. Can you understand?

I did not belong to myself any longer. Deborah had occupied my

center" (27). Thus, it is a matter of life and death--and good

against evil-- that justifies, even sanctifies, Rojack's brutality.

At the same time, Deborah must be seen not as the source, but as

the conduit of evil power, because it is Kelly, not Deborah who is the

real source of corruption. Contrary to Fetterley, Mailer does not

posit women as powerful figures in their own right, but as characters

corrupted by white men.^^ This is true of both Cherry and Deborah,

but whereas Cherry is able, like Rojack, to divest herself of that

corruption, Deborah retains it and allows it to overwhelm her.

Deborah's murder is necessitated by her appropriation of male power;

symbolically she becomes masculine after her miscarriage and

subsequent inability to bear children. Cherry, on the other hand,

rids herself of the last vestiges of masculinity when Rojack, with his

usual tact and delicacy, removes her diaphragm to make way for Baby

Rojack. Where Mailer falters--and, again, it is because of the

rigidity of the biologically determined roles he assigns in this text

to men and women--is in having Rojack murder Deborah, who is not the

source of evil, while Barney Kelly, who is, gets by with Rojack's 275

uninspired and self-defensive poke from Shago's umbrella. Mailer's

point may well be that the pure evil Kelly represents simply cannot be

eliminated, but the rhetorical power of the passage in which Deborah

is murdered negates the point.

In any case, Deborah is presented as Kelly's victimized daughter

and, at the same time, as the single character who must be murdered

before Rojack can move forward in his search for a soul. The

contradiction here is that even assuming Rojack does not understand until his confrontation with Kelly that it is not Deborah but Kelly who is the source of evil, he never expresses any remorse for killing her, and, moreover, it never occurs to him to visit any kind of physical violence upon Kelly himself. Instead, the confrontation with

Kelly is deflected to a wholly ritualized test of courage in Rojack's walk around the parapet. And Mailer's rhetorical power is at its height here as he deftly recreates Rojack's vertigo, and very nearly succeeds in generating our sympathy, at least for the moment--surely the most irate and indignant reader cannot want Rojack to fall. At the same time, the incongruity of this ritualized act, which endangers no one but himself, and the brutal, impulsive, non-ritualized, sexually stimulating act of killing Deborah make it extremely difficult to accept the legitimacy of Rojack's action.

Of course, it is possible that Mailer has built in this contradiction, in which case the reader is meant to understand what

Rojack does not, namely that Deborah is a genuine victim not only of 276

Kelly, but of Rojack as well. Such a view would be supported by the

description of her helplessness in the murder scene:

One of her hands fluttered up to my shoulder and tapped it gently. Like a gladiator admitting defeat. . . . the arm about her neck leaped against the whisper I could still feel murmuring in her throat, and crack I choked her harder. . . . (31)

Clearly such lines go far toward negating any sympathy the reader

might muster for Rojack, but they also suggest that women are

sympathetic characters only when they are helpless and that the woman

who assumes power that is the legitimate province of males simply has

to be done away with. Given what we have learned of Deborah's cruelty

in the preceding paragraphs--had she driven bamboo splints beneath his

fingernails she could not have given Rojack more pain than she does by

ridiculing his sexual prowess--the reader knows that if Rojack were to

release his hold on her she would instantly re-assume her identity as

the lioness going for raw meat. Moreover, Rojack has already established the necessity of doing what "feels right," and nothing could feel tighter than killing Deborah. And, indeed, he does partially liberate himself and make "love" possible by murdering her.

It would seem, then, that whatever hesitation Mailer gives us in his endorsement of Rojack's action is meant not to make the reader question the legitimacy of Rojack's views, which in fact are confirmed in his relationship to Cherry, but rather to generate some sympathy for Deborah, first, because within the narrative, she is at least partially victimized (by Kelly, not Rojack), and, second, because 277

Mailer needs to confirm the distance he has established between

himself and Rojack. That is, it is important that the reader not

interpret literally the need for physical violence in order to

construct an authentic self; at the same time, Rojack's murder of

Deborah is described so concretely and so erotically that physical

violence becomes an unqualifiedly liberating act for Rojack, one that

invigorates him and enables him to assault Ruta with extraordinary

gusto.

Perhaps the most difficult of Mailer's tasks is to maintain the

reader's sympathy throughout the sado-masochistic Ruta/Rojack sex

scene. Most obviously, Ruta is herself far from sexual innocence,

busily masturbating when Rojack appears; moreover, she offers no

resistance to Rojack, even welcomes him and is, on the whole, rather

pleased with Rojack's performance. Later, of course, we will find

that she is Kelly's spy and mistress as well as the blackmailer of

Kelly, a kind of triple-agent in Rojack's pantheon of minor devils--in

short, she is represented as a wholly unsympathetic character. As for

Rojack himself, his inner dialogue never ceases, lending the whole

scene an air of earnest moral choice that is a continuation of his

already established need to define the parameters of his newly

emerging self. Because Ruta, even more than Deborah, is such an unsympathetic character and because she herself derives satisfaction from Rojack's aggression, the scene draws attention away from the blunt fact of Deborah's murder. At the end of this appallingly brutal--and very long--scene, not only is Ruta none the worse for 278

wear, but actually appreciative of Rojack's attentions: "I do not know

why you have trouble with your wife. You are absolutely a genius, Mr.

Rojack," she says (46). If both Rojack's maneuverability and Ruta's

satisfaction are a bit unbelievable, the scene nonetheless serves

several purposes in moving the narrative forward, most particularly in

establishing once again a close connection between violence and

sexuality, in establishing women as naturally submissive but capable

of extreme corruption, in diminishing the horror of Deborah's murder,

in drawing attention to Rojack's continued, painful attempt to choose

what he intuitively understands to be the best option, and in

restating Rojack's conviction that tests of physical strength and

courage are essential to overcoming the fear of death that ordinarily

remains hidden by the very fact of rationality. It seems to me that

here, as in the scene of Deborah's murder. Mailer is aesthetically

astute and stylistically superb; where he loses the reader is once

again in the fundamental sexism of his version of romanticism. These

passages are unconvincing not only because they are meant to be read

metaphorically, but because the assumptions about men and women

inherent in them are simply untenable.

If the creation of Deborah and Ruta poses problems for Mailer,

the character of Cherry also presents considerable difficulties. She

has to engage the reader's sympathy if we are to respond favorably to

her relationship to Rojack; consequently, she must be seen, like

Deborah, as a victim of white male power, yet, unlike Deborah, she must finally reject it, rather than be corrupted by it. Both her 279

victimization and her triumph over it are established by her history

as Kelly's mistress; she has been exposed to exactly the same evil as

Deborah and Ruta, but unlike them, she is able to escape it. Had she

not been so exposed, she would simply be innocent, and would not have

been put to the test, as Rojack might say. When Rojack meets her, she

is in the process of extricating herself from that corruption, largely

through her relationship to Shago, who is, after all, a decent fellow

in Rojack's final judgment of him. (In fact, Rojack doesn't go to

Harlem to expiate his guilt for beating Shago only because he fears

Kelly more than he fears Harlem and must, according to his new logic,

therefore face Kelly. Here, again, we find that physical violence

against males--as a black man, Shago's mania for power is forgivable--

has none of the liberating force of violence against women.) Cherry's

description--half tough broad, half sweet Southern girl--may be a bit

unbelievable, but some such characterization is the only alternative

open to Mailer. As Connie Chatterley must be for Mellors, Cherry must

be intelligent enough to spark Rojack's interest, experienced enough

to appreciate Rojack's superior love-making capacities, and sincere

enough to want, as Rojack does, to find fulfillment in love. In

short, she has to be precisely as unbelievable a character as she is.

Once again. Mailer's aesthetic instincts are impeccable; it is the

thematic conception of An American Dream that is the source of its

failure.

It is not an incoherency in Mailer's aesthetic purposes, as

Robert Merrill argues, that damages this text, but rather a problem of 280

Rojack's--and presumably Mailer's--beliefs about men and women and

their relationship to each other, beliefs that interfere with Rojack's

movement away from the evil power represented by Kelly and inhibit the

reader's capacity to sympathize with Rojack.In fact, any sympathy

the reader might generate for Rojack is attenuated by Rojack's

insistence upon rigidly defined gender differentiation that is itself

based on power, grounded in biology, and manifested in violence:

"women who have discovered the power of sex are never far from

suicide" (55), Rojack believes, and the corollary of that proposition

is that men who have discovered the power of sex are never far from

murder. The separate desires for suicide and murder, Rojack

suggests, are distortions of the "natural" relationship of male

domination and female submission, made invisible by the corrupting

influences of civilization and rationality in general and American

corporate and governmental power in particular. Simply put, Rojack's

story revolves around his attempt to escape the influence of powerful

and malignant forces and to live without fear in a genuinely loving

relationship which would validate his own essential goodness ; at the

same time, the legitimacy of male aggression and female submission

are at the heart of the ideal love relationship Mailer adumbrates for

his protagonist. Because the reader cannot sympathize with Rojack without also accepting the legitimacy of Rojack's characterizaton of

the idealized relationship between Cherry and himself, for those

readers who are troubled by such views, Rojack becomes a figure whose penchant for violence against women is a concomitant of his most basic 281 values and beliefs. In other words, Mailer's attempt to create a character whose fate is tragic fails because Rojack's attempt to free himself from the influence of power is negated by the fact that power is at the heart of the version of "love" he insists upon. 282

Notes

^ Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978) 164-78. For a typical, early indictment of the novel's violence, see Elizabeth Hardwick, "A Nightmare by Norman Mailer," Robert F. Lucid, ed., Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) 145-50.

^ In summarizing the history of this critical impasse, Joseph Wenke, Mailer's America (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1987) 98- 105, notes that "virtually every sympathetic critic . . .[has] placed the novel outside the realistic mode." See, for example, Robert Langbaum, "Mailer's New Style," Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Norman Mailer (New York, New Haven, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986) 51-63; Robert J. Begiebing, Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1980): 58-75; Leo Bersani, "The Interpretation of Dreams," in Lucid, 171-79; Richard Poirier, "The Minority Within," in Bloom, 85-113, and "Morbid Mindedness," in Lucid, 162-70; and Philip H. Bufithis, Norman Mailer (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978) 68-74.

^ Tony Tanner, "On the Parapet," in Bloom, 33-49.

^ As Wenke, 99-102, points out, critics who read the text as a realistic novel dismiss Mailer's imaginative concerns, while those who read it as allegory do not well account for its language. The latter do not, he says, comprehend the "literalness of Mailer's imagination."

^ Norman Mailer, An American Dream (1964; New York: Henry Holt, 1987) 4. All references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically within the text.

^ Jean Radford, Norman Mailer: A Critical Study (London: Macmillan, 1975) 33, 145, 154. In one of the few analyses of the novel that offers an adequate explanation of the text's realistic prose, its irrational elements, and its aesthetic flaws, Radford describes Rojack's peculiarly anachronistic brand of biological determinism as a major flaw in the novel. At the same time, Rojack's "dream" is a kind of religious pilgrimage, a moral journey Rojack undertakes to rid himself of evil influences.

^ Poirier says in "Morbid Mindedness," 163, that An American Dream is "an introspective novel" and that reading it is "a very different activity from thinking afterward about those Terrible Things done by its hero." Written in 1965, Poirier's comment reflects the thinking not only of early critics like Bersani, but of more recent ones like Begiebing and others who dismiss the overt content of this 283

text as untroublesome to the sophisticated or imaginative reader who "knows" that the text's violence is symbolic and hence remains unaffected by it. Such a reader's unacknowledged voyeurism seems too obvious to mention, enlightened as we all are today by sophisticated critical analyses.

® Many critics argue persuasively that Rojack's vision is essentially a moral one. See, for example, Wenke, 92-99.

^ As Radford 149-55, notes, the anti-feminist sexual politics of An American Dream, which male critics like Poirier ignore, is fundamental to Rojack's moral development.

See Andrew Gordon, An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalvtic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1980) 138-40, for a discussion of Rojack's bipolar thinking.

See, for example, Bersani, 124, who argues that life confronts Rojack in terms of choices to be made about language and novelistic form.

Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980) 244. I don't want to argue with the legitimacy of reading this text or any other aesthetically, but such a reading can't have much to say about either overt themes or affective response, even though they can--whether they usually do or not strikes me as a separate issue--have a lot to say about other things that are at least as important. Such inquiries are valuable, it seems to me, insofar as they offer a powerful means of analyzing the process of writing and the power of linguistic systems. At the same time, authors obviously vary widely in the extent to which they are specifically and consciously concerned with aesthetic issues. Interpretations that view literary works principally as an author's unconscious or covert attempts to air his or her own preoccupations with writing and with language tend to preclude both intellectual considerations of the overt thematic content of a text and the emotional effects of the mimetic content. In Lolita, for example, Humbert's concern with style, his avowed intention to create an aesthetic text, his construction of Lolita as an aesthetic object, and so on, are all elements of the text that clearly and openly reveal Nabokov's concern with the role of aesthetics in human life, so that an excellent case could easily be made, and many have been, for viewing the text aesthetically; more importantly, though, even a mimetic reading such as the one I have argued for here requires the specific acknowledgement of the problem of aesthetics as a significant thematic issue raised overtly by the text.

Radford 145-55, discusses at length the necessity of Mailer's sexism for the moral development he posits for Rojack, citing it as the principal aesthetic flaw of the text. 284

Robert Merrill, Norman Mailer (Boston: Twayne, 1978) 67-78, argues that the novel is a formal failure insofar as Mailer attempts to write both a religious book and a realistic novel.

Apparently Mailer is successful here: virtually all critics see Deborah as an embodiment of evil. From a psychoanalytic point of view, for example, Gordon 141, sees Deborah as the "evil mother"; from a feminist and aestheticist point of view, Radford, 35, sees her as a representative of evil; from a political point of view. Tanner, 41, sees her as representing the reality Rojack tries to escape.

Fetterley 137-41, argues that, for Mailer, the real power behind the scenes is female. This is not the case at all. White men are the source of power ; women are their instruments. Barney Kelly's incestuous relationship to Deborah corrupts her and makes her the monster Rojack finds her to be. CHAPTER VI

ROCKETS AND READERS; WAITING FOR THE FALL

IN GRAVITY'S RAINBOW

Gravity's Rainbow would seem to be even less amenable to reading

as tragedy than any of the novels previously discussed here. When

writing of Gravity's Rainbow, critics frequently begin with a

disclaimer to the effect that attempting to interpret Gravity's

Rainbow is counter to the spirit of the novel, and in some respects

they are correct.^ Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern work--non­

linear, heteroglossic, multiplotted, open-ended, metafictional--one in

which Pynchon argues overtly against interpretation and rational

analysis and even against the unavoidable act of "naming." Among

other things, Gravitv's Rainbow is not only a testimony to the

instability of language in general, but a lament for the high price

Western culture has paid for literacy, the decontextualization of language, and the abstracting of the world that is part and parcel of a written alphabet, the letters of which Pynchon at one point compares to the artificial molecules with which chemists have reconstructed the world. Given Pynchon's indictment of petrochemicals--and Laszlo

Jamf's distaste for the humiliatingly unsteady covalent bonds that make life possible is illustrative here--this writer must confess to a

285 286

certain uneasiness in naming Gravitv's Rainbow a tragic work, or

naming it anything at all, for that matter. At the same time,

Pynchon's distress at the process of abstracting that he finds so

destructive also suggests that it is important to attend to the ways

in which literary texts affect us as readers. Gravitv's Raimbow

involves readers in an extremely complex process of interpretation

that undoubtedly varies considerably from reader to reader, but in my

own reading and rereading of this novel, I find the movement of the

narrative, despite centrifugal forces, to lead inevitably toward a

conclusion that is in some sense tragic. "Naming" Gravity's Rainbow a

tragedy may help us avoid abstracting the text; that is, it may help

us explain, rather than explain away, the unsettling effects cf works

that leave us--as perhaps any literary text should--not confirming our

prejudices, but confronting our anxieties.

Nevertheless, Gravity's Rainbow is a very different kind of

tragic action from the other five novels discussed here. Each of

those novels involves characters or character/narrators who can in

some sense be called tragic. In Gravitv's Rainbow this is not the case. Rather, several characters emerge from the narrative, none of whom is central, but all of whom take actions that they know will lead to their complete isolation from the worlds they know. These are characters who are able finally to identify themselves with the perennially displaced person, what Pynchon calls the Preterite. None of these characters can be called a protagonist--their actions are narrated in fragments and all are to some extent lost among the 287

chaotic movements of characters in the text as a whole--yet their

actions provide the only resistance to the movement toward death that

Pynchon posits as the primary desire of Western civilization. The

exposure of that desire is the central thematic concern of the text,

but it gains its emotional power less from readers' sympathy for these

characters than from the ways in which that sympathy works to position

readers themselves to participate in the novel's ending.

Throughout the novel, Pynchon directs his readers' sympathy

toward the Preterite--the passed over, the dispossessed, the wretched

of the Earth whose existence makes possible its own opposition, the

Elect. At the end of the novel, readers are asked to touch whoever is beside them in the instant before the Rocket, poised above their heads, will fall, leaving no one to hear its screaming come across the sky. "There is time," the narrator tells us, to sing the hymn they never taught anyone to sing, William Slothrop's paean to the "last poor Pret'rite one," just enough time to recognize "a face on ev'ry mountainside,/ And a soul in ev'ry stone.The reader is asked to recognize the tragic error not of a single individual, but of our own civilization and of our own limited view of the world. Pynchon's approach is dialectical; throughout the text Pynchon, from a variety of perspectives--not separate, pluralistic points of view, but interconnected and interdependent ideas--drills home not only the limitations of rational thought, but the consequences of those limitations for human beings, as well as for all species not cursed with the knowledge of their own impending death, and even for those 288

faces and souls locked in what we generally assume to be inanimate

objects.

The Elect, in whose name a complex global network of destruction

and exploitation has flourished, depends upon the victimization of the

Preterite. In Gravitv's Rainbow, whenever a character sheds the role

of victim--just quits playing the game that keeps the system working--

he or she becomes tragic to one degree or another. Moreover, it is

the movement of the narrative as a whole in tandem with the Rocket's

parabola that makes inevitable the reader's own participation in the novel's ending. The actions of characters move the narrative forward less than the thematic issues raised in each section as they relate to the development and deployment of the Rocket. The imminent explosion of the Rocket, the shift in time and scene from the post-War years in

Europe to m o d e m Los Angeles, and the merging of discourse and story time at the end of the text all direct readers to remove themselves from the victimization the Rocket requires in order to function. The various actions of tragic characters within the text are a kind of precedent for the choices the reader is given at the end of the novel.

In the dizzying turnabout that comes on the last page, readers are asked to drop out of the long-running game that keeps us strangers to each other, to the living world around us, and to ourselves. Few of us are likely to step willingly into the shoes of the tragic protagonist; those of us who manage to navigate the 760 pages of

Gravitv's Rainbow are probably part of the Elect anyway, and if not, we have probably learned, like Byron the Bulb, to enjoy our 289

powerlessness. But however impractical it may be for actual readers,

quitting the game is an act that can only be undertaken individually;

it amounts to recognizing that transcendence is the dream of those for

whom self and other, mind and body, white and black, Elect and

Preterite are always and irrevocably separate. The desire for

transcendence is the death wish and its manifestation is the Rocket,

already in place at the zenith of its gray parabola, already zeroing

in on its victim. To quit the game, then, is by definition a lost

cause, but not a meaningless one. The possibility of change depends

in this text upon the awakening of Preterite consciousness and with it

a refusal to continue being victimized.

In short, what propels Gravitv's Rainbow to a tragic, if open-

ended, reader-involving conclusion, is its insistence upon a lethal

flaw, a defect at the core of Western consciousness that ensures the

destruction of humanity, Elect and Preterite alike. The Rocket is the

manifestation and the product of that flaw, and the Rocket's explosion

is the end toward which we all move, Pynchon reveals that flaw as it

manifests itself in science, technology, history, politics, economics,

religion, philosophy, ecology, but most fundamentally it is the

divided self and the separation of self from other that virtually

ensures some form of sado-masochism, the foundation, in social and

political as well as psychological terms, of the Elect/Preterite

dichotomy. The roots of that separation derive, in both a Lacanian

and a Derridean sense, from the abstracting function of language, although unlike either Lacan or Derrida, Pynchon makes a sharp 290

distinction between literate and oral cultures: abstraction is a

cultural, rather than a purely linguistic function.^ For Pynchon,

tragedy is possible because it is possible to recognize one's error

and to act upon that knowledge, but it is also true that any such

action in this novel is doomed to failure. In this respect Gravity's

Rainbow is like the other novels discussed here: the character who

acts, acts alone, without recognition, and without rectifying an out-

of-balance situation. The poised Rocket is already at Brennschluss,

already back in Gravity's sphere, already on its way to ground zero to

destroy itself and its victim.

While confessing to a kind of generalized uneasiness about claiming a unified effect for Gravity's Rainbow, we can easily specify a number of more specific objections to calling this novel a tragedy.

Pynchon incorporates, in fragmented form, a number of genres, any of which alone, and certainly all of which together, would seem to negate the possibility of reading the work as a tragedy. Mendelson argues persuasively that, like Ulysses and Moby-Dick. Gravity's Rainbow is an encyclopedic text, one that incorporates vast and disparate knowledge as well as a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres in order to identify the knowledge, beliefs, and ideological structures of a national culture.^ Yet it is less the range of Pynchon's erudition than the metonymic connections he suggests among the array of facts and fictions he gathers that shape this text.^ Thus, for example, sado-masochism, at its most virulent in the relationship between

Blicero and Gottfried, is also at work in Enzian's love for Blicero, 291

Tchitcherine's hatred of Enzian, Pokier's fathering of Use, Greta's

abuse of Blanca, Thanatz's beating of Greta, Slothrop's abandonment of

Bianca, Jessica's betrayal of Roger, Pointsman's observations of Dog

Vanya, Pudding's humiliations before Katje, Van der Groov's slaughter

of the dodos. All of these events can, of course, be explained in

other terms as well, but the repetition of sado-masochistic patterns

of behavior as they are variously manifested in different

circumstances and within different disciplines illustrates the depth

and extent of the need for victimization in the Western worldview.®

The multiplicity of genres and the avalanche of data Pynchon includes

in Gravity's Rainbow leave to the reader the task of making explicit

the metonymic connections that reveal similarities among different

characters and circumstances and among such highly specialized areas

of thought as architecture and organic chemistry.

According to Aristotle, the most effective tragedy is one that

focuses on a single action, and clearly no description of Gravity's

Rainbow could be less accurate. Even granting that particular forms

may require excesses of various kinds to achieve certain effects,

Gravitv's Rainbow nonetheless pushes the possibilities to their limits. Not only are plotlines numerous, fragmentary, and unresolved, but, according to some critics, some episodes appear to be peripheral excesses, if not absolutely superfluous--hyperbolic flourishes revealing little more than Pynchon's virtuosity.7 Moreover, the actions characters do take occur within the largely psychological and political spaces of the White Visitation, the Casino, and the Zone, 292

and the line between the characters' perceptions of reality and their

own fantasies is non-existent. No discursive distinctions are made,

for example, between Slothrop's vision of Tchitcherine leaping into

the bed he is sharing with Geli Tripping and the actual events that

are taking place. Such characteristics, however, provide a

representation of a chaotic world situated within the Rocket's

parabola, which is omnipresent throughout the text. The image of the

Rocket completing its trajectory constitutes the central unifying

principle of the narrative as a whole.®

On the whole, characters' actions are divided into two kinds:

those that play into or perpetuate "Their" system--the maintenance of

the Elect at the expense of the Preterite--and those that do not.

These latter actions involve stepping outside the system and refusing

to participate in it at all, and a number of characters do make that

gesture, almost always involving an act of kindness or caring, a

gesture that the system cannot accommodate or circumscribe.9 Pokier

grants U s e the freedom not to return to him; Tchitcherine, with the

help of Geli Tripping, abandons his search for Enzian; Katje leaves

the White Visitation to search for Slothrop; Ludwig recaptures his

lemming. Even Slothrop, incompetent as he is, finally quits his own

slapstick version of the game, even though he dissembles and disperses

in the process of doing so. Despite the smallness of such actions,

given the novel's unrelenting insistence on the ubiquity and hegemony

of Their system, both the rarity and the futility of each of these actions, not to mention the courage that enables them, lend them a 293

certain amount of dignity that lifts them well above mere futility.

More important, these small gestures toward anarchy and new

beginnings, as these characters find within themselves some small

store of courage to relinquish the security of their partnership with

the system, constitute the only choice available to them that can

affirm life in place of the death-wish Pynchon posits at the heart of

Western culture.Moreover, at the end of the text, the reader is

directed to make, while there is still time in real life, some similar

gesture, even though such a gesture may be futile, as indeed it is within the context of the novel.

The continual interruption and lack of resolution of plotlines underscores the nonlinearity of the way in which dynamic events-- including history--actually occur.Against the persistent backdrop of the perfect linearity of the Rocket's parabola, the various subplots wend their ways, if not precisely toward non-resolution, at least toward anti-climactic resolution. Consequently, at both the discourse and the story level, the novel is at odds with its own parabolic macrostructure. Pynchon is thus able to dramatize the chaos and anarchy of characters' actual experiences and still insist on the relentless, overriding control of the monolithic, rational mindset of

Western thought and culture, as exemplified, again, in the continual presence of the Rocket. One of the results of this conflict within the narrative is that the novel is able to accommodate a resoundingly tragic conclusion--not a resolution of action, but a tragic response-- 294

at the same time that it insists on the essentially open-ended,

chaotic, randomly ordered structure of life itself.

If the actions characters take in Gravity's Rainbow appear to

fall far short of anything remotely akin to the "grandeur" of tragedy,

the characters themselves pose similar problems. The sheer number of

characters--approaching 400--as well as the always fragmented,

frequently comic, and sometimes fantastic manner in which even major characters and their actions are described would seem reason enough to preclude the possibility of reading this text as tragedy. Slothrop, the novel's most likely candidate for the role of protagonist makes an extremely unlikely tragic character, even apart from the fact that he disperses across the Zone long before the novel ends. Many critics view Slothrop as the central character more because the continuity of his story provides the novel with some semblance of structure than because he is an important or interesting character in his own right.That assessment is partially correct, I think, but more important, Slothrop represents on an individual level what is certainly a central dilemma of the characters in this text, the power of the system to "colonize" minds and bodies without being able to extinguish completely in all characters the human impulse toward life.

For a text that virtually annihilates the concept of an autonomous self and so thoroughly undermines the grounds of subjectivity.

Gravity's Rainbow nevertheless insists that individual behavior is ultimately unpredictable and, hence, at least potentially--and in practical terms only potentially--uncontrollable ; as much as anything 295

else, Gravity's Rainbow is an aesthetic version of chaos theory,

applying its tenets of unpredictability to the human condition

itselfGodel's Theorem (whatever can go wrong will go wrong) when

applied to human behavior, rests on that potentiality.

While Slothrop's story is relatively continuous, few other

characters introduced in "Beyond the Zero" move with him through the

Zone; Roger and Jessica, Pirate Prentice and his roommates reappear

late in "In the Zone" and in "The Counterforce." Pointsman, perhaps

the central figure in "Beyond the Zero," is heard from several times

in "Casino," but only sporadically and in passing thereafter. Katje

is important in "Casino," facets of her character reappear in the

characters of Greta and Leni (indeed, she is almost a composite of the

two), and she herself reappears briefly but in an important scene with

Enzian in "The Counterforce." Enzian, while he is mentioned via

indirect discourse revealing Katje's memories of Blicero in "Beyond

the Zero," only becomes a central figure in the Zone, and Tchitcherine

is not even mentioned before "In the Zone," yet these two characters

are at least as important in the remainder of the text as Slothrop, if

not considerably more important. Pokier, mentioned briefly in "Beyond

the Zero," has his story told by means of a relatively linear

narrative roughly in the middle of "In the Zone," only to reappear

briefly in "The Counterforce," yet Pokier's story is perhaps the most directly relevant to readers, or, more accurately, most closely analogous to the experience at least of white, middle-class, male readers of Gravity's Rainbow. Weissmann/Blicero, as shadowy yet 296

central a figure as the Rocket itself throughout the text, does not

speak at length in his own voice until the final chapter of the novel.

Moreover, the many minor characters that appear, reappear, and

disappear are sometimes peripheral players like Osbie Feel, Stephen

and Nora Dodson-Truck, or Frau and Otto Gnahb, and sometimes they are

significant elements in the action or serve as thematically important

elements. Geli Tripping's magical pantheism concretizes the life

force alluded to throughout the text. Gerhardt von Goll (der

Springer) represents the nihilistic artist whose partially justified

presumptions extend to his claim to being the creator of reality. The

conflated Blanca and Use, even more than they represent the betrayal

and molestation of children in Western culture, represent women in the

West as infantilized, artificialized, victimized objects of sadistic male desire. Leni, who is the only female character who directly resists this role through political action, becomes a prostitute as a means of survival, underscoring the larger thematic point concerning the futility of organized political action. Major Marvy, a sort of overweight Oliver North without cleverness or charisma, caricatures the very ugly yet pathetically naive American, whether spy, diplomat, or tourist. Marvy's castration, in addition to offering empirical proof of Godel's theorem, further confuses the opposites of perpetrator and victim: whatever dream of justice his fate may serve, his etherized moans set beside the mechanical and precise indifference of his surgeons reveal his status as victim as well as villain. 297

The discontinuity of the major characters' stories, the

marginality of the many minor characters, and the largely thematic

significance of less peripheral minor characters all prevent the

reader from investing a great deal of sympathy in any single or

several characters. At the same time, as in the case of Marvy's

castration, sympathy is repeatedly generated locally, even for such

abhorrent characters as Blicero and Pointsman. In this regard.

Brigadier Pudding's coprophilia, because we are made aware of his

desperate sense of powerlessness against the paper indifference of the

White Visitation's bureaucracy, becomes less a source of disgust for

the reader than a source of sympathy for the Brigadier as he ritually

performs the only meaningful act left to his ravaged humanity.The

effect of this combination of fragmentation of character development

on the one hand and generation of sympathy for all kinds of characters

on the other is to create sympathy for the broad range of characters

who constitute the Preterite as a whole--the doomed and motley mass not only of victimized human beings but of all the living creatures-- dogs to dodos--that constitute Earth's "mindbody."

While postmodern novels tend generally to create caricatures or highly thematic or synthetic characters, the characters in Gravity's

Rainbow are surprisingly mimetic. This effect is most directly attributable to the momentary arousal of sympathy for them. That is, the fragmentary nature of their stories allows Pynchon to present his characters as unique individuals, even while insisting upon their entrapment within the monolothic system the Rocket symbolizes. 298

Moreover, the uniqueness various characters exhibit, despite the

pervasive ideology of rationality, is a function of the uncontrollable

randomness that is the Achilles' heel of the system, since the

presumption of the system's invulnerability is based on the assumption

that individual behavior is predictable. In the main, it well may be,

but it is equally true that individuals sometimes act against their

own interests and for no clear reason, and in doing so remove

themselves from the system which, as Pynchon makes clear, cannot

function without their willingness to participate in it, whether working for it, as Pointsman does, or against it, as Roger Mexico does. Such acts, moreover, are generally acts of kindness--the one reaction that appears to fall outside Pointsman's behavioral model-- and they serve to arouse sympathy and enhance characters' mimetic qualities. As a consequence of this kind of character development, the reader is encouraged to find that no single action or set of actions or any single character can be called tragic, yet, because so many characters' private pain and occasional selflessness is so poignantly revealed within the context of the pervasive sense of doom engendered by the Rocket's presence, the reader is led not simply to understand their fates intellectually, but to see the entire Preterite world as unwitting victim, and those characters who come to understand and reject their victimization as in some sense tragic.

If no single character's actions can be said to be of tragic proportions, the small actions of a number of characters taken together do form a pattern of response that is tragic. Like Jude or 299

Humbert or Quentin, they take actions that will inevitably and

permanently dissolve the social bonds that constitute their worlds,

however paranoiac or sado-masochistic those bonds may be. The effect

of such actions is to leave these characters isolated from their pasts

and severed from their futures: their bandwidths are reduced to zero, but, to amend Mondaugen's assessment that such a reduction amounts to a complete loss of self, the self that is sloughed off is less a self than a condition of servitude, a colonized sphere. Relinquishing that condition is a terrifying act for these characters and its consequence is an absence of self, but it is also a Nietzschean celebration of loss and a surrender to the power of life. These actions are tragic in the Nietzschean sense of illustrating the failure of the rational mind to contain and control life's excesses, at the same time that the desire to contain and control will inevitably reassert itself--and in

Gravity's Rainbow that desire never ceases to assert itself, indeed is continually present in the Rocket.

Another problem of characterization that would seem to argue against reading this novel as tragedy is that characters' identities are not always distinct either from each other's or from the separate identities that characters assume. Characters are often avatars of each other; Bianca and U s e and the triangular relationships of

Carroll Eventyr/Nora and Stephen Dodson-Truck and of Peter

Sascha/Leni/Pokler come readily to mind. Slothrop, Greta Erdmann, even

Major Marvy assume identities or disguises by which they will become known to others. This tenuous status of individual identity and the 300

permeability of boundaries among consciousnesses seem to undercut the

need for some kind of individual action that tragedy seems to require.

Yet, like the absence of a protagonist and the large number of central

characters, the uncertain status of the self forces the reader to see

characters both as individuals and as constructed products of the

ideologies of Western culture.As a result, individual characters

are tragic to the extent that they become aware of and extend their

solidarity with the Preterite world, which includes not only people,

but animals, plants, rocks, and even molecules. Hence, that the

destruction of that world will be the inevitable result of the

erroneous worldview of Western culture, becomes not merely a cause for

lament but a prescription for tragedy. Pynchon suggests that, like

the theatre-goers at the end of the text, most of us live within the

ideology of property/progress, and even learn to love the

powerlessness that ideology bequeathes us.^® But for those who have

the courage to shed that ideology, the consequence is disconnection,

isolation, and loss of self; there simply is no Kirghiz Light or

Herero mandala to fill the void.

As is the case with multiple characters and multiple plots, the extreme heteroglossia of Gravity's Rainbow appears, oddly enough, to work toward reading this text as tragedy, even though it tends repeatedly to fracture whatever local mood begins to gain ascendancy in the reader's mind. The narrator, for example, habitually breaks into satirical or obscene lyrics set to pop tunes, cuts into poignant moments with bad puns and absurdities, and so on. Pynchon uses street 301

slang, lyricism, technical exposition, pop songs, bureaucratese,

stream-of-consciousness, and other languages generally in rapid

juxtaposition with virtually no transitions among them. While the

most obvious effect of this is to break the mesmerizing quality of

linear narrative, it also reveals the simultaneity of and connections among different modes of perception, a key thematic concern, as many critics have noted, in Gravity's Rainbow. Most important, this fragmented discourse, in addition to varying local purposes, serves in the text as a whole to contain despair and consequently allow an overall sense of the tragic to emerge. That is, since tragedy seems to require that some action be meaningful in some way for someone, if the novel becomes so despairing that it does not matter what anyone does, then whatever action a character may take will be absurd. It is important, then, that the narrator make clear, as he does toward the end of the book, that the forces of death--originating in phallogocentric Western culture--are only almost as strong as the forces of life. The possibility that life will triumph circumvents the utter despair that negates the tragic. That is, a character acting with the full knowledge of the inevitable futility of his or her action posits value in the very act of taking action. If

Slothrop in his zoot suit, his Rocketman cape, his tuxedo, or his pig costume precludes an assessment of him as a tragic character, it is nonetheless true that comic elements in Gravity's Rainbow--and they are always just beyond the next signifier--help lift the text out of the bitterness and despair the narrator seems virtually always on the 302

verge of expressing. While the simple absence of despair hardly

guarantees tragedy, it is, given that other elements are working

toward the same effect, a necessary, if not sufficient, cause.

More important as a unifying agent of the discourse, however, is the consistency of the narrator's voice.Nowhere in Gravity's

Rainbow does this narrator equivocate about his own position on the issues he raises. Even though his characters are allowed to speak for themselves, and even though he rarely comments directly about characters or events, his attitudes about both are rarely ambivalent.

Readers are not asked to make judgments about characters and their actions so much as to recognize that all characters are bound to a monolithic system from which only a few are able to free themselves.

His frequent asides and questions to readers blur the distinction between fiction and reality and attempt to force readers to question their own expectations when reading narrative. When Thanatz returns to the narrative, for example, the narrator anticipates readers' expectations: "You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the

Anubis" (663). Of course, at this point in the narrative, not only has any reader long since ceased to look for direct cause and effect relationships, but the narrator has overtly explained the limitations of cause and effect analysis; here the narrator is anticipating expectations he has already succeeded in frustrating. In general, the narrator's rhetoric, even as he slips from pignancy to pun, is such that it reveals his own attitude of consistent outrage, which 303

always stops just short of self-righteousness. Pynchon is able to

solidify sympathy for the Preterite by using this voice of outrage to

call into question the most fundamental assumptions of Western thought

which lends emotional force to the narrator's profound mistrust of the

attributes of the analytical mind and the global networks of profit,

power, and perversion Pynchon believes it has engendered.

The claim of many critics that Pynchon is primarily a moralist

gains some credibility in part because of this consistent sense of

outrage the narrator imparts.The disparity between the

consistency of the narrator's voice and the fragmentation of both

discourse and story is essential to the achievement of this novel's

tragic effects. It seems to me that Pynchon chooses an omniscient,

uninvolved narrator (one who does not participate in the action as a

character) not in order to be clear about his own moralistic position,

but because he needs a narrator who can remain outside the action, one

who cannot be seduced by the Rocket's charms; at the sa.me time, he

needs to show that no one can escape the Rocket's charms without

recourse to some source of energy or inspiration from outside the

system, not unlike Maxwell's sorting demon. The absence of any

involvement of the narrator in the action leaves Pynchon free to

pinpoint the weak spots in the Rocket's hegemony without the

complications of interpretation an involved narrator would inevitably

generate and at the same time to insist upon the apparently closed

system of the Rocket's hegemony. Maxwell's demon is, in fact, a metaphor for the narrator's role in this novel, insofar as he does 304

remain uninvolved in the story, despite his direct addresses to the

reader and even, at least at one point, to the author. The narrator

notes, however, that Maxwell may have meant his sorting demon not as a

model of real physical systems, but as a warning metaphor for the

scientist and especially for the bureaucrat, both of whom resist

entropy by categorizing--dividing and conquering--both the natural and

the human world. In this respect, the narrator differs markedly from

the sorting demon, since he refuses to mark the boundaries between

categories; indeed, much of his effort is spent in an attempt to erase

the boundaries and reveal both the specific connections among things and events and the status of the seamless web of connections that is generally invisible to us.

The narrator's fragmented discourse is necessary for much the same reason Derrida writes as he does. A linear text that attempted to establish thematically the inadequacy of linear thought and the tragic implications of separating self from other could only assert its case phallogocentrically, as it were, leaving the reader to agree or disagree. While the Rocket, as a nearly perfect symbol of phallogocentrism itself hovers above the text, the discourse relentlessly forces the reader into the position of having to make connections based less on logic than on the metonymic repetition of similar patterns of behavior, events, and images. Since none of these connections can ever be fixed with certainty, but are rather like a series of different signifiers with identical signifieds, the reader is thrown into a kind of vertiginous paranoiac dilemma of his or her 305

own, which generates instability in the distinctions we ordinarily

make between, for example, fact and fiction, conspiracy and

coincidence, dream and reality, mastery and victimization.

At the same time, the narrator's voice reveals discernible and

consistent concern about the seriousness of the story he narrates,

although this concern may manifest itself in a variety of moods

depending on content: lyricism, humor, sarcasm, belligerence,

neutrality, compassion, or sadness. Like the continual presence of

the Rocket suspended above the text, the stability of the narrator's

sense of outrage, whatever the surface vicissitudes of mood, confirms

his own belief in the truth of the version of reality he represents

here in language. The nearly, but never quite completely, despairing

attitude he displays toward it works to help unify the narrative as a

whole. (Here I mean by "unify" a thematic unity underwritten by the narrator's voice that must leave every reader, to one degree or another, knowing this novel insists that Western civilization is propelled by and toward death, even if that reader believes Pynchon's assessment is without any validity whatsoever.

Unlike the narrators of the other novels I have discussed, this narrator appears wholly aligned with Pynchon himself: tension between the author's point of view and the narrator's is not an issue in this text. In fact, the narrator himself, in the very act of narrating the story, is, if not exactly a tragic figure, at least a subtle model of one. That is, the act of narrating for this narrator is itself similar to the kind of act of courage that is involved in stepping off 306

the system's treadmill in order to act--not against Them or Their

system, which would only legitimize both--but in a positive gesture

that is life-affirming, subversive of the system, and without hope.

Again the Nietzschean concept of tragedy as an assertion of life's

uncontainability is pertinent here. The novel, for example, is

studded with passages evoking the unrestrained insistence of nature's

continual reassertion of its revolutionary selfSuch assertions

crop up in the text at unexpected moments, but are never allowed to

merge with one another to create a strong thematic statement about

Nature's ultimate power over humanity. Rather, like the waterbugs in

Jesus's manger and the separate cells of our own nervous systems, they

stand in metonymic connection to each other to underscore the

multitudinous non-human perspectives abounding in Nature, even

including the millenially slow but nonetheless real consciousness of

rocks and mountains. Human attempts to control such a ubiquitous

force are thus set within a cosmic perspective : one watching from a

distant star might well see the absurdity as well as the pathos in our

attempts to do so. Given this context, the act of narrating this text

(and perhaps Pynchon's refusal to participate openly in the literary

or academic communities as well) is a specific example of a subversive act.

This text is not lifted above satire or despair either by an abstract moral stance on the part of the narrator or a belief in some essential human quality, although the narrator sometimes uses terms like courage and kindness, but rather by the loose ends of classical 307

science itself. These loose ends, chinks in the mythology of truth

that science claims for itself, even though the "truth" is that truth

is relative, in fact are demonstrations of the limitations of

science.Godel's Theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle,

for example, undermine the most basic assumptions of classical

science. They insist that there is always at least one variable

outside any given conception that is beyond the mind's grasp, and thus

that the physical laws science generates are never quite applicable to

real situations, and are always limited by their status as a product

of the human mind. These are principles of uncertainty that ensure the

unpredictability of any given event or any single character's actions

and thus also ensure, despite cultural conditioning, the possibility

of unconditioned responses wreaking havoc upon linear expectations.

If these principles do not ensure the possibility of free choice we

generally associate with tragedy, they do ensure that the system

cannot, by definition, control the outcome of all events. "Sensitive

dependence on initial conditions" (SDIC), the idea in chaos theory

that small changes in any given process can have large and

unpredictable consequences, is an appropriate description of this

situation.

Closely related to this issue is the way in which the thematic

issues that seem to dominate the text are presented. Throughout the novel, as many critics have noted, Pynchon deliberately sets up

bipolar oppositions, both abstract and concrete--Elect and Preterite, life and death, rationality and magic, sadism and masochism, paranoia 308

and antiparanoia, order and anarchy, oral and literate, to name

several.Yet each of these oppositions is systematically

deconstructed not only in a general way by the dispersed narrative of

Part 4, which, as critics frequently note, deconstructs the novel, or

by the complexity engendered by multiple, metonymically connected

perspectives, but in the more traditional technique of associating

bipolarism with unsympathetic characters--Pointsman, for example--

whose views contradict the narrator's. Indeed, Pointsman personifies

bipolarizing consciousness itself. For Pointsman, no gray areas

exist; all things, ideas, and events can be separated into distinct

categories which can in turn be understood in terms of the universal

oppositions of black and white, yes and no, on and off. Because of

Pointsman's insistence upon the explanatory power of cause and effect

analyses, he is unable to fathom the space between polar oppositions,

between zero and one, the realm of probabilities so familiar to Roger

Mexico, the "anti-Pointsman." Yet Pynchon does not champion Mexico's

accommodation to probability theory over Pointsman's devotion to

mechanistic causality. The coincidence of actual bombings with

Mexico's Poisson distributions is finally no more illuminating than

Pointsman's map of Dog Vanya's tortured brain, a map that reveals nothing about Dog Vanya, but a great deal about Edward Pointsman.

Roger's accommodation to randomness and disorder is as much an evasion of the terror of an absence of control over untidy life as is

Pointsman's commitment to a rational explanation of the secrets of the brain. Pynchon creates an opposition between Pointsman and Mexico not 309

to demonstrate that Mexico is right and Pointsman wrong, but, in

effect, to deconstruct the opposition between the two, that is, to

show that each depends upon the other for his own legitimation.

Similarly, other oppositions are shown to be inessential and

relativistic, based on assumptions that are themselves groundless;

even the polarities of life and death are shown to be artificial

constructs with highly unstable meanings. Death is, on the one hand,

a plot constructed by "Them" to maintain power over the Preterite, so

that the "void" is only an idea that keeps people in a perpetual state

of repressed terror, hence easily subjugated. For the pre-colonial

Hereros, on the other hand, death is another realm of life, a return to the Earth and to community, as the cattle at the center of the village host forever the souls of the dead who are thus never alone.

For the pre-colonial Hereros, the Void is literally unthinkable, and therefore an alien and meaningless concept. Blicero, of course, represents a perverse and distorted romanticism: the conception of death as the quintessential experience of life, an orgasmic moment that blends the sexual and the transcendent. However different, both

Blicero's and the Hereros' conceptions of death are antagonistic to the notion of the Void. Blicero's uncompromising misreading of Rilke leads him to desire death as a means of transcendence: "Once, only once" comes to mean literally a single moment of such extraordinary intensity that it becomes infinite, a kind of Brennschluss of the soul, rather than the celebration of life's anarchic multiplicity.

The desire to live intensely and to relinquish one's individuality to 310

a joyous (Nietzschean) flow is subverted to a Paterean desire for the

supreme moment that will transcend time. Pynchon includes other

variations than these (not the least of which is the ability of the

dead to send messages from the "other side" to the living) on death's

meaning and its hold over us. Yet these are not presented simply as

different viewpoints about death offered to discerning and critical

readers who may then assess the resultant plurality of ideas. Rather,

no conception is unrelated to any other; each has its own psychic and

social history and consequences, and all refer (or defer) finally to

the Rocket, which incorporates life and death within its brief

trajectory.^®

While I have only scratched the surface of the complexity of

death as a thematic issue in Gravitv's Rainbow, it should be clear

that Pynchon, like Derrida, rejects bipolar thinking as a concomitant

of rationality in general. The concept of death, indeed all concepts, are contingent upon so many variables that their true configurations can never be fixed. In itself, this is not a startlingly new insight; indeed, it has been a subject of discussion at least since Saussure identified the instability of language, in the split between signifier and signified. But in a move closely akin to Melville's symbolic use of the white whale in Moby-Dick^^ (which, incidentally, shares a great deal with Gravity's Rainbow in its over-arching symbol of the whale) Pynchon has incorporated within the Rocket, both as symbol and as concrete object, thematic polarizations that, within the limits set by rational thought, must be separated by mutually exclusive 311

definitions. Thus the Rocket and its trajectory signify not only life

and death, but the shifting relationship between the two terms, the

mutual dependence of each upon the other, and, most important, the

concretization of the chilling concept of life ââ death. More

generally, the Rocket is the concrete embodiment of the confusion of

opposites, the paradoxical phase that so puzzles Pavlov and his

successor Pointsman. At the same time, the narrator asserts

repeatedly the difference between those forces that line up on the

side of death and those that line up on the side of life, so that it

is not the case that life and death are merely ultimately inseparable,

or wholly dependent upon language, or can only be defined in terms of

each other. Rather, the confusion of opposites is itself only a

concept, so that it lacks explanatory power in any absolute sense.

The thematic issues Pynchon raises cannot be adequately described as

bipolarisms; in fact, bipolarity is shown again and again to be

insufficient and suspect, but they also cannot be adequately described

as deconstructed bipolarisms.

Like other elements of this novel, thematic issues are presented

in fragmentary form, which forces readers to make the connections among ideas that will result in thematic statements. Of course, this

is the case even with a novel whose structure is linear, but in

Gravity's Rainbow readers are presented with ideas that are more or less familiar in different contexts and asked to piece them together in such a way that they are seen to form such an impenetrable web that they appear to be part of a monolithic conspiracy. Thus, for example. 312

calculus, a seemingly neutral means of calculating movement over time,

is also a means of removing the mystery and joy of an eagle's flight,

and that perception in turn reveals the role of calculus as an

historical factor, along with many others, in the objectification of

Nature. Moreover, the breaking of the magic of flight reappears even

in the stair-step facades of German houses: the world around us is

literally transformed into a mirror-image of our own thought

processes, confirming for us the rightness of our ideas wherever we

cast our eyes.

Finally, the metafictional qualities of Gravity's Rainbow might ordinarily be considered a hindrance to the illusion of unified action that tragedy seems to require.^® While attention is frequently drawn throughout the text to the novel's fictionality, to the ontological status of art, and to the interweaving of history and fiction, the issue accelerates in "The Counterforce," which is frequently said to deconstruct the novel, as indeed it does, but at the same time does not. "The Counterforce" draws attention to the novel's fictionality and to its contradictions, but it also coincides with the explosion that comes at the end of the Rocket's trajectory/narrative; it both shatters the illusion and confirms the truth of the aesthetic text and its power. The reader is drawn to participate in the novel's ending in a kind of anti-catharsis that shifts the burden of tragedy to the reader. As the novel ends, the narrator dissolves momentarily the distinction between fiction and reality as the entire "Counterforce" section up to this point frequently comes close to accomplishing, but 313

repeatedly stops short of doing. Characters disappear or

disintegrate; at the very least their stories are left unresolved.

The narrator even speaks to Pynchon about what his editors will want

or expect.

In the last subtitled section of the text, "Descent," the

narrator describes a theatre in which the film has been interrupted.

As the audience chants for its continuation, the narrator compares to

the blank pages of the novel the apparently blank screen whose images

are invisible but truthful. Readers, then, are aligned with the

theatre audience, desirous that the film/novel should continue to

involve us in its imaginary world. Readers and audience are unable to

envision the reality being played on the blank screen/page, while the

Rocket silently descends above their/our heads. Rather than simply

revealing itself as fiction, the novel draws the reader into the

fiction, making him or her the final character/addressee. All of the

horrors the novel has described residing under the veil of rationality

are revealed in the invisible images upon the screen, which the

narrator insists are visible to us only gs, fiction; yet because the

reader is both aware of the text's fictionality and also incorporated

into the text, the Rocket is suddenly a reality itself, and only one brief moment of life remains. Knowing that the Rocket is descending makes life valuable--as Gottfried's descent makes clear--but when the

Rocket is descending, it is already too late and life is reduced to a moment. The Rocket's screaming announces its presence, but only when it falls on someone else. Early in the text the narrator tells us we 314

can choose what to believe about the smile of the Baby Jesus, and we

can choose what we want to believe about Gravity's Rainbow (Is

Pynchon's fictional world a reality, or is what we take to be reality

a fiction? Is paranoia a mental disorder or is it the only adequate

response to the world?), but Pynchon has stacked the deck against our

making such a choice. Gravity's Rainbow is not open-ended in this

respect; the novel insists upon and dramatizes Pynchon's belief that

the Western world is on a collision course with its own myopia.

I have tried thus far to present tentative responses to several

of the more obvious and immediate objections to naming Gravity's

Rainbow a tragic novel by suggesting that many of the

characteristically postmodern elements of the text either contribute

to the novel's tragic effects or do not work against them. The most

important of the elements that make this novel tragic is a progression

that mimics the trajectory of the Rocket. For all its apparently

anarchic discourse. Gravity's Rainbow is a carefully structured novel,

and for reader, character, and narrator alike, the Rocket accelerates

through the delta-t's of its trajectory from the first page to the last. The Rocket is everybody's death wish and the tragedy this novel attempts to dramatize is that, because we refuse to acknowledge its presence, we become its tacit and willing victims until the moment we stop playing the game it symbolizes. That is the only act that can move both character and reader from the sado-masochistic center of the

Rocket to the zone of anarchy, the realm of life. Science and 315

technology have allowed us to concretize our own knowledge of death in

an actual form that we pretend will deliver us from our own mortality.

The very fact of the Rocket's existence is evidence that death has

been abstracted from the organic structure of "Earth's mindbody." The

snake swallowing its tail has been transformed from a symbol of

renewal, regeneration, and change to stasis, permanence, and death-in­

life. Technology promises in the form of the Rocket, a means of

transcendence, a route to the stars, but the force of gravity ensures

that the promise of transcendence is a false promise, the quest for

the stars a doomed enterprise. B o m of rationality, the Rocket's fate

is to live in order both to annihilate its own cold certainty and to

fulfill the death wish of its victims.

The progression of this entire narrative, then, discontinuous and disjointed though it may be, moves metaphorically in tandem with the

Rocket's parabola, beginning with the ground rules of rationality laid out in "Beyond the Zero" (launch); the redefinition of chance and paranoia in "Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering" (ascent); the exploration of the possibilities of anarchy in "In the Zone"

(Brennschluss); and finally the violent explosion of hope in "The

Counterforce" (descent). This structure serves not only to unify the fragmented stories of individual characters, but, more important, to recreate in the reader's mind the fictional condition under which the characters operate, namely the omnipresence of the Rocket with its full regalia of symbolic and concrete meanings. As readers read, they must become aware of the Rocket's onmipresence not only because it is 316

a crucial part of the various plotlines of the novel, but because its

dynamic properties metaphorically structure the discourse as a whole.

By "metaphorically structure" I mean the Rocket's parabola is a

metaphor for the progression of the narrative as a whole. The

disparate images, themes, characters, patterns of behavior, historical

and scientific facts, literary allusions, and so on that constitute

the content of the narrative are, on the other hand, connected

metonymically, by association with and juxtaposition to each other.

The reader thus experiences at some level the terrifying rise and fall

of the Rocket's parabola.

At the same time, the content of the story is so fragmented and

non-linear that tension is created between the apparent chaos and

delayed action of the working out of plot(s) and the relentless

movement toward death the Rocket portends. As the reader is

repeatedly frustrated by the effort to piece together what is

happening at the level of story, the presence of the Rocket emerges as

the one unassailable certainty, even to such an extent that it

becomes, if not exactly "real," at least an overriding presence within

the fictional world. Because that fictional world is so chaotic, however, the Rocket assumes a kind of palpability of its own that is obviously part of the fiction, yet has the effect, because of its continuity, of exceeding the limits of the fictional world. It is precisely the inevitable movement of the Rocket, with its attendant sense of doom, that makes so powerful the reader's participation throughout the novel, but most particularly in the ending. This is 317

the moment we have all, like Gottfried and Blicero, been awaiting.

The resolution of the novel's real plot--the rise and fall of the

Rocket--is at hand, it is too late for revolutionary action, and the

reader, hand in hand with an unwary Preterite, awaits the Rocket's

fall.

In each of the four parts of Gravitv's Rainbow, the image of the

Rocket is an omnipresent, controlling factor in the lives of the

characters and in the events and scenes the narrator describes, even

when it is not foregrounded. Few pages go by that do not refer

directly or indirectly to some aspect of the Rocket. In "Beyond the

Zero" the bombing of London is, of course, a literal reminder for all

characters of death's imminence and the randomness of its assertions

of power. More important, both the effects and the causes of the

Rocket's presence are closely connected to the desire for a fixed, knowable reality and for control and containment of life as opposed to the unknowable reality of uncertainty, unpredictability, and anarchy that characterize life in this text. The association of Slothrop's erections with the Rocket's targets links sexual desire to death, suggesting the general eroticism of death that is repeatedly explored throughout the text. Yet the effects of the Rocket's presence are also different for each character, and only Katje's memories of

Blicero hint at the metaphysical aura that the Rocket will assume later in the text. "Beyond the Zero" is the most "realistic" of the four sections and accomplishes several tasks within the novel as a whole. It introduces a number of principal characters who will not 318

reappear until much later, establishes the White Visitation as a

metaphor of Western consciousness, and sets the stage for most of the

thematic issues that will be developed throughout the text. But most

important, it establishes the cultural grounds that made possible, and

perhaps inevitable, the development of the Rocket. Within the

narrative, "Beyond the Zero" is the rocket site from which the

powerful image of the Rocket is launched.

The centrality of the Rocket's presence is established in the

novel's famous opening lines, "A screaming comes across thé sky. It

has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now" (3).

While the first-time reader may not yet know that the screaming is the

sound of the Rocket, the connection will be made a few pages later

when we learn that the Rocket announces its arrival only after it has

exploded. The opening scene describes the evacuation of London, which

we l e a m only indirectly, with no cues from the narrator, is actually

Pirate Prentice's dream when the light entering the dream flows into

the light entering Pirate's window. It had been a dream of darkness

and death, with "no light anywhere" (3); the people, who will later be

identified as the Preterite, are being evacuated, one would suppose,

to safety, yet in reality are moving closer to death:

Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting int.ft-- (3)

The description begins to read more and more like a deportation to

Auschwitz than an evacuation to the countryside: 319

Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, "You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow. ..." (4; Pynchon's ellipsis)

The reader learns very quickly that the Rocket has fallen and that no

one will be saved:

There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before or after? (4)

The Rocket's identification here with death is clear and

uncomplicated, and the death the Rocket refers to is both personal and

communal, and possibly redemptive, but as the novel unfolds, it will

unravel the complex web of multiple, interconnecting psychological,

social, political, economic, ideological, scientific, technological,

and mythological systems whose synergistic effects the inescapable

Rocket comes to comprise., That is, the Rocket becomes both a Sign and a concrete embodiment of the ways in which the principal function for

Western society of each of those systems is the production of death.

At the same time each character responds to the Rocket in his or her own particular way. Pirate Prentice imagines the point of the

Rocket entering his skull: "What if it should hit exactly--ahh. no-- for a split second you'd have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above, strike the top of the skull. . ." [Pynchon's ellipsis] (7). For Slothrop, the Rocket is the hand of God, although he does not himself put it in those terms, a legacy of the Puritan 320

belief in a God who, the narrator suggests, is very much like the

"They" of Gravity's Rainbow, either a paranoid delusion or a gifted

card shark whose deck is always stacked. For Slothrop the Rocket has

always existed:

. . . slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose windows taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the faces above the pulpits defining grace, swearing this is how it does happen--yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud. . ■ . (29; Pynchon's ellipsis)

With or without Laszlo Jamf's conditioning, Slothrop and his penis

(and scant distinction is made between the two; indeed, at one point

he becomes his penis) are attuned to the sky, waiting, like the

evacuees at the beginning of the text, for the light that will carry

them to salvation.

The Rocket has even more immediate effects on Roger Mexico and

Jessica Swanlake. For Jessica, the Rocket's presence is an anomaly, a

circumstancial event that will disappear when the war ends and some

semblance of normalcy returns. For Roger, the war ig, his mother ; pre­ war normalcy means nothing to him. The omnipresent threat of the

Rocket and the apparent randomness of its targets make Roger aware of the inadequacy of his own "cheap nihilism," his awareness of and resignation to randomness and probability, not as a triumph of life and anarchy, but as cold, statistical fact. Roger and Jessica both cling to love and to each other's warm and comfortable sexuality to escape the numbness of the endless death and mutilation the war 321

delivers. But the Rocket is beyond even the horror of the war. A

rocket interrupts their lovemaking:

Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring in pain. The invisible train rushes away close over the rooftop. . .[Pynchon's ellipsis]. They sit still as the painted dogs now, silent, oddly unable to touch. Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me. (60)

If the war makes Roger and Jessica's relatively uncomplicated

relationship possible, the Rocket annuls whatever hope the wistful

reader may wish to see in it. The potentially redemptive love Roger

and Jessica represent is no match for the insistent screaming of the

Rocket.

Pointsman reacts to the Rocket, as he reacts to everything, with

an intense need to control it, and his interest in the connection

between Slothrop's erections and the Rocket is directed toward that

end. Pointsman's desperate belief that everything is knowable and

familiar, of course, is the most blatant example in the text of the

desire to contain the terror the Rocket symbolizes. Indeed, the

Pointsman/Roger Mexico opposition is far less profound than the

Poinstman/Blicero opposition. Pointsman's refusal to believe in the

mythological status of the Rocket as the embodiment of a communal

death wish is in direct opposition to Blicero's desire to create in

the Rocket a living form that is a pure expression of absolute

terror--a lifetime condensed into the five-minute life of the

Rocket's trajectory, the opposites of life and death, male and 322

female, active and passive, sadism and masochism so completely

confused that no distinction can be made between them at all. For

Pointsman, unraveling the secrets of Slothrop's inexplicable talent

for predicting the location of each Rocket's strike represents the

frontier of behavioral science, the chance to map once and for all the

human cortex and thus annihilate the unpredictability of the Rocket

and the terror it brings with it.

Of all the characters introduced in "Beyond the Zero," Katje is

the only one who understands the psychological and mythological

dimensions of the Rocket, thanks to her association with Blicero, the

male/female witch whose sadism and masochism compels him to find in

the Rocket the last possibility for becoming both absolute master and absolute victim. Like Pointsman, he would cheat life's real terror-- randomness, uncertainty, the Rocket suspended above the skull--for control. Pointsman's scalpel and Blicero's whip are enacted by the same mechanism. Katje, despite her brief appearances, is a pivotal character in Gravity's Rainbow: she plays all available roles, including even the role of actress, in the sado-masochistic spectrum, but Katje alone knows that she is only playing roles, even though she does not know how to avoid playing them or what kind of reality might be substituted for the hideous games she participates in. Indeed the

Hansel and Gretel politics of Blicero's, Gottfried's, and Katje's life in SchuStelle 3, is a metaphor for the larger situation of the war and of the condition of the world that Gravity's Rainbow attempts to describe. All three characters are complicit in their desire to 323

maintain their game as a respite from the real horror of the dying

going on around them, but the game is also a respite from the terror

of living. The physical pain, the humiliation, the artificial sex

organs Blicero provides for them create an artificial world in which

they need not endure real pain and humiliation and need not experience

the potential loss of control that sexual experience outside the sado­

masochistic circle promises (or threatens), as it does for Roger and

Jessica.

Finally, in "Beyond the Zero," the Rocket is identified by

Walter Rathenau (speaking from the dead) as a symbol of the Raketen-

Stadt, an artificial environment in which the "structures that favor death persist":

"Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste [dead organisms in the form of coal tars] over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion-- even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs"--a bit of a murmur around the table at this-- "as you all must know. The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata--epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator." (167)

Structures here range from synthetic molecules, strings of polymers that impersonate life, to the rigid, phallic smokestacks that literally feed on the remains of the dead. It is a world constructed from dead organisms. Earth's excrement. Rathenau envisions a new historicism of his own, one which would reveal not only the economic 324

roots of the Raketen-Stadt, the material conditions that make possible

the production of synthetics, but one in which the Rocket's

psychological roots would be explored, in particular the desire to

control randomness, uncertainty, and complexity. The synthetic

polymers of the Raketen-Stadt stand in stark contrast to Pirate's

bananas, described early in the text, with their molecular "stringing

of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of"(6):

flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which--though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . .so the same assertion-through- structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . . (10; Pynchon's ellipses)

Nor is it coincidental that the banana is shaped like a Rocket--the

"steel banana."

With the addition of Walter Rathenau's prophetic comments, all of the significant meanings of the Rocket are introduced or developed within "Beyond the Zero." While the discourse is disjointed, discontinuous, and fragmentary, the effect of the first section is metaphorically to set the Rocket's propulsion system in motion, that is to establish both the cultural and material grounds out of which the idea of the Rocket emerged and the concrete effects upon specific 325

characters of the Rocket's continual physical and psychological

presence.

Before proceeding further along the Rocket's trajectory, some

mention should be made of the title of the first section. "Beyond the

Zero" refers most significantly to the results of behavioral

deconditioning that may be attempted after a subject has been

conditioned to respond to a stimulus. As the narrator explains, a

subject can be brought not only to but beyond the zero, that is, to

the point at which the subject is actually reconditioned; the deconditioning process is simply a new form of conditioning and the results are unpredictable (the stimulus becomes indeterminate). The subject may respond, in other words, to the absence of a stimulus.

Conditioning beyond the zero "ties in," as Roger Mexico puts it, to the ultraparadoxical phase in which the conditioned subject, having moved beyond the paradoxical phase in which he is indifferent to the presence of the stimulus, now responds to the absence of the stimulus.

Beyond the zero is thus equivalent to the ultraparadoxical phase, which is a behavioral description of the psychoanalytic concept of unfulfillable desire for that which is absent, the realm of pure

Desire. The connection between Slothrop's erections and the Rocket, then, is a synecdoche for a more general collective desire for the

Rocket and all it symbolizes. As the text progresses through the next sections, the principal line of action is the variously motivated searches of several characters, including Slothrop, for the secrets of the Rocket, but whatever their specific, conscious motivations, each 326

character is driven to discover in the Rocket some form of absolute

satisfaction.

The two middle sections of Gravity's Rainbow. "Un Perm' au Casino

Hermann Goering" and "In the Zone," might be likened respectively to

the ascent of the Rocket and to Brennschluss, the point at which the

Rocket's engines cut off. Again, the significance of the relationship between the Rocket's movement and the narrative's is that it creates for the reader a kind of intuited plot that concludes, tragically, on the final page of the text. The Rocket's delta-t approaches zero as the Rocket, cut loose from its guidance systems, falls to what is now no longer an ellipse of uncertainty, but a precisely pin-pointed target. That is, once Brennschluss is reached, the victim's fate is fixed, the Poisson distribution is irrelevant, and anyone at ground zero is already dead. It is important to note that where the Rocket will fall cannot be specified until after Brennschluss, so that the often-noted hysteron proteron of the explosion of the Rocket preceding the sound of its own arrival also describes the way in which the

Rocket's victims are selected, as well as the general fact that in reality (as opposed to in the laboratory) causes can never be identified until their effects are empirically known. The Rocket, like all life forms, is subject to the vicissitudes of chance--to atmospheric pressure, or to a mote of dust in its sensing devices.^

Just as the idea of "beyond the zero" as Desire dominates characters' relationships to the Rocket in Part 1, the relationship between chance 327

and paranoia dominates Slothrop's relationship to the Rocket in

"Casino," as attention focuses upon Slothrop's search for the Rocket

and, alternatively, on the White Visitation's observations of

Slothrop.

Slothrop's central problem is to disentangle his relation both to

the Rocket and to "Them." Ostensibly, Slothrop's assignment is to

gather technical information about the Rocket, but in reality his

assignment is to be watched so that They can gather technical

information about Slothrop. It becomes clear to the reader that some

aspect of the Rocket itself is the "mystery stimulus" used by Laszlo

Jamf to condition Infant Tyrone. Significantly, the mystery stimulus is never identified unequivocally, but evidence suggests it is

Imipolex-G, the sensuous plastic synthesized by Jamf and used to create the penile Rocket's artificial vagina/womb within which

Gottfried explodes.

The setting of "Casino" suggests metaphorically that the characters are playing against a stacked deck. What passes for chance in a gambling casino is actually the rule that every gambler knows; the house always wins; only the naive (the non-paranoid) will hope to win. Outside the casino, though, chance, usually represented by the slapstick carnival of Slothrop's comings and goings, works to

Slothrop's advantage, allowing him to elude Their watchful eyes just often enough to disassemble himself and thwart Their mission to discern the secrets of his brain and penis. 328

In much the same way that various meanings of the Rocket and the

cultural grounds from which it emerged are explored in "Beyond the

Zero," the meanings of chance and paranoia and their relationship to

the Rocket are explored in "Casino." In keeping with Pynchon's

explanation of the role chance plays in the Rocket's ascent--random

variables determine, within limits, its final destination--the

movement of the story, though not the discourse, becomes much more

linear, focusing almost entirely on Slothrop's increasing paranoia,

with only an occasional return to the White Visitation. As Pynchon

had put together the various systemic origins of the Rocket in "Beyond

the Zero," in "Casino" he begins to explore the elements of the

Rocket's ascent, and the reader is left to struggle with the role of

chance in Slothrop's progress toward his own fate vis-a-vis the

Rocket.

Chance is, of course, closely related to the issue of paranoia;

to the extent that events occur by chance, paranoia is pathological;

to the extent that they do not, paranoia is perhaps the only sane

response to a monolithic system in pursuit of victims:

all in his [Slothrop's] life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to've been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel--where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit. (209)

The Casino the faceless system, later imagined as a room full of business machines, that controls who wins and who loses; "chance" does 329

not function as true randomness, but as a variable already figured

into the equation. Metonymically, the Poisson distribution of the

rocket attacks over London is only apparently random, since the act-iml

pattern ensures the destruction of London's poor, not of its Elite.

Any site within the range of the Rocket could receive a hit, so

theoretically the points where the rockets fall are random; the

Poisson distribution's predictive power removes any suspicion that the

attacks may not, in fact, be random. (Further complicating this

pattern of randomized certainty is the Allied bombing of labor camps

rather than rocket sites at Peenemunde described in "In the Zone," a circumstance only presumably traceable to Katje's refusal to disclose the location of Blicero's launch sites.) Furthermore, we discover.

Pointsman refuses to acknowledge that, however real Slothrop's fantasies may have been, his map of sexual conquests is bogus--none of the women named on his map actually exists. As Pointsman watches his own reasons for observing Slothrop crumble. Their--and They are also cause for Pointsman to be paranoid about his work, his funding, and himself--reason for observing Slothrop emerges. Slothrop has begun to make the paranoid/real associations and logical leaps that begin to reveal both his own visceral connections to the Rocket and the massive international corporate connections that transcend politics and national boundaries, facts that They do not want Slothrop to uncover.

(Or is it rather that They âfi want Slothrop to uncover them, since, as we know from Walter Rathenau, it is not the cartels per se, but the true meaning of the synthesis of petrochemicals and the development of 330

the Raketen-Stadt, the city of death, that is the real secret? Only

the paranoid reader would suspect the latter.) Globally, it appears,

virtually nothing occurs by chance, while locally the particular

configuration of events is always unpredictable. Hence, the exact

location of the rocket falls is random, a function of chance, but the

pattern is preset: the Poisson distribution (which also functions

equally well for births and deaths) is itself a bogus measure of only

that randomness already accounted for by the system itself. At the

same time, because randomness is a genuine variable of particular

cases, it holds the promise of freedom, that is, of anarchy or chaos.

A rocket could fall anvwhere in London; Slothrop could. and in fact

does, escape the watchful eyes of the White Visitation.

As the Rocket ascends in the reader's awareness over the text,

its meanings, particularly to Slothrop, Katje, and Pointsman are

further revealed. The Rocket's colorless parabola extends between

Katje and Slothrop, Europe and America, with a life of its own:

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice--guessed and refused to believe--that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children. . . . (209; Pynchon's ellipsis)

While world-weary Katje seems to understand intuitively the connections between herself, Slothrop, and the Rocket--her desire, not unlike Blicero's, to transcend the real pain of being alive in a world 331

from which she feels completely disconnected--Slothrop will

disintegrate before he will admit to the fate the Rocket portends:

He continues to believe, here on his French leave, and at his ease, that the interference is temporary and paper, a matter of messages routed and orders cut, an annoyance that will end when the War ends, so well have They busted the sod prairies of his brain, tilled and sown there, and subsidized him not to grow anything of his own. . . . (210; Pynchon's ellipsis)

As Slothrop pieces together the bits and scraps of data about himself

and his past, his interest in the Rocket becomes more and more a hedge

against the terror he remembers feeling when it had occurred to him

that his own all-American college days of white blazers, dewed carnations, and fraternity pranks were not real, but "only elaborate theatre to fool you" (267). Slothrop's search for the Rocket is a heavily disguised, even to himself, search for the self he cannot bear to find, Slothrop's ancestors having long since forgotten their own affinity for life and color, having exchanged it for a life that is itself not real, but all theatre. Slothrop's paranoia is a direct consequence of the terrifying perception that Nothing lies beneath the connections he is beginning to make among the strands of his own life and the Rocket's--the sale of his own infant body to Laszlo Jamf, Lyle

Bland's position at the paper mill, the Shell transmitters, Imipolex-

G, Katje's work for and victimization by the White Visitation,

Tantivy's death, and so on. The enormous conspiracy taking shape in his mind begins itself to hold some protection against the hollowness 332

of his own heart and against the possibility that no second order

exists beneath the surface order of things.

If "Casino" calls the concept of randomness into question, it

also undercuts Pointsman's notion of a cause and effect relationship

between Slothrop's erections and the Rocket. Katje's stark

acknowledgment of the Rocket's own life and its connections to her and

to Slothrop opens what is a more unsettling and a more complex and at

the same time more tenuous, unnamable bond between Slothrop (and other

characters) and the Rocket. The connection between Slothrop and the

Rocket, for example, appears to have something to do with, among other

things, the memory of a room and a peculiar chemical odor that he

finds erotic. As the narrative moves forward to the Zone, the

Rocket's analogous movement is to Brennschluss, both a real and

imaginary moment when the Rocket is theoretically at a point of stasis in orbit--delta-t is equal to zero, and the moment becomes timeless.

Brennschluss is an important metaphor in Gravity's Rainbow because it is a transition point, an interface, a place and a moment between zero and one, a moment of absolute uncertainty when anything can happen, a kind of primal anarchic moment. The mystery of the Rocket only suggested in "Beyond the Zero" and set aside in "Casino" is more fully developed in "In the Zone," as the scientific basis of the Rocket's existence is further undercut:

So was the Rocket's terrible passage reduced, literally, to bourgeois terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware. 333

abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which describes motion under the aspect of yaw control:

® + *• f + ^ (*•-»«)«“ -|f preserving, possessing, steering between Scylla and Charybdis the whole way to Brennschluss. If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised-- (239)

As a language, mathematics contains and de-terrorizes the Rocket, Just

as chemical formulae contain Nature's anarchy, an example of which is

the randomness of genetic combinations that ensure continuous change.

Jamf's study of large molecules was

an announcement of Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a chemical to have, and then go ahead and build i t . . . The target property most often seemed to be strength-- first among Plasticity's virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and Whiteness (Kraft. Standfestigkeit. WelBe: how often these were taken for Nazi graffiti . . .) (249-50; last ellipsis is Pynchon's, but also indicates omitted text)

For all of Slothrop's intention to solve, in his bumbling-detective

way, the mystery o f Imipolex-G and the Rocket and h is connection to

both, all of his deductions are, as calculus and chemistry are for the

scientists and engineers, a means of avoiding the Rocket's own subtext linking sex, death, and desire as fundamentally bound to the development and deployment of the Rocket.

The movement of the narrative into the Zone is analogous to the

Rocket's reaching Brennschluss. By far the longest of the novel's 334

four sections, containing thirty-two of its seventy-three chapters,

"In the Zone" is the psychological and social equivalent of

Brennschluss. Just as Brennschluss is the point outside time, the

interface between past and future, the Zone is an anarchic space, a

moment in historical and individual time when characters act and are

acted upon in ways that will alter or confirm their own lives'

trajectories and the course of history. It is the moment when Their

control becomes tenuous, and the characters, within the limits of

their own conditioned selves, are given their freedom, or are at least

potentially capable of actions not determined by Them. At the same

time, the Rocket remains poised at Brennschluss in the very movement

of the narrative. Again and again readers are reminded of the

Rocket's presence, not only as the overt object of attention, but as

an imaginary and sometimes mystical presence in the consciousness of

the characters. Never is this more evident than in the case of

Pokier, whose job it was to sit exactly upon the target of a test-

firing, a point ostensibly chosen by Weissmann/Blicero because,

ironically enough, the probability that the Rocket would hit its

target precisely was very small. More to the point, it would,

Weissmann believed, strengthen Pokier's capacity for victimization:

But inside Pokier's life, on no record but his soul, his poor harassed German soul, the time base has lengthened, and slowed: the Perfect Rocket is still up there, still descending. He still waits--even now, alone at Zwolfkinder waiting for "Use," for this summer's return, and with it an explosion that will take him by surprise. . . . (426; Pynchon's ellipsis) 335

The explosion, however, will not be the Rocket's, but his own

implosive decision to stop playing the system's game.

If each of the principal characters in the Zone seeks the Rocket

for his own personal reasons. Pokier is the only one who

unequivocally--and surprisingly--acts to reject its imperative without

losing himself, as Slothrop does, in the process. Near the end of

"Casino" the narrator points to Godel's Theorem (popularly known as

Murphy's Law): "when everything has been taken care of. when nothing

can go wrong, or even surprise us. . .something will" (275; Pynchon's

ellipsis). This theorem is, in fact, a statement not only of a point

basic to understanding the limitations of science, but more concretely

to understanding the potential for individuals to make the kind of

choice Pokier makes against all expectations that he will do so. If

the theorem is correct (and its only conceivable "proof" is

empirical), then it is simply wrong to assume either that physical

phenomena are orderly or that human behavior is predictable; in

reality, events are anarchic and unpredictable, while the cornerstone of scientific method is that events are predictable, given that the theory is correct and the variables are known, a highly questionable assumption, as chaos theory suggests. In political and human terms, anarchy makes all things possible, hence both the danger and the promise of the Zone.

It is important to note that Pynchon's root metaphor has shifted from his earlier use of the concept of entropy to the concept of anarchy in Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's ideas of entropy have evolved 336

considerably since his early story "Entropy," which he himself notes,

in his introduction to Slow Learner, is a simplistic application of

physical theory to human systems. In Gravity's Rainbow, many

characters take on the hopeless task of Maxwell’s sorting demon to

forestall entropy, but the idea of entropy, at least in its simplest

terms as the continuous movement of all organized systems toward

disorder and uniformity, whether it is still the ultimate

order/disorder of the universe or not is no longer applied wholesale

to human systems, local or global. Rather, the concept of entropy is

itself reduced to the status of a concept, part of the mental

apparatus through which we interpret the world, rather than the

universal order of things. That is, it seems to me that in Gravitv's

Rainbow entropy is one partially true concept which cannot stand on

its own, but can be explanatory as part of a dialectic among other

concepts, rather than the single concept that subsumes all others, as

it does in "Entropy." Entropy is the principle which scientific and

bureacratic thought resists; at the same time its nature as a concept

in a sense legitimizes the abstract, subdivided world science and bureacracy hypothesize. In fact, the narrative suggests, entropy may not be applicable at all in a cosmic sense:

What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is--what if They're using it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual life in time? What if it's in Their interest to have you believing that? (697)

this lack of symmetry [in the Rocket's trajectory] leads to speculating that a presence, analogous to the 337

Aether, flows through space. The assumption of a Vacuum in time tended to cut us off one from another. But an Aether sea to bear us world-to-world might bring us back a continuity, show us a kinder universe, more easygoing. . . . (726; Pynshon's ellipsis)

It is not the case that Pynchon is positing a purposeful universe

here; rather the asymmetry in the Rocket's trajectory is caused by

unidentifiable random variables (in reality the trajectory is an

unpredictable, dynamic event, however simplified it may be relative to naturally occurring events). The implication of the narrator's

speculation here is that if random variables alter the parabola's symmetry, making each launch unique, it would follow that within the grand scale of the universe, every event is unique, and time is progressive. Even on an individual level, the idea of death as an entropie event may be simply another plot to keep the Preterite ignorant of the ideas of return and renewal and of life as a cyclical, not a parabolic, event. Just as the symbol of the snake eating its own tail--a nearly universal symbol of life's eternally regenerative power--is subverted in Gravity's Rainbow to the stasis of Kekule's benzene ring, so does life itself cease to be of positive value when viewed in terms of entropy: life becomes the absence of a positive value--negative entropy--a loophole, a quirk in cosmic law. In both science and bureacracy, something like Maxwell's sorting demon is the only concept available to account for such a quirk.

The search for the mysterious Rocket 00000 with its equally mysterious S-Gerat is, ostensibly, the principal action of "In the

Zone." The psychological appeal of the Rocket's transcendental 338

potentiality introduced by Katje in "Beyond the Zero" is explored in

terms of the Rocket's technical development and its mythological

status as a redeemer, a technological Jesus, as Thanatz calls it.

While, ostensibly, the central focus of the search for the Rocket

centers upon Slothrop, Tchitcherine, who is first introduced in "In

the Zone," and Enzian, whom the careful reader will remember from his

brief mention in "Beyond the Zero" as Blicero's "boy," also become

central characters in the search for the Rocket that Pokier has

assembled and Blicero deployed. Each is connected to the Rocket in

complex and multiple ways. Each of these five characters and other

less central characters' differing interests in the Rocket are

variants of these connections. Most significantly, whatever the

particular quirks of individual characters, the Rocket has its origins

in two realms that become overlaid upon each other. The first is the

capacity of science (with its own origins in the abstracting function

of a written alphabet) to transform physical phenomena into written

symbols to produce a lifeless reality that is without pain or

pleasure, as the reduction of the Rocket's power to a mathematical

formula illustrates. The second is the idealization of the Rocket as a perfect and absolute form that has always existed waiting to be materialized by the industrious human mind:

[Brennschluss] is a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don't jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There's only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. 339

There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it. (302)

Both levels of thought arise from the uniquely human capacity to

foresee death: if the world is abstracted from its existence as a

living entity, if its existence on paper supersedes its physical

existence, death can be outwitted, and the processes of life can be

controlled. It is from this fear of life's anarchy that the desire

for control on the one hand and death on the other becomes the grim

sado-masochistic enterprise fueling the wheels of rational thought.

Mathematics, the language of science, is the means by which the actual

effects of technology upon the living can be canceled from

consciousness, just as Pokier has the information telling him that

U s e is in a concentration camp, but cannot interpret it, cannot read

the data in terms of real human lives, even his own daughter's. Hence

the Rocket becomes both the pure abstraction of an ideal form beyond

life and death and the perfect expression of the sado-masochistic

desire for control and for death. In "In the Zone" Pynchon weaves

tighter the dialiectical connections comprising the Rocket's origins.

For Enzian, the Rocket means salvation for his people, a never clearly specified means of self and tribal purification--if the

Hereros can bring the Rocket to life--that will somehow allow them not to escape gravity, as Blicero wishes, but to return to Earth:

What Enzian wants to create will have no history. It will never need a design change. Time, as time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside 340

this new one. The Erdschweinhohle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place, the only place. . . . (319; Pynchon's ellipsis)

But there is no place for Enzian and the Hereros, and his search for

the Center is not much different from Josef Ombindi's plan of tribal

suicide; "The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero"

Ombindi and the Empty Ones seek (319). Enzian's understanding of the

fragility and vulnerability of the Rocket, its sensitivity even to a dust mote in its guidance system, allows him to identify himself and

the Hereros with it, even despite his disenchantment with Blicero and his knowledge that the Rocket is a brutal, masculine technology, won from the darkness of "lovable but scatter-brained Mother Nature"

(324). If the Rocket can be successfully launched against such odds, then the gods--equivalent now to Chance in Enzian's mind--will be satisfied and the Hereros will be saved.

Yet if Enzian's dream of coupling with the white Rocket provides the impetus for his quest, the anarchy of the Zone considerably complicates the issue as he discovers that the Real Text is not the

Rocket but the Zone itself:

This serpentine slag-heap. . .is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. . . .we assumed -- naturlich!--that this holy Text had to be the Rocket. . .our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness. . . . But, if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it. . . . (520; ellipses here, except 341

for the last, which is solely Pynchon's, represent both omitted text and Pynchon's own ellipses)

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war. (521; Pynchon's ellipses)

We have to look for power sources here. . . .[We are] zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coal-tars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy factions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling. . . . (521; Pynchon's ellipsis)

Enzian's amphetamine revelation leaves him questioning his own self-

imposed role as redeemer of his people and awakens him to the

possibility that the Rocket is a false Text. He pursues his task of

reassembling the Rocket, but he is cast into a new zone of uncertainty from which he will never emerge.

Enzian's Russian half-brother, Tchitcherine, is also moved to reconsider his desire to murder Enzian when he begins to understand, at least that Enzian is his brother, even if he does not understand that what he hates about Enzian is his own mortality, his own vulnerability to life and death. While Enzian begins to realize that the Rocket is not a means of redemption but a selfish god recreating the world as an expression of its own love of death, Tchitcherine, the nearly bionic man, begins to realize that his feud with Enzian is itself only a small part of the progressive restructuring of the Zone in the image of the Rocket. It comes to him in the form of a pointing finger: 342

A Rocket-cartel■ A structure cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it. Even to Russia . . . Russia bought from Krupp, didn't she, from Siemens, the IG . . . Are there arrangements Stalin won't admit . . . doesn't even know about? (566; Pynchon's ellipses)

If Tchitcherine is doomed always to be held at the edge of revelation,

he does at least know that he and Enzian are outside the conspiracy,

fellow victims of the Rocket's desire.

"In the Zone" brings together in the experiences of Enzian,

Tchitcherine, and the Argentinian Squalidozzi, the ruined fragments of

Third World cultures changed forever by European colonization. The

Zone is the place of interface between the First and Third Worlds,

European guilt come home to roost. The experiences of the Hereros,

the Kirghiz, and the Argentinians are all variations on the same

theme: the colony as the "outhouse of the European soul," where

sexuality could be indulged with impunity, where literacy could sever

the concrete connection between human and Earth, where the terror of openness and freedom could be fenced. Like Enzian, Tchitcherine proceeds on his quest, but with increasingly less enthusiasm, finally, with the help of Geli Tripping's witchcraft, exchanging a handful of cigarettes and a few lost words in the night with Enzian, his brother and fellow victim.

If the narrative never quite makes clear what Their plans are for

Enzian and Tchitcherine, it nevertheless does make clear that both are, by the end of "In the Zone," destabilized by their own uncertainty about their respective missions. The revelations that 343

result in that destabilization constitute precisely the realm of

possibility that the anarchy of the Zone enables. At the socio­

political level, Enzian and Tchitcherine themselves represent unknown

quantities, independent variables that randomize the equations that

appear everywhere to be leading toward the closed system of the

Raketen-Stadt. Both characters, however tentatively, take the first

step toward moving outside the sado-masochistic desire at the heart of

their separate enterprises.

The principal difference between Enzian's and Tchitcherine's

movements toward inner anarchy and Slothrop's is the extremity of

Slothrop's passivity. As Slothrop's self moves toward disintegration

and he begins to "scatter," the various disguises he dons in his

attempt to elude Them mark the changes he discerns in his own

ostensibly simple assignment of tracking down information on the

Rocket. All of Slothrop's disguises are designed for him by others: his passivity/victimization is such that he is quite literally held together by the roles assigned him. As reporter Ian Scuffling, he is little more than a bumbling detective who stumbles upon facts about himself and his own troubling connections tothe Rocket. As

Rocketman, he performs fanciful and fantastic tasks like retrieving several pounds of hashish from the middle ofthe Potsdam Conference and pelting Major Marvy with pies from a hot air balloon. As Max

Schlepzig, he begins to realize that, as they were for Max, his beatings of Greta are not the result of her desire, but of his own.

In his tuxedo aboard the Anubis he becomes, like his hedonistic 344

companions, a child-abuser and, by virtue of his failure to act, an

accomplice to child murder. Wearing Tchitcherine's stripped uniform,

he is a counter-saboteur, warning the Schwarzkommando of Marvy's raid,

and in his Pig-god costume, he loses whatever semblance of self he may

have once had as he spiritually conjoins with lost pigs and lemmings

and trees. Nothing is resolved for any of these characters in "In the

Zone," but their presence within the anarchy of the Zone casts each of

them into a state of uncertainty that is beyond Their control. Not

incidentally, their heavy reliance on drugs is a significant aspect of their disorientation. It is under the influence of drugs that characters frequently gain important insights; drugs are a means of creating inner anarchy, hence new possibilities of insight. That is, the power of drugs to disorient established patterns of thought makes it possible to make new connections among facts, images, objects, ideas, and people that had been unthinkable within the constraints of the conditioned mind. Such insights erode not only the psychological hegemony of the Rocket, but Their political and economic power as well. This is the lack of control the drug salesman Wimpe finds objectionable. Wimpe envisions a world in which a non-addictive pain killer--already available as Jamf's Oneirine--will be available as insurance that control will remain in the hands of an Elite, and the troublesome uncontrollability of addiction (desire for something beyond the zero of painlessness) can be eliminated.

Central also to understanding the significance of the Zone's destabilizing power is Pokier's story, the least fragmented plotline 345

and the one narrated in the most linear fashion of any character's

story in Gravity's Rainbow. Pokier is the only character in the novel

who makes a conscious, deliberate decision to remove himself from the

sado-masochistic game he had for years refused to acknowledge he was

playing:

Later, in the Zone, . . . it would seem to Pokier that he could not . . . have been ignorant of the truth. That he had known the truth with his senses, but allowed all the evidence to be misfiled where it wouldn't upset him. Known everything, but refrained from the only act that could have redeemed him. He should have throttled Weissmann where he sat. .. .

For months, while her [Use's] father across thewire or walls did his dutiful hackwork, she had been prisoner only a few meters away from him, beaten, perhaps violated. . . [Pynchon's ellipsis]. If he must curse Weissmann, then he must also curse himself. Weissmann's cruelty was no less resourceful than Pokier's own engineering skill, the gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring. They had sold him convenience, so much of it, all on credit, and now They were collecting. (428)

Unlike any of the characters who will join the Counterforce, Pokier quits the game knowing that there is and can be no counterforce other than his own aching heart :

The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums . . . and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers. . . . All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom [like the Hereto and Kirghiz genocides] had kept on, in the darkness outside . . . all this time. . . . Pokier vomited. He cried some. The walls did not dissolve--no prison 346

wall ever did, not from tears, not at this finding on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after all and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to that silence. . . . But what can he ever do about it? How can he ever keep them? Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow, works him terribly as run-away heartbeating, and with hardly any chances left him for good rage, or for turning. . . . (433; ellipses are all Pynchon's except for the first, which represents both Pynchon's and omitted text)

If one were to name a single tragic protagonist in Gravitv's Rainbow,

it would be Franz Pokier. Unlike the other Rocket scientists who sell

themselves to America or Russia or der Springer and his black market

escapades. Pokier establishes himself in a marginal existence with

Frieda the pig. Unlike William Slothrop, who waited forever for the

pig who would refuse to die. Pokier, not expecting miracles, gives

Frieda the freedom to come and go in whatever way a pig likes to come

and go. Yet Pokier does not simply become a comical hermit; his pain

is much too graphically evoked to allow such an interpretation. His

ready access to a pistol does not negate his impotence, but it does

suggest that, if he does not anticipate an end to the Raketen-Stadt,

he also does not anticipate becoming one of its inhabitants.

Above all, "In the Zone" dramatizes the space between zero and

one, not Roger Mexico's probabilities, but the realm of possibilities,

including the possibility of genuine tragedy, since the Rocket is

already at Brennschluss, and the time is already past when those possibilities might have borne fruit. Hence the stark difference between the opening and closing paragraphs of "In the Zone." The section begins with a description of the timeless turning and 347

returning of the seasonal cycle, as the "revolutionaries of Spring"

move into the Zone to reclaim it from death. "In the Zone" ends with

the contemplation of yet another Pointsman project, this time to

eliminate the troublesome packs of dogs conditioned to "Kill the

Stranger":

A feasibility study, in fact, is going on even now at staff level in G-5, to see whether original trainers might not be located, and this crystallizing [of the dogs into sects] begun. One sect might try to protect its trainer against attacks from others. Given the right combinations and an acceptable trainer-loss figure, it might be cheaper to let the dogs finish themselves off than to send in combat troops. (614)

The revolutionary possibilities lingering in the Spring breezes of the

Zone are long gone, and here, in the bleak workrooms of the Operation,

the feasibility studies flow forth to determine statistically

justifiable solutions to messy Preterite problems:

Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower self. The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. (616)

The concrete realities of blood and bone, head and heart are simply eliminated, so that "the real and only fucking is done on paper"

(616). The Dorothys and Totos wandering through this Zone lose out to 348

the Wizard, and the yellow-brick road leads finally to ground zero and

the Rocket mandaia.

"The Counterforce," the last of the novel's four parts, is also,

metaphorically, the final stage of the Rocket's deployment. As many

critics have recognized, it is the most discontinuous and fragmented

of the four sections, both in its discourse and in the lack of

resolution of any of the novel's plotlines.^^ In the continuing

metaphor I have been using--the Rocket's trajectory as an analogue of

the novel's progression--"The Counterforce" represents the Rocket's

descent, the post-Brennschluss event when randomness is no longer an

issue. If Brennschluss is the metaphorical moment of interface at all

1evels--dynamic, psychic, social, political, economic--descent is

beyond interface: the Rocket's victim is determined at this point. In

terms of story, that victim is the Preterite; in terms of discourse,

that victim is the reader. The various interfaces of the Zone offer

characters a kind of freedom, an opportunity to move tangentially away

from the Rocket's parabola that constitutes metaphorically the mindset of virtually all the characters, the most notable exceptions being the odd combination of Pokier, Ludwig, Geli Tripping, Leni/Solange, and

Seaman Bodine. These characters, not the self-proclaimed

Counterforce, constitute the true anarchic counterforce of Zonal politics. In "The Counterforce," for most characters the promise of the Zone is negated, as characters either spin off in self-dissipating 349

or impotent actions or become absorbed in establishing the Raketen-

Stadt .

Whatever essential scrap of Slothrop's self may exist beyond the

zero of his lifelong conditioning is far too weak to withstand his

gradual revelation that he is both the Rocket and the Rocket's victim:

Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious h ost. They were the fifth-columnists, well inside his head, waiting the moment to deliver him to the four other divisions outside, closing in. . . [Pynchon's e l l i p s i s ] . So, next to the other graffiti, with a piece of rock, he scratches this sign:

Slothrop besieged. Only after he'd left it half a dozen more places did it dawn on him that what he was r e a lly drawing was the A4 rocket, seen from below. (624)

Later Slothrop will lose the capacity to make connections at all-- paranoid or otherwise--and his consciousness is reduced to a series of disconnected images :

in stru ctin g him, dunce and d r ifte r , in ways deeper than he can explain, have been faces of children out the train windows, two bars of dance music somewhere, in some other street at night, needles and branches of a pine tree shaken clear and luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the early morning as he was walking to school, the idling of a motorcycle at one dusk-heavy hour of the summer . . . and now, in the Zone, la te r in the day he became a crossroad, a fte r a heavy rain he d oesn 't recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest 350

fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, , just feeling natural. . . . (626; Pynchon's ellipses)

While he is no longer a coherent self, his final vision is not of the

gray Rocket descending from the sky to destroy him, but of the multi­

colored rainbow coupling with the green Earth. Paradoxically,

Slothrop's surrender to the Rocket's hegemony even over himself frees

him from its gray parabola, but leaves him fragmented, scattered about

the Zone as various personae. Like the Rocket, he implodes; that is,

his past illusions about control--both his own and others' control

over him--are shattered, but that shattering leaves him "feeling

natural," a vague term that yet connotes some unspecifiable sense of

having beaten the Rocket at its own game, even though the cost is an

absolute and permanent loss of self rather than any sort of rebirth or renewal.

Slothrop's preoccupation throughout "In the Zone" with uncovering his own connections to the Rocket allows him to evade, conceal, and deny his desire to be and to be victimized by the Rocket. Enzian's obsession with the Rocket and Tchitcherine's with Enzian are also methods both use to conceal the truth of their own fascination with the Rocket as an instrument of male sexual power and of mastery over feminine Nature. Enzian and Tchitcherine deny their own intuitions that they are themselves tools of the Raketen-Stadt in which human beings serve technology and not vice versa. Tchitcherine, with the help of Geli, finally abandons his search for Enzian, his own black shadow self whom he finds so threatening. Enzian represents for 351

Tchitcherine the darkness, the unknowable, the uncontainable, the

mysterious. In receiving the cigarettes and potatoes Enzian offers him, Tchitcherine appears finally to have stepped outside the madness

of his former life. At the same time, he does not do so as a result

of his own perception of himself as a victim of the Raketen-Stadt, a perception he intentionally rejects. Rather, the magical charms of

Geli Tripping are required to crack the bonds of hatred and fear that had for so long been the mainstay of his obsessive desire to murder

Enzian. Like Slothrop, Tchitcherine is transformed not by intellectually understanding his real circumstances, but by moving into another dimension in which language gives way to image and experience, to the now of Bandwidth Zero, when the self with all its regalia of past and future is reduced to nothing and where desire is reduced to the concrete, the object of desire to a handful of cigarettes and potatoes.

This exchange between Enzian and Tchitcherine is the last we see of either character, so that Enzian's fate is even less certain than

Tchitcherine's. Enzian has taken on the role of savior of his people; he is an almost too obvious Christ-figure in this text. Unlike

Blicero, he is less intrested in personal salvation than in providing for the Hereros a god in the form of the Rocket and a sacrificial soul in the form of himself. The Herero split between Enzian and Ombindi follows Pynchon's interpretation of Judas' betrayal of Christ. For

Pynchon, Judas is the true champion of the Preterite: Christ's insistence on his own self-sacrifice ensures the permanence of an 352

Elect who can only exist by opposing themselves to the Preterite.

Consequently, whether Enzian chooses to sacrifice himself by firing

the 00001 Rocket is an essential question that the text leaves open,

but Enzian's aloneness, his view of himself as the leader who is

responsible for his people, and his rejection of his own intuition

that the developing Raketen-Stadt is precisely as it should be in

order to transform the living world into a Technological System

suggest that he will choose to lead his people to the cold salvation

the Rocket offers. The other alternative is tribal dissolution;

without the Rocket as Sacred Text, the same sort of scattering

Slothrop sustains at an individual level would inevitably occur,

leaving the Hereros alienated and separate, still unable to

reestablish the cyclical life-centered beliefs of their decimated tribal religion. That Enzian's fate is left undecided is essential to avoid creating in Enzian a single tragic figure who would thus draw attention away from the roles that both the Preterite and the reader must play in the tragic equation.

Unlike Slothrop, Enzian, or Tchitcherine, Roger Mexico, Pirate

Prentice, Katje, Osbie Feel, Stephen Dodson-Truck, and Brigadier

Pudding (joining in from the other side) become the principal members of the self-proclaimed Counterforce. As Prentice tells Roger, "'For every They there ought to be a We. In our case there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-system as a They- system'" (638). But the potential of the Counterforce to undo the

Raketen-Stadt is non-existent. Represented by Roger Mexico's exploits 353

and Pirate Prentice's desire to organize an opposition, the activities

of the Counterforce only serve to legitimize the status quo. Roger is

revealed as a dangerous lunatic in the London Times. and Jessica

Swanlake rejects the passion he offers for the safe, nostalgic

normalcy of a life with Jeremy. Moreover, as long as the Counterforce

defines itself in terms of its opposition to Them, it is subject to

the same rules and desires that govern the Raketen-Stadt--abstraction,

greed, mastery, or in the terms identified very early in "Beyond the

Zero," "Money, Shit, and the Word":

Well, if the Counterforce knew better what those categories concealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dismantle the Man. But they don't. Actually they do, but they don't admit it. Sad but true. They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that's the hard fact. . . .We do know what's going on, and we let it go on. (712- 13)

Consequently, just as the discourse of "The Counterforce" "explodes," even by Gravity's Rainbow's standards, the only adequate response to the Raketen-Stadt is an explosion, a purging of ordinary, rational perceptions of the world, whether as a Rocket scientist, a spy, or a

Third-World politician. The void left in the wake of that explosion can only be filled by individual, groping acts of courage that will subvert, not oppose, the system: theft of an oil filter, acceptance of

Pantheism, recognition of individual death as part of the continuous process of life. Within the fictional world, such small acts cannot subvert the system, largely because too few characters are willing to 354

perform them. At the same time, "They" are never identified with

certainty, and (unlike the conspirators in An American Dream who are

identified with Barney Kelley) They only exist in Gravitv's Rainbow as

an idea, a paranoid delusion like the Puritan God or as hardware--

technology's own desire to fulfill itself. Refusal to participate in

Their system and random acts of terrorism or vandalism are the only

counterforce anarchic enough to avoid the hierarchical structures

endemic to organized political action. Slothrop's individual

scattering is emblematic of the fragmentation, disorientation, and

reduction of the abstraction of language to the concreteness of things

that the narrator believes Western consciousness must undergo.

"The Counterforce" and the novel end with an account of the

launch of Blicero's Rocket 00000, which coincides with the Rocket's descent upon the movie theatre in present-day Los Angeles. The penis/womb of the Rocket contains the S-Gerat Gottfried, and the last few sections of the last chapter of "The Counterforce" are devoted primarily to his experience of the launch, ascent, Brennschluss, and descent of the 00000. Wrapped in his Imipolex-G womb/shroud,

Gottfried's self, like Slothrop's, is fragmented into a series of images. Only after he relives his life in the moments before

Brennschluss, noting for the first time its preciousness, does he realize that he had been given by Blicero the freedom to choose not to die and that he had chosen instead not to live:

His [Blicero's] myopic witch's eyes, through the thick lenses, may be looking into Gottfried's for the first time. Gottfried cannot look away. He knows, somehow. 355

incompletely, that he has a decision to make . . . that Blicero expects something from him . . . but Blicero has always made all the decisions. Whv is he suddenly asking . . . . (724; Pynchon's ellipses)

Blicero waits for Gottfried to stop him from murdering his son, just

as he has waited in the past for someone--Katje or Enzian or Gottfried

himself--to shove him into the oven, but no one does. Blicero is the

signifier of death--that is clear as early as "Beyond the Zero"--but

he is indefatigable only because no one will challenge him. He is the

high priest of the Raketen-Stadt, the creator of the Sacred Texts of

masculine technology that Enzian seeks, the mythological hero of

Rocket religion. As a character, Blicero reveals most baldly the

sadistic desire to obliterate whatever is alive and Other and to make

Death supreme over Life, although even he longs for some other

solution:

"I want to break out--to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become. ..." (724; Pynchon's ellipsis)

At the same time his own guilt-ridden desire to be victimized finds its expression in the murder of what he loves, the extension of self that Gottfried represents. There is no counterforce in Gravity's

Rainbow to the spiritual power Blicero exudes in his single-minded pursuit of death, other than scattered fragments of anarchic dissent:

Slothrop's scattering. Pokier's quitting the game altogether, Geli

Tripping's witchcraft. Seaman Bodine's allegiance to John Dillinger, 356

whose bloody shirt, incidentally, is the revolutionary insignia, the

anarchic countersymbol to the repetitive metonymies of the Rocket seen

from below^O^, the windmill, the swastika, the Herero insignia, all

signs of the an ti-life movement of Technology.

The melding of Rocket 00000 and the present-day Rocket above the

Los Angeles theatre serves as the ultimate, complex expression of the

Rocket's significance for the reader. The discrepancy between story

and discourse time is obliterated as the reader, aware not only of the

Rocket's impending explosion, but of the Schwarzgerat (Gottfried) it

carries, experiences the omnipresence of the Rocket suspended at

Brennschluss a t the zenith of i t s parabola and the imminence o f the

Rocket's penetration of his or her own skull, as well as the destruction of the simultaneously fictional and meta-fictional audience situated with the reader outside the fiction in the perpetual present of discourse time and situated also inside the fiction in the progressive movement of story time. Thus the novel ends prior to the ultimate screaming of the first line of the novel, making the novel itself the warning that is heard by the reader, but not by the theatre audience who, in their insistence on the continuation of the movie that can only mask the invisible images on the screen that would reveal the truth, are doomed to death without a warning they can recognize. The capacity of art to reveal truth, or at least truth as the author sees it, is thus proclaimed even as the novel reveals itself as fiction. 357

Whatever effects this novel generates that cannot be accounted

for in this analysis, reading Gravity's Rainbow as a tragic work

implies a difference between it and most other postmodern works.

Pynchon insists in this text that human beings have the capacity to

perform simple, selfless acts of kindness and of courage. Pynchon

refuses to succumb either to the psychoanalytic assumption that all

actions are a result of unconscious motives, or to the behavioristic

assumption that all actions are the result of conditioning, or to the

Marxist assumption that all actions are the result of ideological

pressures, although each of these is partially true and dialectically

related. Nor does he rely upon a Kantean notion of a moral imperative that exceeds self-interest. Rather he revitalizes the notion of free will by making it a byproduct of the necessarily unpredictable nature of any given event. In any given situation, an individual can and does make choices, even though it would seem a contradiction to call the range of options available to culturally and psychologically conditioned individuals a matter of free choice. What makes this so is left loosely defined by Pynchon as a kind of life force, an inherent desire to live that is not solely the property of human beings, but is the common denominator of the various forms that constitute a living universe. It is a force that lies dormant under ossified layers of Western consciousness, buried by centuries of rationalizing the systematic destruction of Otherness, human and non­ human. It is the unnamable desire of life not to transcend but to 358

defeat death by celebrating life. As the narrator says, the forces

working for death are only almost as powerful as life.

For human beings, though, the inevitability of life's triumph

over death is at best uncertain:

it was the equinox . . . green spring equal nights . . . cnayons are opening up, at the bottoms are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like green in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell . . . human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be bom. This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong. (720; Pynchon's ellipses)

Western consciousness, and perhaps, this passage suggests, all forms of human consciousness are so powerful and so firmly entrenched that they can only be combatted by individual acts of kindness and random concrete acts of subversion, actions doomed to failure.

This analysis necessarily omits much of what happens in Gravity's

Rainbow. I have tried to argue that Gravity.' s Rainbow is unique insofar as its postmodern elements, which ordinarily tend toward disunity and fragmentation and lend themselves to irony, absurdity, or 359 despair, are combined instead with a powerful and consistent movement toward a tragic conclusion. Yet here, as in the other novels I have discussed, it is finally more the reader than the text who creates tragedy. Gravitv's Rainbow leaves the choice to you. 360

No-te.s.

^ David Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pvnchon (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London; Macmillan, 1988) 158, in noting this tendency, notes also the reason for it: "critical analysis will by its very nature work against the values implicit in Gravity's Rainbow, whose rhetoric and associational method are peculiarly resistant to discussion." Gravitv's Rainbow leaves the reader in a double-bind: analyze and be condemned by Pynchon; don't analyze and be silent. On the other hand, we should perhaps also remember Pynchon's indictment of bipolar thinking.

^ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973) 760. All subsequent references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically within the text.

^ I am referring here generally to Lacan's interest in language as both source and means of containment of Desire, and to Derrida's interest in language as both source and constraint of thought processes in general. Pynchon's reliance on Marshall McLuhan for his ideas about oral and literate cultures is generally accepted.

^ Edward Mendelson, "Gravity's Encyclopedia," George Levine and David Leverenz, eds., Mindful Pleasures: Essavs on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976) 161-95.

^ Pynchon's erudition strikes me as far more eclectic than comprehensive; his genius lies more in his capacity to make connections among disparate facts, intuitions, and ideas than in his ability to incorporate the details and subtleties of history and argument.

^ Richard Poirier, "Rocket Power," Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravitv's Rainbow (New York, New Haven, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986) 12, places all of us as masochistic victims of the corporate world, the Rocket the "ultimate whip," the "end product of the system."

^ Or, as the now infamous Pulitzer Prize reviewer summed up the novel's excesses: Gravity's Etainbow is "unreadable."

® The centrality and symbolic force of the Rocket is, of course, recognized by virtually all critics. What I want to posit here is the notion of the increasing dominance of the Rocket as a presence in the reader's mind and the trajectory of the Rocket as an analogue of the progression of the narrative. The reader develops a relationship to the Rocket's presence that is somehow outside the chaotic comings and 361

goings of characters, the consistently outraged voice of the narrator, and the web of thematic connections that constitute the content of the narrative.

^ Many critics note that the only way out of the system is a refusal to participate in it. See, for example, Tony Tanner, "V and V-2," Edward Mendelson, ed., Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N J : Prentice-Hall, 1978) 16-55; and Craig Werner, "Recognizing Reality, Realizing Responsibility," Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Thomas Pynchon (New York, New Haven, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986) 191-202.

As many critics have noted, Pynchon relies heavily on Norman 0. Brown's psychoanalytic study Life Against Death, which posits repression and the fear of death as the motivating factors of civilization. See Lawrence C. Wolfley, "Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman 0. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel," PMLA 92 (1977) 873-89.

Josephine Hendin, "What Is Pynchon Telling Us?" Bloom, MCV: Pynchon 37-46, sees Gravity's Rainbow as Pynchon's statement of absolute hopelessness. By contrast, Edward Mendelson, "Pynchon's Gravity," Bloom, MOV: Pynchon 17, says that Gravity's Rainbow is not a despairing book: "the possibilities for freedom, responsibility, and love are rare and difficult, yet the possibilities are real. Gravity's Rainbow is a tragic, not a pessimistic, novel." Marcus Smith and Khachig Tololyan, "The New Jeremiad: Gravity's Rainbow." Bloom, MCV: Pynchon 139-56, argue that the novel belongs to the jeremiad tradition in American literature, Pynchon insisting that, however propelled toward certain destruction we appear to be, the metahistorical view the novel presents allows for the possibility of freedom within the "chronometric Now." George Levine, "Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon's Fiction," Levine and Leverenz, 113-36, notes that Pynchon intends to disorient readers so that we, like Pokier and Slothrop will finally be willing to risk dissolution of self for the promise of freedom.

Thomas Schaub, Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity (Chicago, Urbana: U of Illinois F, 1981) 110, notes Pynchon's intention to, on the one hand, explain "underground" history and, on the other, to oppose anything that purports to be a stable, fixed "history." Other critics view Pynchon's view of history in terms of one or more thematic issues. For example, Scott Sanders, "Pynchon's Paranoid History," Levine and Leverenz, 139-41, claims that Pynchon views history as a plot narrated by a God who represents the original conspiracy theory.

See, for example, Joseph W. Slade, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner, 1974) 193-202. 362

What has since come to be known as chaos theory first began to take root among mathematicians and scientists from various disciplines in the early 1970's, about the same time as the publication of Gravitv's Rainbow. Obviously, Pynchon could not have been much aware of the questions and discoveries that were beginning to take shape, but he seems to have intuited not only the most revolutionary tenets of chaos science, but also to have found them applicable to human behavior. In the context of human subjectivity and behavior, chaos theory is relevant to Gravity's Rainbow in part because it supplies a theoretical basis for the possibility of freedom. Even though, statistically, human behavior will fall within the limits of normative, predictable behavior, ga individual case is ever precisely predictable. Choices may be limited, but they remain choices, or at least forks in the road (like the one William Slothrop, but not America, chose to follow). Moreover, the specific choices one does make do matter, insofar as they have the power to alter succeeding events in unpredictable ways. See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1987).

See Seed 158-68, for a discussion of characterization in Gravitv's Rainbow.

Paul Fussell, "The Ritual of Military Memory," Bloom, Rainbow 21-28, discusses the appropriateness of the scene as a full and affecting expression of the obscenity of war.

With others, Mendelson, "Encyclopedia" 179-81, argues that characters in this novel live on an interface between self and the systems that construct the self.

For Bloom, "Introduction," Rainbow 1-9, the story of Byron the Bulb and his resignation to powerlessness is emblematic of the entire novel.

1^ See Seed 197-213, for a discussion of both comic elements and narrative technique in the novel.

Critics vary considerably in their assessment of the narrator in Gravity's Rainbow. For example, Mendelson, "Introduction" 3, notes Pynchon's reliance on older narrative techniques such as the use of an omniscient narrator, direct addresses to the audience, and authorial judgments of characters and situations. George Levine, "Risking," 63, says the narrator is impossible to locate and makes no judgment of the horrors he relates. Schaub 124-33, refers to the narrator's "Orphic voice," but also to the gaps in his omniscience, the resultant "incompleteness" representing the "endless continuity of the world in process that Pynchon describes. Seed 205, notes the refusal of the narrator to provide an overview, thus embedding the reader in the text. Maureen Quilligan, "Thomas Pynchon and the Language of Allegory," Bloom, MCV: Pvnchon. 111-37, discusses the play of the 363

narrator's language and the choie of interpretations that playfulness allows, indeed, calls for. Louis Mackey, "Paranoia, Pynchon and Preterition," Bloom, Rainbow 58-61, calls the novel a "sustained piece of preterition," which displays a "linguistic paranoia," since its omniscient narrator makes us doubt his omniscience.

See, for example, Merdelson, "Pynchon's Gravity" 15-21.

See Seed 195-97, for a discussion of Pynchon's use of urban and natural imagery.

23 Most critics, of course, make some reference to Pynchon's use of science in Gravitv's Rainbow. Alfred S. Friedman and Manfred Puetz, "Gravity's Rainbow: Science as Metaphor," Bloom, MCV: Pvnchon 23-35, argue that the notion of "entropy management" is the central metaphor in Gravity's Rainbow. The pattern of life--"dust to order to dust"--is represented by the Rocket's parabola. They conclude that paranoia must be the "dominant condition of the human mind," since we only see the various substructures of the trajectory, not the whole picture. Most critics, on the contrary, and more reasonably, I think, see science as one, but by no means the principal structure or system Pynchon delineates as part of the overarching system of artificial systems Western civilization imposes upon its people.

24 See especially "The Butterfly Effect," Gleick 9-32.

23 For example. Plater xv, points out that Pynchon's plots unfold within the "thematic condition of duality"; Sanders 150-51, notes that binarism is the single most important perception of Pynchon's worldview. More accurate to Pynchon's vision, I think, is the notion of interface, which many critics have remarked upon. Schaub 103-12, for example, argues that Pynchon's prose style itself disrupts thematic meaning, and hence binary oppositions.

2® See Gabriele Schwab, "Creative Paranoia and Frost Patterns of White Words," Bloom, Rainbow 97-102, who refers to the novel as an "ecological fiction," which unifies and interrelates what are ordinarily isolated areas of experience and knowledge.

27 In addition to Mendelson, "Encyclopedia," see Schaub 118-19, on similarities between Gravitv's Rainbow and Moby-Dick.

2® As Mendelson, "Introduction" 4-5, notes. Gravity's Rainbow, unlike much contemporary fiction points not toward art or the artist, but toward the world outside the text. See also Seed 192-94.

2® Schwab 105-07, notes that Pynchon's metaphors reveal a transition from the robot or automaton of the mechanical age to the cyborg of the electronic age. We might note also that the flight of Rocket 00000 is the perfect representation of the cyborg's life cycle. 364

It represents a human life cycle to the extent that life is reduced to its simplest terms: birth--swift, linear, uncomplicated life--death.

Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown, 1984) 12-15.

See, for example. Seed 213-19. CONCLUSION

In the beginning I had hoped this project would help me resolve what I found to be troubling conflicts among competing approaches to literary criticism. As I have struggled to find my own voice within the community of academic critics, the problem has presented itself to me as a dichotomy: on the one hand, the aesthetic power of literary works, given the complexity of language, theme, and character of most canonical and many traditionally marginalized texts, seems to deserve the full attention of critics in an attempt to understand the rhetorical and formal features that constitute that power. On the other hand, I find equally important the issues raised by what I will call (somewhat loosely, I admit) dialectical critics--gender, racial, and ethnic roles within literary texts; marginalization of texts written by women and minorities; subtextual and intertextual complexities; political, historical, and economic contextualization of literary works; and the power of linguistic systems to conceal questionable assumptions and painful contradictions. I had hoped to define a space that would allow discussion of some of these issues while still doing justice to the integrity of the text. In order to define that space, I chose to focus on texts that seemed both to produce tragic effects and to pose questions about the issues

365 366

dialectical critics have raised (often, I might add, long before

critics did raise them). These novels, it seemed to me, had to have

some kind of unifying action or agent (or, as it turned out, voice or

continuous image) in order to evoke a tragic response, yet it seemed

clear also that the instability of their discourse left them so open

to interpretation that any account of the way the texts worked as a

whole would also have to include a discussion of at least some of the

issues raised by contemporary theorists. In short, it seemed that

some kind of unifying factor was at work directing (or manipulating)

the reader, even as other centrifugal forces worked to explode unity,

or at least make the boundaries of the text problematic.

Each of these novels exhibits some variation of these forces or

movements within its narrative structure. With the exception of

Gravity's Rainbow, all of the novels, through the use of narrators who

are involved in the stories they tell, draw attention to the process

of narrating, not in general, but in terms of the specific uses to which each narrator puts that process. Upon rereading, these issues

tend to foreground themselves more clearly, the process of story­ telling turns out to be closely connected to the content of the stories being told, and the whole novel--discourse as it interacts with story--rather than the apparent subject (the actions of Jim,

Gatsby, or Sutpen or the former selves of Humbert or Rojack) tends to be in some way tragic. (In Gravity's Rainbow, the trajectory of the

Rocket, rather than the motivations of the narrator, pulls the disparate elements of the narrative together, although even here the 367

narrator's voice provides a certain continuity.) Put another way,

what unifies each novel has more to do with the complicated

entanglements of story and discourse than with either by itself. The

overt story retains its significance, partly in its own right, but

more importantly as it fits into the narrator's motives and desires.

In Lord Jim, the omniscient narrator "frames" Marlow's narrative,

contextualizing it insofar as it provides both a first assessment of

Jim and the introduction of Marlow as a character targeted by Jim as the single person capable of understanding his case. One who rereads, having already discovered what happened to Jim, is much better able to attend to what Jim's experience means to Marlow and to understand that

Marlow's interest in Jim has a great deal to do with his need to posit

Jim's heroism as an antidote to his own anomie and his own doubt. The process of narrating Jim's story is finally what keeps alive Marlow's faltering belief in the cosmic rightness of the mercantile world he inhabits. Similarly, Nick, himself an eager bondsman, a fortune seeker, a believer in the Midas-myth that lures him to Wall Street, comes more readily to the fore once the story of Gatsby is known. As

Jim's story retains its significance, so, too, does Gatsby's, but, again, within the context of Nick's own world-weariness, unrelieved except by Gatsby, and his admission that we are all ensnared by images from the past that recast an alien world as an uneasy, but less threatening, reflection of ourselves. In both texts, recognizing that the narrators' acts of narrating are intertwined with the content of the story both renders more meaningful the stories of Gatsby and Jim, 368

and retrieves from embeddedness within the discourse the tragic

implications of Marlow's and Nick's narrative acts.

A similar level of complexity is further complicated by self-

ref lexivity in Lolita. As I have tried to argue, the most plausible

explanation of Humbert's actions in narrating is that he had in fact

planned his narrative as a means of self-redemption and as a memorial

to Lolita as he began to write. Yet equally convincing--and, to some,

more convincing--cases can be made that Humbert's narrative is self-

serving from start to finish or that he does alter his purposes midway

or that he is a synthetic character representing Nabokov's complicated

views about aesthetics and imagination. While this issue cannot be

resolved on the basis of the data of the text, casting Humbert in the

role of an artist with clear intentions makes possible a reading in which the discourse enriches the content of the story: as Humbert's

linguistic performance (which quite literally kills him) fails to make

amends to Lolita and he is reduced to mouthing unadorned homilies, so

even the most carefully constructed and successfully executed art--and by extension the self-created worlds in which we live--are always solipsistic, always an abstraction, always a failure. By contrast,

Rojack's self-created world, because it is meant to represent an imaginary but more authentic world than the ordinary one Mailer assumes his readers take for granted, challenges Rojack to become worthy of occupancy within it. However wanting the reader may find that world, Rojack's detailed and realistic descriptions of physical violence are clearly meant to shock the reader into recognizing the 369

need for radical excision of evil networks of power and greed. Here,

readers are asked to construct the world according to their own better

instincts in order to perceive the illegitimacy of the world as Mailer

believes it has been constructed for us.

Absalom. Absalom! and Gravity's Rainbow are the extreme test

cases of the possibility of finding unity within disunity, largely

because of the extreme non-linearity of their plots and, in Gravltv's

Rainbow, the extreme heterogeneity of factual data that continually

interrupts the (at least superficially) linear process of reading. If the other four novels are altered and enriched by rereading, these two rather demand rereading, if only to find out what "really" happened.

As with the other novels, rather than ensuring a dissipation of tragic effect, rereading seems to make that effect more powerful: semi-hidden elements emerge in significance, once the reader is freed from the laborious task of simply discovering what happened when and to whom.

Subsequent readings of Absalom. Absalom! allow readers to discover the inevitable logic of Shreve and Quentin's reconstruction that leads them to Bon's blackness as surely as Oedipus is led to the terrible truth about himself. Rereading also foregrounds Quentin's presence throughout the text and in the end positions the reader figuratively almost within the confines of Quentin's wracked body. Even more than does Absalom. Absalom!. Gravity's Rainbow insists upon rereading, and again rereading transforms the text. Once it is no longer necessary to ponder the fates of Slothrop and Pokier, Katje and Blicero, the

Moebius strip of paranoia and chance, and the strings and webs of 370

science, bureacracy, and history, the insistent presence of the Rocket

can emerge with its own message of tragic inevitability for us.

Tragedy in all of these texts comes in the form of a gradual discovery

or uncovering of facts, and that very process of discovery not only

raises questions about the ways in which we are affected and

manipulated by language, but at the same time offers itself as proof

of the dynamic nature of language as an interface (to borrow Pynchon's

word and concept) between ourselves and the world.

On the whole, this project has, I think, been successful at least

in giving plausible arguments for some of the ways in which each of

these texts works rhetorically, yet what can be said about the text

remains limited by my perception of what the author wants me to hear.

In fact, while the method allows discussion of various issues from

inside the text, it does not allow discussion of them from outside the

text, since doing so presupposes reading against the grain to one degree or another. Still, considering these texts as tragic actions has, I think, contributed to understanding the ways in which issues of contemporary criticism have been presented by these authors within their works, and it seems at least somewhat parochial to assume that what the authors have to say about those issues as they present them within an aesthetic medium is less important or less interesting than what we, as critics, might discover about them by reading against the grain. A more fruitful approach to this problem may be to ask how rhetorical and dialectical readings might enrich each other, despite 371

the fact that they proceed form different and contradictory

assumptions about the text and about the processes of reading and

writing. An awareness of and sensitivity to the issues raised by

contemporary critics would seem to help rhetorical critics delineate

those issues as they are raised by authors, and by the same token,

such rhetorical readings might help dialectical critics contextualize

or even deconstruct literary texts without disclaiming the possibility

of aesthetic effects that not only unsettle in a general way the

established order of things, but are also intellectually and

politically in accord with their own agendas.

The difficulty of such a position lies in the contradictory

assumptions that underlie reading with or against or perhaps without

regard to the grain. The best answer seems to be to adopt a

dialectical approach that can accommodate such contradictions by

focusing attention upon the relationships among different kinds of

analysis, rather than upon their mutual exclusivity. At the very

least, it seems necessary to use whatever tools are available, even at

the expense of logical consistency, if only to reflect some semblance

of the actual complexity of reading and writing processes. The

interface between the text and the world is, it seems to me, complex, dynamic, and to some extent unpredictable--perhaps chaotic is the appropriate adjective. It may also be the case that the interfaces among critical approaches are equally complex and worthy of attention and exploitation. 372

Closely connected to the issue of the relationship between

rhetorical and dialectical reading is the question of what it means to

us to read a literary text. I am not referring now to questions about

the complexity of the process of reading; I mean rather the ways in

which reading literature affects us as persons living in the world.

The issue might be framed in terms of Nietzsche's critique of

Aristotle's notion of catharsis, which hinges upon the question of

whether literary texts are (or should be) by nature conservative or

revolutionary. In Aristotle's view they seem to be conservative:

readers are freed from internalized fears and tensions that might

otherwise hamper their productivity as the morally responsible

citizens of a community. In Nietzsche's view they seem to be, at least ideally, revolutionary: readers are made to confront the illusory security of community, family, and even self, and emerge from that confrontation not only renewed, but changed. The literary text,

Nietzsche suggests, makes us aware of the radical contingency of our own lives, and thus makes us better able to live somehow more authentically (whatever that may mean) because of the immediacy of that knowledge. This is, of course, to pose the question in its starkest terms, and thus to reduce to two what are in reality an infinite variety of responses to an infinite number of texts. I don't wish to reduce that complexity or exaggerate the potential significance of literature either as an instigator of change or a conservator of established order. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that, depending upon how we read, literature can either make us more 373

comfortable living within the confines of the world as we have

constructed it materially and linguistically, or, on the contrary, it

may make us more aware of and resistant to the artificial security of

that world. It may not be stretching the issue too far to say that

each of the novels I have discussed poses this question for the

reader. As I have read and reread these novels and thought and

rethought my response to them, this question remains unanswerable to

me, dependent as it seems to be upon little more than the reader's own

inclinations (however complex the underlying causes of those

inclinations). As teachers, as well as readers and critics, of

literature, though, it would seem to be a question worth asking, and

our own responses to tragedy--whether modern, postmodern, Greek, or

Elizabethan--an appropriate vehicle through which to ask it. WORKS CONSULTED

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