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Content
PATTERN A N D PERCEPTION IN THE FICTION O F STANLEY ELKIN
by
Peter Joseph Bailey
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY O F THE G R A D U A TE S C H O O L
UNIVERSITY O F SO UTH ERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
D O C TO R O F PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1980
UMI Number: DP23070
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Dissertation Publishing
UMI DP23070
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
Peter ley.................................................
under the direction of A.is.... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements of
the degree of
Ph-D-
t l
'80
BISS
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
n * » M a y S’0 *
DISSERTATION
Chairman
ACKNOW LEDGEMENTS
Jackson I. Cope fir s t recommended that I read The Dick Gibson Show,
then encouraged m e to expand m y discussion of that novel into a Stanley
Elkin dissertation, a suggestion whose adoption I have not for a moment
regretted. I f the resulting work reflects any of Professor Cope's
wisdom about or love of 1iterature, I would be enormously pleased; it
bears the imprint of his critical methods on every page. Geoffrey
Green's advice and criticism have been extremely important to m e in the
preparation of this dissertation, his extensive knowledge of contempor
ary fiction having often guided m e through quandary and inspired m e with
its demonstration of the value of such knowledge. Max F. Schulz's
books on the American/Jewish novel and black humor clarified m y thinking
on many points, and his comments and suggestions on the manuscript were
encouraging and helpful. Karen Niche!son Segal supported m y graduate
career by extending to m e the invitation to teach in USC's Thematic
Option Program, and provided m e in the process with a succession of
excellent, demanding, stimulating classes of students, Eleanor Welch
Bailey offered support, constructive criticism and the example of her
own recent academic success. Lucretia Bailey Yaghjian helped m e to
parse Elkin's Heaven, and otherwise lent spiritual solace and intellec
tual aid. Frances Weller Bailey not only endured the dissertation pro
i i
cess but contributed mightily to i t , criticizing early drafts, proof
reading later attempts and typing final ones, and in general supplying
comfort and love when Elkin's work seemed momentarily too "wild and
bitter" even for m y taste. And Stanley Elkin provided delightful fic
tion, for which w e can all be grateful.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE............................................................................. 1
I. A DESERT SENSIBILITY IN TH E VIRGIN LAND..........................................7
I I : THE SO U N D O F THE AM ERICAN ORDINARY . .....................................................43
I I I . DEMYELINATING AMERICA A N D THE STRICKEN B U R G ER KING ....................... 134
IV. SEA RC H ES IN LANG UAG E, SEIZURES O F DESPAIR 194
V. THE APOTHEOSIS O F ANALOGY, THE CELEBRATION O F STO R Y .244
iv
PREFACE
In his review of Stanley Elkin's most recent book, The Living End,
Frank Kermode wondered why Elkin's characteristic literary admixture of
"sour, manic prose," linguistic extravagance, and "comic terror" has
not gained for him a wider audience, and he regretted that this latest
work showed l i t t l e promise of altering that circumstance. The targets
of The Living End, Kermode contended, "seem somewhat too large and
easy," and then added, "but only on cursory inspection; the fine print
w ill stand a lot of attention from anyone who thinks he could get
i
hooked on a taste so wild and b itter." The existence of this disser
tation is proof enough of one reader's having gotten "hooked on a
taste so wild and bitter"; what the dissertation must demonstrate is
that the "fine print"--not only of The Living End, but of Elkin's
previous work as well—is , as Kermode suggested, deserving of careful
and serious critical attention.
Elkin's work has been subjected to enough critical scrutiny at
this point--discussions of his fiction by Raym ond Olderman and Thomas
3
LeClair in the mid-1970s having established his novels' accessibility
to rigorous and detailed analysis--that there is no need to rational
ize or justify its extended examination here. And yet there remains a
tendency am ong critics and reviewers to assume that, however m uch they
1
admire or enjoy i t , his fiction is ultimately shapeless, self-indul
gent, uncontrolled--!'n short, inartistic--and a deliberate, thorough
going confutation of that view is one of the primary objectives of
this dissertation.
There are two different assumptions which underlie this attitude
toward Elkin's work, one of which is that i t is too funny to be
serious. His appeals for laughter in his stories and novels, Elkin's
detractors contend, tend to dissipate the formal energies of his work,
the narrative tensions necessary to effective fiction being so con
tinually released as to make his books feel excessively lig h t, relaxed,
as a consequence. A related, perhaps corollary, assumption is that
because his work gravitates toward self-contained scenes and humorous
sketches i t is episodic, lacking in formal coherence and structure.
(", . . the Brooks that comes to mind with Elkin," as one reviewer
4
neatly sum m ed up this position, "is not Cleanth but Mel." ) And,
most recently, the objection has frequently been raised that Elkin's
work has com e increasingly to value language (language-for-its-own-
sake is the popular term) in excess of its worth, letting an osten
tatious and gimmicky syntax and diction so thoroughly dictate the
course of his stories and novels that coherence is sacrificed to mere
expressiveness and form to poetic exuberance.
I t will be the burden of the entire dissertation to establish
the invalidity or irrelevance of such judgements against Elkin's art,
but i t may be well to sketch out the gist of these responses briefly
here. To begin with the final objection, we will see that one major
2
development in Elkin's fiction has indeed been its progressively
greater interest in and self-consciousness about language, this issue
becoming so central to the work that i t actually represents the
primary thematic concern of the novellas in the Searches and Seizures
collection and of the opening novella of The Living End. This does
not, certainly, deny that Elkin's language has become more and more
distinctive, intricately poetic and tirelessly evocative; i t is only
to suggest that his work has com e increasingly to dramatize the evo
lution of his own attitude toward language and to inquire seriously
into the meaning of the gesture of extreme language. The significance
of language in Elkin's fiction w ill be discussed in detail in the
chapters dealing with Searches and Seizures and The Living End, but
the conclusion of those arguments can be glimpsed in William Gass's
comment on Elkin's description of merchandise stacked on a department
store counter in A Bad Man: ". . . nothing but genre blindness," Gass
insists, "could prevent us from seeing that there is no warmer,
5
wealthier poetry being written in our time."
The argument that his work is marred by its episodic nature
assumes that Elkin is trying—and fa ilin g —to write plot-centered
fictio n , his attempts at conceiving consonant, resonant stories and
novels, stories and novels possessed of beginning-middle-end sequen
tia lity and solid, satisfying narrative-level resolutions, somehow
constantly going awry. Jhe Franchiser clearly demonstrates how l i t t l e
Elkin is concerned with cohesion of this narrative-level sort, and
the chapter dealing with that novel sets out to show that i t is
1
rendered coherent through metaphor and analogy, not plot, its con
sonance achieved through the convergence of parallel scenes and the
intertwining of patterns of reduplicative imagery. Im plicit in the
dissertation and informing its every page is the assumption--which
the fir s t chapter attempts to substantiate--that, although his ear
lie r work seems to align its e lf naturally with the plot-centered
fiction of contemporaries like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, there has
always been an anti-realist tendency in Elkin's work, a tendency which
ties i t more closely to the fiction of writers like Thomas Pynchon,
Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme than to the tradition of the
American Jewish novel. To portray the evolution of Elkin's fiction
in any other way is to be obliged to declare The Living End an inex
plicable divergence from Elkin's habitual m ode rather than to see it
(as the dissertation's concluding chapter does) as an extension and
culmination of tendencies discernible in his work from Boswel1 and
Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers forward.
Is Elkin's fic tio n —to consider the in itia l objection last—
overwhelmed by its ow n extravagances of humor? is there an excess of
thevComic .in his work? Certainty--but then there is an excess of
practically everything in his work: of pathos, poetry and hilarious
dialogue, of outlandish situations and rhetorical tours de force, of
puns, funny stories and spirit-crushing insights, of improbable tales
and visionary similes, of paradigms and picaresque quests and eccen
tric , fu lly imagined people, place and things—and of catalogues like
this one. Elkin's is a fiction of excess, a fiction of plethora,
4
abundance and a rtis tic generosity, and to recognize this is to under
stand that the real tension underlying all his work, whatever its
shape once i t has been transformed, dramatized into plot, is that of
the imagination refusing to allow invention to flag,that of the crea
tive mind's insistence that new pleasures and insights are s t ill to
be wrung from the old materials i f energy and vision enough are
brought to the task. This aspect of Elkin's art can be discussed only
in uncomfortably intuitive and speculative terms, but before we leave
inspiration behind to concentrate on those qualities (form, deliberate
execution, metaphoric cohesion) which Elkin's work is reputed to lack,
w e should note that i t is only because of that surface exuberance and
generosity of invention that his work invites critical analysis in the
fir s t place. Explication must be the m ode and method of our under
taking, then, and i f the vast majority of the passages from Elkin's
work cited in the following pages are trotted out to provide evidence
of pattern or to demonstrate coherence, som e others will be quoted as
m uch for the simple pleasure of quoting them, as a reminder of the
extrastructural joys of language and invention which are the animating
dynamic behind all of his fiction and which make i t such a delight
to read.
5
e
N O TES
1
Frank Kermode, "'Love and D o as You Please,'" rev. of The Living
End by Stanley Elkin, The New York Review of Books, 1 August 1979,
p. 46.
2
The fir s t important discussion of Elkin's work appeared in Ray
m ond M . Olderman, Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the
Nineteen-Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 53-71,
175-81, et passim.
3
Thomas LeClair, "The Obsessional Fiction of Stanley Elkin,"
Contemporary Literature, 16, 2 (1975), pp. 147-62.
^Geoffrey Stokes, rev. of The Living End by Stanley Elkin, The
Village Voice, 20 August 1979, p. 82.
^William Gass, O n Being Blue (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976),
p. 89.
6
CHAPTER I
A DESERT SENSIBILITY IN THE VIRGIN LA N D
There is a presence, pervasive but largely unspecified, in m uch
of Stanley Elkin's fiction , a reality with which his protagonists all
com e into contact and in terms of which each of them must orient and
define himself. That presence consists in what might variously be
termed the ordinary, the commonplace, the routine, or the normal, in
what the protagonist of Elkin's f ir s t novel identifies as "a texture
of domesticity, thick as atmosphere, as complexly there as government—
its highways, national parks, armies—imp!icit in a postage stamp."1
Elkin's contemporaries Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover too have worked
with the possibilities inherent in a juxtaposition of the omnipresent
yet elusive ordinary with intimations of som e deeper, more portentous
or revolutionary conception of reality: in Oedipa Maas' suspicion that
"behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent
2
meaning, or only the earth," in The Crying of Lot 49, for instance,
or in the unresolved tension between Mr. Brown's political predicta
b ilitie s and the anarchistic, liberating yet disquieting, vision of
the Cat in the Hat with his "Tricks and Voom and things like that" in
3
"The Cat in the Hat for President." But neither of these writers
has made the ordinary a central thematic concern of his work as often
7
or as consistently as has Elkin, and while the theme is not new ("Our
themes, like the poor, are always with us," Elkin has said4), his
approach to i t is, his fiction viewing i t from numerous perspectives,
attempting to distinguish its constituent elements and to describe
whatever.structure i t can be said to have.
The ordinary, for Elkin, is not merely the random scramble of
events which impinge, without altering or surprising us, upon our
consciousness from day to day; for him, instead, the ordinary is a
habit of mind, a perceptive structure we carry in our heads which not
only colors, but actually dictates, what we comprehend and the ways in
5
which we comprehend i t . The ordinary that Boswell and so many of
Elkin's other protagonists imagine themselves to be encountering in
the world is actually what Elkin's latest work of fiction designates
"the conventional wisdom," a normal, apparently logical and com m on
sensical way of thinking which allows us to convince ourselves that
everything is under control, that there are discernible joints and
seams in reality, the discovery of which can reassure us that the real
is safe, sound—that i t is well-constructed and admirably suited to
our purposes. In that most recent work, Elkin's protagonist is
murdered and ascends to heaven, where he finds everything—St. Peter
with his key to the Pearly Gates, harp-playing angels floating by on
flu ffy clouds—just as the conventional wisdom has always pictured i t ,
the world beyond a veritable Children's Bible image of paradise.
Elkin's purposes jn The Living End are too complex to be easily
summarized here, but i t is nonetheless clear that in working with our
8
paradigmatic image of heaven he is attempting to do with i t what many
of Coover's Pricksongs & Descants fictions do to their similar subject
matters: using, as Coover expresses i t in his prologue to the collec
tion's "Seven Exemplary Fictions," "familiar mythic or historical forms
to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader . . . to
the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from mystery
to revelation."^
Although Elkin elsewhere takes similar products of the conventional
wisdom as his subjects (the figure of the bully in "A Poetics for
Bullies," the aristocratic fairy tale in "The Making of Ashenden,"
received notions of the security and s tab ility of a hom e in "The Condo
minium," the idea of celebrity in Boswell), he has also approached this
mental set from the opposite direction, focusing not upon the thoughts
which constitute i t , but upon the various sources in the world from
which we derive i t and have i t reinforced. Radio, with its neat time
segmentations and reassuring interruption of our silences, is one such
source, Elkin suggests, and so he gives us Dick Gibson, a cipher and
embodiment of the Midwest American Standard view of reality, a radio
personality whose voice becomes "part of the generalized sound of
American life " and whose ideal, by his own admission, is to "have life
be like i t is on the radio--all comfy and clean."7 Another vehicle
for the promulgation of the conventional view is popular music,
references to which proliferate throughout Elkin's fiction. From the
early story, "Perlmutter at the East Pole" (in which the protagonist
of the t it le boasts that all his brainstorms come from "popular music.
9
I o
That's where the ideas are" ), to the 1976 novel, The Franchiser, with
its elaborate scaffolding of show music motifs and tin pan alley echoes,
that music which is franchiser Ben Flesh's personal heritage ("Stan
dards. Hits. Top of the charts. Whistled. Hum m ed. Carried on the
com m on American breath .") is the environment through which nearly all
of Elkin's protagonists move, their ears preternaturally tuned to those
lyrics which, in their assumption of life 's ordinariness, affirm their
view of the world and their place in i t .
One additional repository of the conventional wisdom worth noting
at the outset is language—words and their a b ility to give substance to
and codify the normal, their capacity for syntactifying the ordinary.
The Elkin characters who treat language as a primary means of expres
sing their intrinsic unexceptional ness, who use language as a badge
signalling their solidarity with the typical and the regular of America,
are numerous. O n a bus trip to N ew Jersey, Dick Gibson encounters a
w om an whose conversation consists almost entirely of knock-knock jokes,
" lit t le moron" stories and corny one-liners, her explanation of this
linguistic tic being " 'I thought that's the way people speak1" (DGS,
p. 53). In his travels, Ben Flesh picks up a hitchhiker who converses
in public service announcements, advising Flesh " 'Only you can prevent
forest f ir e s ,'" and reassuring him that he keeps the Rolaids he is
chewing with the rest of his medicines, out of the reach of children
(TF, p. 221). The most elaborate and significant episode of Elkin's
fiction in which language is purposefully manipulated to make i t reflect
the average and the everyday occurs in his second novel, A Bad Man. At
10
the novel's conclusion the protagonist, Leo Feldman, recalls a relation
ship he has had with one Dedman, a m an uncomfortable with uncodified
friendships and inarticulate comaraderie, What Dedm an really wanted,
Feldman understood, was a friendship which reduced both of them to
mere images of each other, a bond which sacrificed difference and
idiosyncrasy to the good of the relationship, and, offended, he turned
on Dedman, mocking his notions of comradeship by insisting that they
call each other "Ace" and "Chief" and that they speak to each other
only in the good-buddies jargon of fraternity men, babbling '"Way to
££, big f e lla 1" and "'How're they hangin', Flash?1" at every possible
opportunity.^ Although Feldman's situation differs from that of the
travelers both Gibson and Flesh meet, he is no less aware than are
they of language's potential for expressing one's enlistment in the
ranks of the average and the regular, a potential which he exploits by
parodying i t , using conventional forms to mock themselves.
The ordinary, then, is delivered up in a number of forms in Elkin's
fiction , but the message behind i t is always the same. W hy the ordir
nary? Another of Ben Flesh's hitchhikers, a m an recently released from
a twenty-year term in prison, provides the most explicit defense of the
ordinary to be found in the Elkin canon, while simultaneously identi
fying Flesh as the m an who, like himself, has particular reasons to
take this message to heart. 1,11 been shut up with fellows like you
decades,'" the ex-convict insists.
Crook, all crimes are crimes of passion. Adventure
lays in the bloodstream like platelets . . . . Get a
normality. Live on the plains. Take a warm milk at
11
bedtime. Be bored and find happiness. Greys and
m uds are the decorator colors of the good life .
Don't you know anything? Speed k ills and there's
cholesterol in excitement. Cool i t , cool i t . The
ordinary is all we can handle.(TF, p. 220)
The ordinary is the safe, the passionless, the mediated; i t prevents
those living within its bounds from losing touch with the human--the
hum an defined in its most superficial terms--while i t also insulates
them against unfamiliar or disquieting experiences by providing
preconceived explanations of all phenomena, and assures them that the
accomodations they make and the sublimations they achieve on its behalf
w ill ultimately afford them longer, though more boring, lives.
I f i t is in their concern with the ordinary, its investigation and
illumination, that Elkin's stories and novels most closely resemble the
epistemological and perspectivist fictions of Pynchon and Coover, i t
is in the nature of the opposition that som e of his characters express
toward i t that his work diverges most perceptibly from the matter and
the manner of theirs. In characters like Feldman ("In the A 1 ley") , ^
Push the Bully ("A Poetics for Bullies"), Leo Feldman (A Bad Man), and
Alexander Main ("The Bail bondsman") Elkin presents the ordinary's
antagonists and combatants: irascible, w illfu l, tenacious, uncompro
mising m en for w hom the self is the ultimate value and all external
forces which attempt to define, restrict, or in any way impinge upon
that self are the enemy. A primary commitment in life for these
characters, consequently, is the disruption of all bureaucracy, lite ra l
or figurative, of a ll forms of organization which have as their
effect the subordination of the claims of the individual to their ow n
12
collectivist imperatives and objectives.
Feldman refuses to submit to the role of dying m an the world would
impose upon him, rejecting the ordinary, dignified hospital death in
favor of an "heroic death," one he can personally seek out and fu lly
experience, no matter how tawdry or degrading its circumstances. Push
the Bully feels similarly reduced to the basic unit of self, recog-.!
nizing his utter unsuitability to the world of the competent, the
productive and the prosperous, but affirming that self nonetheless,
insisting upon its constituent elements of "envy, jealousy, and need,"
and boasting of "the cabala of m y hate, of m y irreconcilableness,"
because they are "what I have, all I can keep. M y bully's sour solace.
It's enough, I ' l l make do" (p. 217). Irreconcilable equally well
describes Leo Feldman, the protagonist of A Bad Man, Elkin's most ex
tensive treatment of the selfhood theme. For Feldman not only rejects
the mutual self-abnegation im plicit in Dedman's offer of friendship;
he also uses his department store basement to sell ille g a l products
and services to the public and, when arrested and jailed for this,
does everything in his power to disrupt the bureaucratic regimentation
imposed by the prison's dictatorial warden, attempting to undermine
its well-ordered codes of behavior and to dissolve the prisoners'
united front, their collectivized identity. Even more committed to the
disruption of conventional ordersis Alexander Main, partly because,
as a bail bondsman, he profits from others' legal trespasses, but also
because he has a taste for violation and contingency, a taste he
articulates in toasting "Our times":
13
Here's to the complicated trade routes of the drug
tra ffic , to micro-dot tabs of LSD, to folks' vengeant
itchiness as the discrepencies bloom apace and injustices
shake the earth like underground faults. Here's to
moonshots and the confusion of priorities. To TV in
the ghetto and ads in the glossies and whatever engines
that raise expectations like the hard-on, and drive m en
up one wall and down the other. To hard times and our
golden age of blood. (S&S, p. 12)
Main cultivates disorder less for its ow n sake, however, than for the
possibility its existence offers him for action and self-assertion,
every fissure in the cultural superstructure providing him with access
to power, creating an occasion for him to step between the law and the
lawless and exercise his judgment as to who should be released back
into the society and who should remain in the state's custody. What
Main is, then, is what Feldman and Push are, what the prison warden
calls Leo Feldman: "a bad man"--a subverter of order and organization
in the nam e of self, one who in the world's view will always stand
accused of his own character, guilty of his own impulses; a man, in
short, whose w ill, needs, and desires w ill ever be too strong for him
to surrender possibility or allow all of the special and the extra
ordinary, the exceptional and the abnormal, to be routinized out of
existence.
The character and quality of the opposition these 'bad men' pose
to the American ordinary reflects an influence discernible in Elkin's
work nowhere to be found in the fiction of Pynchon and Coover--that of
Saul Bellow and, more generally, of the American Jewish novel tradition
of the 1950's and 60's. What Elkin and Bellow share—and what these
four Elkin characters exemplify—is what Max Schulz has termed "radical
14
sophistication," a refusal to see the basic polarities of hum an
existence reduced to anything less than irreconcilability, and a convic
tion that the tension between communal demands and individual desires
12
is one of the most inevitable and irresolvable of these conflicts.
The notion that, as Moses Herzog explains in Herzog, m an is capable
of taking on his "bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-develop
ment," that he need not utterly surrender his "poor, squawking,
13
niggardly individuality," represents a point of thematic convergence
linking the fiction of Elkin and Bellow, a link further testified to
by their shared preference for writing novels dominated by a male
protagonist, usually identified in the work's t it le , around w hom a
number of less sharply characterized m en and wom en orbit, less charac
ters than projections of the choices the protagonist must make in his
attempts to successfully balance personal needs with public responsi-
14
b ilitie s .
The extent of Elkin's literary indebtedness to Bellow's work is
d iffic u lt to measure with any precision, though his acknowledgement
15
that Bellow is "the writer who has influenced m e most deeply"
decreases the likelihood of that influence's importance being over
estimated. Further complicating the issue, however, is Bellow's
identification with the American Jewish literary tradition, a tradition
to which Elkin has consistently in recent published interviews dis-
1 fi
claimed any allegiance. That Bellow can be separated off from that
tradition, as Elkin's alignment of himself with the w riter, but not
with his literary heritage, would seem to imply, appears less implausi-
15
ble when we recognize that the numerous thematic parallels between the
two authors' work are less significant than a number of general formal
sim ilarities--that Elkin very probably learned less what to say from
Bellow than he learned how to say i t . Leslie Fiedler's description of
Bellow's style accurately characterizes that style, while at the sam e
time pointing up a few of the elements of i t which might have inspired
Elkin's early s tylistic development. ". . . there is always the sense
of a living voice in his prose," Fiedler contends,
Muted or released, his language is never dull, or
simply expedient, but always moves under tension,
toward or away from som e kind of rich, crazy poetry,
a juxtaposition of high and low style, elegance and
slang, unlike anything else in English except Moby
Dick, though at the same time not unrelated in range
and variety to spoken Yiddish.
Since Bellow's style is based on a certain
conversational ideal at once intellectual and informal,
dialogue is for him necessarily a d is tilla tio n of his
strongest effects. Sometimes one feels his characters'
speeches as the main events of the books in which they
occur . . . "17
I f we were to multiply exponentially the terms of this description,
liberally inserting 'very' and .'extremely' and 'excessively' at
strategic points, we might arrive at a passable characterization of
Elkin's style, the ElRinian inflation of tone, pitch and language
accounting for the fact that his prose so seldom echoes Bellow's
despite its descriptive sim ilarity to i t . Elkin's style, Tike Bellow's,
attempts to encompass formal and vernacular, intellectual and vulgar
planes of discourse through the assimilation of all of them into one
elastic and expansive level of narrative; his novels too display a
tendency to gravitate structurally toward characters' speeches, the
MJ
cruxes of his work as often crises of rhetoric as crises of plot; and,
fin a lly , dialogue provides his work with the model upon which the
narrative line is predicated, the narrators of his novels often seeming
continuous with, even extensions of, the idioms of the central prota
gonists. Elkin's acknowledgement that his approach to dialogue derives
18
from Bellow makes explicit what a comparison of any two of their
early novels would clearly indicate—that Elkin's own "rich,.crazy
poetry" was developed under Bellow's tutelage, and that Elkin's primary
debt to him is a technical or formal one, one having less to do with a
shared cultural or literary heritage than might in itia lly seem to be
the case.
More d iffic u lt to resolve than the question of the nature of his
debt to Bellow's work is the issue of Elkin's relationship to the
American Jewish literary tradition as a whole. While his most recent
work has concerned its e lf peripherally, where at a ll, with notions to
which fiction within that tradition typically addresses its e lf (those
of the Jew's assimilation into, or rejection of the majority American
culture and the possibility of the survival of a recognizable Jewish
identity once that assimilation has been effected), such issues are
considerably more important in his early fiction , fiction which bears
an occasional marked resemblance to the work of other American Jewish
novelists of the 1950's and 60's, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth in
particular. Elkin's Meyer Feldman ("The Sound of Distant Thunder")
and Jake Greenspahn ("Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers") are
urban shopkeepers beset by fears and agonies not unlike those suffered
17
by the ghetto merchants of Malamud stories like "The Last Seven Days,"
"Angel Levine," and "The Prison"(to cite only those stories that Elkin
could have read before publishing his own fir s t fictio n s), while
Feldman's epiphany at the close of Elkin's story ("'A ll the beauty,'
19
he sobbed, 'all the beauty'" ) is teasingly reminiscent of the Malamud
protagonist's typical discovery of the supernatural at the core of the
mundane and spirit-defeating reality which he inhabits. Less obvious,
perhaps, are the sim ilarities between Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" and
Elkin's "Am ong the Witnesses." Both stories have as their protagonist
a middle-class Jewish young m an just out of the service who is attempt
ing to postpone making any definite decisions about his future--
attempting, that is, to declare personal moratorium on his responsibi
lit y to define his position relative to the tensions which exist betweer
the.culture in which he lives and the cultural heritage which is his.
Both characters find that no such moratoria are possible, Roth's Neil
Klugman and Elkin's Richard Preminger reluctantly recognizing and ac
cepting the social place and role to which their cultural heritage
commits them, their efforts at disengaging themselves from their
familial pasts abandoned.
That these stories share settings as well as a number of cultural
presuppositions is obvious enough, but the point of comparing them
here is not so much to suggest that Elkin's early short fiction is
imitative of Malamud's or Roth's, only that som e of that fiction loca
ted its e lf squarely and self-consciously within the bounds of the
American Jewish literary tradition, to which Malamud and Roth are
18
prominent contributors. These early Elkin pieces contain an element
too, however, which at once undermines their continuity with that
tradition and also predicts the kind of fiction he was subsequently to
write, a fiction bearing greater sim ilarities to the work of writers
like Barth, Pynchon and Coover than to the work of Malamud, Roth, Bel
low, et al_. That departure from the form and assumptions of the typical
American Jewish short story is clearest in "Am ong the Witnesses,"
which, although similar in many respects to Roth's novella, nonetheless
diverges from i t in its final rhetorical purposes. For "Goodbye,
Columbus" is ultimately a work of realism, one which declares its
continuity with the American Jewish litera ry tradition--and thus, by
extension, with European realism, which underlies that tradition--
through its "criticism of the contemporary world," its."serious
treatment of everyday rea lity ," and its pretense of objectivity, of
actions recorded in unmediated and untendentious terms, to use Erich
20
Auerbach's standards of literary realism. Although there are
numerous realistic elements of Elkin's story as well, his work is less
concerned with how people interact in society (James is Roth's literary
mentor, not Elkin's) as i t is with how people mentally construct the
world they subsequently com e to call society. While both stories
deal with alternative interpretations of what Jewishness means (Neil's
relatives representing middle class, urban Jews, the Patimkins a more
prosperous, suburban model; Preminger's sense of Jewishness as a kind
of cultural self-abandonment and heedlessness played o ff against the
hotel guests' sense of i t as a bond linking them a ll as suffering,
19
guilty humans), Roth concentrates upon the external signs and
manifestations of the two cultural worlds—upon what Tom Wolfe calls
"status lif e details"—and their impact on the love a ffa ir between Neil
and Brenda, and Elkin focuses upon the story's duality as competing
conceptions of reality, as contrasting interpretations of a given
cultural situation. To put the difference over-simply: Roth's charac
ters think in order to act, and we understand them through their ac-.\
tions; Elkin's characters, on the other hand, have largely mental
confrontations, their oppositions resulting from contrasting conceptions
of the real, their resolutions effected only through the emergence of
a triumphant vision.
What has always prevented Elkin from becoming the realis t som e
21
of his critics would prefer him to be . is~:his.,tende.ncyo to:-take more
interest in mental structures than societal ones, his greater concern
with how his characters perceive than how they act. The difference is
not very great in an early short story like "Am ong the Witnesses,"
which traces, in terms a more conventional realist could readily
accept, the gradually developing realization oh the protagonist's part
that the idea he has been trying to live out—that of the self-indulgent
bachelor-on-the-make—is ludicrously inappropriate in a world in which
children drown in resort swimming pools and all but he know that
vacations from casual hum an suffering, and the guilt often attendant
on that suffering, aren't to be had. For Roth—and for a number of his
colleagues— the center of interest in such a narrative would be the
consequences of Preminger's thinking upon the lives of others; for
20
Elkin, the emphasis instead must be placed on the pattern of thought
its e lf, its foundation and implications. For Preminger to move from
viewing Norma, one of the hotel's guests, as a wom an "on the edge of
age," as a w om an who, "having tried all the other ways, having gone
alone to the dances in the gymnasium of the Hebrew School, having
read and mastered the Journal of the American Medical Association for
April so that she might hold intelligent conversation with the nephew
of her mother's friend" (C&K,K&C, p. 74)—for Preminger to begin to
see this w om an not as a sociological type of the husband-seeking Jewess-
as-loser but as a possible marriage partner is reversal and recognition
enough for Elkin.
Despite the presence of som e of the characteristics and concerns
of the American Jewish novel within i t , then, Elkin's fiction ultimate
ly diverges from that tradition in significant ways and for a number
of cultural and a rtis tic reasons. Primary am ong those reasons, cer
tainly, is Elkin's determination not to situate his work within that
tradition. A necessary precondition of that choice, however, was a
cultural shift effected by American popular culture which transformed
what had previously been recognized as a distinctly Jewish idiom or
style of speech into something approaching a national syntax of humor,
the mode of Jewish comedy coming more and more to seem simply the m ode
22
of American comedy. Elkin's characteristic style, particularly in
its previously cited capacity for accommodating divergent and often
incongruous realities and in its general tone of mordant comedy, owes
m uch to that idiom; significantly, that style, with only slight shifts
21
in syntactical emphasis, can be used with equal effectiveness in
narrating both the adventures of Jewish Leo Feldman and goyish Dick
Gibson.
The Americanization of that familiar Jewish idiom was a develop
ment reflective of broader social changes occurring over the past
quarter century in the relationship between mainstream American and
American Jewish cultures, one paradoxical result of which was that that
former culture's adoption, through the American Jewish novel of the
1940's and 50's, of the Jew as literary type of hum an alienation had
the effect of fa c ilita tin g the real-Hife Jew's assimilation into
mainstream American social and cultural lif e , his alienation, in these
terms at least, decreasing in the process. While the mutuality of
influence discernible in these cultural shifts culminated, on the one
hand, in the emergence of Jews as major figures in the American lit e r
ary landscape, i t could also be said to point toward the subsequent
appearance of a number of American writers of Jewish descent whose
heritage would play l i t t l e i f any role in shaping the kind of fiction
they were to write. Jonathan Baumbach, Leonard Michaels, Peter
Spielberg, Ronald Sukenick and Elkin areia few such writers, all of
w hom share, beyong a com m on heritage, an interest in literary form
which allows them to subordinate social and psychological realism in
their fiction to the exploration of pattern, of paradigm and its
relation to meaning. Clearly the most accomplished writer of this
group, Elkin is also the one who has managed most successfully and most
extensively to put the traditional materials of the American Jewish
22
novel to the unconventional ends of this kind of fiction. While
"Am ong the Witnesses" can be seen as a story which points in the direc
tion of manipulating a set of Jewish cultural assumptions for struc
tural purposes in fiction, Elkin's later novel, A Bad Man, pushes well
beyond this, setting up a conceptual dichotomy between a metaphorical
Jewish perception of the world and a WASP-ishly Christian one, the
two perspectives combining to constitute a novel which effectively
mediates between the American Jewish novel at one extreme and the
epistemological fiction of Pynchon and Coover at the other.
Elkin is hardly the fir s t novelist to make the clash between
Jewish and gentile cultures in America the subject of a literary work,
of course. Nathanael West's "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" presents
an allegorized version of the Jew's attempted entrance into Western
culture, a few of the protagonists of Bernard Malamud and Bruce Jay’
Friedman fantasize at length about being goys or about gaining admis
sion to the goyishe world, and much of Norman Mailer's work, fiction
and non-fiction, has been concerned with the nature of the disparities
between these two cultures. Elkin's treatment of the theme is
exceptional, however, not only in the extent to which i t is willing to
transform this opposition into an epistemological problem, but also in
its simultaneous a b ility to sustain the illusion that this is a con
f li c t being waged between two convincing and believable figures at the
same time.
The novel's t it le gives the reader his fir s t indication of what
Jewishness is to mean here: to be Jewish, in the view of Fisher, auto
23
cratic warden of the prison to which Leo Feldman has been committed for
a year for "doing favors" for customers in the basement of his depart
ment store, is to be a "bad man," to be a m an more concerned with the
self than with the communal order and the societal structures with
which Fisher aligns himself. Self-proclaimed "Fisher of bad men," the
warden represents goodness in a ll its various forms and ramifications—
self-denial, generosity, logicality, a belief that hum an existence is
rational and controllable because i t is predictable, consecutive,
ordinary, reducible to simple explanations and consistent with normal
expectations. Feldman, consequently, is the "bad man" opposed to all
this, one dedicated to self-aggrandizement and to the philosophical
assumption that the individual's only possible role in a contingent,
senseless universe is to keep himself alive through extending his sense
of his ow n special ness and extraordinariness, an undertaking which
often necessitates the victimization of fellow humans and the recogni
tion that he himself is the only one in the world capable of perceiving
and celebrating his own special ness. Fisher is reasonable, whereas
Feldman insists upon his passions and instincts; Fisher advocates
compliance and accommodation-;in all things, while Feldman keeps a
weather eyje-out for that which can be resisted; Fisher feels very m uch
at hom e in the unheroic, unaspiring bureaucratic world of modern mass
society, whereas Feldman feels a stronger tie to "a world that might
have been charted on an old map, the spiky spines of serpents rising
like waves from wine-dark seas . . . a distant, Praetorianed land,
unamiable and harsh" (p. 42)--of such things are the contrasting vi~;
24
sions of Elkin's typical W A S P and Jew comprised.
Feldman's position, not unlike Push the Bully's, assumes his ow n
irreconcilability, presupposes individual isolateness and the absolute
fin a lity of hum an loneliness as givens, and i t is these notions that
Fisher wants most to root out of his prisoner. Feldman is too m uch
his father's son to submit to the prison's regimen, however, too m uch
the son of a Jewish peddler who worked the streets of southern Illin o is
for a living and who once sold the entire inventory of his wagonload
of merchandise to an enthralled audience of W A SPs watching an ox-
pulling contest at an Illimois county fa ir. Feldman recalls his fa-.,
ther's obsession with the question, "'What's to be done with the
unsalable thing?'" when he is assigned to work in the prison canteen
and, encouraged by Fisher to increase the canteen's profits, complies
by selling only that merchandise which prisoners couldn't possibly need
or want—overseas mail letters, shoetrees, suntan lotion, crayons, guava
soda, gum m ed reinforcements for notebook paper and the like. Recogni
zing this to be the merchandising scheme of a bad m an carried out in
bad fa ith , as the perversity of a salesman who sells only for the
pleasures of self-aggrandizement and the victimization of others, Fisher
condemns Feldman to solitary confinement, convinced that there he will
learn the illusion of selfhood, the lesson that there is no Feldman,
no bad man, in a room with only one person in i t . Solitary confine
ment affects Feldman exactly as Fisher had anticipated that i t would.
Visiting Feldman in his cell after a week or so, Fisher subtly offers
him his release i f he w ill only revise the ending of a story about his
25
son he has told Fisher so as to make i t reflect fatherly love rather
than 'bad man' perversity, Feldman ultimately submitting to the lie in
order to escape from imprisonment with himself.
Feldman's capitulation here not only anticipates the final scene
of the novel, in which he must plead for his life using the similarly
self-incriminatory narrative of his friendship with and betrayal of
Dedm an for his defense, but i t also suggests the ultimate basis of
Feldman's vulnerability to the warden's systems and machinations—g u ilt.
I t is g u ilt which convinces Feldman that he belongs in prison despite
the flims.i ness of the evidence brought forth to convict him; i t is
gu ilt too which allows him to accept Dr. Freedman's explanation of a
shadow over his heart as an homonculus, the fossilized fetus of a twin
which succumbed to "some early Feldmanic aggrandizement" (p. 7) and
which becomes, while he is in solitary confinement, an imagined c ritic
of his heart, designating i t "'a desert, som e prehistoric potholed
thing . . . a m oon of a heart'" (p. 141). Feldman's guiltiness stems
less from what he does than from what he is, a fact not lost upon
Fisher, who sights in on this point of vulnerability in his prisoner
and lets fly with a lecture which represents the novel's most explicit
articulation of the WASP/Jew antimony. Upon his release from solitary
confinement, Feldman is invited to a party in the warden's quarters,
the gathering intended as an object lesson for him in W A S P civics, as
his host patiently explains.
'Say what you w i ll , Feldman . • . but urbanity is a
Christian g ift. Rome, London, Wittenberg, Geneva—
citie s , Feldman. The history of us Christians is
26
bound up with the history of great cities. I mean
no offense, of course, but yours is a desert sensibility,
a past of pitched tents and camps . . . . I've stood
beside sideboards and spent Christmas with friends.
There's leather on m y bookshelves, Feldman. I've been
to Connecticut. I know how to sail. What are you in
our culture? A mimic. A spade in a tux at a function
in Harlem.
'I make this astonishing speech to you not out
of malice. It's way. of life against.way of life with
me, Feldman. I show you alternatives to wholesale and
re ta il. I push past your poetics, your metaphors of
merchandise, and scorn the emptiness of your caveat
emptor. I, the least of Christians, do this.1 (p. 156-7)
Fisher, clearly enough, has forms ("'Civi 1 ization j_s forms,'" he
te lls a prisoner assembly) on his side, the way of lif e he espouses and
represents one constructed self-consciously and obsessively out of
rules, laws, conventions, customs and similar components of humanly-
created order. The prison, of course, is the symbolic projection of
the warden's vision, a "place of vicious, plodding sequiturs" (p. 58),
a world so complexly suffused with regulations and ordinances that even
Fisher, its inaugurator, finds the fu ll comprehension of its workings
d iffic u lt. Its intricacy seems to him nothing of a drawback, since
for him even order maintained purely for its own sake is a positive
value, its implementation offering additional proof that the life of
m an is subjectable to hum an reason. I t is for their anti-order tenden
cies that he holds bad m en in contempt, then, reserving for the Jewish
bad m an a particular loathing, born of his conviction that these
disruptors of the norm can have no understanding of the civilization
they have dedicated themselves to subverting, their own 'desert cul
ture' and values of 'wholesale and re ta il' having given them no terms
with which they might be able to apprehend the grandeur and complexity
27
of the Western, Christian model. Taunting Feldman with the simplicity
with which his crimes were detected and the orderliness with which his
conviction for them was accomplished, Fisher carefully adumbrates
for him for a final time the institutional hierarchy which he and his
prison represent, insisting that '".W e have a system. Virtue is system,
honor is order.. G od is design, Grace is a covenant, a contract and
codicils, what's down there in writing'" (p. 70).
Rather than exemplifying a single philosophical point, Fisher
represents a complex of ideas connoting form, order, system, and design,
abstractions which reflect the primarily intellectual terms in which
he addresses and attacks his inmate adversary. He is not, however,
Feldman's sole antagonist in the novel. Complementing Fisher's largely
philosophical objections to Feldman and his 'bad manism' is the more
passive but equally disturbing opposition of a land developer of
Feldman's acquaintance whose very existence represents what amounts to
a rebuke and repudiation of his own lif e to Feldman. The land develop
er—we know him only as the father of Oliver B., a classmate of Feld-
main's son, B illy — is the ideal of American WASPishness which Fisher
can imagine, but not be, a father who knows the names of things and
how they work, and who knows how to casually and unself-consciously
pass his knowledge on to young Oliver so that the boy can join him in
the practical, reassuringly tangible world of American technical
competence. Feldman comes to know the developer fir s t in his pre
prison days through seeing Oliver's dazzlingly excellent schoolwork on
display at a parents' night at the elementary school B illy attends,
28
schoolwork so impressive, and so clearly superior to the illite r a te
scribblings and ramshackle crafts produced by his own son, that Feldman
actually presents himself to one of the other parents as Oliver B.'s
father.
Their paths cross again som e months la te r, when the developer
takes Feldman to inspect land on the city's outskirts suitable for the
branch store he is halfheartedly considering. Listening to his breezy,
articulate pitch, Feldman is aware how thoroughly the developer is his
son's father--lucky with machines, knowledgeable with the ways of
nature, capable of tolerance, good w ill, and a fierce optimism. Feld
m an fin a lly looks "deep down into the man's eyes, past good wishes,
deeper than good hope, past faith its e lf to the saucy bedrock of the
developer's vision, where he thought he saw the basic mix--the roily
vats of molassesy premise that worked the circuits of his phoenixy w ill
and gave him his feel for reclaimed land, for swam p and ashpit and
trashy fie ld where rats lurked and mice skittered" (p. 235).
The geological and mechanistic metaphors used here to delineate
the levels of the developer's vision distinctly resemble the hier
archical terms in which Fisher views the world, the circuits of the one
parallelling the sequiturs of the other, the developer's tropism for
reclamation of lemd analogous to the warden's a b ility to turn bad m en
into good ones. The developer represents an extension of the Fisherian
interpretation of re a lity , a translation of i t into different terms,
his American optimism and progressivism, his handyman's competence and
camper's self-sufficiency, his a b ility to transform wastelands into
29
shopping malls all qualities marking him as one for whom--as for Fisher
—reality is everywhere tractable, manageable, ordinary. Stirred by
the recognition that he is confronting an enemy, Feldman refuses to
participate in the developer's dreams of frontier and settlement, his
WASPish visions of expansion and progress, telling him " 'I won't have
i t , . , .Fuck your virgin land.1" I t is once again way of life
against way of lif e , Feldman continuing, "'We're in the homestretch of
a race: your energy against m y entropy. The universe is running down,
Mr. Developer. It's bucking and fillin g . It's yawing and pitching
and rolling and fa llin g 1" {pp. 235-6).
Against his adversary's expansionist mentality Feldman pits a
personal entropy; against his W A S P frontiersman ethic Feldman opposes
a cultural metaphor of his own—dispersion. Feldman's strongest argu
ment in the novel, his self-justification and credo, lies in the
implications of a concept his father had made m uch of in their travels
together: the Diaspora, or the scattering of Jews through the Old World
after the Babylonian captivity. Upon their arrival in southern I l l i
nois, Isidore Feldman had introduced himself and his son to their new
Midwestern neighbors b y explaining what a Jew is and what his history
consists in, pointing out that '"ours is a destiny of emergency , , . .
You see m e sitting here fu lfillin g God's w ill. I bring God's w ill to
the Midwest. I don't l i f t a finger. I have dispersed. Soon the kid
is older, he disperses. Scatter, He said. To the ends of the earth.
Yes, Lord'" (pp. 35-6). Isidore Feldman ends his phase of the Diaspora
in the Illin o is cornfields, and although his son believes for a time
30
that he has moved beyond i t — that he has disposed of the Diaspora as
his sense of having lived an "old timey life in a strange world" with
his father diminishes and he becomes a "naturalized citizen" of the
normal American reality (p. 44)— the s p irit of the Diaspora, with its
risks and restlessness, its contingency and excitement, remains alive
in him, prohibiting him from succumbing to the empty purposefulness of
the developer's vision or submitting to the sterile systematics and
puerile moral ism to which Fisher's mind, and the prison which is its
physical projection, reduce the complexities of hum an existence.
I t is his longing for this discarded sense of Diaspora which leads
Feldman to marry a w om an so ill-s u ite d to him that their life together
is as hellishly miserable as he had anticipated, a life lived as i f
am ong the 'spiky and fanged monsters' on the m ap of the world that he
and his father had once shared. I t is this longing too which accounts
for his taking on his father's occupation, less out of nostalgia or a
sense of family tradition than out of his recognition that selling j
could become "his way of bearing down on the world" (p. 66), his means
of exploiting one of existence's few infinites—the endlessness of hu
m an desire. W hen the exploitation of that desire through the merchan
dising of ordinary products begins to pall for Feldman, he responds by
offering his customers more exotic goods and services, indulgently
reveling in the heightened sense of self he derives from his over
coming of the authorities and regulations which stand between those
desirers who patronise his basement operation and the gratification of
their dark wants and needs. His contempt for the laws which frustrate
31
his customers extends beyond them to all forms of regulation and
control, a fact reflected in his manic denunciation of
. . . the timers of the stoplights, and those who
license, and those who make the rules for the safety
checks of airplanes . . , . Damn, too, the snoops who
oversee the construction of bridges and insist on
precautions before letting a single worker go into a
mine or tunnel. D am n that measly conspiracy of the
civilized that puts safety before profit and makes
hazard ille g a l, and dam n fin a lly , then, those at the
top who would extend longevity by requiring dullness
. . . (p. 271)
Feldman's Diaspora s p irit, clearly enough, is a s p irit of contentious
ness and resistance, of opposition and struggle, but i t is, above a ll,
a s p irit which wants to keep things moving and to keep possibilities
open in a world too fu ll of Fishers-of-bad-men and land developers in
tent upon locking things up and closing things down, m en who would
define, classify and circumscribe, reducing everything to a basic
ordinariness at once static and utterly devoid of all potentiality.
So pervasive is the Diaspora metaphor in the novel and so exten
sive its implications that the reader is l i t t l e surprised to find i t
the fulcrum upon which the novel's resolution is poised. Just as
Feldman's surrender to the appeal of the land developer in claiming
Oliver as his own son must culminate in, or be balanced by, a reversal
--Feldman's explicit rejection of the man and his v is io n --if resolution
is to be achieved of that scene, so the scene in which Feldman capitu
lates to Fisher, fin a lly admitting the lie the warden offers him into
his account of his relationship with his son in order to gain his
release from solitary confinement, can only be completed by a similar
32
reversal, and this is precisely what is enacted in the novel's last
pages.
Once again Feldman is offered the opportunity to free himself
from confinement by telling a story about himself, and once again
Fisher is the ultimate judge of his performance. In this instance,
however, the stakes are higher. Brought before an assemblage of
inmates in a specially isolated c e ll, Feldman is subjected to a cere
mony of denunciation, his fellow prisoners rising one by one to charge
him with acts of selfishness, betrayal and immorality. The point of
the ritual is to determine—or rather affirm—Feldman's guilt: i f
found innocent, he w ill be allowed to serve out the few remaining days
of his sentence and be released; i f judged guilty, a trained boxer w ill
be brought in to hammer at his homonculed heart, killing him. Entering
the proceedings in their third day, Fisher assumes the role of presi
ding magistrate, throwing out of court a ll of the evidence that has
been amassed against Feldman in order that the disposition of his case
be decided solely on the basis of his own account of a single
relationship he has had in his life --h is friendship with Dedman. In
presenting his version of their relationship, one he himself sees as
inexplicable, to the kangaroo court, Feldman is neither offered, nor
does he introduce into i t , any fabrications which might soften its
details: he makes l i t t l e effort to rationalize or extenuate his actions
against Dedman, recalling them as i f recognizing in them for the fir s t
time their real justification . Having not only mocked the friendship
Dedm an offered him by reducing their conversations with each other
33
to exchanges of adolescent cliches of buddyhood, having ridiculed i t
further by turning their comradely activities into images of the hijinks
of cameraderie characteristic of "A Date with Judy" films, Feldman
crowns their bond by trapping the unwitting Dedman into a terrib le
marriage on the grounds that he who gets married has an all-American
responsibility to see that his bachelor companion gets married too.
Even after Dedm an has taken on his termagant mate Feldman finds himself
incapable of giving over this travesty of friendship, realizing i t
to be "'something I needed to keep m e alive'" and confessing himself
‘"hooked on [Dedman's] doom'" (p. 335), a doom he hastens by offering
him loans in an amount calculated to get him started in, but not succeed
with, any of the numerous businesses he attempts to establish.
Feldman's monologue sends Fisher into a paroxysm of rage, and,
forgetting the executioner, standing by in the gym, he sets the inmates
upon Feldman, convinced that the Dedm an episode has convicted him a
bad man.. The narrative persuades Feldman, quite to the contrary, of
his innocence. In the seconds before the prisoners' attack he sees
that Fisher's fin a l, desperate efforts to push him into "this last,
closed corner of their justice" (p. 336) has had the opposite effect of
revealing to him his freedom, of convincing him that he is neither a
23
good m an nor bad man, but a m an who affirms his lif e . That affirela
tion is one made, Feldman concludes, in spite of the existence of "wars,
history, the deaths of the past and other people's poverties and losses.
Their casualties and bad dreams I write off. I remember all the
disasters that have happened and a ll the disappointments of the
34
generations from time's beginning to its end, and s t ill I am permitted
to live." Having come close at numerous points during his prison term
to acquiescing to the Fisherian view of the world and that view's
interpretation of his own ethic, he here conclusively rejects the
g u ilt that the prison has dedicated its e lf to making him feel, invoking
against i t a cultural value and tradition of his own. Perhaps the
warden's lapse of memory, he speculates as his attackers close in, "was
God's sign that the Diaspora was s t ill unfinished, and that, until i t
was, until everything had happened, until Feldman had fille d the world,
a ll its desert places and each of its precipices, all its surfaces and
everywhere under its seas, and along its beaches, he could not be
punished or suffer the eternal lean years of death" (p. 336).
Isidore Feldman's son has determined to disperse further, then,
committing himself, should he survive his punishment, to serving a G od
of possibility and openness as opposed to the "God is design" whose
worship Fisher has been attempting to impose upon him. For Feldman,
as for Elkin's bailbondsman, Alexander Main, the crucial thing is to
keep possibility open, to preserve in the world the potential for the
existence of the mysterious, the special, the extreme—thus Main ban
ishes a bail juniper into freedom, the involuntary fugitive representing
to him a mystery s t ill to be solved, a tra il s t ill to be followed; thus
Feldman rededicates himself to his ethic of self-extension and disper
sion, the civilized world,upon which g u ilt had previously impaled his
impulses, being transformed into the ground of his absolute freedom in
the process. The release from the prison of civilizatio n 's forms which
35
awaits Feldman just beyond the novel's final page can be seen alterna
tively as a release into a post-penitentiary lif e or as a release into
a beating-inflicted death; in either case, that release can represent
nothing more than a confirmation and enactment in lite ra l terms of the
psychological liberation he has already achieved. Convinced of his
innocence, certain of the rightness of his stance, Feldman has not
merely vowed to carry on the Diaspora which ju stifies him as i t had
justified his father, but has, in a characteristically "Feldmanic
aggrandizemant," himself become i t , scattering, in his vision, "To the
ends of the Earth."
The Diaspora theme so crucial to the resolution of A Bad Man in
forms the novel on two different levels and thus determines the
character of the work in two different ways. Diaspora, this is to say,
has a cultural meaning as well as a metaphoric one in this work, and
i f its cultural significance contributes to the novel's usual placement
within the tradition of the American Jewish novel, its metaphorical
aspect links i t with the metaphorical complexes underpinning Elkin's
two subsequent novels, The Dick Gibson Show and The Franchiser, the
structural and thematic parallels thus forged between them resulting
in a progression of books which seems more a trilogy than a trio .
Although Feldman tends increasingly to think of the Diaspora meta
phor in positive, life-affirm ing terms, i t nonetheless contains impli
cations which, and becomes associated with ideas that, are considerably
more sobering. Not only does the concept deny utterly the possibility
36
of any real hum an community; i t is also strongly associated, through
metaphoric elision, with the fact that the universe is running down—
'"yawing and pitching and rolling and f a llin g ,1" as Feldman puts i t in
defending his entropy against the land developer's energy. To disperse
is to be in tune with this universal decline, Feldman clearly suggests,
to conceptualize, construct or concretize to vainly oppose the gravity
of things. The Diaspora metaphor becomes the novel's shorthand for this
overwhelming sense of things breaking apart, of centers failing to hold,
of the fragmentation and atomization at the heart of rea lity, and i f
the consequent throwing off of the trappings, ideas, and institutions
once closely associated with those now discredited centers is libera
ting, i t is into a colder, less human, more desolate world that i t
liberates us. For Feldman, a m an with "no feel for patterns" (p. 198)
and no "taste for the available" (p. 220), a release into formlessness
and the exceptional can only be a liberation, but he is the only
protagonist of the three who aligns himself so unequivocably with these
anti-order forces, both Dick Gibson and Ben Flesh trying--unsuccessful-
ly, as i t turns out— to secure for themselves a solid footing in the
ordinary. What opposes their attempts to ground themselves in the
everyday and the routine is a perceptible undermining of the fabric of
reality as they understand i t , a disintegration of the complex of
assumptions which supports their conceptions of things. Dick Gibson's
determination to become the voice of the American ordinary, the very
sound of security and reassurance, runs afoul of the disintegration of
the social fabric upon which such an ambition depends, the American
37
public he seeks to comfort gradually becoming fragmented into a mass
of lonely and troubled individuals with obsessions too personal and
private to be allayed by the "steady steady-as-she-goes pep talk"
(DGS, p. 5) of a radio personality* The country which Ben Flesh's
franchises have helped to build undergoes a similar process of atomiza
tion in that later novel, its protagonist remarking upon "America's
molecules drifting away from each other like a blown balloon, like heat
rising, the mysterious physical laws gone public" (TF, p. 306). The
combination of the nation's soaring energy needs and dwindling energy
sources culminates in a "new disposition" characterized by brownouts,
decreased mobility and a general sense of severed connection and
electrical failu re, a condition vividly dramatized through the analogue
of Flesh's multiple sclerosis, the progressive sensory deterioration
of his demyelinating nerves.
Against such massive social and existential dislocations the ordi
nary necessarily seems a puny foe, one offering neither formidable
opposition to nor meaningful solace from i t . But Elkin refuses in .
these novels to settle for making Dick Gibson and Ben Flesh merely the
deluded proponents of an impossible position, choosing instead to
present their advocacy of the ordinary as a commitment at once comic
and serious, simultaneously hopeless and heroic. Approached from a
standpoint other than that of Warden Fisher, who views i t merely as a
rationalization for subjugating others to his capricious w ill, the
ordinary comes to be an increasingly ambivalent concept in Elkin's f ic
tion, its absolute distinguishability from the special and the extreme
38
sacrificed to a more complex sense of their interaction. In the
tension between the everyday and the extraordinary, between routine
and extremity, lies the major dynamic of Elkin's two finest novels,
then, the attempts of Dick Gibson and Flesh to patch the rents in the
consciousness of contemporary humanity with talk shows and HoJo's
providing som e of these novels' most moving and most comic moments.
39
N O TES
^Stanley Elkin, Boswel1: A Modern Comedy (New York: Random House,
1965), p. 312. Abbreviated IB for subsequent citations in the text.
2
Thomas Pynchon, The Cryinq of Lot 49 (New York: Bantam Books,
1967), p. 136.
3
Robert Coover, "The Cat in the Hat for President," New American
Review #4 (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 12.
4
Introduction to "I Look Out for Ed Wolfe," Writers Choice, ed.
Rust H ills (New York: David McKay Company, 1974), p. 125.
5
Larry McCaffery ("Stanley Elkin's Recovery of the Ordinary,"
Critique, XXI, #2 [1980]), presents the ordinary in Elkin's work as
that which is lost to us through too great fam iliarity and is recover
able only through its transformation into "expansive, energetic prose"
(p. 50). Language can also, of course, be a purveyor of and receptacle
for the ordinary.
^Robert Coover, Pricksongs & Descants (New York: E.P. Dutton,
1969), p. 79.
^Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (New York: Random House,
1971), pp. 84, 27. Abbreviated D G S for subsequent citations in the
text.
O
Stanley Elkin, Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (New York:
Random House, 1965), p. 239. Abbreviated C&KJ<&C for subsequent
citations in the text.
9
Stanley Elkin, The Franchiser (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1976), p. 341. Abbreviated TF for subsequent citations in the text.
■^Stanley Elkin, A Bad M an (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 331.
Abbreviated A B M for subsequent citations in the text. Alexander Main,
the t it l e character of "The Bai 1 bondsman," uses a different idiom—
Black English—to similarly mock and gain access to his black clients.
"The Bailbondsman," in Searches and Seizures (New York: Random House,
1973). Abbreviated S&S for subsequent citations in the text.
4a
Elkin gives the nam e Feldman to three different protagonists:
Meyer Feldman, the central figure of his f ir s t published story, "The
Sound of Distant Thunder," as well as the Feldmans of "In the Alley"
and A Bad Man. Although there are som e superficial sim ilarities
between the three of them (a ll are merchants and share an inclination
toward ira s c ib ility ), Elkin makes no attempt to link them, using the
nam e primarily for its punning suggestion of felled m an and, as he has
mentioned in an interview, because i t was his mother's maiden name.
Thomas LeClair, "The Art of Fiction LXI" (interview with Stanley Elkin),
Paris Review, 66 (Summer, 1976), p. 56.
12
Max F. Schulz, Radical Sophistication: Studies in Contemporary
American Jewish Novelists (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969),
pp. v i i i , 25.
■^Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 92-3.
14
The protagonist-centered nature of Bellow's and Elkin's fiction
is reflected in the title s of their novels, only two of their combined
thirteen novels making no reference to a featured individual in their
title s —Bellow's Seize the Day ana Elkin's The Living End. Max F. .
Schulz (Radical Sophistication, p. 147) cites Norman Mailer's objection
to this aspect of Bellow's work, Mailer contending that Bellow "creates
individuals, and not relations between them" and that his protagonists
begin and end their journeys alone and largely untouched by others.
Much the same could be said of Elkin's protagonists.
15Scott Sanders, "An Interview with Stanley Elkin," Contemporary
Literature, XXVI, 2, (Spring, 1975), p. 140.
■^Jeffrey L. Duncan, "A Conversation with Stanley Elkin and William
H. Gass," The Iowa Review, V II, 1 (Winter, 1976)? pp. 53, 63.
^Leslie Fiedler, "Saul Bellow," To the Gentiles (New York:
Stein & Day, 1972), p. 63.
I O
"To the extent that I imitate anyone, I think I may—in dialogue
--im itate Saul Bellow," Elkin told Scott Sanders, Contemporary Litera
ture, pp. 140-41, "that rich kind of Constance Garnett mix of the
formal and the vernacular: that's what Bellow does better than anyone
else in the world, in dialogue. And that's something I try to do."
Compare, for instance, the following passages of dialogue from Bellow's
The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Viking Press, 1953), p. 116,
and from El kin1s The Franchiser. . . were you looking for a th rill?
is this a time to be looking for a th r ill when everybody else is
covering up? You could take i t out on the roller coasters, the bobs,
the chute-the-chutes. G o to Riverview Park. But wait. All of a
sudden I catch on to something about you. You've got opposition in you.
You don't slide through everything. You just make i t look so.'" And
41
from The Franchiser: 1 1 'What you do. It's a U.S.A. nightclub perfor
mance. You do John Wayne and Ed Sullivan. You do Cagney and Bogart.
Liberace you do. Sinatra, Vaughn Monroe. Tell m e something. Which
is the real Howard Johnson's? Which is the real Holiday Inn or Chicken
from the Colonel?"' (p. 92).
19
Stanley Elkin, "The Sound of Distant Thunder," Epoch, V III, 1
(Winter, 1957), p. 57.
20
The definitions of realism used here are adapted from Erich
Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Rea1ity in Western Literature,
trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1968), pp. 490, 491.
21
One such c ritic is novelist John Gardner, who in O n Moral Fiction
(New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 110, charges Elkin with "preferring
comic surprise to energetic discovery and looking for fic tiv e energy
not in character and action but in the power of the w riter's perfor
mance or in poetic language."
22
Leslie Fiedler discusses som e of the implications of the major
role that Jews have played in the creation of American mass culture
over the past half century in "Some Jewish Pop Art Heroes," collected
'*n To the Gentiles, pp. 133-34.
23
Raymond M. Olderman draws a similar conclusion in his chapter
on A Bad M an in Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the I9601s
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 66.
42
CHAPTER II
THE SO U N D O F THE AMERICAN ORDINARY
The cultural underpinning provided A Bad M an by the Diaspora
metaphor with its implications concering the dew's history and his
assimilation into American culture has its counterpart in The Dick
Gibson Show and.The Franchiser in the American cultural figure whose
genius underlies the visions of both Gibson and Ben Flesh, the novels'
protagonists. Although Elkin never specifically identifies this
figure, Gibson's habit of referring to himself as "Poor Dick Gibson"
and Ben Flesh's fir s t nam e and in itia ls both invite us to see behind
their American materialism and optimism the s p irit of America's most
famous champion of the commercial, the civic and the secular, Benjamin
FranklinJ I t is not the historical Franklin with all of his hum an
complexities that these characters recall, of course; i t is the l i t e r
ary creation, the deliberately fictionalized narrator of the Autobio
graphy and Poor Richard's Almanac for w hom hum an existence is reduci
ble to explicable patterns of behavior and pithy maxims, that Gibson
and Flesh resemble. Beyond a number of character traits and philo
sophical assumptions that Gibson and Flesh could be demonstrated to
share with Franklin (practicality, purposefulness and endless energy,
the conviction that reality can be mastered through the proper
43
application of technique), there are two much more compelling explana-
ions for his allegorical presence in these novels.
First of a ll, Franklin is both the proponent and the self-
proclaimed proof of the American dream of limitless opportunity, the
notion that, as he explains i t in the Autobiography, . . one Man of
s
tolerable A bilities may work great Changes, and accomplish great
Affairs am ong Mankind, i f he f ir s t forms a good Plan, and, cutting
off all Amusements and other employments that would divert his Atten
tion, makes the Execution of that sam e Plan his sole Study and
Business.'1 ^ This idea, which Dick Gibson refers to as "the self-made,
from the ground up vision of the world" (p. 23), is one that both he
and Flesh enthusiastically endorse, each of them attempting in his-own
way to act out a part of its truth. More important to both of them,
however, would be Franklin's articulation and dramatization of a
secular myth,3 his demonstration that one need not test the extreme
boundaries of hum an civilization in order to transcend hum an limitation
and expand the terms of hum an possibility, but need only become a
rarified version—a symbol--of hum an possibility to raise himself above
the mass of men. Because this is precisely what Dick Gibson and
Flesh attempt to do, i t w ill be worthwhile to consider in som e detail
the way in which their model accomplishes i t and what i t ultimately
means.
"Mythic" is not, of course, a word Franklin uses to describe his
ascent from the "Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred"
to "a State of Affluence and som e Degree of Reputation in the World,"4
M
this sense of the word well post-dating his 18th century. And yet,
his insistence that his progress through the world is exemplary ("I
have been the more particular in this Description of m y Journey," he
carefully explains in the Autobiography, "and shall be so of m y firs t
entry into that City [Philadelphia], that you may in your mind compare
such unlikely Beginnings with the figure I have since made there" ),
as well as his introduction into the work of a le tte r describing its
g
fir s t part as "a sort of Key to Life" for m en of affairs and ambi
tion, qualify his "Life" as very m uch mythic in our modern sense of
the word. Mircea Eliade's definition of myth, for instance, neces
sarily encompasses an exemplary "Life" like Franklin's in its assertion
that the function of myth is to "reveal models and, in so doing, give
a meaning to the World and to hum an life . . . . I t is through myth
that the ideas of re a lity , value, transcendence slowly dawn. Through
myth, the World can be apprehended as a fu lly articulated, in te llig ib le
7
and significant Cosmos."
What distinguishes this Franklinian myth from those with which
Eliade is typically concerned is its apparent lack of any sacred
element--its omission of any sort of supernatural background against
which hum an action can take on meaning. While Franklin has m uch to
say about rea lity and value, he pays transcendence l i t t l e heed, at
points even repudiating the metaphysical when i t opposes his establish
ment of his own vision of the world. Thus, for example, does he
reduce Revelation to mere moral ism, dispensing with all but its
most u tilita ria n significance:
45.
Revelation had indeed no weight with m e as such; but
I entertain'd an Opinion, that tho certain Actions
might not be bad because they were forbidden by i t ,
or good because i t commended them; yet probably those
Actions might be forbidden because they were bad for
us, or commended because they were beneficial to us,
in their own Natures, all the Circumstances of things
considered. And this Persuasion, with the kind Hand
of Providence, or of som e Guardian Angel, or acciden
tal favourable Circumstances and Situations, or all
together, preserved m e (thro this dangerous Time of
Youth and the hazardous Situations I was sometimes
in among Strangers, remote from the Eye and Advice
of m y Father) without any w ilful gross immorality
or Injustice that might have been expected from m y
Want of Religion.8
These are, quite clearly, the sentiments of a m an for w hom the meta
physical is non-existent, expendable, or irrelevant, his lumping of
Providence together with "some Guardian Angel" and the nebulous
"accidental favourable Circumstances and Situations" only serving to
underline the point. Denying, then, the possibility of man's entrance
into higher realms of significance, Franklin posits an alternative
scheme of values, a myth which, though lacking in metaphysical or
cosmological explanations, nonetheless encompasses all other per
quisites of archetypal narrative. The real—and only—mythic pro
gress, Franklin suggests, is upward through the hum an world of
a ffairs, the young man's rise in business as stirring a primal
episode to him as the Easter story is to a devout Christian. So con
vinced was Franklin by this myth that he composed a parable expressing
i t which he called the Autobiography, a work whose protagonist is as
elemental as Oedipus, as one-dimensional as Job and as adventurous as
Odysseus. That this quester's adventure never leads him outside the
ordinary world of 18th century business and politics represents not
46j
an objection to his undertaking but an articulation of its basic
premise: that, in a world without transcendence, the everyday world is
the only possible stage upon which mythic journeys m ay be carried out.
Thus the Autobiography is a sacred story which denies the existence of
sacred stories, a myth which repudiates the validity of mythic thought.
I t is also the vehicle through which Franklin translated himself into
the image of the archetypal young-man-on-his-way-up, thus creating a
place for himself in the American imagination as symbol and exemplar
of that reified state, the figure and summation of our communally-
shared aspirations.
Dick Gibson too would make of himself a symbol and exemplar; he
would have his nam e come to 'define a condition' (p. 334) as
Louis Quatorze defines elegance or Benjamin Franklin defines a state
of American successful ness. Instead of turning himself into a non-
dimensional character in a narrative, however, Gibson chooses (or is
chosen by) radio as his medium of transformation, becoming a place-
less, timeless voice— "Dick Gibson of Nowhere, of Thin Air and the
United States of American Sky" (p. 11)—his goal. He has no "Plan"
to offer the world, but he does have two messages to deliver to i t ,
two messages which are, in effect, one: "Dick Gibson" and "Please
remain calm. Please stand by. Please be easy" (p. 8). These
messages are the same because of what i t is that Gibson wants his
name to become synonymous with: the American ordinary, a sense of
extremity held off and the extraordinary rountinized, a sense of the
normal and the everyday sustained and preserved. To become the very
47
sound of that sense of American well-being is Gibson's goal, for he
hopes that in becoming its aural embodiment he w ill personally be able
to transcend i t . As Franklin rose above the ordinary by becoming its
champion, in other words, so Dick Gibson hopes to come to embody the
normal and the everyday so thoroughly that he himself w ill actually
transcend them, placing himself beyond their realms by becoming their
very symbol. In denying the mythic element of re a lity and insisting
that the ordinary is a ll there is, Gibson attempts to turn himself
into the quotidian's champion, the mythic embodiment of the anti-mythic
view.
Gibson's attempts to propel himself into myth resemble Franklin's
successful realization of that stature in a number of ways, then, but
there are two aspects in which their passages d iffe r significantly,
and in those differences lie the seeds of the failure of Gibson's
undertaking. First of a ll, Gibson is highly self-conscious about his
quest, frequently referring to his desire to live a mythic life and
caring more, apparently, about the achievement of that life than he
does about the idea--the American ordinary—whose embodiment might
allow him to achieve it . The greatest boon he has to offer humankind,
to put i t another way, is his desire to be recognized as a larger-
than-life, mythic figure. Second, and perhaps more important, the
world he attempts to be mythic for is a very different one from that
which was willing to see Franklin's parabled experience as "a sort of
Key to L ife ." - His own contemporaries, Gibson finds, are m uch more
d iffic u lt to be symbolical for, their tendency to splinter off into
48
individual, isolate selves frustrating his attempts to rely upon them
for communal affirmations of his representational efficaciousness.
Worse, he comes to suspect that i t is the very view of reality he
promotes and embodies—the ordinary view--which is at least partially
responsible for their retreats into solipsism and obsession. The
source of his failure to successfully emulate Franklin's mythic pro
gress, clearly enough, rests in his double-edged message of "Dick
Gibson" and "Please be easy," a message at once inadequate as a
response to, as well as symptomatic of, the cultural problems he takes
i t upon himself to confront. That his quest is a failure is less the
point of the novel, however, than is Elkin's success in creating
through i t a compelling myth of our own—and Dick Gibson's—mythless
condition.
What prompts Dick Gibson to think of his life in mythic terms is
the circumstance under which he is initiated into professional broad
casting, an incident resonant with suggestions of selection and fate.
Working as an engineer and spot announcer for a Butte, Montana, radio
station, he is suddenly called upon to f i l l a half hour of airtime
when the scheduled transcribed program proves defective. Not only
does he deal e fficien tly with this emergency, words and phrases
flowing easily and unself-consciously from his mouth as he assures
the audience that all is well, but he experiences too the inspiration
of his life as he signs o ff, his radio name-to-be--Dick Gibson—coming
to him "from the air" (p. 7). The pun is intentional, of course: the
a ir which he is fillin g with his voice providing him with a name, the
49
name which he will-save for that period in his career when he ap
proaches the radio self "he was meant to be," when he has proven him
self "worthy of his voice"—the name, as he later thinks of i t , which
"consolidates in its three crisp syllables his chosen style, his
identity, a saga, a mythic body of American dash" (p. 83).
This incident marks the beginning of Dick Gibson's quest to live
the mythic life ; ironically, he only partially recognizes the extent
to which his adventure recapitulates mythic paradigms. He is fu lly
aware that he is emulating the Franklinian pattern of young-man-on-the-
rise, of course: "The American Dream, he [thinks], the historic path
of all younger sons, unheired and unprovided. The old time test of
princes" (p. 13). So aware is he of living out this paradigm, in
fact, that he deliberately endures unnecessary discomforts, indigni
ties and self-deprivations out of an inverted logic which convinces
him that such suffering is proof and guarantee of his "mythic turn"
(p. 13). He is less aware, however, of the resemblance his quest
bears to the archetypal narrative of the adventure of the hero, the
ur-story of heroic passage which Joseph Campbell has called the
"monomyth." In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell distinguishes
the three major stages of the hero myth, designating them the Depar
ture, or Separation, in which the hero leaves the world of everyday
reality to begin his adventure, the In itia tio n , in which he learns
the mysteries of the unknown realm he has entered and undergoes his
ordeal, and the Return, in which he reappears in the ordinary world
q
bearing a boon for humankind. That the three parts of The Dick
_________________________ 50
Gibson Show can be demonstrated to correspond to these three stages in
the hero's progress is not particularly surprising, given the level of
generality upon which Campbell's ur-story is constructed. More inter
esting, however, is that many of the monomyth's sub-stages are equally
apparent in the novel, suggesting that Elkin was using a mythic struc
ture not unlike this one to undergird the adventure of his myth-
aspiring hero.^ Established early on, then, is a tension between the
archetypal backdrop of Dick Gibson's adventure and the non- or anti-
mythic resolutions of the novel's major scenes, the protagonist himself
contributing to this dynamic by insistently denying any imputation of
transmundane significance to his experience in order to preserve its --
and his--assumption of the world's non-mythic ordinariness.
His initiatio n into broadcasting in Butte, for instance, is an
experience so portentous that even he must submit to its insistent
symbolism, seeing i t as a harbinger of an exceptional and magnificent
'
future for himself in radio. I f he doesn't think of this incident in
such Campbellian terms as the "call to adventure" or "sign of voca
tion," he comes close, fu lly recognizing the role that accident and
chance have played in his sudden el evation to radio personality and
understanding that he has conceived not merely a name but an identity
in his "Dick Gibson" inspiration, an ideal self equal to the rigors
of a quest in ways which he could never be. That self can be de
veloped only through a process of deliberate priming and conditioning,
he sees, and so he takes upon himself his apprenticeship, a self-
imposed regimen of preparation and education designed ultimately to
51
deliver him from being an anonymous aspirant to radio jobs and to
transform him into that ideal s e lf, Dick Gibson, "the generalized sound
of American life " (p. 84).
Denying himself theappellation of Dick Gibson until his appren
ticeship has been completed, he takes a job in Roper, Nebraska, under
the alias Marshall Maine, this juncture of his quest--as his repudia
tion of the mythic nam e would suggest—corresponding to the "refusal
of the call" substage in Campbell's scheme. Hired by the Credenza
family, who own m uch of the state--including the area's only radio
station-~and utterly control its politics, Marshall acquiesces totally
to his employers. Awed by their power and intimidated by their wealth,
he comes fin a lly to see them as parts of one numinous, omnipotent
1 1
whole, a godhead he calls Credenza. S o worshipful is his attitude
toward this communal deity that he aspires not to be accepted merely
as an employee but to be taken into the family its e lf, his hope that
their gratefulness for his excellent broadcasts w ill prompt them to
elevate him to their level, making him one of them. I t is conse
quently devastating for him to learn that they are not only dis
satisfied with his work but are considering firin g him—banishing him,
in his terms, from the secure confines of their power and influence.
Terrified at this prospect, he tries the harder to please them, his
fears betraying him instead into greater transgressions and excesses
until he finds himself actually baiting them on the a ir, desperately
hoping to s tir any kind of response from this suddenly inattentive
monolith. They failed to respond, he ultimately realizes, because
52
they had long since stopped listening to his broadcasts, the sincerity
of his desire to please them having fin a lly bored them so thoroughly
that they simply forgot to tune him in. Marshall understands that
this episode represents a major setback for him, worrying most about
its demonstration of his capacity for losing an entire listening
audience in the space of a few months. What he understands less
clearly is the incident's verification of the mythic truth that the
hero can never advance merely through submission to or petition of the
supernatural powers, that the god--Credenza—w ill not intercede to
raise the hero to his level, but the hero must raise himself. What
this episode dramatizes, in Campbell's "refusal of the call" terms,
is the hero's "impotence to put off the infantile ego, with its sphere
of emotional relationships and ideals," his "timorous soul, fearful of
Som e punishment, failin g to make the passage through the door and com e
12
to birth in the world without." What i t dramatizes to Marshall is,
more simply, a defeat, and although he manages to plant the seeds of
a later triumph in the final days of his K R O P employment, he leaves
Nebraska with an obscure sense of failed mission, feeling l i t t l e
closer to the ideal Dick Gibson identity than he did when he arrived
in Nebraska.
From Roper the discouraged radio m an travels east, his disgrace
having so undone him that he feels himself utterly isolated from the
everyday world of American competence and success, "a greenhorn to
ordinary life " (p. 51) who must be tutored by his fellow bus passen
gers in the commonplaces of routine living (how to read his ticket,
53
whether to wear his coat on the bus, how to schedule his overnight
stay in Chicago) as i f he were a stranger to such existence. Their
helpfulness on his behalf gradually reorients him in the ways of the
ordinary world, Marshall noticing, but trying to deny the significance
of, the role that one of them has played in his retrieval: "The old
man," he thinks, "was an old man, no high priest, but a stranger with
a good wish no stronger than m y own" (p. 51). Marshall's objections
notwithstanding, the old m an is^ something like a high priest r e -in iti-
ating a supplicant into the everyday world, and he is the f ir s t of a
number of figures Marshall will meet whose purpose i t is to return
him to and confirm him in his adventure. The second of these figures
1 3
(which Campbell would designate "spiritual helpers" ) Marshall
encounters appears in itia lly in the contrary guise of the temptress
who lures the hero away from his journey by ensnaring him in somnolence
and sensuality.
N o sooner has Marshall been restored to the ordinary world than
he is propelled out of i t once again by Miriam Desebour, a girl who
sits next to him through the long night's bus ride. Suddenly con
sumed by desire for one another, they heedlessly grope and fondle
each other through the night, their lust's surprising onset seeming
"like something in a charm: one smash of passion and poof went the
world" (p. 53). The world remains poof for nearly a year as Marshall
moves into Miriam's one-room apartment in the Morristown, New Jersey
convalescent hom e toward which she had been travelling to take up
duties as a practical nurse. Their connubial arrangement in the hom e
54
is accepted by its directors only because Miriam presents Marshall as
a permanent invalid who requires the constant nursing of his "wife,"
and although there is nothing physically wrong with him, he nonetheless
assimilates the mien and attitude of his fellow patients, cultivating
in himself their "fortitude and resignation--all the loser virtues,
all the good sport resources" (p. 55). By treating him as a patient—
feeding and bathing him, emptying his bedpan—Miriam encourages his
lassitude and intensifies his dependency upon her, and i t is only her
voice which prevents him from becoming terminally catyleptic in her
presence. While nursing her patients Miriam habitually talks, her
ministrations accompanied by a steady stream of anecdotes, opinions,
questions, reminiscences and insights which Marshall in itia lly accepts
as merely an extension of her professional a b ility to soothe, heal,
and pacify her charges, as nothing more than, as he terms i t , "a
compulsion to f i l l up the silence imposed on patients whose blood
pressures and temperatures are being taken" (p. 58). But her voice's
capacity to lu ll him and her other patients into a state of compla
cency and ease keeps him alert and interested, and he responds to her
demand that he leave her by agreeing to move on as soon as he has
"broken the secret code of her voice" (p. 6 3 ).^ That that secret
code has something to do with Marshall's chosen profession is made
perhaps more explicit than i t need be by his comment to her, " 'I f I
didn't know you I'd tune you in and listen to you on the radio'"
(p. 63), but Elkin is attempting to establish what radio is to mean
in this novel by drawing together a number of motifs at this point,
_____________ 55
and i t is for this reason too that his convalescent hom e monologue is
suddenly interrupted by a return to the frame narrative surrounding
i t , the juxtaposition of these two scenes effectively dramatizing what
radio must come to signify to Dick-Gibson-to-be.
W e learn of Marshall's relationship with Miriam through a mono
logue that he--now b illin g himself as Dick "Pepsodent" Gibson, mythic
m an diluted by the commercial—delivers to an audience he is supposed
to be 'warming up' for a Bob Hope radio show som e years la te r. Baffled
by his warm-up man's narration, Hope takes the stage, interrupting
him and easily winning over the audience with a few quick one-liners
as Dick retreats to the wings to catch his employer's act. What he
learns from the comedian—or what he can articulate having watched
him--is that time is the battleground of radio and the enemy as well;
that he who stands up in it--a s Hope does—is a hero who has taken on
the awesome task of making himself a medium of time's mastery, his
voice, his jokes and his pauses "scheduling i t , slicing i t into
th irty - and sixty-minute slices" (p. 67). What Hope represents to
him, then, is radio viewed in its heroic, time-conquering aspect--
viewed, that is , from the perspective of the insider who knows its
risks and understands the gravity of its task. Miriam's voice, on
the other hand, bespeaks radio in its domestic, commonplace aspect,
radio as i t is heard by listeners, as a soporific and tranquilizer,
reassurance's twenty-four hour beacon. These two perspectives w ill
ultimately constitute Dick's notion of what radio is, define for him
its dramatic--perhaps even tragic--edge, and provide his justification
56
for wanting to live his lif e in i t . But to reach that stage--his
employment with Hope s t ill years off--Marshal1 has to extricate himself
from the torpor of his convalescent hom e existence, the narrative now
circling back upon that episode in order to bring i t to a conclusion.
He accomplishes his rejuvenation largely by forcing himself to attend
to Miriam's spell-binding voice not as a listener (one soothed) but as
a professional (one who would seek the source of her voice's sooth
ingness and attempt to assimilate i t into his own technique). This
mystery reanimates him, waking him from his languor so completely
that he begins challenging the patients' by-now habitual character
ization of him as an ineffectual, helpless cuckold, a t it l e he gained
through Miriam's rumored services to her charges. His resurgence
culminates in a number of victories he scores in competitions held at
the home's annual picnic, his sweep of the invalid decathalon sym
bolically delivering him from the ranks of the a fflicted and the
handicapped while turning him into something like a hero to the other
patients, who see in his stunning recovery hope for their own
improvement.
To fu lly liberate himself from the home's influence, however, he
must solve the mystery of Miriam's voice, a feat he accomplishes when
the two of them wander into a "dead room" contained in a nearby
house, a chamber acoustically constructed so as to be 99.98 percent
free of reflected sound, thus making i t "the quietest place in the
world" (p. 70). Sensing that he is on the verge of a breakthrough
(an earlier published version actually has him declare '" I haven't
57
been on the radio for months, but this is Dick Gibson1 moments
before his epiphany), he prompts Miriam to speak into this a ll-b u t-
total silence, blurting out fin a lly his solution to the mystery as the
juxtaposition of her voice and the surrounding soundlessness reveal
i t to him, '"You were naked,"1 he explains, recalling her stories
after their love-making sessions, '"I'm a sucker for the f ir s t person
singular"1 (p. 72). Her voice is naked--'"You spoke naked"' is the
16
earlier version's more explicit line --because i t is pure, undisguised,
unadulterated self-expression, a "firs t person singular" which f ill s
the inhuman silence (even the nearly absolute silence of the "dead
room") with speech, with words, with an unapologetic, unembarrassed
affirmation of being. (That is the sam e silence, of course, that she
"compulsively fille d " in taking patients'temperatures and blood
pressures.)
Aware now what Miriam's voice has unconsciously represented to
Marshall, and having been given, through the flash forward to the
Bob Hope show, advance notice of what the comedian w ill define and
help him to articulate about the radio l if e , we are able to anticipate
many of the conclusions he reaches once he has arrived hom e in Pitts
burg to sort out his lif e . What had fascinated him about her voice
had been its unself-consciousness, its capacity to sustain lengthy
personal anecdotes and reminiscences without betraying the slightest
hint of embarrassment. (He later revises this solution to her
voice's mystery somewhat, but the idea remains largely the same, its
secret lying in "the something in its cool timbre which assumed i t
58
would never be interrupted"[p. 304].) Throughout his nascent broadcast
career, he has never not f e lt embarrassed, Marshall admits to himself,
the announcements he has had to read, the interviews he has had to
give and the products he has had to sell all making him feel obscurely
s illy , abashed at his spokesman's role. "For the truth of the matter
was," he realizes in inventorying his career-to-date, "that radio was
silence as well as sound; the unrelenting premise was that the an
nouncer's voice occurred in silence, in the heart of an attentive
vacuum disposed to hear i t . . . Nothing was worthy of violating such
silence; nothing yet in the history of the world had been worthy of
i t . That's why he was embarrassed" (p. 83). Miriam is not embar
rassed to inject her lif e story into that silence, aware that its
sound w ill comfort and reassure whomever she is treating, nor does
Bob Hope hesitate to f i l l i t with jokes, thereby giving i t a hum an
dimension and a shape. Both of them understand in their own spheres
the two fine points which Marshall has yet to master: that the
crucial thing is to turn one's voice into an instrument of self-
expression and self-confirmation; and, that that voice must be trained
to do unceasingly what the veteran radio m an does in an emergency,
interposing himself between i t and the listener, thus "creating a
sense of the real silence held o ff, engaged elsewhere" (p. 5). Trans
lating these lessons into his own terms with his father's subsequent
assistance, Marshall resolves that he must "become immodest" (that is,
he must make a creed of the notion that to say Dick Gibson--even Dick
"Pepsodent" Gibson—is in fin ite ly better than saying nothing) in order
59
that he be able to "dispassionately enter the silence" (p. 83) and
tame i t , shape i t , humanize i t for others. He is s till years away
from delivering on the a ir the two-pronged message— "Dick Gibson" and
"Please be easy"—which w ill become his trademark, but he has com e to
understand that that w ill have to be what he will say into the
silence, his mastery of that message, he hopes and believes as he
prepares to depart from Pittsburg to resume his apprenticeship, only
another cycle of in itia te 's tria ls away.
This conception of the dialectics of radio broadcasting (which,
despite immense changes in the world to which he brings this vision,
remains largely the same throughout his career) presupposes the
existence on the far side of the speaker of a clearly-defined and
endlessly predictable listening audience, glimpses of which we are
given in the narration of Marshall's Credenza employment. I t is the
era of Allen's A lley, Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, The National Barn
Dance, and Town Meeting of the A ir, programs which figuratively denied
geographical differences by turning the airwaves into a kind of pan-
American home,^ a. locality where the nation's listeners could com e
together to recognize the shared values and mutual ideals which made
them Americans before they were anything else. Such programs per
fectly express, in Marshall's view, the homogeneity of Americans,
the "form, order" which underlie their te rrito ria l peculiarities and
the "national sense of the institutional" (p. 25) which insures their
coast-to-coast solidarity. The basic constituent unit of this sense,
he is convinced, is the family, and he delights in the encyclopedia
60
photographs of Dad, M om , Brother and Sis gathered around the set,
certain that they are not only radio's ideal audience but its real
audience: four attractive people in prescribed relationship to one
another, secure both in familial as well as social roles, who have
joined each other in their living room to listen , "together in time,
united, serene" (p. 26). I t is this image of the American family as
audience which originally inspired Marshall to make a career of radio,
we are told, out of an obscure need to "join his voice to that impor
tant chorus, that lovely a capella" (p. 26), and i t is a similar
assumption of a constancy, communality and homogeneity out there in
the land that motivates a ll of his subsequent efforts in broadcasting,
even in the face of growing evidence that such terms no longer accu
rately reflect his actual listenership.
The encyclopedia image of the American family, i t becomes clear
during Marshall's stay in Pittsburg, bears l i t t l e resemblance to his
own family. For the f ir s t half hour that he is there, his mother
plays the part of a "dowdy Irish washerwoman from the Sunday funnies"
welcoming hom e her adventurous, profligate son, while his brother
appears in a wheelchair, impatient with any profferings of assistance
or pity and pathetically determined to discover whether Dick--their
nam e for him—has made his fortune out in the big world while the
family has been suffering such crippling reversals at home. Dick
plays along with both masquerades, recognizing them as methods for
circumventing the "really fe lt," deflections of the emotional strain
of family reunion into stock comic situations which will defuse the
61
moment of its impact until normal relations are re-established between
them. He recognizes too that this odd ritual is m uch more typical in
its purposes than i t might otherwise seem, all sound, well-keeled
families, in his view, being possessed of their own, i f less extreme,
techniques of concealing true feelings and of muffling emotion at its
source. The national necessity for such evasions prompts him into
som e very un-Dick Gibsonish musings: "W hy couldn't folks take it?
W hy did they insist on the quotidian? What was so bad about bad news?
Surely the point of lif e was the possibility i t always held out for
the exceptional. The range of the strange, he thought" (p. 76). The
strategy of becoming exceptional by exploiting 'fo lks1' fear of bad
news and craving for the quotidian has just begun to form in his mind,
and is given a ‘Considerable boost as a consequence of his dealings
with his father while he is at home.
His mother and brother both abandon their role-playing after a
short time, becoming recognizable and reassuringly predictable for the
remainder of Dick's v is it, but his father has become even more
mysterious than Dick had remembered him to be, and he soon understands
that the enigma of his father, like the mystery of Miriam's voice,
are both "in som e way related to his testing, more grist for his
ongoing apprenticeship" (p. 81). At the core of his father's enigma
too is his propensity for role-playing, though his theatrics are
distinguishable from his wife's and son's by the fact that he never
stops acting, making i t impossible for Dick—his primary audience--to
te ll i f there is actually a m an behind all the masks. These
62
performances become a medium of remoteness for his father, a sheaf
of insulating irony which prevents his son from knowing who he is and
from depending upon the man's age, experience and knowledge for ego
support.
Their relationship, though not specifically resembling that of
any other father-son pair in Elkin's fic tio n , is typical in the
awkwardness that exists between them, and in the in ab ility of both
18
to approach the other without embarrassment or uncertainty. That
this relationship is one to which Elkin has paid considerable attention
is reflected by his discussion of i t in William Faulkner's fiction in
his 1960 Ph.D. dissertation, his comments there proving in som e
instances as applicable to the fathers and sons in his own work as
they are to those in Faulkner's novels. "The father is, of course,
the Lifegiver, the ruler, a kind of God," he argued. " It is perfectly
consistent with Faulkner's theology for the father to remain aloof,
inaccessible. As [Elkin proceeded to demonstrate], i t is precisely
this sort of non-involvement on God's part that makes i t possible for
m an to save himself, . . . In all of Faulkner's novels, . . . there
is no fu ll scale portrait of a warm, easy relationship between
19
fathers and sons." This final comment is as pertinent to Elkin’s
work as i t is to Faulkner's, certainly, but more interesting in terms
of The Dick Gibson Show is the notion that m an is able to save himself
as a consequence of God's non-involvement, for this—reduced to
human, familial terms—describes accurately Dick's solution to the
mystery of his father. Approaching him to discuss his apprenticeship
63
and his prospects in lif e , Dick watches his father promptly adopt the
guise of the indifferent dad, a character out of generation gap
comedies who cannot begin to understand or sympathize with his son's
aspirations and ideals. Frustrated, Dick walks o ff to work i t out
for himself, concluding fin a lly that the point of his father's
theatrics is to teach him how easy i t is to be unself-conscious and
to instruct him in the rewards of becoming immodest. This, at any
rate, is what Dick decides the point of the performances to have
been, and, his father's continued distance offering no contradiction,
he consequently resolves to "dispassionately enter the silence" by
resuming his apprenticeship, possessed now of the knowledge his
father has 'taught' him. The ambiguity of that lesson is preserved
through the family farewell scene, Dick coolly and unself-consciously
grasping his father's hand to shake i t , his father refusing the
gesture by warmly embracing his son, his eyes red with tears.
In one sense, then, the meeting with the father is successful,
Dick's interpretation of the meaning of his father's mysterious per
formances at once a confirmation and reinforcement of the truth
gleaned through his solution of the mystery of Miriam's voice, the
two episodes’ combined effect being to propel him out of his stag
nation, setting him o ff on his adventure again. The parallel! ism
between these two scenes can, however, obscure the important point
that, while Miriam can nicely serve Dick's journey as a "super
natural helper" figure, the father, in mythic terms, represents m uch
more than'this—■ o r so both Elkin's description of the significance
64
of the father and Campbell's explanation of the "atonement with the
20
father" stage of the hero's journey would suggest. In these terms,
Dick has only received an equivocal blessing from his father, having
succeeded in revealing the meaning of his father's impostures, but
having failed to disclose the face of the father which exists behind
them a ll. The significance of the meeting with the father as Campbell
characterizes i t is that the son "opens his soul beyond terror to such
a degree that he w ill be ripe to understand how the sickening and
insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely
validated in the mystery of Being. The hero transcends lif e with
its particular blind spot and for a moment rises to glimpse the
source. H e beholds the face of the father, understands--and the two
21
are atoned." Dick's father does try , in one of his inexplicable
monologues, to prove a bias in nature which leads i t to tear the arms
off toughminded blue collar types in preference to white collar
workers, but outside of this, the closest he comes to evoking the
mystery of Being for his son is by becoming an embodiment of i t ,
never once allowing Dick to-see his true face and thus understand.
Dick's failure to pass successfully through this stage has
psychological ramifications as important on the narrative level as
its mythical elements are to the novel 's underlying themes. For,
as Campbell points out in his introduction to The Hero with a Thousand
Faces, the purpose of the societal rituals corresponding to each of
these stages in the hero's journey is "to conduct people across the
very d iffic u lt thresholds of transformation that demand a change in
65
22
the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious lif e ."
Therefore, to unsuccessfully pass through one of these stages is to
fa il to develop fu lly in psychological terms, to become fixated at a
certain plateau of psychic maturity. His failure to achieve atonement
with his father has, from a psychological perspective, the consequence
of leaving Dick as selfless a m an as his father seems to be, one w ho
must project a destiny for himself as a kind of substitute for
personality. The foundation of that destiny is, of course, his
apprenticeship, Dick's attempt to make adherence to a prescribed plan
of action impose upon him characteristics and give him someone to be.
(In his need for a destiny, as in many other matters, Dick anticipates
Ben Flesh, a m an who has an annual itinerary of franchises "in lieu
of a life " [TF, p. 245].)
Dick dimly recognizes the nature of this problem when, confronted
subsequently with inconsistency in his own feelings and actions, he
admits to himself "I do not know what m y lif e is," and responds by
calling o ff his apprenticeship, suspecting i t to be the source of
his confusion. I t is too m uch a part of him to be abandoned, however,
and he all but immediately takes i t up again, going "back into radio"
as "the quest continues" (p. 87). His longing for a destiny and a
stable identity are abruptly gratified when he is drafted into the
Army during World War I I , becoming a soldier the temporary solution
to both aspirations. But his want of a stable identity remains a
major concern in Parts I I a n d lll of the novel, i t becoming increasingly
clear to him that this characteristic of selflessness, although suiting
56
him admirably to be the ordinary's broadcast embodiment, is a devastat
ing lack when the social fabric to which he had dedicated himself as
both voice and representative (or as representative voice) unravels
all around him.
The m ilitary not only imposes upon Dick a number of people to be,
but i t also provides him with the circumstances of his most ecstatic
and triumphant moment. Before that occurs—or that occurs only
because--Dick resolves to become a brute. In itia lly assigned to a
combat unit, Marshall (his G .I. name never revealed, we know only that
he is not Dick Gibson) effects a transfer to Special Services for
himself by doing an hour's audition for the division commander,
parading before him all the broadcast roles and selves he has been
learning to master in the various jobs he has held in the year between
his departure from Pittsburg and his induction into the Army. He
brings to his new Armed Forces Radio assignment the memory of the
brute mentality to which he had been introduced in his original unit,
and, impressed that such m en exist within the nation of whose character
types he had thought himself to have exhaustive knowledge, he secretly
declares himself one of them. W hen an a ir raid ale rt is signalled in
the middle of one of his transcriptions of The Patriot's Songbook
on AFR, Marshall is ordered to finish the taping before retreating to
a shelter by Lieutenant Collins, his studio engineer. As i t had
during his employment with the Credenzas, his fear prompts him to
strike out at the powers above him, attacking them by f illin g the
transcription with anti-Army propaganda, obscene parodies of service
67
anthems, and incitements of his "fellow animals" to desert, his
engineer taping i t a l l, not for broadcast, but for use as evidence
of the charge of treason he plans to level at him as a result of this
outburst. The taping finished, Collins turns Marshall over to the
m ilitary police, the alleged tra ito r secretly delighting in the
myriad of selfhood potentialities im plicit in the well-defined, famil
iar role of prisoner.
Whereas a ll the "please be easy"'s he has delivered into micro
phones in the last few years have failed to advance him appreciably
toward the mythic status to which he aspires, his recognition of
"the impossibility and inanity of comfort" (p. 96) during the a ir
raid and his consequent explosion of fear, anger and frustration on
the transcription prove m uch more successful toward that end. The
tape is played for a "famous general" who, having heard about the
incident, is considering making an Army-wide example of this sergeant
and his broadcast treason, but who changes his mind upon hearing who
this offender is. Driving through Nebraska one winter night years
e a rlie r, the general, too exhausted to drive the icy roads, had tuned
in K R O P on his radio and was waked up--rescued—by a voice which had
identified its e lf as Dick Gibson. Marshall had used the name in the
last days of his Credenza job, during a period when he had f e lt him
self to be in a kind of post-fall (or post-firing) "state of grace,
of classic second chances." He had sensed then that one listener
could make the difference between "one conception of the place and
another" (i.e . Roper as defeat vs. Roper as significant state in his
6 8
mythic progress), and he imagined that listener out there somewhere
being guided by his voice, preserved "on the treacherous road as art
preserves, as G od does working in mysterious ways" (p. 43). The
famous general was that imagined listener, Marshall finds when brought
before him, the mythic conception of Roper, and of his entire lif e ,
proved and confirmed by this revelation. Overtaken by emotion,
Marshall weeps openly before the general and his s taff, knowing now
"that i t was over: his apprenticeship was really finished, the last of
all the bases in the myth had been rounded, his was a special l i f e ,
even a great life --a l i f e , that is , touched and changed by cliche'
by corn and archetype and the oldest principles of drama." A s i f out
of some ritual necessity, he launches into a silent recitation of a
litany of the cliche's appropriate to the moment, evoking the nam e
of the founding father of quests such as his and conferring upon
himself not only that nam e but his ow n ideal nam e in the process:
Good work, Dick Gibson, he thought. Poor Dick Gibson,
he thought. You paid your dues and put in your time
and did what you had to. You struggled and fought and
contended and strove, and many's the time your back
was against the wall, but you never le t up, you never
said die, even when the night was darkest and i t seemed
the dawn would hold back forever. You showed them. You,
Dick Gibson . . . (pp. 105-6)
The Franklin allusion aside, Marshall's characterization of himself
as "Poor Dick Gibson" reflects his conviction that the mystical
event of the general‘s intercession has magically transformed him
into his ideal self by confirming his "mythic turn," thus vindicat
ing his years of self-imposed suffering and tr ia l; i t also represents
his approximation of the pity the truly great must feel for themselves,
the delightful sorrow that comes from one's recognition that greatness
necessarily separates one from ordinary m en and women, isolating him
o ff in an existence whose states are epochs rather than days, months,
and years, and whose share of suffering, portentous incident and
significant gesture, danger and success will be proportionally
greater as well. He dissolves this pleasantly melancholy reflection
by assuring himself that the solitariness he will suffer is not
"niggling loneliness and apprentice's uncertainty" but a loneliness
which exists "inside power," and thus he opens himself to "the
exceptional lif e he has been vouchsafed to liv e ," a magnificent
l if e , "but fam iliar too, unconventional, but riddled with conventions
of a different, higher order" (p. 107).
Having entered the Army and symbolically crossed the "firs t
threshold" bounding off everyday rea lity from the "regions of the
23
unknown" or the "zone of magnified power," Marshall undergoes a
metamorphosis which changes him from normalcy's prime advocate into
a brute, his broadcast on the brutes' behalf a necessary link in his
ultimate elevation through the intercession of his final "supernatural
helper," the famous general. Restored to himself through the gen
eral's account of his magical K R O P broadcast, Marshall--now Dick— is
confronted with his f ir s t cliche situation even before he can silently
pledge, "I am ready for things to happen to me. Let the chiches
come. I open myself to the great platitudes" (p. 108). Like all
reluctant war-heroes-to-be in Hollywood movies, he is given the
choice of court martial for his seditious broadcast or a hazardous
70
duty assignment, and, good mythic m an that he now believes himself to
be, he opts for the la tte r. The task he has been set is to become
the "voice of the war," as he had once been the sound of the ordinary,
the Patriot's Songbook tape having made clear that his voice is a
perfect barometer of prevailing conditions and could thus be used
by the general and his s taff to provide "color" on the war, giving
them an accurate feel for the war's progress and emotional tenor.
And so Dick, in the company of Lieutenant Collins, is dispatched to
Mauritius to send back reports to the high com m and on a war that
hasn't arrived there yet.
The closing episode of Part I, a tour de force of such richness
and imaginative breadth as to be unequalled anywhere in Elkin's
endlessly inventive creations, pits the competing conceptions of
reality--th e " life is ordinary" view and the mythic view--which are
the novel's primary thematic concerns against each other once again
in a kind of f ir s t movement fin ale. Dick again insists upon the
ordinariness, the unmysteriousness and explicability of l i f e , while
his own actions continue to replicate archetypal paradigms too l i t t l e
like cliches for him to recognize them and embrace them as mythic
experiences in his personalized, secularized, untranscendent sense
of the word.
Uncertain exactly what kind of information he is expected to
be gathering, Dick reports on the scarcity of troops on Mauritius at
his and Collins' arrival and the subsequent buildup of allied and
Japanese forces, his transmissions back to the high com m and the
71
episode's narrative units. The f ir s t paragraph of Dick's in itia l
transmission, in the form in which i t was originally published, is
worth quoting at som e length, since i t reflects more e xp licitly than
the novel passage does how hard Elkin worked to set up the central
tension--the extraordinary world of Mauritius opposing Dick's attempts
to respond routinely to it - - o f this complex episode.
"Dick Gibson talking low on the low band.
"We're on Mauritius. Formerly lie de France. Indian
Ocean, east of Madagascar. Breasting the 20th parallel
like a runner breaking the tape. Sister isles, all
volcanic—Reunion (a French possession), Rodrigues and
the St. Brandon group. (Who's St. Brandon, patron of
what? Sounds English to me. How did he get those
spic brothers Reunion and Rodrigues for sister isles?
What miscegenous, nigger-in-the-woodpile history went
on here anyway? Who, wanting something for nothing,
looking for what trade routes, asking the way east
from the way west like those other old junkmen of
science, the alchemists, lowering what boats of which
mutineers or the sea-sickened say, burying the
beriberied, promising to return, putting them ashore—
as the government Coll ins and m e—on som e open-
ended wi11-cal1, found this place? Charted i t on
maps, informing the old cartographers so they could
erase their ancient lame finesse, Hie sunt leones? I t
is the world, real as Paris. And ah significance returns,
grazing the surfaces of the place like that random
spinning spotlight of the world, the sun, illuminating—
the light is te rrib le , I have no smoked glasses, though
Collins, an officer does--the landscape as monks an
in itia l le tte r in an old text.
I t is d iffic u lt to ignore the numerous Faulknerian echoes in
the style and substance of this paragraph, but i t is equally obvious
that Elkin is here putting Faulknerian locutions to distinctly un-
Faulknerian ends. In Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner presents a lengthy
historical account of the growth of Jefferson, Mississippi, the
chapter succeeding not only in convincing us that the city owes its
72
evolution to the attempts of som e early residents to deny responsi
b ility for the loss of an ordinary padlock, but in also transforming
that padlock into a resonant symbol of the absence, or sense of loss,
out of which often spring the greatest hum an undertakings and achieve-
25
ments. There is comedy in this narrative, certainly, but i t is a
comedy which elevates its subject rather than reducing i t , which
ennobles rather than demeaning its historical material. The histor
ical ordinary is permitted no such reification in Elkin's paragraph,
largely because i t is its narrator's tendency to deflate the signif
icance of history by demythologizing i t , paring i t down to a panorama
of hum an pettiness and greed through sarcasm and hyperbole. Dick
approaches this exotic locale with the tourist's chip on his shoulder
and a sense of nationalistic bad fa ith , all but defying the place
to ju s tify its e lf and its history to him. Its sister isles are un
inhabited, desolate, in his view, their names of dubious origin;
its discovery was a navigational accident, the island merely a con
venient dumping ground for the mutinous, the incompetent, and the
physically unsound from crews of ships heading on toward greater
discoveries, more promising land masses. And even the speculations
of baffled cartographers overrated the place, their attempts to
ascribe characteristics--human meaning—to the island, "hie sunt
leones?" overshooting by a good deal its actual meaning, which Dick
subsequently articulates for the high command: " 1HIC SUNT DODOES! 1"
The belligerence in the tone of this paragraph (Dick really
is "talking low") reflects his discomfort at transmitting reports
73
whose purpose he doesn't understand, and is also attributable to his
resentment at having been marooned on Mauritius by the U.S. govern
ment to carry out this apparently pointless, and distinctly unmythic,
task. But there is more than this behind his querulous broadcast,
because he is also contending with the aura of the island, his efforts
at b elittlin g i t , at reducing i t to the tawdry and the quotidian,
proving not completely successful. For, after years of accidental
sightings and meaningless, unrecorded landings, the island was
ultimately charted, brought within the compass of hum an knowledge
and significance, the unsolvable mysteries of its incalculable past
subsumed within a superficial coherence called Mauritius, a place
in the world "real as Paris." Dick acknowledges the island's evo
lution from meaninglessness into meaning, from incomprehensibility
("hie sunt leones?") into history, but this is all that he is con
sciously w illing to grant it . The metaphors in which he concludes
his description of its fully-evolved reality betray a very different
sense of the place, however. Mauritius has become part of the
humanly-recognized world, he asserts, then likens its rea lity in
the world to that of Paris, his simile simultaneously affirming the
solidity of the place and attributing to i t the kind of unreal,
metaphoric aura which has attached its e lf to this most romantic
and ideal of citie s . The significance that has 'returned,' clearly,
is not ordinary significance any more than Paris is merely a real
c ity , and Dick's final simile in the paragraph confirms this sug
gestion. The significance that 'grazes the surfaces of the place'
and 1 illuminates the landscape as monks an in itia l le tte r in an old
te x t1 cannot, by the very terms of Dick's comparison, be routine or
ordinary, for just as the monks' embellishments of manuscripts reflect
no merely decorative impulse, but represent instead their attempts to
glorify God through the introduction of beauty into the world, so,
by implication, Mauritius is illuminated by a more than merely human,
more than everyday meaning for Dick. His aversion to these metaphysi
cal glimmerings notwithstanding, Dick proves--ironically--to be the
one visito r to the island whose senses are finely tuned enough to make
him aware of its 'te rrib le lig h t,' and he refuses the officer's use
of sunglasses as a defense against i t , opting instead to battle i t out
with language, attempting to deny its existence with the very words
through which he inadvertently gives i t shape and substantiality.
What this paragraph dramatizes, then, is Dick's awareness that he has
entered a foreign realm, "the range of the strange" with its 'te rrib le
ligh t' illuminating more than hum an truths and more than ordinary
rea litie s. Fiercely responsive and sensitive to this strange aura
that the island projects, Dick must nonetheless deny i t , refusing to
admit the alterations its influence causes in his own character^or
to recognize the series of actions i t imposes upon him, endeavoring
instead to routinize and defuse its extraordinariness by articulating
i t into normalcy.
Dick's f ir s t transmissions to the high com m and concern the rapid
buildup of troops taking place on Mauritius, his accounts of the
increasing activity omitting the rumored explanation that attributes
75
the mobilization to the discovery of a dodo bird on the island's
southern periphery., the Japanese troops having gone in after i t , the
allies in hot pursuit. Sansoni, a Japanese ornithologist, confirms
the rumor's veracity when Dick and Collins encounter him in the
Mauritius Museum of Art and Dodo Reconstruction, explaining to them
why his country wants this supposedly extinct bird by launching into
a lengthy mythic narrative of a 13th century Japanese emperor, Shobuta,
and the dodo bird that twice saved the nation from fallin g into the
hands of an evil warlord. The bird appeared mysteriously in Japan on
the island of Shikoku, Sansoni relates, attracting the attention of
one of Shobuta's counselors, who resolved to use this rarity to teach
the emperor, a faint-hearted m an popularly known as Shobuta the Tender,
courage and tenacity. The dodo proved voiceless, frustrating the
counselor’s attempts to teach i t to say "courage," the word of which
he hoped to make the bird a symbol. (As in Mauritius, so in Shikoku;
hie est virtus becomes hie est mutus. ) The counselor hopelessly con
signs the dodo to a zoo, where Shobuta finds and rescues i t , convinced
that its wings have been amputated by the zookeepers as a sop to
oddity-seeking patrons. He takes the dodo hom e with him, determined
to become its wings by carrying i t around with him everywhere and to
become its voice by singing to i t constantly. Far from seeing the
dodo as an embodiment of courage, Shobuta projects his fears of
imminent assassination on i t , viewing the bird in its wingless state
as emblematic of the hum an truth "we all come down." His fear of
assassination stems from threats m ade on his life by Zamue, a hideous,
76
protean, demonic figure whose vow of murder amounts to a decree of
fate in the frightened emperor's eyes. Zamue arrives fin a lly , intent
upon making good his threat of cleaving the emperor in two when the
ungainly dodo waddles into view, momentarily distracting him from his
purpose. He sets again to strike, but the dodo suddenly rises into
the a ir before him, shocking him so thoroughly that Shobuta is able
to disarm and k ill his would-be assassin.
The miraculous ascension of this flightless bird saves Shobuta
and the nation as well, but its subsequent effects prove to be dis
tin ctly less positive. Into the vacuum created by Zamue's elimination
from the national struggle for political power crowd a number of
treacherous and unscrupulous men, a ll of them intent upon dislodging
the emperor. Shobuta responds to this circumstance by throwing off
his tenderness, transforming himself into a warlike, fearsome leader
of m en whose string of victories in the defense of his realm soon
earn him the new t it le of Shobuta the Jealous. W hen only one contend
er for his throne--a warlord named Korogachi who has publicly scoffed
at reports of the dodo miracle—remains, Shobuta mobilizes his troops
for combat and moves to engage the opposing forces, his dodo at his
side. By the.third day of the battle the dodo, unaccustomed to the
martial airs with which Shobuta has replaced the love songs and
lullabies he had previously used to serenade the bird, and mercilessly
inundated by the clangor of battle intolerable to its delicate sense
of hearing, is fin a lly driven mad, the shield of a fallen enemy
soldier becoming the means upon which i t dashes its brains out.
77
Discovering his dead friend lying on the shield, Shobuta undergoes an
other character transformation, throwing down his weapons and picking
up the bird. The spectacle of Shobuta the Jealous mournfully bearing
the dodo's body through the battlefield proves so affecting that the
combatants on both sides cease their fighting in order to attend it and
to empathize with the emperor's grief. Only a deaf samurai in Shobuta's
ranks fa ils to notice that the battle has stopped and, spying Korogachi
disarmed by the general lamentation, he sneaks up on him and k ills him,
thus eliminating the cause of the war and thereby bringing i t to an end.
Even in death, then, the dodo has saved Japan a second time, the inci
dent also confirming a rumor that had circulated widely following the
fir s t miracle: that his relationship with this rare and magical bird
had rendered him "rosichicho"--irresistible, invincible. Aware that
they are losing the war, Sansoni explains in concluding his narrative,
the Japanese have come in search of the dodo in hopes that i t might
grant them a third and final miracle: victory in World War I I .
That Sansoni's narrative has mythic dimension and power is sug
gested by its efficaciousness in liberating Dick from a role fixation
to which he has succumbed on Mauritius, his compulsion to play the
no-nonsense, hardnosed N C Q to Collins' aristocratic officer dispelled,
as i f magically, by the story. Feeling himself "unsergeanted" at
its conclusion, Dick is "as grateful to the Japanese [ornithologist]
as he had been to the general" (p. 126), his pairing of the two
figures reflecting the fact that both of them contribute to trans
formations he undergoes (from brute to m an of destiny, from sergeant
78
to himself) and that both of them serve him also as guides and in itia
tors into mythic adventure.
Sansoni's motive for relating this story to Dick and Collins, the
la tte r realizes, is that he needs them to convince the British troops
on Mauritius not to stage combat attacks in the area of the dodo hunt
for fear of maddening the prey, the ornithologist gambling that the
two Americans will allow him to lead them to the site, where they will
attempt to capture the bird themselves before the Japanese can claim
i t and benefit from its magic powers. Having driven deep into the
Mauritius jungle, the three abandon their jeep, Dick aware of having
entered a primeval zone, outside history, a mysterious realm permeated
by "an odor neither ripe nor rotten, lif e nor death. I t was as if ,"
he explains to the high command, "we smelled the molecules themselves,
things outside of time and form" (p. 129). This primordially dark
jungle represents the sphere where reason fails and contradiction is
reconciled in a greater unity, a region, in Campbell's terms, "beyond
26
the phenomenal realm of names and forms." Isolated when Sansoni and
Collins vanish into this all-consuming night, swallowed up himself
in the elemental darkness of this jungle where he crawls on hands and
knees in search of the elusive dodo, Dick begins his journey towards
the lig h t, an ordeal of rebirth in which he symbolically murders his
self-conscious, embarrassed self to rise a new man, recapitulating,
in the process, the final state of Shobuta's mythic progress.
Groping through the darkness he comes upon the dodo's nest,
silently capturing the bird as i t attempts to escape him. Certain
79
that he w ill be killed i f discovered by one of the Japanese soldiers
with his hostage, he hides i t under his shirt and continues to crawl
on all fours as i f s till in search of i t . Aware that the Japanese
have the area too completely covered to make escape possible, and able
to arrive at no other plan of action, Dick spends the night beating
the bushes, his unwilling passenger in tow. Not uncharacteristically,
he views his catch with l i t t l e reverence or awe, explaining to the
high command, "over the rough old ground we went, a trade route of the
extinct, and I thought of dinosaurs and mammoths and the sabre-toothed
tiger, and here was I , Dick Gibson, with that other loser, the dodo.
Back, I thought,.back to history, you1 1 (p. 130). Unable to imagine a
disruption of the ordinary so extreme as to explain the appearance of
an extinct bird in the 20th century, Dick sees the miraculous creature
merely as an irrita tin g anachronism, angry that this intruder from
another epoch is certain to cost him his lif e at dawn--as certain, as
i t turns out, as Zamue was to cost Shobuta his lif e . N o less angry
with its captor, the dodo bites, pisses and shits on Dick and is
vomited on in return, the relationship between the two of them deepen
ing with the night such that Dick's predawn efforts to free the bird
are met with its refusal to leave his side. Having arrived at no
plan, but beginning to feel the odd effects the "extinct germs" the
dodo's bite has introduced into his bloodstream will have, Dick rises
from the ground at dawn, holding up his captive for the Japanese to
see. Perhaps these germs, extinct for centuries, necessarily induce
languor in their host, or, germs from a mythic beast, they may
80
translate whomever they invade into a realm beyond time in which all
is determined and a ll action fated--whichever the case, Dick begins to
feel lazy, oddly detached from his surroundings as the Japanese troops
close in on him and Collins screams orders at him, promising to shoot
him i f he doesn't k ill the dodo. Protesting weakly that " 'It 's only
a bird. Everybody. Hey, it 's only a b ird ,'" Dick fin a lly s lits the
dodo's throat with the knife that Collins has thrown to him, the
Japanese soldiers gasping "as i f I'd pressed the blade to their own
throats" (p. 132) as he does so. He walks toward them with his k ill
in his arms when i t suddenly rises into the air and fa lls , repeating
the movement twice more as the Japanese army looks on in wonderment
and fear, murmuring "Rosichicho" in parting ranks to le t Dick and
Collins depart without interference. From a safe distance the two
Americans watch an English garrison move in and wipe out the Japanese
encampment, killin g every m an in the detachment.
'"Oh m y God, it 's the miracle!'" Collins cries out when the dodo
rises from Dick's arms, but Dick assures his high com m and audience
that there was no miracle, only c ra ft—that he had intentionally
tossed the corpse into the a ir three times in an effo rt to cover his
and Collins' escape. " 'It 's all in the w rists,'" he insists, invoking
the age-old American belief in the primacy of technique and execution
27
over magic and myth. Predictably, then, Dick denies the premise
of a myth--it is the wrong myth, unrelated to his apprentice's "self-
made, from the ground up vision of the world"--and rejects the truth
i t embodies, exploiting the dodo narrative as a gimmick to save his
81
l i f e , and subsequently dismissing i t as the superstition of a credu
lous people. Although he has earlier declared his embrace of all myth,
characterizing himself as "a sucker for all primal episode" (p. 22),
he is describing his proclivities more accurately when he te lls
Miriam that he is "'a sucker for the f ir s t person singular'" (p. 72),
the isolate individual's story more compelling to him than the nar
rative which embodies truths about all of humankind. This inclination
is at least partially responsible for his in ab ility to recognize the
parallels which exist between his own experience and events in the
story of Shobuta's elevation to in vin cibility: expecting no one else's
lif e to resemble his own, he neither seeks nor finds sim ilarities.
There are sim ilarities, however, up to and including Dick's adoption
of the same selves Shobuta progresses through and his parallel attain
ment of in vin cib ility as well.
His fir s t days in the Army represent his Dick the Tender stage.
Horrified by the coarseness and depravity of his fellow GIs, he
becomes extremely passive and deferential toward them, making him a
convenient dupe for their cruel jokes and a perfect audience for their
vulgar displays. ("Was he the last innocent man?" he wonders at the
time; "He was sure he was not innocent, just less brutal , perhaps,
less reckless, more hygienic than the next man" [p. 92 ].) The fear
he experiences during the a ir raid broadcast changes his attitude
toward his fellow soldiers and himself, his brush with death leading
him--as i t led Shobuta—to become a brute. He not only sabotages the
AFR broadcast in his brute role, but also verbally abuses all the
82
m ilitary underlings with w hom he comes into contact, threatening one
of them by demanding "'Cut the sarge shit, Mac . . . or you and m e
are going to tangle assholes'" (p. 102). (Significantly, Sansoni
echoes this phrase in describing Shobuta in his jealous stage, asking
his listeners i f i t is not correct English to say that during this
period Shobuta '"locked assholes'" with a number of adversaries.) And
fin a lly , i t is through the dodo's death that Dick, like his mythic
predecessor, becomes "rosichicho," the bird's refusal to leave his
side when he releases i t having the effect of saving his lif e rather
than, as he had anticipated, costing him i t . I f i t is true that
"neutrality is the miracle" as Dick te lls the high com m and at one
point, recalling the Japanese soldier who had helped him adjust his
seat on the plane to Mauritius, then the dodo has broughtabout the
miracle (as Collins' outcry suggests) by conferring neutrality on
Dick, thus making him, in symbolic terms, invincible. For both
Shobuta and for Dick i t is necessary to become a brute in order ot
progress toward a more elevated state of being, the dodo becoming for
each of them a crucial means to that end, its sacrificial death at
their hands redeeming them. What makes their paths seem so dissimilar
is the apparently contrasting resolutions of their individual passages.
Shobuta's second foe, Korogachi, skeptical about the accounts of
miraculous circumstances surrounding Zamue's downfall, contends that
the actual miracle lay not in the emperor's triumph but in the extreme
character change he underwent shortly thereafter, his interpretation
of the story proving analogous to a Campbellian psychological
83
approach to ritual and myth, the assumption that within such forms is
contained the accumulated knowledge of the stages and transformations
28
representative of the lif e of the hum an mind. The story of Shobuta
and his dodo, clearly enough, dramatizes one such psychological trans
formation, bodying i t forth through the narrative of a m an who must,
quite lite r a lly , live up to his name. Shobuta, we are told early in
Sansoni's account, means compassion, and although the emperor is, at
the outset, already known as "the Tender," he must s till undergo the
experience with the dodo to move from tenderness to compassion; he
must suffer, as Dick would put i t , to make himself worthy of his
name. In the battle with Korogachi, Shobuta undergoes a second trans
formation or character change, his "Shobuta the Jealous" self dis
solved by the sight of the lifeless dodo on the shield, the grief this
sight causes him so overwhelming and affecting as to compel his
enemy, Korogachi, to join him in tears, the 'miracle of n eu trality1
thus forged marred only by a deaf samurai unable to hear that the
clangor of war has been s tille d , replaced by a universal lament.
(Korogachi's interpretation of the fir s t dodo incident proves, ironi
cally, grimly prophetic of the second, his own defeat proving of m uch
smaller significane than the change that takes place in Shobuta.) The
image of the emperor bearing his burden across the silent, smoke-
fille d battlefield becomes for the Japanese an image of the omni-
29
presence of hum an sorrow and visualization of the corollary truth
that this recognition of the sadness contained in the hearts of all
m en is the ground of reconciliation and unity between them--that their
84
shared birthright of loss and suffering is so elemental as to render
unthinkable and absurd all the more superficial claims upon them which
necessarily result in contention, opposition, war. Shobuta, then,
becomes the mythic embodiment of compassion, his image on the battle
field reminding all who contemplate i t of the universal anguish which
underlies all of human existence, and of the understanding and mutual
30
sympathy that that knowledge imposes upon us a ll.
L ittle more perceptive about the meaning of the myth than is its
narrator, Sansoni (who misunderstands i t so thoroughly as to think
that the recovery of a dodo w ill actually achieve something as counter-
31
mythic as to win a war for Japan ), Dick not only remains largely
oblivious to the parallels between Shobuta's progress and his own,
but he also manages to overlook the fact that this is the story of a
m an whose nam e comes to 'define a condition,' precisely the circum
stance to which he has for so long aspired. (That Shobuta's name has
a meaning--compassion— im plicit within i t from the start distinguishes
i t from the vague and indeterminate "mythic body of American dash"
Dick hears in the syllables "Dick Gibson," of course.) This myopia
does not, however, prevent Dick from being transformed by his experi
ence with the dodo, though i t does compromise significantly the
meaning that transformation can have. Pausing in his narrative to
ponder the dodo's lack of wings, Sansoni wonders i f "'we have all
along paid too m uch attention to its winglessness and not enough to
its voicelessness. Perhaps voicelessness is a choice--the choice of
silence. Perhaps winglessness is one. Perhaps there are birds that
85
reject the a ir and choose the earth. Perhaps even extinction is a
choice of sorts" (p. 126). The m an who aspires to be "Dick Gibson
. . . of the United States of American sky" should understand very well
Sansoni's argument here, for he has himself 'chosen voicelessness1
in the past, retiring into a Morristown convalescent home, thereby
rejecting "the air" (pun on radio's sense of "the air" intended) and
'choosing the earth.' I t had been fa ilu re , embarrassment, self-
consciousness which had driven him into that withdrawal--for the
radio m an a 'choice of extinction1--and he has since dedicated himself
to the overcoming of these inhibitions, the culmination of his experi
ence with the dodo symbolic of his successful completion of this
undertaking.
Sansoni's insistence upon the significance of the dodo's voice
lessness is not the only prompting w e are given to associate Dick's
failings with the bird; the ambiguous syntax of a previously-cited
sentence offers another invitation to us to link the two. "Over the
old ground we went," Dick explains, "a trade route of the extinct,
and I thought of dinosaurs and mamm oths and the sabre-toothed tig er,
and here was I , Dick Gibson, with that other loser, the dodo"
(p. 130). Although "that other loser" lite r a lly places the dodo in
the ranks of the other extinct beasts that Dick lis ts , i t is gram
matically more correct to interpret this final phrase as suggesting
that Dick is one loser accompanied on this trek by another. This
"crippled bird" becomes a kind of doppelganger for Dick, a living
projection of the scruples, fears, insecurities and weaknesses which
86
imprisoned him among the invalid and the handicapped, and which i t was
the purpose of his apprenticeship to eliminate from his character.
The apprenticeship cannot end here, but in s littin g the dodo's throat
Dick has (as we shall see) effectively destroyed its--his--disposition
toward voicelessness and self-extinction, affirming and confirming,
in the process, his own resolve to subsequently "dispassionately enter
the silence" and f i l l i t with words. This sacrificial rite proves
Dick worthy, then, his elevation reflected in the circumstance to
which he has ascended in Part I I , Dick Gibson having been transformed,
on Connecticut radio station W H C N , into the Dick Gibson Show.
In one regard, consequently, Dick appears to have been as success
ful as his mythic predecessor, moving smartly from one level of psy
chological awareness to another; viewed from another perspective,
however, the apotheosis achieved by Shobuta utterly eludes him. To
understand why Dick's apotheosis is inefficacious and truncated, i t
is helpful to consider Daniel Hoffman's comments on the similar
failures of American folk heroes to advance beyond a limited form of
self-transformation through their adventures. "In the American folk
hero," Hoffman argues, "the transformations are metamorphoses without
being rebirths. The concentration of psychic energy necessary for
spiritual commitment and spiritual change is not apparent in either
the bourgeois get-ahead values of Ben Franklin or in the sly or
boisterous go-ahead values of Sam Slick-Davy Crockett." Dick's
metamorphosis, we notice, resembles those undergone by these heroes in
being "only outwardly comparable to the rebirths achieved by initiato ry
87
rites in cultures or institutions of sacred orientation. Their func
tion, nonetheless, is a ritu a lis tic one: not a rite de passage but a
ritual of intensification, in which the powers of self are affirmed,
reinforced and glorified by each demonstration of their successful
32
use." What these fi gures--Frank! in'of the Autobiography and Dick
Gibson incl uded--experience is not rebirth but the confirmation of self
through action, the enigma of identity solved through deed and task,
the resulting self a construct formed out of the accumulation of all
such acts. Dick's transformation in particular consists largely in a
redefinition of the claims of the self, his resolution to "dispassion
ately enter the silence" being his answer to the "plan" through which
the Autobiography Franklin sought to impose the pattern of himself
upon rea lity . But such a "plan," as Hoffman's argument suggests, can
take the planner only so far: i t can culminate in greater and greater
affirmations and confirmations of the s e lf, but i t cannot affect any
"spiritual change" or make the passage into any higher state of being
possible. This would com e as bad news to Dick Gibson, a m an w ho
believes that his lif e has already been transformed into one essential
ly different, exceptional, mythic, and who spends the remainder of
the novel waiting for that special dispensation to take effect upon
him, experiencing instead only the succession of incidents, the
"rituals of intensification," which allow him to know himself more
and more thoroughly through actions, but which fa il to lead him toward
the achievement of a stable, constant, knowable self. His evolution
into Dick Gibson continues, in other words, but i t is unaccompanied
88
by the rebirth that would transform Dick Gibson into someone to be
rather than merely leaving i t as a name to take and a voice to become.
A second, equally crucial difference between the mythic journeys
of Shobuta and Dick involves the impact their undertakings have upon
those beyond themselves. Shobuta's gesture of grief on the b attle
field brings a c iv il war to a halt, saving lives and renewing the
state while subsequently becoming a national image of the redeeming
powers of hum an compassion. His deed is mythic because i t carries
within its e lf the potential to effect the transformation i t dramatizes
in those to whom i t is related, its efficaciousness testified to by
its a b ility to 'unsergeant' Dick. O n the other hand, Dick’s apothe
osis—insofar as i t is one--is an apotheosis of the fir s t person
singular, a transformation so personal and private as to effect no one
but himself. His anti-mythic gesture of tossing up the dodo makes
him "rosichicho," but his in vin c ib ility is not even potent enough to
prevent the death of his sidekick, Collins, who is killed in the
battle following the bird's 'miraculous' flig h t. To embody the truth
of human compassion is to accomplish miracles of rescue and redemption,
a comparison of the two men's mythic journeys would suggest, but to
emerge from sacred time with no message but technical efficiency and
American know-how is, at best, to save only one's own skin.
The inadequacy of Dick's anti-myth, anti-magic stance is further
demonstrated by his reaction to his discovery of the Army's purpose
in having him send back broadcasts to the high com m and from Mauritius.
They were merely trying out a new type of radio transmitter, he
89
realizes, using his lengthy broadcasts as elaborate aural test pat
terns. Mauritius had been chosen intentionally as the site of this
test because there had been no m ilitary ac tivity in the area prior to
the arrival of Dick and Collins, insuring that there would be l i t t l e
that he could report that the enemy could use even i f they were able
to intercept this new signal. Dick was never told what to report,
consequently, because the high com m and had never intended that his
transmissions be anything other than meaningless. But even Dick under
stands that meaninglessness is neither easily achieved nor preserved,
and i t is he who explains in his final report to the high com m and
that, despite the fact that he and Collins were sent here only to
conduct a test, their arrival attracted the attention of the Jap
anese command, who sent troops in to watch them and stumbled upon the
dodo in the process, these troops followed in, in turn, by allied
forces suspicious about the sudden m ilitary buildup in this non
theater of the war. Through a complicated series of actions and
reactions a test of equipment culminates in a major engagement and
thousands of lives lost, prompting Dick to point out in signing off
for the last time that he knows his messages were supposed to be
meaningless, but that "'th at's very hard,you know? Meaning is every
where, even in Mauritius'" (p. 133). Dick's final transmission con
stitutes his grudging acceptance of the existence of a m ode of signi
ficance he had tried to deny in his fir s t broadcast from Mauritius,
i t becoming necessary for him to acknowledge som e kind of force in
the world--call i t meaning--which turns tests into slaughters and
90
transforms meaningless messages into rea litie s of frightful import,
Mauritius., he is ta c itly admitting, is an extraordinary he cannot
routinize, its 'te rrib le lig h t1 proving too bright to be dimmed by his
attempts to syntactify i t into normalcy. In this, the most distinctly
Pynchonian moment in Elkin's fiction (we are reminded of similar
intuitions of realities behind the ordinary experienced by Stencil,
Oedipa Maas, Leni—or by Cooyer's Ralph Himsbaugh in The Origin of the
Brunist§% for that matter), Dick must acquiesce to the existence of a
portentousness at the heart of the world for which he cannot account.
Typically enough, his acquiescense is not quite complete.
Haying in his previous paragraph accepted "Meaning" in Mauritius,
Dick immediately launches into his debunking of the dodo miracle in
the nam e of technique, the precipitation with which he does so throwing
into question once again whether his idea of "Meaning" is n 't too
limited and mundane to encompass the mysterious events in which he has
participated. However l i t t l e credence he may place in the myth of the
redemptive dodo, in other words, i t nonetheless has played no small
role in the eventuation of the battle of Mauritius. Not only was this
myth primarily responsible for the majority of Japanese soldiers having
been brought to the island, their task to seek out and capture the
bird in hopes that its magic would win them the war, but the myth also
allows Dick to stall those forces long enough with its re-enactment
such that the English troops can surround them in ambush, the resulting
battle being more of a decimation than an engagement. Dick may have
tossed up the dodo in imitative parody of the myth, but to these
91
Japanese forces this sacred story becomes something to die for, the
implication clear that those who fa il to recognize the power of myth
may actually become its fa ta litie s , an idea which w ill be echoed in
the obsessions of Dick's listeners on his c a ll-in radio show. Against
all evidence that in Mauritius, as everywhere, circumstances develop
and connections occur which are attributable to no merely hum an
motivation and are the product of no completely human agency, Dick pits
his 'the world is ordinary, technique is enough1 vision: against the
overwhelming certainty that a Japanese company has been obliterated
as a direct result of their participation in a mythic re-enactment
of sacred events, he continues to oppose his belief that existence is
explicable, circumscribable, safe--ordinary.
That there is no one listening to this broa,dcast--to its content,
at any rate—sugtests that Dick may not have adyanced as far beyond
the days in which he was turned o ff en masse by the Credenzas as i t
might otherwise seemj in any case, his progress through Part I of the
novel has met with only mixed success. He has made the crucial com
mitment to "dispassionately enter the silence," but s t ill lacks any
thing to say into i t save "Dick Gibson" and "Please be easy." He
continues to aspire to the mythic l if e , and yet finds himself com
pelled to deny the truly mythic elements of his own experience. At
this stage in the novel Dick remains a man without a self, one whose
mythic aspirations too often disintegrate into the perpetration of
empty roles and meaningless histrionics. The end of Part I fore
shadows, in fact, what will happen to him again and again in the
92
remainder of the novel, the m ilitary assignment he had thought to
represent the f ir s t real test of his worthiness of his newly-achieved
mythic estate fin a lly having proven to be nothing more than an extended
version of the hack radio man's stock and meaningless litan y, "testing
one-two-three."
With the opening of Part II the narrative surface of The Dick
Gibson Show undergoes a significant shift from the narrative m ode
established in Part I. Whereas in the earlier section the reader had
grown accustomed to a succession of movements forward and backward in
time reminiscent, perhaps, of the swirling, looping, and overlapping
temporal perspectives of Faulkner works such as Light in August or
The Wild Palms, Part II quickly establishes a straightforward, linear
narrative movement which remains uninterrupted from beginning to end.
The density of texture achieved in Part I by that interweaving of
temporal contexts is replaced in Part II- - t o the extent that i t is--by
the diversity of voices tellin g their stories on the a ir during Dick's
program, his own role in the section consisting in introducing these
guests and in his subsequent confrontation with one of them, the
confrontation which represents his ultimate ordeal and triumph. What
is significant in this shift is not merely that Dick's story has
given way to the stories of others (he has never, after a ll, denied
others' accessibility to the sam e ordinary world he champions), but
that he, even at this apparent pinnacle of his career, has already
lost control of the radio world of which his apprenticeship was
93
designed to make him master, the lin earity of the narrative reflecting
how severly his mythic aspirations have been compromised by mere
chronicity, by the routine succession of minutes, hours, and days
which opposes his own conception of time as a medium of complexly
interweaving planes perfectly structured to reveal mythic destinies
and confirm mythic truths. (The novel's temporal scheme w ill undergo
s till another deflation in Part I I I , where the five hour segment that
■marks not only the duration of one of Dick's programs, but also pro
vides the temporal boundaries of Part I I , disappears and is replaced
with purely contingent successiveness, Dick proving as incapable of
controlling the events of his lif e as he is of ministering to the
random obsessions of the listeners who call in to talk to him on the
a ir .) Part I I , then, is the Dick Gibson Show (one of them, at any
rate ), the novel's middle term mediating between the complex surface
and mythic resonances of Part I and the utterly linear, one-dimen-
33
sional and ordinary character of the narrative of Part I I I . Although
Part I I dramatizes Dick's arrival and his most triumphant moment,
f u lfillin g , to a degree, his Part I hopes and aspirations, i t tempers
them with foreshadowings of the hollowness and disappointment in which
that triumph will culminate in Part I I I .
The most striking characteristic of Dick's program, and, given
the protagonist we have come to know in Part I, its most predictable
element, is its odd admixture of the ordinary and the mythic, the
everyday and the marvelous. The program's format is the fam iliar one
of the late night celebrity talk show pioneered by radio personalities
94
such as Long John Nobel, Barry Gray and Jean Shepherd, three of the
broadcasters to w hom Elkin has, te llin g ly enough, dedicated the novel.
For this evening's program, Dick has invited four conventionally con
troversial guests of divergent interests and opinions, as well as a
special guest about w hom he knows less than he should. Each o f his
guests is expected to speak from his or her own corner of the world,
of course: Dr. Jack Patterson, an associate professor of English at a
local junior college, represents the Humanities; Pepper Steep, a
w om an who owns and runs a charm school, can talk manners, morals and
etiquette; Bernard Perk, a Hartford pharmacist and fluoridation
proponent, is the program's specialist in health and physical exercise;
and Mel Son, a disc jockey with extensive experience in running for
city office, provides a political perspective. Together, these four
ground the program firm ly in the everyday world, its activities and
debates, Dick serving merely as a non-controversial "control" medi
ating their disputes and insuring that all of them get equal say.
(Technology assists him in this, the studio microphones automatically
compensating for the different power levels of the guests' voices,
equalizing and common-denominating them on their way out over the a ir .)
Despite the thoroughly routinized and utterly premeditated character
of the show, Dick is , typically enough, able to think of i t in dis
tin ctly mythic terms. Going through the program's ground rules for
the panel of guests and for those they have brought to watch, Dick is
responding .to his conviction that these visitors deserve insights for
having com e to the studio, and he is "only sorry that the show was so
95
much what i t seemed. Those who came to the house of magic," he thinks,
"were entitled to secrets." The only real secrets here, as i t turns
out, lie in Dick's perception of his nightly broadcast and its meaning:
Besides, he loved the people who saw him work. The
capsule-like character of the studio, the heavy drapes
hung down over solid, window!ess walls, and the long
voyage to dawn created in him a special sense of intimacy,
as though what they were about to do together was just a
l i t t l e dangerous. Even more than the people who watched
him work he loved the people he worked with. They were
comrades. For him i t was as i f place—all place—was
ridiculous, a comedown, a ll studios makeshift, the
material world existing only as obstacle, curiously
unamiable, so that, remembered la te r, the night they
worked together became som e turned corner of the lif e .
(A sense, up all night, of emergency, of national crises
kicked around the anchor desk.) (p. 139)
The studio described here not only recalls the one in which Collins
ordered Dick to transcribe an AFR broadcast during an a ir-ra id ; the
passage also suggests that through The Dick Gibson Show Dick has risen
to the attainment of his ideal conception of time, the program
metamorphosing the five hours i t is on the a ir from just another
evening of pure successiveness into a nightly ritual of 'turned
corners of the l i f e , ' time rendered significant through mythic trans
formation and Dick blissfully seated at the controls of this sublime
process. Through the program too he is able to throw o ff place and
become what he has always hoped to be: "Dick Gibson of Nowhere, of
Thin Air and the United States of American Sky" (p. 11). H e is fu lly
ready, then, to undergo the final stage of the hero's passage, the
ultimate ordeal, or in itia tio n , for which his previous lif e has been
but a preparation. That ordeal appears embodied in the figure of his
f if t h , and special, guest of the evening, Edm ond Behr-Bleibtreau.
96
Dick experiences his sense of arrival and fulfillm ent only insofar
as he feels himself to be in control of his radio world, and Behr-
Bleibtreau quickly undermines this sense of well-being by all but
lite r a lly stealing the show out from under him, making this particular
journey toward dawn more than "just a l i t t l e dangerous." Professional
ly , Behr-Bleibtreau is a psychologist who dabbles in flying saucers
and psychic phenomena, but his primary interest lies in the notion
of mind over matter, psychokinesis. N o sooner has the show gone on
the a ir than Behr-Bleibtreau is using auto-suggestion to set the other
guests bickering at each other and at him, Dick's attempts to bring
the discussion back to issues meeting with l i t t l e success.
The psychologist then proceeds to compel each of the panelists
to relate a particularly personal and private experience to the radio
audience while the remaining guests s it dumbly by, psychically checked
against interrupting their fellows' self-exposures. Thus Jack
Patterson speaks not of literatu re and art but of his infatuation for
a ten-year-old songstress who has the body of a child and the face
of a woman; Pepper Steep ignores etiquette to recall a failed love
a ffa ir with a m an for whom the lure of show business proved stronger
34
than her love for him; Bernie Perk forgets fluoridation, rhapsodizing
instead about the embarrassing ailments and astonishing physical
characteristics that wom en bring in to his store for his inspection,
and detailing his strange relationship with one of these customers;
oblivious to political concerns, Mel Son threatens to commit suicide
with the gun he has brought to the studio and discusses his adolescent
97
resolution to be sexually touched but never to touch others, his goal
of becoming a sexually self-sufficient being. In one sense these four
narratives (which comprise nearly four fifth s of Part 11's ninety-five
pages) anticipate the monologues of callers-in to Dick Gibson's Night
Letters, a later program, in Part I I I , but they d iffer from them in
being more complete, less fragmentary accounts with beginnings,
middles and ends, these panelists proving relatively more on top of
their obsessiveness than the telephone contingent w ill turn out to
be, and thus more in control of their 1ife-narratives as well. What
links their four monologues with each other and with those of Dick's
future callers is the tendency of their stories to revolve around a
missed connection, a frustrated relationship, an ungratifiable fix -
ation--any type of failure to make contact with people, with things,
with lif e . Their compulsion to confess (whether i t be of external or
internal origin) culminates in no absolution or communion, only
silence, each of them lapsing into utter wordlessness once his or her
story is through.
Behr-Bleibtreau in bringing all this about is posing a threat on
two separate fronts to Dick's vision of the world and his attempts to
proselytize for i t . First of a l l , the psychologist prevents the
guests from discussing the subjects ordinarily covered on this pro
gram, subjects which can generally be counted on to inspire lively
exchanges in the studio as well as in the hom es tuned in to the show.
To discuss fluoridation is to discuss the public health, for instance,
a communal concern in which a ll citizens can take an interest, and i t
9 8
is to such intercommunication of public issues that Dick dedicates his
show, secure in the knowledge that the program not only embodies the
concept of an American social fabric, but actually helps to create i t .
Not content merely to prevent such an exchange from taking place, Behr-
Bl eibtreau manages also to turn the program's conversation into the
precise opposite of such public-spirited debate. In Part I of the
novel, Dick speaks movingly of 1 1 'the private lif e . That everybody
has"’ (pi 48), evoking the sad situations of those reduced to their
individual circumstances, of people hopelessly locked into their own
fates and thus deprived of the comforts and support of the public
realm, and i t is accounts of this utterly private lif e that Behr-
Bleibtreau e lic its from Dick's panel of guests, compelling them all
to reveal to the world the extent to which they are isolated selves
bounded in by their private obsessions, needs, longings. ("'Every
body has his secret,'" Bernie Perk disgustedly objects after hearing
out the self-revelations of Patterson and Steep, " 'But i t isn !t
people '3 bug tries s '1 1 (p. 183) he adds before launching into his own
rapturous paean to the dimensions of the private parts of one of his
customers.) Against Dick's ideal image of the American family
gathered warmly around their radio set, sharing a program on a
winter's evening, Behr-Bleibtreau opposes the spectacle of solitary
people too deeply tucked into themselves to see out; against Dick's
projection of an American social fabric in which a ll can be united,
Behr-Bleibtreau counters a procession of personal narratives which
intersect with each other at no point and which provide no meeting
99
ground whatever upon which any sense of community could be founded.
What Behr-Bleibtreau accomplishes, in short, is to turn Dick's program
into a cacaphony of the fir s t person singular, giving its host his
fir s t lesson in the implications that being a "sucker" for that voice
35
have in relation to his ideal communal vision.
The other side of the two-pronged threat Behr-Bleibtreau poses
to Dick's vision of things was accurately articulated by Joseph M e Elroy
in his review of the novel, in which he described Dick's special guest
3 6
as "a silence into which the regular unpaid panelists eagerly plunge."
Having drawn their private confessions out of them, Behr-Bleibtreau has
silenced each of the guests, becoming himself a kind of personification
of the dead room of Part I, a silence which attempts to swallow all
sound up into its e lf. The guests rendered speech! ess, Behr-Bl ei btreau
turns his attentions upon Dick, a m an not unacquainted with the silence.
Not only W as i t Dick's self-imposed task to "dispassionately enter the
silence" in order to become a radio man, but he has more recently suf
fered the loss of fourteen years of his own taped programs by fir e in
his apartment, a loss which represents to him "the word disintegrate
. . . the wisdom forgotten and the madness gone, and only the silence
for punctuation" (p. 140). He has now watched Behr-Bleibtreau reduce
his guests—the representatives not merely of the listening audience but
also of all the panelists he has ever had, that motley crew he would
"keep talking forever" (p. 142) i f he could--to Wordlessness, and he
must consequently confront the si1ence alone, combatting the psycholo
gists's efforts to steal his voice and quiet him forever. Whereas
100
killin g the dodo and, in effect, 'silencing its silence' had been a
symbolic act of self-affirm ation, his battle with Behr-Bl eibtreau repre
sents his actual in itia tio n into the role of hero, a lite ra l confronta
tion with the powers of silence the triumphant emergence from which will
—apparent!y--establ ish once and for all his claim to mythic stature.
Behr-Bleibtreau notes that fir e has already destroyed much of
Dick's voice, and proceeds to invoke a demon, Sordino, from the infer
nal regions to complete the task. Imagining himself the s p irit he has
called up, Behr-Bl ei btreau attacks Dick, attempting to strangle him.
He is on the verge of succeeding when Dick's chair slides out from
underneath him, upsetting them both and giving Dick the opportunity to
37
wrest Mel Son's gun from him. Dick turns upon his attacker with the
weapon, beating at his Adam's apple with i t as he had cut the dodo's
throat at the close of Part I, fin a lly allowing the psychologist to es
cape with his lif e . His departure from the studio frees the guests
from their trances, and they rise to go, leaving Dick to ad lib his way
through the remaining hour of the. show, "using his voice because he
s till has i t , because it 's s till his--uniquely inflected, Gibson-tim
bered, a sum of private frequencies and personal resonances, as marked
as his thumbs— because the show must go on and he must be on it" (p.
229). So he signs o ff the show on a note not unlike that upon which
he closed down his Mauritius broadcasts, his earlier assurance tempered
now by the fact that he "has had a closd call" and knows it:
"Well, ladies and gentlemen," he says,'\there is
no astrology, there's no black magic and no white, no ESP,
no UFO's. Mars is uninhabited. The dead are dead and
101
buried. Meat won't k ill you and Krebiozen won't cure you
and we'll a ll be out of the picture before the forests
disappear or the water dries up. Your handwriting doesn't
indicate your character and there is no God. All there is
. . . are the strange displacements of the ordinary." (p. 229}
What might have been a genuine r ite of passage (to recall Daniel Hoff
man's distinction) becomes just another "ritual of intensification"
for Dick, and a severely qualified one at that, his triumph vitiated by
his own acknowledgement that he was able to prevail largely because
he had nothing that Behr-Bleibtreau could have deprived him o f—that,
unlike his guests, for w hom compulsory confession culminated in word
lessness, "Poor Dick Gibson had nothing to confess . . . his own slate
is clean, his character unmarked, his history uneventful" (p. 229). I f ,
as Dick insists at one point in their struggle, 'the voice is the sound
of the soul1 (p. 224), then i t follows that he has nothing that this
Mephistophelean figure can steal, for he is only a voice without con
tent, the very sound of the soulless man. For all the mythic buildup
of this journey toward the dawn of spiritual rebirth, Dick emerges from
38
the night very much the Protean m an (to use Robert Jay Lifton's term )
he had signed on the a ir five hours e a rlie r, his sense of himself—
insofar as he has one--continuing to derive from his image of the
world into which he sends his voice. He has gotten in a final good
word on the ordinary's behalf—that is, on the behalf of that community
of listeners with shared values and shared concerns he imagines to be
out there--but he has had to submit to giving its displacements nearly
equal time, a concession attributabl e to the fear Behr-Bl eibtreau has
put into him (the magnitude of which is not clear until Part I I I ) , or
102
to his intuition that the narratives to which he has been listening
this night bear precious l i t t l e sim ilarity to the socially affirmative,
public-spirited visions he would have expected to hear from his in-
studio audience surrogates. The options le ft to him by the end of
Part I I seem to be two: he can either choose to remain nothing more
than "what I think . . . and what I say on the radio" {p. 209), a m an
w ho has only "the show must go on" for principles (p. 222) and is
"acharacter as som e are amoral" (p. 208), or he can follow his guest's
example, confirming identity through obsession, throwing o ff all
sense of the public, the social and the communal in order to gratify
immediate impulses and indulge private visions. He is, as i t turns out,
too much a radio m an to choose the la tte r and too much a mid-20th
century m an to opt exclusively for the former, and thus he spends Part
I I I in a state of desperate irresolution, now attempting to embody and
encourage an American public 1ife , now retreating into private answers
and personal obsessions. This means, of course, that his apprentice
ship has not ended, Dick having failed to move from one state of
being to another through this in itiato ry t r i a l ; and, that he has no
boon to bestow as he re-enters the daylight world, the only message he
brings back--the same old one of "Dick Gibson" and "Please be easy"—
seeming inadequate now even to him.
"The agony of breaking through personal lim itations," Campbell
argues at the close of his discussion of "The Initiation" stage of
the hero's adventure,
103
is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, lite ra tu re , myth
and cult, philosophy and ascetic disciplines are
instruments to help the individual past his limiting
horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As
he crosses threshold after treshold, conquering dragon
after dragon, the stature of the d ivin ity that he sum m ons
to his highest wish increases, until i t subsumes the
cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of
the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences
of form--all symbolizations, all divinities: a realiza
tion of the ineluctable void.39
Although Dick has had his in itia tio n , has confronted his dragon and
conquered him, he has experienced no "spiritual growth" but only the
reinforcement of his commitment to those "limiting horizons" which
allow him to believe that the world is normal and that lif e is
ordinary. He imagines for a moment in Part I I I that he has become
invested with the power of a d ivin ity, but the moment turns out to be
just another epiphany of his isolation and loneliness, and i f he is
led to a realization of "the ineluctable void," i t is not that which
underlies all being but the less dramatic, more dispiriting one which
is the a ir into which his listeners and callers in Part I I I w ill hurl
their obsessions, questions and fears while he listens on the other
end of a telephone,. Whereas The Hero with a Thousand Faces served us
a guidebook for the following out of the patterns of Parts I and II
° f The Dick Gibson Show, then, its argument proves largely inap
plicable to Part I I I , in which patternlessness has become the norm
and point, this section demanding the gloss instead of works of
sociology with title s 1 ike The Fal1 of Pub!ic Man and The Culture of
Narcissism. The "return" stage of the hero's passage represented by
Part I I I of the novel is less a re-entry into the everyday world than
104
i t is a series of half-hearted gestures on Dick's part to repeat
those past moments in which he had been convinced that his mythic life
was just beginning, these efforts counterbalanced by his equally
indecisive motions toward repudiating the mythic life in favor of the
private one.
The allure of private gratifications confronts Dick even as he is
delivering his 'displacements of the ordinary' monologue closing out
Part I I , the sight of Pepper Steep's sister, Carmel la , asleep in the
visitors' section of the studio arousing in him feelings of concern
and protectiveness, their subsequent relationship becoming the sub
ject of the early pages of Part I I I . Although Dick has fallen in
love with her, Carmella resolves to stay with him only until she meets
someone "who is already something" to love, someone who has defined
himself in conventional denominational and professional terms, a m an
whose character answers her passion for the "normal and the ordinary
and the public" (p. 240). (Dick fa ils to f i l l this b ill because he
is only the ordinary's broadcast embodiment and not himself an
ordinary man.) Carmella and Marshall (he has abandoned Dick Gibson
upon being asked to resign at W H C N following the Behr-Bleibtreau
evening) travel to Pittsburg for his mother's funeral and end up
moving in with his brother, Arthur, whom she comes gradually to
recognize as Mr. Average himself, the Methodist of her dreams. Aware
of Arthur's reluctance to take his mistress from him, Marshall rises
one night during a furious rainstorm to experience an old feeling
and to respond to i t with a magnificent and mythic gesture. He
105
ascends to the solarium of his brother's house and watches the play of
lightning and the rain beating against the glass;
It was as i f he were flying in i t . He thought of radio, of
his physics-insulated voice driving across the fierce fall
of rain; i t seemed astonishing that i t ever got through.
Now, though he was silent, i t was as i f his previous •immu
nities s till operated, as i f his electronically driven
force pulled him along behind i t , a kite's ta il of flesh.
He stood in the sky. He raised his arm and made a magic pass.
"This is Dick Gibson," he whispered, facing the thunder,
"of all the networks, coast to coast." (pp. 248-49)
Having lapsed into silence for a time following the Behr-Bleibtreau
incident, Marshall here re-experiences the old mythic conception of
himself as a m an possessed of special powers and immunities, and feels
too the fam iliar compulsion to send his voice out into the night in
affirmation of his restored certainty that his destiny lies in the
airwaves, that his voice's only true hom e is in the sky. This re
captured vision inspiring him, Marshall indulges himself in a series
of grandiose power fantasies, imagining his voice as a sort of net
work of all networks, and then pictures himself as G od throwing a
lightning bolt at downtown Pittsburg. Thus inflated with himself, he
comes to think of Carmella "as of som e mortal w om an he had loved,"
and has hereby prepared himself to make his great, tragic gesture of
renunciation. Arthur appears, and Marshall grandly offers Carmella to
him, suggesting that they are well-suited to each other, whereas he—
although i t breaks his heart—was meant for higher things and greater
sacrifices, this Kierkegaardesque relinguishment of Carmella clearly
one such act. The grandeur of his gesture is immediately deflated
when a flash of lightning discloses Carmella, naked, standing behind
106
Arthur, what Marshall was offering his brother in all humility and
self-denial having, quite clearly, already been given. Unable to
leave Pittsburg with a sense of having willed his fate and chosen his
departure (just as he had been disappointed to arrive there in Part I
in answer to no c a ll), Marshall leaves nonetheless, the public self
he w ill resume as he returns to the a ir now seeming less an ideal than
one of love's rejects, an involuntary drop-out from private lif e .
From Pittsburg he travels west, visiting past apprenticeship
stops and rediscovering his misplaced sense of "the several Americas,"
a hierarchical ordering of American re a litie s which moves, level by
level, inward from the surface homogeneity created by the omnipresence
of Safeways, Dairy Queens and Howard Johnsons'^0 to the disparities
attributable to region and socioeconomic situation and, "structuring
even these, adumbrating difference like geologic layer, character,
quirk, personality like a coat of arms, and below personality the
unspoken and below the unspoken the unspeakable, so that he walked
down Main Street he might as well have been in Asia" (p. 251).
Rather than discouraging him, the "xenophobic unease" Marshall feels
in the American cities he passes through f i l l s him instead with a
sense of purpose, of tasks s t ill to be accomplished and uniformities
s t ill to be imposed upon the intractable and various materials of the
American re a lity . There are many levels to which his precious
ordinary has not penetrated in the mind and hearts of his fellow
citizens, he now understands, characters and quirks i t has not en
compassed and layers of the unspeakable and the unspoken into which
107
his words have not yet been breathed. I t is this realization that
reconciles him to continuing his apprenticeship with a renewed dedi
cation and a new purpose—to find the program format best-suited to
his resolution to further common-denominate the country.
Marshall's new project is strongly influenced by the introduction
of two advances in radio technology which a lter considerably the
medium's capabilities while also expanding its claim to the triumph
over time: the "instant on" feature that eliminates the frustrating
delay that listerners of previous eras had to endure while the tubes
in their sets warmed up, and the tape delay, a device that makes
feasible two-way talk programs on the radio by providing a means of
monitoring the conversations of callers before they go out over the
a ir so that they can be safely censored when necessary. (This device,
as Irwin Schlueter, a radio technologist, points out in his lengthy
paean to the innovation, has combined with the ordinary house te le
phone to make "every hom e in America its own potential broadcasting
station, and every American his own potential star" (p. 237), a ll of
which must necessarily turn upside down Marshall's image of the ideal
American family, who now gather not around the radio to be entertained,
but who gather around the phone to be entertainers.) Aware of this
advance and sensitive too to the prevailing Zeitgeist, Marshall
decides that a two-way talk show is what is required, a format in which
the listeners, rather than being represented via surrogates as they
had been on his Hartford program, be given fu ll opportunity to express
themselves in their own voices and in their own words on his airtime.
108
Thus is Dick Gibson's Night Letters, his Miami Beach talk show, born,
and thus does Marshall become, for the last time, Dick Gibson once
again.
I f Dick's mythic passage through the novel can be said to culmi
nate in the conferral of any concrete boon, the format of his Night
Letters program, although not original with him, is necessarily it .
What this format allows Dick to do is to give the public its voice and
to insure that, during the hours i t is on the a ir, there is a con
tinuous dialogue going on in the world, irrefutable broadcast proof
that the"real silence" can be held o ff merely by the chatter of two
people holding a dialogue over the radio. He believes that his Night
Letters show can become a kind of forum for the exchange of American
wisdom as well as a demonstration of the nation's homogeneity, a
broadcast umbrella under which all of his communal persuasion are
invited to huddle. The problem with this format, as i t turns out, is
that there are few listeners out there who share his vision, and
fewer s t ill who want to talk about anything other than themselves.
Whereas i t had'taken the auto-suggestion of Behr-Bleibtreau to
deflect the conversation on The Dick Gibson Show from customary civic
concerns and questions in the public interest to the secret shames
and private obsessions of his guests, Dick's Night Letters audience
requires no such alien prompting to set them off on their elaborate
barings of souls and expressings of selves on the radio. Their
arguments, frets, reminiscences and general self-disclosures, which
comprise m uch of Part I I I of the novel, present Dick with more "firs t
109
person singular" than he could ever have wanted, and i t is only approx
prtate that one of his callers is Miriam Desebour, the wom an responsi-
ble for his discovery of his predilection for that mode, the fru its of
which he is now reaping.
His callers generally fa ll into two different groups, one of which
is the contingent of isolatoes and-boundary-squatters, the s e lf
obsessed too deeply involved in "the private lif e . That everybody has"
to even imagine participation in the communal world Dick is attempting
to project. This group includes a wom an fixated upon the meaninglessly
horrible circumstances of her childhood ear-piercing; a boy orphaned
at the age of ten who is trying to manage the vast financial holdings
his deceased relatives have bequeathed to him; a young, enormously
bright couple whose impressive cultural contributions have been brought
to an abrupt and complete halt by the arrival of their fir s t child,
born blind; a m an whose obsession with money-making schemes turns'into a
kind of solipsism, the world existing for him only as validation or
repudiation of his latest project; and Miriam Desebour, whose lengthy
soporific monologue reflects not only her assumption that she will never
be interrupted, but her corollary indifference to the utter lack of
relevance her personalistic soliloquies can have to anyone who would
uninterruptingly s it through them. Exasperated by these egotistical
Dutpourings, Dick fin a lly complains
What's happening to m y program? What's the matter with
everybody? W hy are we a ll so obsessed? I te ll you, I'm
sick of obsession. I've eaten m y ton and can't swallow
another bite. Where are all m y Mail Baggers, the ones
who used to call with their good news and their recipes
110
for Brunswick stew and their tips about speed traps between
here and Chicago? How do your gardens grow, for Christ's
sake? What's with the crabgrass? What'll i t be this summer,
the sea or the mountains? Have the.kids heard from the colleges
of their choice? What's happening? (pp. 321-22)
What's happening, a ll too clearly, is that his listeners have been for
too long cultuvating the garden of the self to be worried about crab
grass in the external world, their preoccupation with inwardness
insuring that neither a summer vacation nor a son's or daughter's
advancement through institutional America will m uch allay their
anxieties or resolve their dilemmas. His callers are the Americans
discussed at length in works of social psychology such as Richard
Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, individuals "concerned with their
single lif e histories and particular emotions as never before," and
who find this concern "a trap rather than a liberation"; they are
people who attempt to realize "an intimate vision of society," those
who refuse to acknowledge the necessary discontinuity between public
and private lif e and consequently must reject social existence when
i t fa ils to provide them with the psychological rewards and personal
41
gratifications their misguided view has demanded of i t . Too intro
spective to have tips, directions or recipes to present to the world
beyond themselves, they speak only to confirm their sense of exis
tence by seeing i t reflected in the eyes of others or by hearing i t
substantiated on the a ir by programs like Dick Gibson's.
Significantly, Dick aligns himself with the compulsive con
fessors and the helpless obsessives in this complaint, im plicitly
affirming the communal vision he has promulgated all along as the
111
ideal, and yet suggesting that he, lik e his callers, has failed to live
up to i t . He may have in mind an incident shortly antedating his Miami
Beach employment. Tired, discouraged and a l it t le drunk, he had call ed
in to a radio program much lik e the one he would soon have, unburdening
himself in a 1 engthy account of his apprenticeship, failed love lif e
and increasing sense of hopelessness, the host's attempts to soothe his
sobbing caller by assuring him that everything is all right being met
with the testy reply,'"No, i t is n 't. But i f you want to know w ho I am
. . . I'm Dick Gibson'" (p. 257). The ideal, pub!ic self represented
by the magic nam e here coalesces with the private, suffering self, and
although Dick has not given up his mythic aspirations completely, he
has used this public forum of the a ir to acknowledge that what he had
once referred to as "niggling loneliness and his apprentice's uncertain
ty" will necessarily exist within that mythic self once it has been
realized. In these terms, then, i t is something of an admission of
defeat for him to legally change his nam e to Dick Gibson as he does
shortly after this phone c a ll, for i t compromises what Dick Gibson can
become by dictating that he will not ever again not be Dick Gibson.
S till more compelling evidence of Dick's divergence from the
ideal, public-spirited l i f e he has championed is that he has developed
an obsession of his own. An anthropologist who calls Night Letters
one evening asks Dick to put him on hold until after the show has
ended, when he explains that his real study is not man, but Dick's
program, warning Dick that he must " 'be more careful . . . get his
rest and try not to worry'" (p. 292). Alternately te rrifie d and
112
exhilarated, Dick is convinced that he heard a Behr-Bleibtreauian
giggle as the connection was broken and consequently interprets the
call as the fulfillm ent of his mythic aspirations, the enemy, he
believes, having re-emerged to engage him in another struggle and to
provide his lif e with shape and direction once again. He has ex
plained this need of his for a coherent, purpose-filled lif e to
Sheilah, a showgirl who lives in the same hotel he does, recalling
for her benefit the exceptional li f e he had thought would be his, a
lif e "'that would be as i t is in myth. That maybe I would have to
suffer more than ordinary m en . . . that I would even have enemies
. . . like Dorothy had the Witch of the West'" (p. 270). Inspired
by such feelings, Dick decides that the schemer from Cincinnati, the
boy whose relatives have a ll been wiped out in accidents, and the
patient from whose hom e Miriam calls him are a ll Behr-Bleibtreau
using a disguised voice or stand-in, and although he recognizes the
accusations he throws at each of them as symptoms of an obsessiveness
no less virulent than that of the earring lady's memories, he none
theless remains vigilan t, awaiting the confrontation he half knows
w ill never occur. He expects the ultimate collision between himself
and his adversary to take place at a picnic the radio station is
holding for his Night Letters listeners, and immediately upon his
arrival at the picnic's playground site he takes to the pitcher's
mourid, the raised vantage point allowing him to scan the crowd of
fans against the appearance of Behr-Bleibtreau. Whereas an earlier
picnic—the one at the Morristown convalescent home—had culminated
113
in Dick's liberation from his withdrawal into voicelessness and in
the resurrection of his forsaken radio career, this one reaches no
similar resolution; instead, the listeners who have driven hundreds
of miles to meet their Night Letters host fin a lly give up their efforts
to lure him down from his perch, abandoning him to his obsession and
circulating around him to encounter unfamiliar Mail Baggers and
Listening Post members as i f he weren't there. Thus does the voice
of communality become the very image of isolated, obsessed humanity,
m an trapped in the magic circle of the self while the external world
moves on about him, unreal, unheeded and unheeding. Standing there
in his solitude, Dick has become what he has always wanted to be; a
symbol of his listeners. What he symbolizes, however, is not their
oneness but their aloneness, not the truth which brings them together
but the obsession which insulates them from each other, making them--
in Sherwood Anderson's phrase--"grotesques," people whose attempts
to embrace one truth as the truth have turned i t , and their lives
as well, into falsehoods.^
Behr-Bleibtreau never arrives at the picnic, of course, and
Dick’s subsequent attempt to recognize him behind a war toys pro
motion advertised in children's comic books reflects the extent to
which the psychologist has been transformed from a specific individual
into a pure symbol in Dick's mind. Finally engaging the toymakerv the
latest of his Behr-Bleibtreau avatars, through the mails, Dick finds
him to be the center of nothing--no symbol, no representative, no
embodiment, but just a dreary, pathetic, isolate symptom of a
114
national illness which has placed visions of private gratification
above all sense of what impact that vision, once realized, will have
upon the world beyond the gratified self. To murder such a man, as
Dick half-seriously considers doing, would be utterly pointless, for
his share of the illness is too small, too insignificant, for its
elimination to make the slightest difference. And so Dick abandons
the hope that Behr-Bleibtreau, whose re-appearance would have "focused
the great unfocused struggle of his life " (p. 323), w ill ever show up,
save in his emanations, his adversary character so thoroughly d if
fused, dispersed into the American landscape that i t cannot be engaged,
but only experienced as fragmentary revelations of the extent to
which the nation's public lif e has been corrupted and destroyed by
private visions, personal obsessions. In an important sense, then,
Dick had been absolutely right in believing Behr-Bleibtreau to be
behind a number o f - - if not a ll--o f the calls that came in to his
Night Letters show, for i t is the psychologist's anti-communal,
solipsism-inspiring vision that so many of these calls reflect. Not
merely 'a silence into which the panelists eagerly plunge,' Behr-
Bleibtreau is the circumstance of that silence as well, an embodiment
of the modern psychic dynamism which leaves speechless those who have
delivered themselves of their egotistical, self-obsessed lif e
histories. The psychologist represents the enemy in a double sense,
consequently, embodying not only a contradiction to Dick s communal
vision, but becoming also the very source of Dick's own fa ll from
his commitment to that vision. Having always wanted to represent his
115
listeners raised tp a higher power,, Dick ironically realizes this
ambition through Behr-Bleibtreau, for while his listeners are obsessed
with, something. he* in his obsession with his adversary, is obsessed
With, obsession, his success in this undertaking all but fin a lly
rendering his mythic project a failu re. The novel's most important
symbol? Behr-Bleibtreau is introduced in Part I I as the potent enemy
who can be defeated only by the pure hero who has no self to steal,
and then is transmuted in Part H I into obsession its e lf and the
silence into which i t leads, a force or s p irit so pervasive and so
protean that i t strikes everywhere but can be attacked nowhere? its
ultimate effect that of unraveling the social fabric and reducing one
and all to "the private l i f e . That everybody has" and to the silence
that surrounds it .
The second group into which Dick’s callers is divisible is that
of the opder^compulsiyes, m en and wom en no less obsessed than their
fellow listeners but for whom the source of obsession is different,
their monologues consequently representing an objection to a d if
ferent side of the Dick Gibson vision of things, One of these is a
m an desperately searching for a solution to the mystery of why
people in all lines of work predictably and unvariably te ll each other
jokes on their lunch hoursj another sleeps on the couch in the
waiting room of an emergency ward, secure in the knowledge that,
whatever emergency should befall him from within or without, there is
a specially designed tool or process available here to cope with the
situationj a third is the anthropologist, who presents Dick with an
116
overload of insights linking apparently disparate objects and events,
concluding that "'Truth is everywhere, Dick; significance is as
available as gravity'" (p. 291); and, fin a lly , serving as a sort of
spokesman for them a ll, an elderly caller whose discovery that tele
phone poles bear individual location tags—addresses, as he thinks of
them--led him to the realization that, throughout the hum an world,
"'There's order. There's procedure. There's records on everything.
There's system'" (p. 313). The monologues of each of these m en could
well be read as rebuttals to Dick's closing speech in Part I I , his
denial of the existence of various levels of significance and
coherence that others have imputed to the universe ("'there is no
astrology, there's no black magic and no white . . . Your handwriting
doesn't reveal your character and there's no God'" [p. 229]) figura
tively prompting this caller and his fellows to locate--or imagine--
alternate systems of relation and connection in the hum an world to
replace those deprived them by the secular, profane visions of m en
like Dick. Meaning becomes for them an end in its e lf, the slightest
glimmer of its presence in the world sending them off on benders of
significance-seeking, their hyperactive imaginations proving more than
equal to the task of building massive structures of order and conti
guity upon the foundation of the merest of nature's coincidences and
convergences. (In this, of course, they closely parallel the
paranoids, sensitives and world-projectors of Pynchon's work, though
they bear their burdens of meaning with greater wonder and optimism
than do his characters.) To a man, the order-compulsives delight in
117
the tig h tly-k n it world each of them has privately uncovered, and
Dick's airwaves become the perfect medium through which they can re
veal their discoveries to the world.
I f the private lif e fixates are, at least p a rtia lly , victims of
an ethic like that projected by Dick's show, which unintentionally
promotes and rewards the f ir s t person singular, then the order com
pulsives are victims of that Gibsonian vision which would strip the
world of all possibility of transcendence and a ll that smacks of
metaphysics and the metahuman, rendering i t safe, unthreatening,
manipulable and ordinary. (Such a vision, in which all boundaries
have been breached and the mystery of what lies beyond has been
abolishdd, is a vision characterized by, in Peter Berger's apt phrase,
43
"repressive triv a lity ." The weakness im plicit in Dick's vision is
its failu re to recognize the compensatory capacities of the human
mind, which, once i t is deprived of one form of sense-making, w ill
quickly engage another to take its place. The mental process involved
here resembles that described by Erich Neumann in his essay,
"Creative M an and Transformation," where he discusses the effects
of an excessive development of the reason to the exclusion of the
unconscious, or creative, mind. ". . . i f devaluation of the symbol-
creating unconscious brings with i t a severe s p lit between the
rational consciousness and the unconscious, the ego-consciousness,
unbeknownst to its e lf, will be overcome by the powers i t negates and
seeks to exclude. Consciousness becomes fanatical and dogmatic; or,
in psychological terms, i t is overpowered by unconscious contents and
118
overload of insights linking apparently disparate objects and events,
concluding that '"Truth is everywhere, Dick; significance is as
available as gravity1" (p. 291); and, fin a lly , serving as a sort of
spokesman for them a ll, an elderly caller whose discovery that te le
phone poles bear individual location tags—addresses, as he thinks of
them--led him to the realization that, throughout the hum an world,
'"There's order. There's procedure. There's records on everything.
There's system'" (p. 313). The monologues of each of these m en could
well be read as rebuttals to Dick's closing speech in Part I I , his
denial of the existence of various levels of significance and
coherence that others have imputed to the universe ("'there is no
astrology, there's no black magic and no white . . . Your handwriting
doesn't reveal your character and there's no God'" [p. 229]) figura
tively prompting this caller and his fellows to locate—or imagine—
alternate systems of relation and connection in the hum an world to
replace those deprived them by the secular, profane visions of m en
like Dick. Meaning becomes for them an end in its e lf, the slightest
glimmer of its presence in the world sending them off on benders of
significance-seeking, their hyperactive imaginations proving more than
equal to the task of building massive structures of order and conti
guity upon the foundation of the merest of nature's coincidences and
convergences. (In this, of course, they closely parallel the
paranoids, sensitives and world-projectors of Pynchon's work, though
they bear their burdens of meaning with greater wonder and optimism
than do his characters.) To a man, the order-compulsives delight in
117
the tig h tly-k n it world each of them has privately uncovered, and
Dick's airwaves become the perfect medium through which they can re
veal their discoveries to the world.
I f the private lif e fixates are, at least p a rtia lly , victims of
an ethic like that projected by Dick's show, which unintentionally
promotes and rewards the fir s t person singular, then the order com
pulsives are victims of that Gibsonian vision which would strip the
world of a ll possibility of transcendence and a ll that smacks of
metaphysics and the metahuman, rendering i t safe, unthreatening,
manipulable and ordinary. (Such a vision, in which all boundaries
have been breached and the mystery of what lies beyond has been
abolished, is a vision characterized by, in Peter Berger's apt phrase,
"repressive trival ity . The weakness im plicit in Dick's vision is
its failure to recognize the compensatory capacities of the hum an
mind, which, once i t is deprived of one form of sense-making, will
quickly engage another to take its place. The mental process involved
here resembles that described by Erich Neumann in his essay,
"Creative M an and Transformation," where he discusses the effects
of an excessive development of the reason to the exclusion of the
unconscious, or creative, mind. ". . . i f devaluation of the symbol-
creating unconscious brings with i t a severe s p lit between the
rational consciousness and the unconscious, the ego-consciousness,
unbeknownst to its e lf, w ill be overcome by the powers i t negates and
seeks to exclude. Consciousness becomes fanatical and dogmatic; or,
in psychological terms, i t is overpowered by unconscious contents and
118
unconsciously remythicized. The transformation of the world's
terrors and mysteries--to return to terms more appropriate to Elkin's
novel--into everyday realities can have only one effect: to oblige the
disenfranchised contents of the unconscious mind to attach themselves
to ordinary, fam iliar surfaces, their customary objects having been
rationalized out of association or symbolic link with them.
The relationship between the unconscious mind of man, with its
residue of terrifying images and unresolved symbolic tensions, and
the secularized, demythologized world through which he moves is a
problem addressed, in various forms, in the fictio n of Coover and
Pynchon as well as that of Elkin. In "The Door: A Prologue of
Sorts," Coover has Beauty (of "Beauty and the Beast") admonish her
heedlessly profane granddaughter, L ittle Red Riding Hood, "'sing
m e no lumpen ballads of deodorized earths cleansed of the stink of
enigma and revulsion! for I have mated with the monster m y love and
4-5
listened to him lap clean his lo lly after!" Pynchon's Dr. Hilarius,
on the other hand, once believed that the unconscious mind could be
made to mirror the domesticated, threat-exterminated world, that i t
would prove to be "'lik e any other room, once the ligh t was le t in.
The dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer
furniture. That therapy could tame i t after a l l , bring i t into
A C
society with no fear of its someday reverting'" ; his subsequent
experiences in psychiatry have convinced him otherwise. In The Dick
Gibson Show the confrontation between the sterilized surface of
events and the unconscious mind's consequent need to remythicize i t
119
is presented through the narrative of a caller named Ingrid, a wom an
whose "perfect pitch for machines" enables her to bridge the cate
gories of Dick's callers, the private lif e fixates and the order-
compulsives.
A divorcee with apparently conventional values and interests,
Ingrid found herself shortly after her separation from her husband
becoming obsessed with inventions, buying up all kinds of mechanical
gadgets and delighting in watching them perform their triv ia l tasks
in her home. The device with which she becomes particularly enthrall
ed, however is an alarm in her new Buick intended to a le rt the driver
when she has le ft the keys in the ignition with the engine o ff or
has improperly closed a door or failed to buckle a seatbelt. One
evening she drives to a party that her ex-husband will also be
attending ("'we s till know the same people,'" she te lls Dick, and so
i t is "'no big deal'" for them to meet this way), and inadvertently
leaves the key in the ignition as she leaves the car, the alarm
consequently sounding in the driveway as the party proceeds. Having
had more to drink than usual at the party, she fin a lly goes out to
shut i t o ff, but feels inexplicably guilty upon doing so and decides
instead to drive the car around the block to allow the device a
chance to howl its e lf out. The lengths to which she goes to keep
the sound from stopping become more and more improbable, more and
more manic, and by the end of her narrative the reader fu lly under
stands what she means when she explains that the siren '"is what
mourns.47 It's what says everything is n 't okay. It 's m y gadget for
120
g r ie f'" (p. 298). One of those for whom the domestication and rou-
tinization of reality has culminated in an incapacity for expressing
real emotion, Ingrid must look outside herself for a medium to express
the sorrow she feels, a sorrow for her broken marriage and fatherless
children, a sorrow for her tendency to drink too m uch and for the
general sloppiness of her lif e , a sorrow incompatible with a world
in which, by com m on consent, the most painful and harrowing of feelings
can and must be dismissed as "no big deal." Denied the normal chan
nels of emotional release'by the contemporary ascendency of routini-
zing visions like Dick's, the Ingrids of the world can do l i t t l e else
but fetishize their feelings, attaching them to objects to which they
bear no apparent relation in order to have them expressed at a l l,
the unconscious mind through symbolic substitution succeeding in
circumventing the rationalized and ratio n a lis tic obstacles the
Gibsonian view places in the way of that release. Feelings of grief
and their expression may become culturally distasteful and socially
discouraged, in other words, and normalcy demand the suppression of
real emotion, but i t is the hum an mind's capacity to turn mechanical
devices into 'gadgets of grief' which insures that such amelioristic
visions can never be ultimately triumphant; on som e level, the minds
of m en and wom en must always resist this view, recognizing what Dick
admitted over another announcer's ait— that "everything is n 't okay."
Having become no less an obsessive than are the members of half
of his listening audience, Dick is as m uch an order-compulsive as
are the callers in the other half, the significance or mode of
121
meaning he seeks out represented by the mythic coherence into which—
he is s t ill trying to believe--his lif e is about to f a ll. He recalls
the characteristics he had thought that l if e , once i t went into effect,
would have, continuing to describe i t to Sheilah:
I'd have this goal, you see, but I'd be thwarted at every
turn. I'vealways been in radio. I thought maybe m y
sponsors would give m e trouble, or m y station manager. Or
the network VP's. Or God, I admit i t , the public. That
somehow they'd see to i t I couldn't get said what needed
to be said. That I'd be kicked and I'd be canned, tied
to the railroad tracks, tossed off c liffs , shot a t, winged,
busted, caught in traps, shipwrecked, m an overboard and the
river dragged. But that I'd always bounce back, you under
stand; I'd always bounce back and live in high places
where the glory is and the ta ll corn grows. That m y
birthdays would be like third-act curtains in a play.
(p. 270)
Dick's advocacy of the ordinary and insistence upon the mundane as
the only rea lity victimizes him as thoroughly as i t does his fellow
order-compulsives, his denial of metaphysical truth, extrahuman modes
of meaning and psychic necessity leaving him only one source from
which to draw the metaphors and sequiturs which could transform and
magically organize his lif e : the national residuum of old movie
chiches. He has a goal throughout his lif e , of course, but since his
mythic aspirations pose no threat to anyone else, attempts at thwart
ing them have--save for the Behr-Bleibtreau incident--never tran
spired. Having never been certain what needed to be said (except his
name and "Please be easy"), he has never experienced suppression or
censorship in any form. And, as for being thrown from c liffs or
caught in traps, we have already seen how d iffic u lt i t is to raise a
flesh-and-blood enemy w illing to in flic t such injuries and indignities.
122
The sequiturs, the befores and afters, have, so fa r, failed to materi-
liz e , leaving Dick with a l i f e of unredeemed continuum,condemned to
mere consecutivity.
For Dick, as for the listeners he comes increasingly to represent
in the course of the novel, there turn out to be no third-act curtains
in lif e , no discernible transitions from one state of being to another,
no demarcations of even temporary beginnings, middles and ends; all
there is is "an interminable apprenticeship he now saw could never
end" (p. 331). The plottable, predictable, patterned lif e he has been
anticipating, the life that would have confronted time on its own terms
by dividing, segmenting and defining i t into humanly significant
portions never takes effect, his days never transformed into epochs or
periods, his hours never accreting but only progressing. Behr-
Bleibtreau is not the only evanescent, ever-dispersing, all-pervading
enemy Dick unsuccessfully takes on in the novel, then; time is the
other, the failure of his lif e to turn mythic, to become characterized
by recognizable turned corners and resolutions consonant with begin
nings, reflecting Dick's ultimate submission to this, his second sub-
stanceless adversary. The mythic lif e would have imposed upon the
purely successive nature of time a human meaning, treating i t much as
radio does, taking i t on "at its own game, scheduling i t , slicing i t
into fifte e n - and th irty - and sixty-minute slices" and thus making
him of the mythic l i f e , like radio its e lf, time's "single master"
(p. 67). The mythic life 's medium of defining and organizing time
is not by temporal units nor programming schedules, but through plots
123
48 ^
or--in Frank Kermode's phrase--"concord-fictions," the cliches and
platitudes Dick welcomes when he senses that the famous general's
intercession has confirmed and set into motion his mythic destiny.
Instead of a lif e marked by coincidences, consonances and intricate
relational convergences, Dick's lif e never moves beyond a state of
uninterrupted apprenticeship, of perpetual preparation, no deadlines,
significant stages, temporal objectives or resolutions interfering
with its headlong, meaningless durational flow. Nor is this the only
sense in which Dick is undone by time in the novel.
What Dick had admired about Bob Hope when serving as his warm-up
m an was the heroism which enabled Hope to stand up in time, to take
upon himself the task of f illin g time with his voice, observing the
segments into which i t had been divided precisely and emerging from
his entrance into i t without a word he had planned to say le f t unsaid.
(So impressed had Dick been by this a b ility of Hope's that he emulated
i t in relating the master's story, imposing upon himself a d iffic u lt
interval in which to explain in depth what he had learned from the
comedian, im itative form seeming to him the sincerest form of f la t
tery.) By Part I I I of the novel Dick has relinquished this ideal on
his own program, of course, abjuring the heroism im plicit in defining
and articulating radio time in favor of a broadcast format in which
the caller-in designate the segments and determine the flow of time
that w ill characterize each show. Rather than fillin g the time
allotted him with precisely-scheduled jokes and anecdotes as Hope had,
rather than making each show a demonstration of his own sense of
124
perfect timing, Dick allows the random complaints and context!ess
monologues of his callers to become time's sound, his renunciation of
the heroic role of articulator of time's content depriving him of all
control over his radio world, turning him into just another passive
49
listener to the world's woes. What Behr-Bleibtreau could not take
from him he allows his 1isteners--acting under a Behr-Bleibtreauian
compulsion—to appropriate, the surrendering up of his voice neces
sarily entailing as well the renunciation of any claim he might ever
have had to being the hero who stands up in time.
In this convergence of reversals lies the ultimate meaning of
Dick Gibson's mytic quest. Convinced that the American public, once
allowed its own voice, would echo the "important chorus" and "lovely
a capella" he had imagined to be the sound of the ideal listening
family, Dick turns his microphone over to them in good fa ith , only
to be greeted by a cacophony of narcissism nothing like the harmonics
of solidarity he had anticipated. He is equally unprepared for the
discovery that his Gibsonian ethic, working in concert with advances
in radio technology, has contributed to the fragmentation and
alienation that cacophony expresses, the tape delay device having
made "every American his own potential star" (and thus having made
him indifferent too to the pronouncements of his fellow stars), Dick's
routinizing vision denuding the physical world of its sources of
anxiety (and thus obliging the anxiety-ridden to internalize their
fears, turning them into obsessions by turning them in upon the
s e lf). His only message, "Dick Gibson" and "Please be easy," turns
125|
out, then, to be exactly the wrong message, its ultimate effect being
to encourage self-absorption and obsession rather than to fa c ilita te
the development of the communal sense which is Dick's objective. And
beyond these miscalculations and misguided alliances lie the twin
enemies, Behr-Bleibtreau and time, both of them handily surviving
Dick's efforts at invading their centerless cores and reversing th eir
inexorable and insidious effects in the world. All of these elements
coalesce in Dick's undoing, the m an who would be mythic aligning him
se lf, at the end of the novel, with those overmatched others, his
listeners, all of them "blameless as himself, everyone doing his best
but maddened at la s t, a l l , a ll zealous, all with explanations ready
at hand and serving an ideal of truth or beauty or health or grace.
Everyone--everyone. I t did no good to change policy or fiddle with
format. The world pressed in. I t opened your windows" (p. 331). His
attempts at promoting and embodying an American public-spiritedness
and solidarity, at common-denominating a national sense of time,
having come to nothing, Dick is le f t at the end of his mythic journey
listening hopelessly to the "scrambled I Ams' of Miami Beach radio
station WMIA, his quest having led him not into ascension, re ific a
tion or mythic stature, but only into "'the private lif e . That every
body has. Being loose in the world. On your own. O n mine, Dick
Gibson's1" (p. 148).
126
NOTES
Robert Edward Colbert notices the Frank!inian allusion in Ben
Flesh's name in his "The American Salesman as Pitchman and Poet in the
Fiction of Stanley Elkin," Critique, XXI, No. 2 (1980), p. 56.
2Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed.
Leonard W . Labaree e t al ~{New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964),
p. 163.
3Thomas LeClair briefly discusses Dick Gibson's attempt to live
out the American myth of success in his "The Obsessional Fiction of
Stanley Elkin," Contemporary Literature, 16, No. 2 (Spring, 1975),
p. 153.
^Franklin, p. 43.
5
Franklin, p. 75.
^Franklin, p. 137.
^Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), p. 145.
8Franklin, pp. 114-15.
^Joseph Cambell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York:
Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 30, 36, et passim.
10Much of Elkin's fiction is sim ilarly underpinned by incidents
from popularly-known fa iry tales, fables and folklore. In "On a
Field, RampantJ' a young m an convinced that he is of royal blood must
find a way to make the 20th century world recognize the fact, his
quest recapitulating those of many princes from folklore who had also
to prove their noble lineage. Both James Boswell(of Boswel1) and
Ben Flesh (The Franchiser) are provided with avuncular, godfatherly
figures who set them on their ways in lif e and help them to chart
their courses, guides-to-1ife not unlike those benefactors of young
m en on the rise in the Horatio Alger novels. In "The Making of
127
Ashenden"—one of the novellas collected in Searches and Seizures--a
celebrated society princess sets the aristocratic Brewster Ashenden
the task of recovering his sexual purity in order to win her love, a
journey into the heart of a dark wilderness and an encounter with
the te rrib le beast which resides there his adventure's exactions.
Elkin's most extensive, sophisticated and successful use of this type
of material is the dodo bird narrative which closes out Part I of
The Dick Gibson Show, which w ill be discussed below.
^The godhead character of this family is reinforced by the nam e
Elkin has given i t , Credenza not only suggesting the Italian word for
creed, but also approximating the English word credena, which the
O.E.D. defines as "things to be believed, matters of fa ith ."
^Campbell, p. 32.
^Campbell, p. 71.
14
Marshall is not the only Elkin protagonist saved from despair
and veritable self-extinction by the recognition of a mystery in the
world that he can concentrate upon and solve. His near namesake,
Alexander Main, is able sim ilarly to rejuvenate himself through rein
troducing mystery, possibility back into the world. See above, p. 35.
^ The Dutton Review No. 1 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970) published
an early draft of a section of the novel corresponding to the fir s t
edition's pages 44-72 two years before Random House released the
book. Although there are few substantive changes between the earlier
publication and the book form, Elkin did make a number of rhetorical
and s ty lis tic revisions in the final text which shed lig h t on his
customary process of composition. In general, The Dutton Review
version is more expansive and explicit than the novel text, Marshall's
comment--for instance— " 'I haven't been on the radio for months
. . not to be found in the novel, which betrays m uch less tend
ency to explain or comment upon its own action. In som e instances
the novel actually expands passages from The Dutton Review version,
but in most cases the expansion, rather than clarifying the point,
actually renders i t more indirect, more suggestive rather more
explicit. The following comparison points up that typical s h ift, re
flecting toothe novel version's increased emphasis upon mythic refer
ences. The Dutton Review: ". . . there I was, sidetracked in Morris
town and living incognito with a nurse--and no R N at that—in a rest
home. What kind of lif e was that for one who would be ordinary,
what kind of l i f e was that for your apprentice personality?" (p. 207).
The Dick Gibson Show: ". . . there I was, sidetracked in Morristown
and living incognito with a nurse in a rest home, things too strange
for your apprentice personality and one track soul. H ow could I have
1 2 8
known better who had gotten every idea I ever had from what they per
mitted to be spoken on the air? Why, m y greenness was written in the
stars . . ." (p. 66).
^6The Dutton Review, p. 214.
Compare the description of Dick's attitude toward geography in
Part I I of the novel: "For him i t was as i f all place—all place—was
ridiculous, a comedown, all studios makeshift, the material world
existing only as obstacle, curiously unamiable" to the re a lity his late
night talk show is projecting (p. 139).
1 ft
Two of Elkin's works are concerned specifically with father-son
relationships. In "Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers" Jake
Greenspahn, embittered by the death of his son, is compelled to con
front the truth of the young man's human fr a ilty and abandon his grief-
tinged idealization of him; in "The Condominium," Marshall Preminger
becomes acquainted with the tawdry circumstances of his father's death,
learning for the fir s t time through them who his father was. Both
works bear distant, but discernible, echoes of Bellow's father-and-son
novel, Seize the Day.
19
Stanley Lawrence Elkin, "Religious Themes and Symbolism in the
Novels of William Faulkner," Diss. University of Illin o is 1961, p. 45.
20 •
In Campbell's scheme this substage occurs in the second, or
In itia tio n , phase of the hero's progress. Its introduction into the
Departure phase in Elkin's novel can be ju stified on four separate
counts. F irst, however m uch Elkin has a scheme lik e Campbell's in
mind, he is writing a novel, not attempting to reproduce accurately a
descriptive construct. Second, Campbell's scheme is descriptive,
not prescriptive, its generalized outline of the monomyth necessarily
allowing for individual differences from one story or myth to another.
Third, Elkin's novel is structured so that the entire second part
represents, through a single incident, the tria l or test stage of the
hero's journey, and thus the "atonement with the father" phase must
occur in Part I i f i t is to appear at a ll. And, fin a lly , this need
only be a late stage i f the hero successfully passes through i t en
route to apotheosis, and this is not the case with Dick, who accom
plishes at best reconciliation, not atonement.
^Campbell, p. 147.
^Campbell, p. 10.
^Campbell, pp. 77, 79.
129
24
Quoted from "The Dodo Bird" In The Iowa Review 1/3 (Summer,
1970), p. 28. This excerpt, corresponding to pages 108-33 of the
published novel, differs from i t primarily in its greater specificity
and explicitiness; i t bears generally the same relationship to the
hardbound text as The Dutton Review excerpt bears to the Random House
text. Phrases and sentences not appearing in the published novel are
ita lic ize d in this citation.
William Faulkner, "The Courthouse (A Nam e for the City)" in
Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), pp. 3-42. Elkin
may have had this chapter in mind in writing the brief history of
habitation which prefaces "The Condominium" in Searches and Seizures
(New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 191-8.
^Campbell , p. 88.
27
For this point and many others in this treatment of The Dick
Gibson Show, I am indebted to Raymond M. Olderman's fine essay, "The
Six Crises of Dick Gibson," in The Iowa Review 7/1 (Winter, 1976),
p. 134.
28
Campbell discusses the four functions of traditional myth, the
psychological among them, in numerous places in his work, but one of
his most lucid and accessible descriptions can be found in the essay
"Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and Art," in Myths, Dreams
and Religion (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), pp. 138-41.
29
The image of Shobuta carrying the dodo over the battlefield
simultaneously parodies and reduplicates the significances of Lear's
bearing Cordelia over the battlefield after she has been hanged in
Shakespeare's play. Both scenes represent the confrontation with
unbearable human sorrow, and both also culminate in an upward move
ment, a restoration of the land and an end to war.
30
The meaning of the dodo narrative partakes of the Mahayana
Buddhist teaching of the Middle Way, "where compassion is a function
of the realization that all these suffering beings are no-beings,
but s p irit, which neither is nor is not," and of the westernization
of this idea though the philosophy of Schopenhauer. See Joseph
Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (New York: The
Viking Press, 1968), pp. 71-3, 332-3.
31
Sansoni not only misunderstands the myth he relates, but also
constantly undermines i t by using supposedly Japanese idioms ("the
grass is always greener," "what will be, w ill be") and similar
chiches in his narration, the resulting demythification of the story
130
pointing up how thoroughly he has missed his own tale's significance.
His tendency to reduce the myth to the mundane may explain why Elkin
has named him san-Sony.
32
Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York:
W .W. Norton, 1973), pp. 80, 81.
33
The brief radio log reproduced on the fir s t page of Part II
"12:00 Midnight
W G R Witching Hours (Music and News)
W H C N The Dick Gibson Show (Talk)
W LLD The World Tmrw"
cleverly suggests the novel's three parts and their salient character
istics in microcosm, "The Dick Gibson Show" mediating between the
vabuely haunted past with its myths and songs and stories and the
sterile future of "The World Tmrw," the truncated, fla t rea lity of
the novel's Part I I I , the abbreviation of tomorrow reflecting the
u tilita ria n lack of grandeur which will characterize the world of
that future.
34
This narrative, title d "The Memory Expert" when excerpted in
the May, 1971 Esquire, deals with a m an who must be tutored in navi
gating his way through the ordinary world, his perfect photographic
memory impeding his a b ility to maneuver past the com m on objects of
re a lity . Coover's Gloomy Gus must be similarly trained in the
ordinary, the simplest gesture proving impossible for him i f he is
not d rilled in i t , spontaneity as out of the question for him as i t is
for Elkin's memory expert. See "Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of
the Chicago Bears?" in American Review 22 (New York: Bantam Books,
1975), pp. 34-110.
35
Because the central concern of this treatment of The Dick
Gibson Show is Dick's mythic—or unmythic--progress through the novel,
a lengthy consideration of each of his panelist's monologues would
be inappropriate here. In general, these narratives reintroduce or
reinforce themes presented in Part I, especially those dealing with
the ordinary and its meaning. The memory expert (see previous note),
for instance, refuses to accept the glasses which would enable him
to preserve his extraordinary g ift for remembering all that he sees,
and in so doing chooses a predictable and depressing form of vanity
over that superhuman a b ility , the world gradually becoming for him
"as m uch a blur as i t is to the rest of us" (p. 181).
Joseph McElroy, rev. of The Dick Gibson Show, by Stanley Elkin,
New York Times Book Review, 21 February 1971, pp. 7-8.
131
37
Dick's triumph over the forces of silence represented by Behr-
Bleibtreau is reminiscent of Leopold Bloom's similar (and similarly
nightmarish) victory over Bella Cohen in the 'Nighttown' chapter of
Joyce's Ulysses. The sexual elements of Bloom's victory are also
noticeable here, Dick's grabbing Mel Son's erect penis in reaching
for his gun corresponding to the moment in which the button popping on
Bloom's trousers signals his recovery of his manhood and restoration
to phallic health.
qo
Robert Jay Lifton discusses the Protean man, one whose values
are unstable and whose lif e has about i t a quality utterly improvised
and contingent, in Boundaries (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979),
pp. 37-9.
39
Campbel 1, The Hero with a ^ Thousand Faces, p. 190
40
In the notion that America "atmospherically exists" behind the
chains of Howard Johnsons' and a ll the other fam iliar consumer land
marks that dot the nation's geography lies the inspiration of Elkin's
fourth novel, The Franchiser.
41
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage
Books, 1978), p. 5, et passim. Similar arguments have recently been
made by Tom Wolfe, "The M e Decade," in Mauve Gloves and Madmen,
Clutter & Vine(New York: Bantam Books, 1977), pp. 111-147, and
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W .W . Norton,
1979), pp. 3-50.
42
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio
Small Town Life (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919), p. 5. In his dis
sertation Elkin wonders i f the debt Faulkner owed to Sherwood
Anderson for the concept of "the grotesque" had been fu lly recognized.
"Religious Themes and Symbolism in the Novels of William Faulkner,"
pp. 51-2.
43
Peter Berger, "The Devil and the Pornography of the Modern
Mind," in Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics and
Religion (New York: Harper/Colophon Books, 1977), p. 210.
44
Erich Neumann, Creative M an and Transformation," in Art and
the Creative Unconscious, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 171.
^Robert Coover, Pricksongs & Descants (New York: E.P. Dutton),
p. 16.
132
46
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Bantam Books,
1967), p. 100.'
The radio technologist whose speech before an "Annals of Broad
casting" dinner opens Part I I I of the novel takes a different view of
mourning and its relation to the world of electronics. In the old
radio receivers, he argues, there is a delay when the set is turned
on, '"a period of mourning, and mourning— I don't care what religion
you're talking about--means one thing and one thing only: abstinence.
And abstinence, humanitarian considerations aside, is bad for busi
ness. Solid state does away with a ll th is'" (p. 235).
A Q
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1968), p. 59.
49
In this capacity, as in a number of other characteristics, Dick
resembles Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, who understands as well
as he does how hopeless i t is to try to minister to casual suffering
and who ends up as thoroughly entrapped in his readership's pain as
Dick does in the laments of his audience.
133
CHAPTER I I I
DEMYELINATING AMERICA A N D THE STRICKEN BUR G ER KING
The world, the world its e lf, the world was strange;
recognizing another face was strange; being alive
was wondrous strange. But the others had families,
pictures in their wallets, letters to write. You
had to go i t alone to make i t mean anything.!
These sentiments, presented in Elkin's characteristic narrative
m ode of indirect in te rio r monologue, might well be those of either Dick
Gibson or Ben Flesh, both of w hom are wont to be interm ittently seized
with wonder at the inexplicable panorama of being and both of w hom
also end up 'going i t alone,' extemporizing lives for themselves with
out benefit of the ordinary hum an comforts of wife and family. The
source of these musings is, however, neither of them, for these are
thoughts of James Boswel1, protagonist of Elkin's f ir s t novel, who
shares with his, successor characters not only a tendency toward wonder
and terminal solitariness, but who also manifests their fixation with
death, their preference for living on the periphery of things, their
isolation from the cultural forms of family which help us define for
ourselves who we are, and their conviction that beneath their actions
and accomplishments lies nothing more than a m an who wants to act and
accomplish--a man, that is , who does things because i f he didn't he
would have no one to be. The significance of the discernible
134
parallels between these three characters is not that Elkin obsessively
returns to the same character type in his novels, though this is not a
completely indefensible conclusion to draw from his work; the important
point is that these three protagonists represent something like a con
stant in his fic tio n , a settling down to one stable protagonist type
who moves from one novel to the next testing his ideals against pro
gressively more d iffic u lt and progressively less yielding obstacles.
I t is not enough, then, to say that the protagonists of these novels
are sim ilar, but i t is necessary to notice that the shapes of the
works in which they appear are remarkably--and intentionally—similar
as w ell.
Viewed this way, the Stanley Elkin novel (A Bad Han excepted)
consists of an overall narrative pattern which adheres to the follow
ing general lines. A protagonist, lite r a lly or figuratively orphaned,,
is lacking in the inspiration or sense of self necessary to translate
ambition into accomplishment,; and is helped on his way by the in ter
vention of a kindly benefactor who confers boons upon him, confirms
him in his sense that his is to be a special destiny, and assists him
in arriving at,a decision concerning the area of endeavor in which he
w ill make a nam e for himself. (In Boswel1, the benefactor is Dr.
H erlitz, a psychiatrist who charts people's life courses for them; in
The Dick Gibson Show i t is the famous general, and in The Franchiser
i t is Ben's godfather, Julius Finsberg.) The protagonist gradually
and confusedly arrives at decisions concerning his application of his
mentor's scheme, finding that the cause he has committed himself to
135
(Boswell's courting of celebrities, Dick's promulgation of his com
munal credo, Ben's attempt to make America look like America everywhere)
has run afoul of complexity, obliging him to simplify his project and
more thoroughly isolate his purpose from the surrounding matrix of
2
concerns. His enterprise also collides with inertial forces in Ameri
can culture opposed to the organizing, synthesizing, arrangemental
nature of his vision and his project, and his narrative moves toward a
close as these opponents become progressively hostile and increasingly
dedicated to his defeat. Hoping to salvage something from his life 's
contest with these entropic agencies, he undertakes one final project
which is to be a final commitment of energies, a last confrontation of
self with the forces of complexity and disorder, an ultimate staking
of time, hope, identity on a creation of the w ill which can either
com e to represent the mark he has le ft upon the world or may dis
integrate and disappear, leaving him a m an without a monument. For
Boswell, the final project is The Club, an organization which w ill
unite him with all the great m en in America; for Dick Gibson, i t is
his Night Letters format with its democratic assumptions and communal
ideals; and for Ben Flesh, i t is a Travel Inn in Ringgold, Georgia,
his largest, most elaborate franchise and one to the success of which
he has mortgaged all the others.
Underlying this basic narrative structure are two fam iliar l i t
erary paradigms, the one feeding gradually—and significantly— into
the other. Each novel contains a kernal of the Benjamin Franklin/
Horatio Alger story of the young m an making his way in the world,
136
accruing talents and influence as he ascends through American society.
This pattern gives way to an opposed, i f not contradictory, denudation
3
movement reminiscent of that of King Lear, the novels' protagonists
gradually 'casting off lendings' (commitments, alignments, assumptions)
as the compass of their aspirations diminishes and the parameters of
their hopes are reduced. Elkin had subjected another of his characters
to this dynamic in even more exp licit form in the early story, "I Look
Out for Ed Wolfe," the t it l e character selling off all of his worldly
goods in order less to discover himself "unaccomodated man" as to learn
exactly what his lif e is worth in dollars and cents. Although that
story resolves its e lf in different, distinctly Bellovian, terms, its
basic dynamic reduction, of things being stripped away, is the same as
the movement which constitutes the final third of each of these three
Elkin novels. Their peripheral interests and subsidiary concerns
renounced and abandoned, Boswell, Dick and Flesh all settle into an
absorption in one final project, enterprises which w ill, they hope,
bring an end to their anonymity and establish them as, in a lite ra l
sense, s e lf-fu lfille d m en of the world, the sacrifices they have made
and the commitments undone to be ju s tifie d by the apotheosis to come.
But something goes wrong with their plans, and that something takes
largely the same form in a ll three novels.
What goes wrong is that they gradually com e to recognize that
their projects are ultimately serving and contributing to the forces
that they developed the enterprises to counter. The Club which Bos
well has developed to be a worldly repository for his massive ego, an
137
organization of celebrities the founding of which is intended to l i f t
him out of his intolerable obscurity, turns out to be a betrayer and
seducer of the self rather than its redeemer and ju s tifie r , a fact
which Boswell realizes as he watches the arrival of the great from the
throng of spectators across the street from the site of The Club's
fir s t meeting. Choosing to stay with the m ob rather than taking his
rightful place as Club Founder with the gathering luminaries, Boswell
momentarily recants the lifelong "gluttony of the ego" which had
inspired him to his desperate creation of The Club, but then feels the
old pressure to distinguish himself, to stand out in the crowd of
mortal m en and women, and so he counters their adoring gasps and envi
ous sighs with his own special ejaculations of "'Hey, hey, down with
The Club . . . Dow n with The Club! 1" (p. 387). The resolution of Bos
well is a tentative one, forged out of a temporary conciliation be
tween the demands of the rapacious self and the expectations of the
world beyond i t . But i t Is an actual resolution nontheless, Boswell's
qualified assimilation into the realm of others in the final scene
4
earning the novel its subtitle, A Modern Comedy. Boswel1, then, un
like The Dick Gibson Show or The Franchiser, ends on the tonic--or
perhaps only the subtonic—chord of comedy, its concluding and resolv
ing movement founded upon the realization of two paradoxical truths--
that the self may be affirmed through the renunciation of its crea
tions, and that one may gain the self through losing i t in a m ob of
others.
That The Club can be turned upon and attacked, that i t can be
138
made so conveniently to incorporate into its e lf the terms of the con
f l i c t which Boswell has been so fru itlessly living out—these are the
characteristics which distinguish i t most decisively from the other
wise similar enterprises to which Dick Gibson and Flesh fin a lly commit
themselves. Like those other projects, The Club embodies the contra
diction that the protagonist's adventures--his very existence—drama-
tizes, but its separability from the mind of its creator and the ex
tent to which i t can be externalized and objectified make i t a less
compelling symbol of the a b ility ( i f not the necessity) of our crea
tions to trap us in precisely that bind they were brought into being
to free us from. I t is the separability of project from projector
that makes the comic resolution of Boswell possible, consequently, and
the in extricab ility of the Night Letters format from Dick Gibson or the
Travel Inn from franchiser Flesh which dictates that these novels can
not resolve, but simply end. Dick Gibson cannot turn against his
Night Letters format because i t too much represents the real culmina
tion of his talents and vision, because i t is too much the perfect
vehicle for everything he has ever wanted to do or say on the radio.
All he can do, then, is to continue to take calls on the air (he is
s t ill doing so in the spring of 1971, when Ben Flesh tunes his show in
on his car radio), hoping that somehow his audience w ill come to heed
his message—that they should think communally, not narcissistically—
rather than that of his two-way talk show medium—that, as the radio
technologist suggested, such programs make every American his own star.
Ben Flesh's not unGibsonian desire to homogenize a ll of America
139
5
by'peddling proliferating sameness,' common-denominating the nation
by planting identical franchises over the span of its geography, runs
afoul of a similar contradiction to such visions of the collectivized
American soul--the recognition that the coast-to-coast uniformity
which is his contribution to the culture is its e lf a symptom of the
cultural malady to whose cure he had believed himself dedicated. Or,
to put i t another way, Flesh finds that his attempts at symmetrizing
the American landscape, rather than manifesting a communal, other-
directed s p irit, represent instead his effo rt to project upon the ex
ternal world the increasingly undifferentiating and undistinguishing
characteristics of his own internally diseased self. The point of The
Franchiser ( i t is neither new nor in any way surprising) is that how
ever much we try to live out the teamwork visions of American public
life variously embodied in the business ethic, in Broadway shows, in
advertising appeals and the lik e , we are necessarily betrayed by the
fact that we are trapped in bodies in which 'the plague builds nests'
and which progressively oblige us to pull into ourselves and watch
from a solipsistic, self-indulgent standpoint the decreasing s ig n ifi
cance that the world has to us or we have to i t . How better to drama
tize the s p lit between our public faces and private griefs, between
our communal good w ill and our existential bad fa ith , than to articu
late them through a protagonist whose grand design is to uphold and
expand institutional America by multiplying its commercial manifesta
tions, but whose very efforts in this direction become themselves
reflective of the disease which is disintegrating his nerves and
140
destroying his a b ility to ta c tile ly distinguish one thing from another?
How better to evoke the crazy f u t ilit y of human action than to embody
i t in a m an who counters the "gravity of stuff," the "dead weight of
reality" and the absurd being of this "barbell earth" that we jo in tly
shoulder every day with the franchiser's vision, with the belief that
we w ill be redeemed by one who w ill speak "some Esperanto of simple
need, answering appetite with convenience foods" (p. 259)? And how
better--to close out this metaphorically complex c irc le --to suggest
the intricacy, seriousness and all-pervasiveness of America's current
energy crisis than to present Flesh's Travel Inn, his ultimate commit
ment, as a victim of the altered physics that crisis has imposed upon
American geography, the external world once again imitating, through
power shortages and similar disruptions, the ruined circuitry of
Flesh's demyelinating nervous system?
In an important sense, then, Dick Gibson's passage recapitulates
the outlines of Boswell's, while i t in turn is echoed in the pattern
of the experiences of Ben Flesh. Perhaps the most crucial point of
convergence between their journeys is , however, to be found in the
paradox explicated by Boswell toward the close of Elkin's f ir s t novel.
Musing over the fact that he has lived a life innocent of complexity,
untroubled by a "proliferation of passions," Boswell finds complexity
progressively forcing its e lf upon him and is surprised to discover
that "complexity was not so much a proliferation of passions as a
diminishment of them, a chipping away at whatever passion one could
call his own" (B, p. 361). I t is this paradox that the conclusions
141
of these three novels delineate, then, each of the protagonists
gradually learning that the jettisoning of the goals and commitments
which have tied him to the earth and which have represented his in
volvement with i t results not in greater feelings of simplicity and
freedom, but in lives of progressively greater uncertainty, complexity
and impotence. I t is to the disclosure of this truth that the final
thirds of these three novels are dedicated, The Franchiser in particu
lar.
The element that most significantly distinguishes each of these
novels from the others, clearly enough, is neither plot, theme, nor
character, however dissimilar these aspects of the works might in it ia l
ly seem; what is truly distinct about each of these books is the sys
tem of metaphors they develop and exploit. This fact, among other
things, helps to explain why the occupations of his protagonists is
such a major consideration in Elkin's work, these vocations providing
the novels' primary stores of metaphor, while also shaping and defining
characters who otherwise tend toward the amorphous. (This amorphous
ness of character is purposeful on Elkin's part, of course; Dick Gib
son could be describing Boswell, Ben Flesh or a number of other Elkin
protagonists in designating himself "acharacter as som e people are
amoral" [p. 208]). The dominant weakness of Boswell, i t might be
argued, is its protagonist’ s lack of stable employment, the fact that
he has only inconstant projects and vaguely-defined enthusiasms leav
ing him an excessively protean character, and leaving the novel, per
haps more importantly, without a central context of metaphors from
142
which to draw. This d iffic u lty is remedied in Elkin's two subsequent
novels, the protagonists in each of them thoroughly identified with
and defined by a specific profession, a profession which provides, at
the same time, for a wealth of metaphoric extensions, implications and
variations. Since what happens to these professional m en (and we can
add bail bondsman Main to the lis t at this point) is largely the same,
the self-imposed dimunition of their passions and commitments compli
cating their declining lives, the different jobs they hold allow Elkin
to approach the basic thematic, narrative pattern of their experience
through divergent systems of metaphor and analogy, the resulting works
proving similar in general form and in the point they convey, but dis
tinct in the terms through which that point gets conveyed.
I f The Franchiser is Elkin's most accomplished and successful
novel (and the contention here is that i t is ), then i t is so because
i t proves better able than its predecessors to translate its linear,
open-ended plot structure into coherent form through the precise and
s k illfu l manipulation of metaphor. What Elkin's most effective work
moves toward, as we have seen, is the establishment of paradoxes--
Boswell renouncing the self in order to gain i t , Dick Gibson actually
fostering his listeners' inward-turning tendencies in his attempt to
make of his voice and his show of medium of reconciliation and commun-
a lity , while both of them experience diminishment of passions as a
complication, rather than sim plification, of their lives. The success
of Elkin's work, consequently, can be best gauged by considering the
extent to which each of a novel's scenes, events and incidents direct-
143
1y contributes to the establishment of the paradoxes he is striving to
delineate, and by the extent to which the paradoxes themselves coalesce
into an effect of wholeness, completion, unity, of one complex argument
thoroughly and evocatively worked through. The Franchiser is the Elkin
novel which most effectively and extensively f u lf ills both of these
c rite ria . To see why and how, i t is necessary to briefly examine the
linear narrative of the novel as a basis upon which to build an under
standing of that plot's subordination to a metaphoric coherence. Such
a summary is useful also because the novel's interweaving of temporal
planes, its often unsignalled shifts from one chronological period to
another, can be in it ia lly confusing and disorienting, however clear the
juxtapositions of scenes and their thematic purpose come subsequently
to seem.
Ben Flesh, orphaned by an auto accident which killed his parents
while he was serving in the Army during World War I I , is taken up by
his godfather, Julius Finsberg, who had once been a partner of his
father's in a theatrical costuming firm. From his deathbed Finsberg
sum m ons Flesh and informs him of two things: f ir s t , that he had cheated
Flesh's father out of his share in the business when he foresaw how
hugely successful Broadway would soon become, and second, that he is
going to make this up to Flesh by bequeathing to him the prime interest
rate, thus insuring him the a b ility to borrow money at the rate that
banks give only their best customers. These loans, Finsberg stipu
lates, are to be used to set up any businesses Flesh chooses, so long
as they aren't used to back Broadway shows. A student at Wharton
144
Business School at the time, Flesh has learned how to be thoroughly
competent in business management, but has not been taught how to choose
what i t is he wants to manage, and so he holds off investing in any
thing until Finsberg's children— 18 identical twins and trip le ts —
persuade him to use his loan potential to build franchises, i t having
occurred to them that Howard Johnson's restaurants and Robo Washes and
Dairy Queens are as identical to each other as the eighteen of them are
to themselves. Thus does Flesh become the franchiser, "the m an who
made America look like America" {p. 262), a m an content with his role
in the world and pleased to be at least a peripheral member of the
Finsberg family.
The decline of Flesh's fortunes is signalled be an incident in
1960 when, at the inauguration of his Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise,
he suddenly finds himself blind in one eye. The condition turns out to
be temporary, and i t is not for another ten years that he learns from
a fellow franchiser he subsequently refers to as Dr. Wolfe that the
retrobular optic neuritis he suffered a decade earlier was an unmis
takable symptom of the onset of multiple sclerosis. Within the year
the disease's symptoms, no longer in remission, begin to appear, and
on a v is it to his Rapid City, North Dakota, Mr. Softee franchise Flesh
checks in to a hospital for an examination only to have Wolfe's diagno
sis confirmed. His is a sensory strain of the illness, the doctor
there explains, and w ill not inconvenience him severely unless i t turns
into the more serious, and necessarily.fatal, motor form of multiple
sclerosis, the symptoms of which are speech impairment, muscular dys
145
function, the experience of an inexplicable euphoria and ultimate
paralysis. This equivocated doom upon him, Flesh is sent o ff to con
tinue his "grand rounds" with the reassurance that, even though he may
suffer practically a ll ta c tile contact as "a shiver of electric plague"
and may be constantly aware of the "ruined, demyelinating nerves
sputtering like live wires in his fingertips" (pp. 133-4), he '"re a lly
is n 't in such bad shape. 1 1 1 He drives back out into the American na
tion's heartland, finding the failu re of his own internal circuitry
mirrored in the towns and cities he bypasses, a massive heat wave hav
ing caused brown-outs and power- shortages throughout the region. He
spends the next week attempting to escape this regional short circu it,
storing up gallon cans of gas and quarts of oil against his own immo
bilization in a desperate search for an oasis of lig h t, energy, power.
He arrives fin a lly in Colorado Springs, its current intact, and settles
in at the Broadmoor Hotel to wait out the crisis. He invites Patty
Finsberg, one of the twins and trip le ts , to join him there, partly so
that she can become yet another in his string of godcousins-as-mistress,
and also because he needs to te ll her—and through her, the family—
about his M.S.
His symptoms, as his Rapid City doctor predicted, apparently
diminish for a period of two years, for in the scene chronologically
following his Broadmoor stay he is beginning his 1974 grand rounds man
ifesting no signs of physical disab ility. At his Fred Astaire Dance
Studio in Chicago, however, he finds himself delivering a bathetic
diatribe on "'the wondrous cakewalk and hopfrog of re a lity '" and
146
notices an unsettling tingle in his hand, these symptoms culminating in
his attempt to give two five dollar b ills to a wom an who confusedly
indicates that the palm he has extended to her holds nothing at a ll.
The remainder of the novel delineates the increasing severity of his
symptoms as he travels from St. Louis (One-Hour Martinizing) to Kansas
City (Baskin-Robbins, a Radio Shack convention) and through the "packed
masonry of states" he knows so well that they represent less a series
of places to him than the continuous American place he calls home. His
last remission upon him, he visits his Cinema One franchise in Oklahoma
City, the animated meshed gears of the chain's onscreen symbol coming
to symbolize for him the unsticking of his ow n nerves as his stay ends
in the reassertion of his symptoms, the final remission remissed. A
sum m ons from the godcousins in Riverdale sends Flesh flying to New York
to explain to them what he is doing with his prime interest rate, the
shaky economic situation of 1974 having led the Finsberg boys to want
to take stock of the m an whose projects their inheritance is under
writing.
Flesh resumes his rounds a week la te r, committed to proving his
sound business sense to the Finsberg family in the belief that his suc
cess w ill somehow reverse their recent tendency toward atomization,
their gradual drifting apart not merely in space but also in appear
ance. Thus he closes out a few of his less prosperous franchises (his
H. & R. Block, his Evelyn W ood Reading Dynamics), transferring that
money into more lucrative operations such as Dunkin' Donuts (which
becomes immediately less lucrative because of the soaring price of
147
sugar). I t is a Travel Inn in Ringgold, Georgia, to which Flesh comes
to dedicate most of his time and energy, however, in the belief that
its success w ill convince the Finsbergs of his worthiness as a business
m an and thus restore them to themselves and them to him. The building
of the motel proceeds as the twins and trip le ts begin suddenly to die
o ff, struck down by the odd infirm ities—one is a chronic bedwetter,
another has cradle cap, a third has no marrow in her bones and is as a
result impossibly heavy— they have carried since birth. Despite
Flesh's entreaties that the survivors travel to the Travel Inn's grand
opening in August, 1975, they a ll refuse to come, the fear that their
chances of following their brothers' and sisters' fates are greater
away from hom e keeping them from attending. Because the energy crisis
has altered the "gas/food/lodging synapses" of the American public
upon which Flesh predicated the location of his Travel Inn, the venture
is a fa ilu re , cars driving from the midwest making a three—eather than
two, as before--day trip to Disney World, the natural rest stops no
longer in the Ringgold, Georgia, area, but Chattanooga to the north of
i t and Atlanta to the south. This setback is rendered more bearable
by the fact that by this time the Finsbergs have withdrawn their fa
ther's bequest to Flesh due to the precipitous rise of the prime rate,
leaving him on his ow n and no longer hoping that the Inn's success
would accomplish any miracle of restoration of the Finsberg clan. As
the novel ends, Flesh has set o ff on his rounds again, his speech now
showing signs of impairment, his symptoms increasing at an alarming
rate as he euphorically passes judgment upon, and finds good, the
148
America which he has helped to create.
A summary of this kind, clearly enough, does a novel like The Fran
chiser no favors in that i t extricates what is secondary in the work
and treats i t as i f i t were primary; those reviewers who greet each new
Elkin novel with the complaint that the plot structure is inadequate to
support the setpieces and anecdotes which are the work's real center
make precisely the same error.^ For Elkin, plot— down to The Living
End--has com e more and more to be a convenient structure, a stage upon
which rhetoric, invention, metaphor--in short, language--can be sent
8
out to perform, and this is partly because he has only one story to
te ll (that of the individual self's gradual recognition of his utter
g
aloneness ) and also because rhetoric, invention and metaphor--again,
language--are what interest and excite him most in the composition of
fiction. The Franchiser, Elkin has said, "is a more tig h tly structured
book than anything I have written before," and he adds that although
there are stories in i t "that apparently have nothing to do with what
is going on in the book, I know what they are doing t her e. What
they are doing there, clearly enough, is establishing and extending the
metaphoric coherence of this 'tig h tly structured book,' and the nature
of that coherence w ill be our primary concern in the remainder of this
chapter.
The two occupations from which the majority of metaphors in The
Franchiser are derived are those of business and show business, and i t
is one of the novel's basic objectives to dramatize the continuity
between the values these occupations assume and the perspective upon
149
rea lity that they imply. Flesh is able to become the franchiser, for
instance, only because of Julius Finsberg's success in the theatrical
costuming business, and were i t not for a specific proscription in Fins-
berg's w ill against this use of his prime rate bequest, Flesh would
have undoubtedly put the money back where i t came from— into Broadway
shows. Flesh elaborates upon the connection between his business life
and the life of the Broadway stage for the benefit of guests w hom he
has gathered for a celebration marking the closing out of his Fred
Astaire Dance Studio in*Chicago. The room in which they are dancing,
he informs them, once housed the Finsberg and Flesh theatrical costume
company before the partners moved i t to New York, and the songs to
which they dance, Broadway show tunes, are the same songs that made
Finsberg a rich man, which in turn enabled him to leave Flesh the be
quest he has, which means, Flesh concludes, '"We dance to the prime
rate of interest its e lf. W e compound it '" (p. 62).
Instead of becoming a theatrical angel, then, Flesh became an
owner of franchises, and this, by his own admission, makes him " 'lik e a
producer with several shows running on Broadway at the same time. M y
businesses take m e from place to place. M y hom e is these United
States'" (p. 34); i t explains, too, his propensity for referring to
the story of his inheritance as a "How I Got to Play the Palace" nar
rative (p. 37) and for summing up the closing out of an unsuccessful
operation with the phrase "'We a in 't taking i t to Broadway'" (p. 70).
That franchising is a form of theatrical costuming is made even more
explicit late in the novel when the narrator explains Flesh's relative
150
indifference to profits and success in terms of his overriding interest,
"the backstage Finsberg propinquity to staged l i f e , his need to costume
his country, to give i t its visual props, its mansard roofs and golden
arches and false belfries, a ll its ubiquitous, fam iliar neon signatures
and logos, a ll its things, a ll its crap, the true American g r a ffiti,
that perfect queer calligraphy of American signature, what gave i t its
meaning and made i t fun" (p. 270).
What Dick Gibson attempts to do with time, Americanizing i t , trans
forming its relentless progress into the reassuring sound of ordinari
ness its e lf, Flesh wants to do with space, his efforts undertaken to
the tune and in the s p irit of Broadway melodies which project a posi
tive, communal vision of the world, the vision of musical comedy. That
vision is most conspicuously embodied in the novel by what Flesh refers
to as "that strange fairy tale crew," the Finsberg twins and trip le ts .
In addition to the fact that a ll of them bear the names of Broadway
luminaries (Moss, Lorenz, Gertrude, Oscar; Patty, Laverne and Maxene),
they also, in their apparent reduplication of each other* their "cho
ruslike being," are a living repudiation of the tragic, their very
existence suggesting that there is always another to take up the failed
challenge, that hope cannot be lost until a ll of them have been elim
inated, their interchangeability dictating that a certain inconsequence
necessarily rule their lives. I t is significant that theirs is the
inspiration for Flesh's franchising career, not only because they
glimpse the sim ilarity between their ow n identicality and that which
renders all International Houses of Pancakes and Fotomats indistin
151
guishable, but also because the parallel establishes^the metaphoric
sense in which franchises are like the Finsbergs are like musical
comedies, a ll of them secured against happy endings, defeats, reversals,
by the fact that there are legions involved, that no individual (with
the individual's vulnerability to loss, to death) w ill ever tragically
have to carry on the banner alone, for there w ill always be other Ken
tucky Fried Chickens, other Finsbergs, other onstage characters to in
sure that a comedic resolution, the communal affirmation, is achieved.
The interrelationship between the worlds of business, show business and
Finsbergs is effectively conveyed by the symbol that adorns the back
door of the bus in which the adolscent Finsberg clan travelled—a de
piction of mistletoe, the state flower of Oklahoma, paying tribute to
the musical comedy which made their father a wealthy man. I t is note
worthy, too, that when, in his excitement over the twins' and trip le ts '
suggestion that he use his prime rate to build new Howard Johnson's
restaurants, Flesh kisses Lotte, one of the g irls , beneath this mistle
toe image, he is embarking on two new careers simultaneously: the buy
ing of reduplicative franchises and the taking of renewable mistresses.
The Finsbergs manage to maintain their collectivized, carefree
front into early young adulthood despite the "dark diathenics" at work
in each of them which w ill ultimately undermine their health and dis
solve their solidarity. W hen this healthy-minded resolve falters in
any-one of them, when i t threatens to give way to individual fears and
purely personal anxieties, Flesh provides the object lesson required to
restore the fa lte re r to the wholesome, communal view. O n the pretext
152
of showing her a Robo-Wash he is considering buying in Queens, for
instance, Flesh has K itty, a lifelong bedwetter, accompany him through
the dousing and soaping process, attempting through i t to prove that
the terrib le nightmares that cause herto lose control of her bladder as
she sleeps can be reproduced by a mechanism as ordinary as a public
carwash, and to convince her that her nocturnal phantoms are as inno
cent of real threat as is this harmless machine. Her nightmares cannot
be so simply neutralized, obviously, and Kitty remains a bedwetter,
doomed by askew telegony to her insulting, isolating infirm ity, her
life irrevocably poisoned by the personal.
In the early pages of the novel, however, the Finsbergs are asso
ciated with solidarity and unity, with Flesh's organized and organizing
vision; i t is only later that they come to embody the physical decline
that a fflic ts him and which characterizes too the power-depleted Ameri
ca through which he carries out his grand rounds. The pre-dissolution
character of Flesh and the Finsbergs is most e x p lic itly described by
Roger Foster, a Colonel Sanders imposter whom Flesh meets in 1956 and
brings to Riverdale for a v is it. Likening the Finsberg hom e to Briga-
doon, Foster compares the twins and trip lets to himself, arguing that
they are all doppelgangers, he doubling for Colonel Sanders, they for
each other. Flesh, on the other hand, is a 1 1 'doppelgangster,Foster
insists, his borrowed businesses qualifying as doubles of each other,
mercantile masquerades. " ‘What you do,1 1 1 Foster concludes, '" is a
U.S.A. nightclub performance. You do John Wayne and Ed Sullivan. You
do Cagney and Bogart. Liberace you do. Sinatra, Vaughan Monroe. Tell
153
m e something. Which is the real Howard Johnson's? Which is the real
Holiday Inn or chicken from the Colonel?"1 (p. 92). In addition to
reinforcing the link between Flesh and the Finsbergs with their pro
pinquity to staged life ," Foster's characterization establishes by
analogy another aspect of the franchiser's personality: his suspicion
that he is a m an without a stable, consistent s e lf, his Dick Gibsonian
sense that at the core of Ben Flesh, beneath a ll the roles and all the
commercial gestures, is no one at a ll. The doppelganger progression
Foster evokes here, then, moves from himself, a m an who masquerades as
a real someone else, to the Finsbergs, reflections of each other and
thus--like Howard Johnson's restaurants or Kentucky Fried chicken
franchises— imitations lacking a central, "real" ur-image to imitate,
to Flesh, the reflection of a m an in a mirror before which no one is
standing, or, the outline of a m an rendered visible only through the
connecting of the dots on the nation's face representing the franchises
that he owns.
Flesh begins thinking of himself in these terms even before his
inheritance, i t becoming clear to him early on that because "he had no
good thing of his own" i t would be best for him "to place himself in
the service of those who had" (p. 46), and consequently he is elated
to learn from the Finsbergs that he can buy the names of m en with good
things of their own and trade through them as i f through a mask. He
spells this out for Kitty Finsberg late in the novel, explaining to her
that
som e people, me, for example, are born without goals.
154
There are a handful of us without obsession . . . I
live without obsession, without drive, a personal
insanity, even, why, that's terrib le. The loneliest
thing imaginable. Yet I've had to live this way, live
this—sane l if e , deprived of all the warrants.of
personality. To team up with the available. Living
this franchised lif e under the logos of others, (p. 282)
Rather than a personality, Flesh has a career, his franchise itinerary
("what he has in lieu of a life " [p. 245]) directing his steps and
scripting his activity so thoroughly that he has l i t t l e time to ask
himself who the real m an behind all the commercial masquerades is.
Only late in the novel, a fter his disease has begun to redefine every
thing for him, does he admit that he does business '"as som e people
paint pictures—by the numbers,"' and that "'there's no franchise . . .
called Flesh's'" (p. 255). Franchises, then, have given him someone to
be, have provided him with a script to follow, America becoming the
stage upon which his play is acted out, his lines provided by Robo-
W ash Inc. and the Radio Shack Company, firms which, for a price, give
him their corporate masks to wear.
O n a national plane, Flesh's proliferation of these corporate
masks throughout the American landscape represents an imposition of
sameness, of uniformity, upon space, a calculated attempt by a m an of
no distinguishing characteristics to transform the country's face, to
recreate i t in the image of his own undifferentiated and undifferenti
ating vision. Consequently, he wants to join in the singing of "the
bouncy anthems of our firms, tears in m y _ eyes in the face of a ll this
blessed, smarmy hope, even i f I know, as I do know, what I know"
(p. 75); he insists that as "a m an of franchise" he is a "true democrat
________ __________________________________ _ _ _____________________________ 155
who would make Bar Harbor, Maine, look like Chicago, who would quell
distinction, obliterate difference, who would common-denominate until
Americans recognize that i t was America everywhere" (p. 164); and he
would be known as nothing other than
the m an who made America look like America, who made
America famous . . . the m an who knows that there wasn't
a television in the thousands of motel rooms in which he'd
slept which wouldn't show him in the course of a single
evening at least two sponsored minutes of the homogenized,
coast-to-coast America he'd helped design, costuming the
states, getting Kansas up like Pennsylvania, Georgia like
New York. Why, he was a Finsberg! A Julius and his ow n
father Flesh too, loose and at large in his beautiful
musical comedy America! (p. 262)
Even before the second half of The Franchiser is taken into con
sideration, the half in which the characters' ideals are revealed to be
destructive, the Finsbergs are doomed, and Elesh and the United States
simultaneously demyelinating, i t is clear enough how the novel is
structured and how different i t is from anything Elkin has previously
written. Whereas the f ir s t three novels work themselves out largely
in terms of linear progressions, their narratives developing through
the addition of new scenes and new incidents, their form requiring
serial analysis and explication, The Franchiser develops more through
accretion, the plot less responsible for sustaining the novel than is
the gradual convergence of a number of its themes into something like
a palimpsest. I t becomes more and more d iffic u lt as the novel pro
ceeds, in other words, to isolate or distinguish any one of its themes
from any of the others, so thoroughly has each of them, through meta
phoric association, come to contain, or at least imply, the others.
156
Im plicit in the "bouncy anthems of the firms" that Flesh delights in
singing, for instance, is a suggestion of the continuity between busi
ness and show business which is one of the novel's central themes, and
which is reinforced by the fact that Flesh is a businessman whose busi
ness consists in costuming his country. As a symbolic costumer, of
course, he resembles Julius Finsberg, out of whose costuming company
his own inheritance derives, and who also fathered 18 children, a
"franchise of flesh" (p. 85) who in name and number are associated with
Broadway musical comedy and are also identical to each other as Flesh's
Carvel is identical to other Carvels, as his Burger King cannot be dis
tinguished from other Burger Kings. The interchangeability of these
Finsbergs and franchises in turn suggests Flesh's "common-denominating"
vision, its e lf a reflection of his need to impose upon the country the
contours of his own undifferentiated and undifferentiating heart, and
to accomplish this, fin a lly , requires that he take upon himself the
role of businessman, one ready to chime in on the "bouncy anthems."
The associative links between these thematic elements could be traced
out from different starting points and be shown to follow out different
patterns of connection, but, however they are delineated, the novel
they constitute w ill, because i t is put together spatially rather than
consecutively, remain very much the same book with very m uch the sam e
center of metaphoric coherence, a novel which intentionally circles
around one unvarying core of ideas and associations, constantly jug
gling, re-aligning and redefining them as i t proceeds.
Elkin's insistent and deliberate transformation and metaphoriza-
157
tion of these themes in The Franchiser is undertaken not so much for
the pleasure of watching things transpose themselves into other things
through language, though in his work, as in William H. Gass's, there
is some of this; more importantly, he introduces and reintroduces these
associative links in order to demonstrate their inescapable v alid ity,
and to indicate the way in which such analogies join together to con
stitute a full-bodied perspective on reality. To maintain that the
perspective that dominates the novel— Flesh's— is in any complete sense
exemplary would be to exaggerate the case, and yet there is compelling
evidence that Elkin does want us to see Flesh's viewpoint as represen
tative— i f hyperbolically so—of a way of thinking about the world
which has, in the past two decades, gradually succumbed to the intru-:-
sion of a very much more troubling vision" of the way the world works.
That midcentury, peculiarly American perspective is one patched
together out of a number of sources and symptoms, among them hopes for
the future that came with peace and the burgeoning birthrate that
attested to the avidity of those hopes, the prospect of tremendous
economic growth with its promise of prosperity for a ll, the related
faith in business and the belief that business methods conscientiously
applied could remedy many of the ills of mankind, and, underlying and
reinforcing a ll these expectations, a ground for the cultural optimism
they express, were musical comedies, their medium and message both
harmonizing with while helping to create the ethic the larger society
had, in war as in peace, placed its trust in: the idea that "we can do
i t together." (Im plicit in this vision is the same assumption that
158
underlies much of musical comedy and makes i t work: the belief that
hum an experience transcends individual differences, the idea that we
all at bottom recognize in ourselves the same basic impulses, joys, and
sorrows, whatever the regional appelations through which we articulate
them. Beneath this assumption is another, however, and one which Flesh
--lik e Dick Gibson—understands a ll too well: the notion that we have
all dealt sufficiently wi/th our primary needs to allow ourselves the
leisure and the wherewithal to indulge ourselves in extravagant exis
tential reflection of this sort; he, like other Elkin characters, calls
the state of being in which this kind of thoroughly mediated contempla
tion is possible "the ordinary," and wants nothing more than to extend
its dominion over the American mind.) Whether anyone outside of the
pages of The Franchiser ever believed a ll of this matters l i t t l e , of
course; Ben Flesh doubts not a word of i t , and in his perhaps excessive
credulity toward the more optimistic and commercial claims of his
culture, he represents in extreme form all those who, even though ‘ know
ing what they knew,' were nonetheless secretly stirred by musical
declarations like "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "W e know we belong
to the land, and the land we.belong to is grand"; who found themselves
giving private assent to the notion that "There's N o Business Like Show
Business," or who found som e gut-level conviction of hum an solidarity
and possibility miraculously captured in the rousing choruses of
"Seventy-Six Trombones" or "A Real Fine Clambake."
Nor is Flesh in any sense hesitant to affirm his exemplification
of this half-conscious, sentimental, optimistic mode of thought, his
159
representativeness reinforcing the idea that he is less a m an in his
own right than a reflection of other men. Recalling the numerous,
varied, largely inconsequential experiences which have befallen him in
his li f e , he asserts at one point in the novel that "'they've got m e
programmed for an Everyman!"' (p. I l l ) , and he subsequently te lls Patty
Finsberg "'I'm the culture! Ben Flesh the Avon Lady, Ben the Burger
King'" (p. 193). As both Everyman and embodiment of the culture Flesh
undergoes a thoroughly exemplary decline, his illness reflecting the
breakdown of the Broadway/business ethic in which he (and, to a less
extreme extent, his generation) believed, a breakdown hastened by the
intrusion of an opposed ethic, one characterized by dissolution, irra
tional expansion and domination by inhuman physical laws, musical
comedic possibility succumbing to the dictates of cosmic necessity.
Flesh goes down fighting, s t ill hoping toward the end of the novel that
his hopeful, communal vision will prevail, s t ill trying to believe that
i t w ill be "'a franchiser who w ill save us . . . a franchiser. Yes.
Speaking som e Esperanto of simple need, answering appetite with con
venience foods'" (p. 258). But his disease is by now too debilitating
for him to be able to carry out this redemptive work himself, even with
in the microcosm of the rapidly dispersing Finsbergs, i t becoming
increasingly clear that his multiple sclerosis is its e lf a reflection of
the very processes Flesh hopes to counter with spritely lyrics and the
gratification of the now "universalized appetite."
It is exceedingly unlikely that Elkin would ever have thought of
using multiple sclerosis as a cultural symbol had he not himself been
160
afflicted with the disease, but our awareness of its autobiographical
roots, rather than diminishing our sense of his achievement in The
Franchiser, tends instead to make our admiration for his a b ility to
transform a physical re a lity into a complex symbol that much greater.
Elkin's fir s t extended attempt at metaphorizing the disease in the
novel consists, as we have seen, in using i t as a microcosrhic reflection
of the power shortages plaguing the American heartland in the early
1970's, Flesh symbolically fleeing the dissolution of his own internal
power system as he drives fran tically through the midwest in search of
towns with ligh t and energy, hoarding gallons of gas and quarts of oil
12
against the threat of his own immobilization. In these terms, then,
Flesh's multi pie sclerosis is an embodiment of the new American
cultural re a lity of depleted energy supplies, the 1950's and 60's
assumption of plenty buckling under to a mentality of lowered expecta
tions, of mandatory conservation and straitened circumstance. Flesh
makes the link between his own internal disintegration and the external
world's similar failure explicit when he te lls the Finsbergs that
'"There is n 't enough energy to drive m y body. How can there be enough
to run Akron?'" (p. 258).
The disease takes on a more private, immediate and characteristic
significance shortly after Flesh arrives in the energy oasis of Colo
rado Springs. Joined there by Patty, the Finsberg trip le t nicknamed
"the Insight Lady" for her a b ility to decipher cultural symbols semio-
tic a lly , Flesh and his latest mistress trade o ff explications of social
re a litie s , he winning the competition by launching into a demonstration
161
that ours is a ta c tile , preliterate culture, its bottles, boxes and
containers differentiated by size and shape in order to distinguish
visually their contents from one another. For one whose own ta c tile
relationship to the world is growing progressively more limited and
progressively less immediate and precise, his neural signals mixing in
such a way that wet feels dry to him and iron feels like wood, this
insight could hardly come as a reassuring one, even i f the threat i t
poses to him is one more symbolic than real. Symbolic extensions of
the disease's significance continue to accrue over the course of the
novel, Flesh's precisely depicted disintegrating contact with the world
enacting the pattern of gradual loss, denudation, reminiscent of the
King Lear dynamic considered e a rlie r, and anticipating, as well, Joan
Didion's use of the same illness as symbol in her essay dealing with
the end of the 1960's, "The White Alburn."^3
The pivotal irony of The Franchiser, then, consists in the fact
that the m an who has set himself the task of spatially binding, uniting
and homogenizing his country, he whose "stars-and-stripes vision" and
"American overview" make him a "Mnemonic patriot of place" who knows
"where everything goes" in the national landscape (p. 213), is himself
suffering from a disintegrative malady the symptoms of which are ex
pressed through a blurring of neural distinction analogous to the
effect his common-denominating franchiser's mentality has on the na
tion's geography. Flesh has to face a truth not unlike that confronted
but never realized by Dick Gibson: the disturbing recognition that his
ideals, once put into practice, somehow manage consistently to betray
162
their own purposed ends, that they result in circumstances different
from--in fact, contradictory to--those whose realization had been his
project's objective. Wanting nothing more than to extend a sense of
American communality and shopping mall well-being throughout the land,
Flesh must fin a lly see that he has only imposed upon i t a spatial,
geographical analogue of the disease which is destroying him, imposed
upon i t the characteristics of multiple sclerosis, which is, he subse
quently concludes, "perhaps merely the physical configuration of his
personality" (p. 308).
This central recognition reaches its dramatic climax in the novel
in a scene in which Flesh is flying to New York in response to a sum m ons
from the Finsbergs. He watches out the window as America flows by
below him, taking characteristic delight in this vantage point, one
which, in its obliteration of differences and presentation of the nation
as one homogenized continuous place, confirms his own intu itive sense
of its re a lity . His typically complacent meditations upon viewing
America from this perspective are interrupted on this occasion, however,
by the insistent intrusion of an alien thought which fin a lly thrusts
its way into his consciousness through a circuitous route of associa
tion and analogy. He feels the country's
ultimate homogeneity, a homogeneity squared, the final
monolithism of his country, the last and lo ftie s t
franchise, the a ir, the sky, a ll distinctions, whichever
remained intact, whichever he had been unable to
demolish in his capacity as franchiser, as absent, as
blasted away as the ta c tile capacities of his poor
motherfuck fingers and his lousy son of a bitch hands.
(p. 245)
163
Flesh proves no mpre capable of altering strategy or revising
tactics than is Dick Gibson when i t occurs to him that his efforts
are tending to extend the dominion of the very forces in the culture
he sought to oppose; both of them simply push on, continue doing what
they have been doing in the hope that the results of their exertions
w ill somehow reverse themselves. Aware now that America is too large
for him to save, its atomization too advanced for his commercial song
and damce to succeed in effecting its restoration, Flesh determines to
redeem that microcosm of the culture which has always represented to
him its most ideal manifestation—the Finsberg twins and trip le ts .
They need saving because, like everything else in the nation, they have
begun to d r ift apart, their musical comedy iden ticality, their "50's
and 60's tract house mode" submitting to the ravages of change, of
difference and distinguishability.
Flesh has a dream in which he sees himself as an archaeologist at
the Finsberg digs, one intent upon "restoring their old mass individu
alism, only with d iffic u lty putting them together, a painstaking labor"
(p. 273). He wakes from this dream resolved to rise to its challenge,
even though he suspects that i t is a task beyond the capabilities of
his blasted hands and demyelinating nerves, and he decides that he m ay
be able to accomplish the necessary work of restoration by shaping his
franchises in a more coherent, less arbitrary way. Instead of planting
franchises wherever there is a vacancy, he resolves, he w ill arrange
them "in such a way as to coincide with a traveller's cicadi an rhythms,
his scien tifically averaged-out need to pee, eat, rest, distract him-
•164
self with souvenirs." The consequent success of these franchises, he
reasons, w ill regain for him both the respect of the Finsberg boys and
the love of the Finsberg g irls , and that respect and love w ill— he
hopes— "somehow force them back into their odd single magical manifes
tations" (p. 273). The Finsbergs, in short, represent Flesh's last
hope of proving that i t w ill be "a franchiser who'll save us."
His attempts at turning himself into the serious, sober, p ro fit-
minded businessman he believes he must become i f he is to reverse the
Finsberg's decline into dissim ilarity run afoul not only of his habi
tual indifference to the financial prosperity of his operations but
also of the existence of a freak, unpredictable business climate.
"'The economy is spooked,'" he te lls the Finsbergs during his Riverdale
v is it in 1974, "'There's a curse on free enterprise"' (p, 255), This
curse manifests its e lf in the fact that Flesh's subsequent financial
maneuvers--apparently sound and carefully considered ones--mysteriously
backfire on him, the old definitions of and assumptions about fluctu
ations in the economy proving themselves no longer reliable or accurate
guidelines. Flesh closes down his Friendly Finance o ffice, convinced
that the unstable economic climate w ill result in borrowers defaulting
on their loans; he sells too his Evelyn W oods Reading Dynamics fran
chise because he anticipates that the escalating price of paper w ill
reduce the reading that people do, and this w ill obviate any necessity
for speed reading; he invests the moneys gained from these transactions
in a Dunkin' Donuts franchise, supposing that Americans' need for sweets
and coffee w ill outlast even the most serious of economic slumps.
165
Sound reasoning in a less v o la tile , more stationary financial climate,
Flesh's strategy explodes in his face when the price of sugar suddenly
and unpredictably soars.
Whereas American business and the commercial vision i t implies
represent a s ta b ility and certainty in the early pages of the novel
which Flesh finds comforting and encouraging, so encouraging that he
makes i t the medium of his hopeful vision, the medium through which he
creates in lif e the "musical comedy democracy" that lives in his heart,
they come gradually to partake of and contribute to the complex of ideas
involved with deterioration, dispersion and death. Flesh's dream of
restoring the Finsbergs through business savvy and franchiser creati
vity comes to nothing partly because of the sudden inexplicability and
in s tab ility of the economic sphere, its arbitrary leaps and descents
proving too intractable to be manipulated in any reasonable way. His
dream fa ils also, however, because the Finsbergs begin dying o ff before
he is able to reunite them, and i t is not insignificant that the survi
vors announce their brothers' and sisters' deaths with the phrase
" bought it , " so thoroughly by now has business become
associated with death and dissolution. The business frame of mind,
which Flesh has always valued for its opposition to and repudiation of
any view of life which is grave, somber or hopeless, ultimately proves
to contain within its e lf the rea litie s i t attempts to veil beneath its
insistently comedic vision of things. I f the business mentality and
the world i t creates and projects are fundamentally comedic in their
orientation and implications, Flesh must come to understand, they are
166
so because they are playing to endlessly renewable contingents of 14-
20 year-olds, cross sections of middle age males earning in excess of
$20,000 annually, masses of housewives of a particular educational
level and so on. From the businessman's perspective these contingents
might well be thought of as choral groups entoning in harmony their
communal willingness to be sold Stridex pads or Betamax or Palmolive
dishwashing liquid; to each individual within the group, he or she is
a single person with a private need, an isolate being characterized by
som e unfulfilled desire. The distinction between these perspectives
is crucial and irresolvable, and i t is one that Flesh makes much of
towards the end of the novel when he realizes how thoroughly the busi
ness ethic has failed to bring about the world he has envisioned. He
speaks for himself and other businessmen as well when he admits that,
in the end, "he was no businessman but only another consumer," a m an
"who came to s e ll, almost always, what he had already f ir s t used, tried,
bought himself . . . and all of i t testimonial to nothing fin a lly but
his needs, to need its e lf" (p. 2 5 5 ).^ The comedic vision of American
business cannot ultimately transform the individual's needs and their
fulfillm ent into something more pub!ic, more communal, for at bottom
all there is, the songs and commercials with their promises of oneness
and solidarity through the products' gratification of desires notwith
standing, is Ben Flesh, the isolate Everyman-as-consumer, alone and
inseparable from his needs. Neither need nor desire can constitute a
basis upon which community can be b u ilt, in other words, for however
they and their gratification are metaphorized into images of good-
167
natured congregation (into "The Pepsi Generation," for instance, or
into the assertion that "America is turning 7-Up"), they remain a
source of hum an isolation, not of human solidarity. What this
realization means in the novel's terms is that Flesh has begun to
experience, and recognize that he has begun to experience, the increas
ing complexity of his lif e as a 'diminishment of passions,' as a
gradual fa llin g away from and loss of belief in the things which pre
viously tied him to others and a consequent turning inward upon the
self where lonely, subjective need lives.
Flesh's gradual transformation from outer-directed public m an to
iliner-directed private se lf, from salesman exploiting human needs to
consumer engulfed by them, is echoed by the parallel, though more
extreme, transformation of a number of Finsbergs from lif e into death.
None of the eight who ultimately die in the novel succumb to the
ordinary diseases s ta tis tic a lly charted by the A.M.A.; they die, in
stead, of themselves, of the absolutely individual defects that each of
them was born with. Kitty is poisoned by the salts in her urine in
which she slept every night; Jerome defecates his colon in response to
doctors' attempts to cure his chronic constipation; Noel infects his
cradle cap by scratching i t nervously upon learning of the other deaths;
Moss slams into a truck sided with an alloy his eyes have never been
able to perceive, and the others are sim ilarly struck down by som e
grotesque consequence of their "dark diathenics," their fatal illnesses,
as Flesh thinks, "like signature, like customized curse" (p. 307). The
survivors are rendered dumbstruck by this chain of terrib le deaths and
168
appeal to Flesh for explanation, chorally lamenting that
'W e don't' Lorenz said
'understand,1 said Ethel.
'W e were always,' Sigmund-Rudolph said,
'musical comedy sort of'
'people,' said Patty, Laverne and Maxene. (p. 287)
Flesh can offer them l i t t l e consolation, nor can he te ll them how their
Broadwayesque lives can result in something so grim as actual deaths,
but he has arrived at a conclusion about the meaning of the passing
of these godcousins, decided in very unfranchiserian terms what the
significance of their deaths is. He watches the survivors at the mul
tip le graveside, realizing that they weep for themselves as m uch as
for their lamented brothers and sisters:
Each mourning for each and for his own doom. As he was
moved by his multiple sclerosis, his own flawed scaffolding
of nerves. Everyone carried his mortality like a birth
mark and was a good host to his death. You could not
catch anything, and were from the beginning already
caught. As i f Lorenz or Cole, Patty, Mary or himself
carried from birth the very diseases they would die of.
Everything was congenital, handsomeness to suicide.
'There are,' he said, 'no ludicrous ways to die. There
are no ludicrous deaths.' (p. 290)
The Broadway vision cannot work i f "plague builds its nests in us" and
we are a ll in some ultimate sense our physical fates, that physicality
fin a lly necessitating our withdrawal from the rousing American choral
ensemble that we might have the privacy in which to nurture our own
deaths; i t cannot work i f "'there are no ludicrous deaths,"' for that
rules out the comedic necessities of inconsequence and interchange^
a b ility , denies categorically the communal and commercial affirmation
that individuals die, but there w ill always be groups of new individuals
169
to replace those who are gone. That affirmation cannot, Flesh has
realized, offer any real solace to one like himself, a man whose choral
identity is gradually being replaced by a self circumscribed by disease,
a franchiser whose reports to the surviving Finsbergs become less and
less concerned with the businesses he is buying and operating and more
and more concerned with the symptoms of his internal deterioration.
Flesh is very much a m an of flesh, then, one extraordinarily poorly
suited to live in the realm of the ideal, even i f that ideal is only
that of American commercial optimism, his own hands and nerves an ever
present reminder that the physical is the ground of all being, and that
the ground of his being is in the process of collapsing beneath him.
And yet Flesh never entirely abandons his commercial, conmunal,
comedic understanding of things, partly because i t has become so m uch
a part of him that to reject i t would be to throw o ff the only self
that he has. Consequently he insists that the Finsberg dead be buried
in like coffins, as i f in parodic fulfillm ent of his dream, now dashed,
of restoring them to identicality. I t is Flesh too who wants the
period of mourning in Riverdale to be fille d with the melodies of the
shows that Julius Finsberg costumed, not the "you-can1t-1ick-us
indomitable stuff" songs, but the chorus numbers, the entire cast tunes,
a ll the cowboys and their girls singing ’Oklahoma!,'
the veterans singing "Call M e M ister,1 the e lf and
townspeople singing 'On That Great Com e and Get I t Day,'
the fishermen and their families doing 'June is Bustin'
Out All Over.' I t was, that is, the community numbers
that reinforced them, the songs that obliterated differences,
among m en and women, am ong principals and walk-ons. Not
the love songs, not even the hopeful, optimistic songs
of the leads who, down and out, in the depths of their luck,
170
suddenly blurt their crazy confidence. Again and
again i t was the townsfolk working as a chorus, three
dozen voices singing as one, that got to them, appealing
to some principle of twin- and tripletship in them,
decimated as their ranks now were. The odd bravery of
numbers and commonality, a sort of patriotism to one's
kind. And Ben, more unlike them than ever, now he
looked so old and fe lt so rotten, as cheered and charmed
as any of the Finsbergs could have been. (p. 290)
This passage represents the novel's most detailed and expressive evoca
tion of the Finsberg/Flesh Broadway vision and the values and hopes
which underlie i t , and i f i t reflects too the flimsiness of the vision's
hope and the absurdity of its democratic ideals, i t also catches some
of the excitement and joy impl.icit in the vision which at moments
reduces the absurdity and flimsiness to negligibi1tty --fo r Flesh, at
any rate. I t is no exaggeration to say that The Franchiser succeeds as
a novel only insofar as i t convinces its reader of the absolute conti
nuity that exists between the ideas expressed in this paragraph and
Ben Flesh's desire to give the nation "its visual props . . .all its
things, a ll its crayp, the true American g r a f fit i, that perfect queer
calligraphy of American signature, what gave i t its meaning and made
i t fun" (p, 270). I t is probably also true that the novel w ill affect
the reader only insofar as he is persuaded by the crazy nobility of
Flesh's zany enterprise, and feels with the protagonist the odd, hope
less joy of undertaking i t . Outside of Don Quixote, few protagonists
in the history of the novel have taken upon themselves quests so
thoroughly foolish as that to which Flesh commits himself, and fewer
s t ill manage as successfully as Elkin's protagonist does to implicate
the reader's ludicrous designs and impossibly optimistic projections
171
in his own, even as the novel leaves l i t t l e doubt as to the end to
which a ll such dreams must come.
Flesh's vision is by no means to be dismissed as the sentimenta-.
lism of a seriously i l l m an or as the delusion of one who has taken the
promises of American merchantry with excessive literalness, though both
of these do figure in his character; he is better understood as an
exaggerated representation of the way in which a generation of Ameri
cans comprehended the world and their lives in i t , his self-proclaimed
decline into age and irrelevance reflecting their p a ra lle l, i f less
precipitous, experience of the passing of the world they knew and
their sense of their unsuitability to the one which has taken its place.
The obsolesence of his ways of thinking f ir s t becomes obvious to Flesh
when he visits Kansas City's Crown Center, a shopping mall predicated
upon very different business assumptions form those under which he has
operated his own concerns. More than a mere shopping mall, Crown Cen
ter is something like a museum of mid-20th century re a litie s , an
exposition of plants, trees, waterfalls, airplanes, streets—of a ll,
that is , those commonplaces of contemporary lif e which are expected to
disappear with the further deterioration of the environment and the
eventual exhaustion of our energy resources. Even more troubling,
from Flesh's perspective, are the Center's preponderance of specialty
shops (he is , after a l l , an obi iterator of differences and queller of
distinctions), shops which sell nothing but dollhouse furniture or
candles or personalized hand stamps, and which bear not the names of
fam iliar national companies but names suggesting homey, cottage.Indus
172
try sincerity and coyness--an art gallery named Ethnics, a bakery
named The Bake Shop, a furniture store named Habitat. That such shops
violate Flesh's franchiser ethic—his b elief in the ultimate validity
of identical franchise units reflecting one nationally fam iliar corpor
ate source, situated such that random vehicular tra ffic w ill find them
convenient and accessible— is obvious, and he flees the Center, making
his way out "by means of necessary detours" much as he had fled the
midwest power outages seeking "a hole in the heatwave" (p. 164), in
tu itiv e ly aware that both phenomena, Crown Center and energy depletions
alike, are confronting him with an exactly-defined, uncompromisingly
severe rea lity which has nothing to do with mansard roofs, fun, musical
comedy, or—because he won't live to see i t become the norm—with him.
I t is partly in response to his premonitory aversion to Crown Center
that an inebriated Flesh, eating dinner at a nostalgia restaurant that
evening with some fellow franchisers, begins to mock the restaurant
and abuse its s ta ff, sensing that the present—which is , in a real
sense, a ll that a multiple sclerosis victim has, the past representing
irrecoverable good health, the future increasing d is a b ility --is being
systematically diminished from both directions, restaurants like this
one banishing i t in celebration of yesteryear, shopping malls like
Crown Center ushering in the future before its time. What he is able
to lash out against when drunk he must submit to in silence when sober,
acquiescing mentally to the fact that those who created Crown Center
are "way ahead of him, way ahead of the franchiser with his Robo-Washes
and convenience food-joints. . . . Why, he was decadent, a piece of
173
history, the yesterday kid himself, Father Time, 01' M an River--his
America, the America of the interstates, of the sixties and middle
seventies, as obsolete and charming and picturesque as an old neighbor
hood" (p. 166).
The world that Crown Center and the brownouts foreshadow is all
but upon him, Flesh admits to himself even as he is building his Travel
Inn, the franchise which is to represent the real culmination of his
career, and what he fears most about that world is not so m uch that he
w ill live a cripple in i t , or that i t w ill "oldtimer him," imposing
upon him the fam iliar stagy mannerisms of outrage and astonishment
which are his only available means of expressing his feelings about
having been le ft behind by time. However frightening these prospects
may be, they alarm him less than does the utter alienness of this
world with its "new dispensation" to anything Flesh has ever thought,
f e lt or hoped. The m an who wants to unite the nation under one commer
cial banner and who, as a "mnemonic patriot of place" wants to pull
all American place into the orbit of a ll other American place, can only
be appalled to find the "new dispensation" actually increasing the
distances between places, altering the scale of things, "space com
pounding its e lf like the introduction of a new dimension." For the
m an who holds to the musical comedy perception of things with its
assumption of ultimate inconsequence, reversib ility and the promise of
second and third chances, the "new dispensation" can represent nothing
other than a horror, its omnipresence, in e v ita b ility and imperviousness
to the dreams of human beings utterly dooming all his hopes. Whereas
174
Flesh is attracted by juncture, fusion, consolidation, plenitude,
connection, synthesis and organization, the new dispensation is charac
terized by disjunction, disunion, division, deficiency, separation,
dissolution, atomization and chaos, and Flesh learns quickly to ap
preciate the power of this adversary, naming i t "the expanding universe
here, America's molecules drifting away from each other like a blown
balloon, like heat rising, the mysterious physical laws gone public"
(p. 306).
In metaphoric terms, of course, the expanding universe concept
accounts for a number of occurrences in the novel, this new dispensa
tion overcoming the explanatory vision of Ben Flesh progressively in
the book's final scenes. The deterioration of the Finsbergs' "tract
house mode of being," their simultaneous decline into difference and
death, is one manifestation of the emergence of this new hum an physics,
Flesh at one point e x p lic itly referring to their dissolution as "an
expanding universe theory of Finsbergs" (p. 273).' This metaphoric
extension of the significance of the Finsberg's decline heightens not
only the absurdity but also the crazy heroism of Flesh's endeavors to
hold them together, to save and restore them to their "odd single
magical manifestations" and to their sense of themselves as 'musical
comedy sort of people' in the face of opposed scientific necessity, of
inhuman laws which render inevitable the atomization of the twins and
trip le ts .
I t is no coincidence, then, that the event which culminates Flesh's
various failures to rescue and re-unite the Finsbergs is one brought
175
about by a circumstance clearly associated with the expanding universe
notion. Having planned the location of his Travel Inn with great
deliberation in hopes of translating its success into a restoration of
the Finsbergs to themselves and to him, Flesh discovers that the
national fifty -fiv e miles per hour speed lim it enacted between the time
of the motel's planning and its construction has significantly altered
the distances upon which his concept of the "gas/food/lodging synapses"
of the American traveller had been predicated. This new law transforms
Ringgold, Georgia, Flesh's prime Travel Inn site , from a perfect mid
way point on the southern route from numerous northeastern population
centers to the recently-opened Disney World, into a "sort of place"
halfway between the post-law natural rest stops imposed--or created—
by energy-drained America, Chatanooga to the north and Atlanta to the
south. The dislocation which lands tourists in Chatanooga and Atlanta
for the night instead of in Ringgold is infinitesmal in relation to
the unthinkable magnitudes of the universe's expansion, but i t is more
than enough to insure that what has been intended to be the crowning
and most personally significant achievement of Flesh's franchising
career w ill prove a losing proposition, its chances for success as
dispersed now as "America's molecules drifting away from each other
like a blown balloon."
Even before i t has opened the Travel Inn proves to be a failure
in the purpose Flesh had most wanted i t to accomplish, and a ll that
is le ft for him is to experience the culminating repudiation of his
franchiser vision in the motel on its f ir s t night of business. Once
176
the few guests who have stumbled upon the new establishment are in
their rooms, Flesh inadvertently overhears the moans of a couple
copulating in the room next to his, and then tours the hallways of his
motel to discover that a ll of his guests are involved in sexual a c ti
vity of one kind or another. ("'What's this? what's this?"' he mutters
as he moves from door to door, echoing Angelo's astonishment at the
arousal of his own passion by Isabel la in Measure for Measure, the two
men having been previously and sim ilarly reluctant to recognize sexua
l it y as a central issue in hum an l i f e . ) Exhilerated by this discovery,
and yet disturbed as well, Flesh hurries to the lobby to report his
news to other Travel Inns throughout the country over the Inn-Dex,
the chain's intercommunications system, turning the network into a kind
of Dow Jones ticker tape index of American sexuality. Much to his
disappointment, other Travel Inns respond that their rooms too resound
of the erotic squeal and coital cry, one operator confirming Flesh's
hypothesis, concluding that "YOU PUT YO U R FINGER O N IT, RINGGOLD, THE
W O R LD IS A VERY SEXY PLACE" (p. 329). Before long the franchise head
quarters in. Richmond knocks Flesh and his respondents o ff the Travel
Inn airwaves, but by this time he has a new definition of the adhesive
which holds the American nation together to consider. What he had
hoped the response from the other Travel Inn operators would be was that
their guests were doing much what Flesh had encouraged the couple in
the room next door to his to do as he ushered them to it : take a swim,
eat dinner in the restaurant, stop by the bar for a nightcap when the
combo is playing, watch a l i t t l e color TV, d r ift off early to sleep in
177
the motel's comfortable double beds. Instead they love, masturbate;
commit incest and do anything else they can think of to achieve
physical gratificatio n, their indulgence in the sensual so national and
so unvarying as to compel Flesh to concede that this, like all nights,
is "love night," and that "Not even the time differential made any
difference, fin a lly , Ringgold's nighttime, California's evening, love's
m ood obliterating time and space and a ll zones erogenous" (p. 329).
'Obliterating time and space' in the name of som e unifying concept
has ever been one of Flesh's fondest objectives, but for personal as
well as philosophical reasons "love's mood" is not the agent he had
hoped would accomplish the task, sexual appetite never having been the
"universalized appetite" to which his lif e had been dedicated. In
personal terms, "love's mood" is no longer more than an inconstant
re a lity for Flesh, his paresthetic fingers having "deadened others as
well as himself," turning "whole populations into wood and stone" and
giving them the "dead, neutral texture of plastic" (p. 227). From a
philosophical--or franchiser—perspective, "love's mood" is inadequate
as a consolidating, unifying force because i t at best brings together
two people, and at worst sets numerous others at odds with each other.
Rather than providing a basis upon which the solidarity of mankind can
be established and hum an suffering and loneliness diluted, sexuality
as an ultimate value celebrates only the individual's need for self-
g ratificatio n, affirming the other only as a means to that end. I t is
no more capable, fin a lly , of leading toward the realization of the
communal ideal than is the commercial ethic, both of them ultimately
178
presupposing the irreducible self and its incommunicable and ungratifi-
able needs as the one absolute in existence.
As a cultural adhesive and bulwark against national dispersion,
sexuality is even less an adequate agent than many o f the comic possi
b ilitie s (Burt Reynolds movies, the "PG's and R's of our collectivized
souls and Esperanto'd judgment" [p. 232], community sings from musical
comedies, or a chain of indistinguishable franchises) that Flesh pro
poses. What disturbs Flesh is that he has understood everything amiss
from the beginning, and now realizes that "'love is sweeping the
country and lyrics are the ground of being, singing the literatu re of
the ordinary, and romance is as real as heartburn. Because guys score
and stare at the wom an next to them and trace their fingers gently
over their sweethearts' eyebrow breaking like a wave1 1 ' (p. 330); he
understands that in spite of illness and in spite of death the urge to
love endures and that this nearly solitary passion (which he has
known only in the most perfunctory of ways) underlies re a lity undeni
ably and inescapably, defines and shapes i t more thoroughly than his
16
paltry candidates for deep structure irred u cib ility ever could.
His communal vision necessarily pared down now to the unit of
couples ('"Everyone everywhere is evidence, datum,"' he te lls his night-
clerk, "'We're the proof. Everyone at the Super Bowl is a fact of
fuck1" [p. 328]), Flesh has s t ill to experience the further reduction
of that given by half in order for him to confront his own position in
the world, though he perhaps mercifully misinterprets the significance
of what he sees. Waking, at 3:30 a.m., from a brief nap in the motel
179
lobby following his "love night" communiques, Flesh glances up at an
elaborately l i t display board bearing a m ap of the United States with
symbols designating the other Travel Inns across the country super
imposed upon i t . Rising to study this display more closely, he decides
that its real significance lies in its confirmation of his franchiser's
vision, in its demonstration of the fact that the interstates have made
i t necessary for there to be mileage signs for Washington, D.C., in the
Bronx, for St. Louis to post signs directing through tra ffic to Des
Moines and Tulsa. Encouraged by this apparent contradiction of the
endlessly disquieting tendency of the nation to disperse and expand,
Flesh considers the map further and concludes that its superimposed
circles joining cities within the same radius of each other suggest
"loops of relationship" beyond anything he has previously perceived.
"He is equidistant," we are told in the novel's characteristic indirect
interior monologue narrative,
from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and Pine
Bluff, Arkansas, and Centralia, Illin o is . He could as
easily be in Columbus, Ohio, as in Petersburg, Virginia.
New Orleans rings him, Covington, Kentucky, does. He is
surrounded by place, by tiers of geography like bands of
amphitheater. He is the center. I f he were to leave now,
striking out in any direction, northwest to Nashville,
south to Panama City, Florida, i t would make no difference.
He would stand before maps like this one in the older
Travel Inns. Anywhere he went would be the center.
Only the most inalert reader w ill need the sentence that follows this
passage and makes exp licit the circumstance i t dramatizes, but Elkin
supplies that explanation nonetheless: " It was the start of his ecstasy
attack" (p. 333).
180
What has happened here is that Flesh's franchiser vision and his
disabling disease, which have been metaphoric counterparts throughout
the novel, at this point elide into one another, becoming lite r a lly —
not merely analogically—inseparable and indistinguishable. The
euphoria which signals the onset of a la te r, more serious stage of his
illness is now upon him, and he responds to i t by seeking in the
external world a source for the sudden happiness he feels, locating i t
in the m ap of Travel Inns which decorates his motel lobby. What this
map dramatizes, he imagines, is the ultimate success of his life 's
venture, the realization of his attempt to pull all of American place
within one orbit and to achieve a visual consolidation of space which
would leave no doubt that America is America everywhere. Having now
seen the "loops of relationship" which had eluded his perception before,
Flesh now understands that his plan has worked, that he is now ju s ti
fied in saying that "He could as easily be in Columbus, Ohio, as in
Petersburg, Virginia," for the American commercial exterior which he
has sought to impose everywhere upon the land has, he imagines, elim i
nated a ll differences between these places, and has thus succeeded in
obliterating the hum an subjection to the necessity and inescapability
of spatial lim itation. What Flesh imagines this m ap to dramatize is
not, however, what the reader is compelled to find in i t .
Rather than the gathering in of spaces which Flesh sees as the
map's object lesson, the reader cannot help but notice the sim ilarities
in Flesh's perception to the expanding universe notion with its
assumptions of the equality of distances increased between any two
181
points, and the scale of a ll distances simultaneously increasing.^
S till more significantly, Flesh's perception refutes the very vision
he believes i t to confirm, his communal assumptions surrendering in i t
to the ultimate paring-down im plicit in the realization that "He is the
center," and that "Anywhere he went he would be the center." This
insight is , of course, an euphoria-induced delusion, a fanciful and
sentimental conception in a ll senses but one: i t describes quite pre
cisely the extent to which circumstance and illness have reduced Flesh
to an isolate individual, m an alone, his own personal, portable center
because he has no one but himself to care about any longer. The Fins
bergs have disinherited him because their depleted ranks make i t
impossible for them to hold his paper in these d iffic u lt times, and
they are themselves gradually retreating into death; he has mortgaged
most of his other franchises to the success of his Travel Inn as well,
and consequently his "Grand Rounds" are correspondingly attenuated,
reduced. What he is le ft with, then, is a reduced itinerary, a body
which confuses him into happiness when circumstances dictate nothing
other than sorrow, and an absurd sense, which is in some inverted way
true, that he is the center, coupled with an in ab ility to recognize
how thoroughly this insight conflicts with and absolutely contradicts
his ideal communal vision.
By the penultimate chapter of The Franchiser Flesh has reached a
point not unlike that reached by the protagonists of Elkin's other
novels toward the ends of their narratives, each of them putting forth
an equivocal or ambivalent affirmation of the individual self. W e last
182
see Boswell hurling imprecations at the celebrities arriving for the
opening of the Club which he has created as a monument to his own ego,
his renunciation of the old self's medium of apotheosis representing
an affirmation of the achievement of a new, equally voracious, self.
In the process of being beaten—perhaps to death—by Fisher and the
inmates the warden commands, Feldman experiences the revelation that
he is no "bad man," but is one who loves his life and whose expansion
through the empty spaces of the world is just beginning. For Dick
Gibson and Flesh, on the other hand, the revelation of the ultimacy
and primacy of the self is ambivalent in a different sense, one
experienced, insofar as i t is , as a repudiation of the ideal vision
of communal tty and shared human purpose. Not only does his Night Let
ters show fa il to locate or create for its e lf an audience of other-
directed, public-spirited Americans, Dick Gibson finds, but i t actually
encourages inwardness and self-absorption in his listeners as well as
in himself, a ll of them fin a lly and a ll but inexorably submitting to
"mindless obsession" and life 's "Dow-Jones concern with its e lf" (p. 331).
S till more ambivalent, and doubly poignant, is Flesh's Travel Inn m ap
revelation, a revelation he interprets as the confirmation of his fran
chiser vision but which is actually its ultimate refutation, a mere
prefigurement of the solitude that is to be his as he sets o ff on his
"Grand Rounds" once again.
Take up these rounds once again he does, and the novel ends where
i t began, with Flesh gassing up at a service station in Birmingham,
Alabama, in the late summer of 1975. What had been puzzling in the
183
opening pages is clear now: Flesh's uncertainty as to whether he is
in Birmingham, Alabama, or Birmingham, Michigan, reflects his euphoric
sense of the vision realized, as does the f ir s t chapter's closing sen
tence, " It's a beautiful day in the United States of America" (p. 5);
clear too is his game show host chumminess with the station attendant,
his unrestrained delight in the commonplace features of this ordinary
city , and his certainty that another driver having his car serviced
here is his good friend, a ll of these eccentricities attributable to
his multiple sclerosis-induced ecstasy. The novel’s final chapter,
which functions more as an epilogue than as an extension of the plot,
serves primarily to confirm two of Flesh's earlier established appre
hensions. While the attendant services the car of a Minnesotan at
another pump Flesh regales its driver with an account of his stay in
the Rapid City hospital, recalling for him an R.A.F. lieutenant who
shared a ward with him and who suffered from a rare, fatal tropical
disease called lassa fever. In the account of their hospital stay
presented e a rlier in the novel we learn that their exchange of fears,
complaints about the unbearable heat and comparison of symptoms results
in friendship, and when Flesh is released from the hospital he refuses
to walk behind the screen behind which Tanner is lying to say goodbye,
afraid that he w ill find him dead and that this incident w ill become
nothing more than a story Flesh can te ll in the impaired speech of old
age, Tanner's extinction reduced to a too-dramatic irony in the tale of
Flesh's lif e . So he leaves the hospital, uncertain whether Tanner
lived or died, and thinks l i t t l e about him until he te lls his "friend"
184
from Minnesota about him at the Birmingham gas station. Flesh obvious
ly has forgotten his resolve never to debase the friendship by reducing
i t to an ironic story to be told around fireplaces in his old age (p.
136), not only relating the story but also adding on the ironic twist
that never happened, describing himself going behind the screen and
finding Tanner dead. His speech seems not to be excessively impaired
as he recalls the incident, but i t is clear from his frequent injection
of goshes and gollys into the narrative how thoroughly his illness has
"oldtimered" him, imposed upon him the "stagy mannerisms" of old age
and rendered him vulnerable to the kind of self-indulgent and sentimen
tal raconteurism to which in better days he had sworn himself never to
descend.
He is l i t t l e more aware of this incident as a trespass upon a
previously adopted resolve than he is receptive to the significance of
the gesture and its result which this recollection prompts him to under
take. Reminded by his story of a boy who had started his car for him
as he was leaving the hospital, Flesh recalls that his offer of pay
ment had been refused when the boy insisted that Flesh's reassurance
that his father, hospitalized by a stroke, would make a fu ll recovery
was payment enough. Flesh remembers the boy's father's name--Richard
Mullen--and uses the station phone to put in a call to him in Rapid
City to learn how he had fared since his illness. Mullen's wife an
swers the phone and immediately collapses the comedic scenario Flesh
had created for Mullen's son and nurtured himself these four years,
explaining that her husband died in the hospital during that summer of
185
1971. What puzzles Flesh is that the w om an is s t ill reduced to tears
by a stranger's mention of his husband's name four years a fter his
death, Flesh's musical comedy assumptions having poorly prepared him
to understand the irreconcilability of such a loss, his unmoored life
(he refers to himself at various points as "Ben Bum " and "Footloose
Flesh") having given him sadly l i t t l e experience in appreciating such
devotion.
Flesh's recollection of his friendship and parting with Tanner
dramatizes the extent to which his multiple sclerosis has altered and
debilitated him, how much i t has betrayed him into cheap sentimentality
and an old man's garrulousness; his recollection of his untruthful ness
with Richard Mullen's son tends to reinvoke that act of selfishness and
reinforce i t through the heedless phone call with its underlying assump
tion that everything always works out well in the end. The difference
between the fabrication and the phone c a ll, however, consists in the
fact that Flesh knows he is lying to the boy when he te lls him that his
father is improving, aware that he has talked to no doctors about the
man's condition, and he worries about this thoughtless deception as he
drives through the midwest brownouts, convinced that his concern over
the matter proves that he has not entered the euphoria stage of the
disease which his physician has recently described to him. By the end
of the novel, when he is making the call to Rapid City, the euphoria is
upon him, his impulsiveness and sentimental presumption in attempting
to contact a man he has never met and whose health he takes for granted
very much the products of the onset of that euphoria. The epilogue of
186
The Franchiser, then, depicts a Ben Flesh less completely responsible
for the things he says, does, and thinks than he has been, and the
painfully ambiguous feelings stirred in the reader by this chapter are
a consequence of his awareness of the helpless disparity which has
com e to exist between what Flesh feels and what the actual circumstance;
of his situation are, a disparity for which the entire novel has been
gradually preparing the reader.
"The problem solved by the sentence in chapter one has got to be
solved by a more elaborate sentence in chapter two," Elkin has said in
an interview, "and by a s t ill more elaborate sentence in chapter
18
three," The more elaborate sentences which close out The Franchiser
are, in these terms, sentences which so effectively and persuasively
and movingly articulate Flesh's franchiser vision that they almost com
pel the reader to forget that the vision is now largely euphoric, the
joy primarily chemical—sentences, in short, not unlike those through
which the vision has previously been expressed, and yet sentences more
immediate, more convincing, more precisely evocative of the "America
ofithe interstates" in which he had placed so much hope and whose pas
sing is reflected in his own decline. The final few pages of the novel
are not, then, mere rehersals of what Flesh has been saying throughout
the novel but rhetorical heightenings of his message calculated to
balance them with the increasing desperation of his circumstances and
to emphasize the unresolved tension between the necessity of his percep
tion and its content—between his in ab ility not to think what he thinks
and what he thinks—upon which the novel closes.
187
O n his way to the Birmingham motel at which he w ill spend the
night, Flesh takes inventory of his lif e , toting up the debits and
credits and deciding that i t has been a good l if e , an exciting lif e ,
one fu ll of extraordinary experiences (his parents killed in an auto
accident, his inheritance of the prime rate, his "very big league" dis
ease) as well as extraordinary people (his godfather, the twins and
trip le ts ). Continuing to count his blessings, he celebrates the "musi
cal comedy in his blood. What a heritage! Songs. Standards. Hits.
Top of the charts. Whistled. Hum m ed. Carried on the com m on American
breath. . . . Melodies as fam iliar as appetite and as pressed upon
others as their habits." And, in the fin a l, culminating and synthe
sizing vision, he is part of i t a ll,
Ben Flesh himself like a note on sheet music, the clefs
of his neon logos in the American sky. All the businesses
he'd had. The road companies of Colonel Sanders, Baskin-
Robbins, Howard Johnson's, Travel Inn, a ll his franchises!
Why, he belonged everywhere, anywhere. In California like
the sound of juice, Florida like the color of sunlight,
Washington and Montana like the brisk smell of thin
height, and Missouri like the neutral decent feel of the
law of averages, (p. 342)
That this moment represents an apotheosis for Flesh, i f a deluded one,
is certain: gone now is the notion that his franchising is only a con
figuration of his disease, i t having been replaced by the fantasy that
he is not merely the center but the consolidator of the nation, that
which holds i t a ll together and makes one place out of a ll its d if-
19
ferent places. Having become a ll that he ever wanted to be, a ll that
remains for Flesh to do is to experience the recognition of a final
synthesis between himself, business and Broadway, an ultimatizing of
188
the bond between them which immediately follows.
At his motel room, he decides ■ he w ill order dinner brought in,
s it before his window at dusk and "watch out for his signs as they came
on in nighttime Birmingham, all the blink-bulb neon and electric
extravaganzas that stood out sharp against the sky and proved that
every night Broadway opens everywhere" (p. 343). Flesh imagines, clear
ly enough, that he has succeeded in spreading his Broadway/business
religion throughout the nation, countering its expanding universe ten
dencies with the values of coherence, consolidation and connection and
creating the American "musical comedy democracy" which has always been
his ideal. The fusion is, of course, only a metaphoric one, Flesh's
similes as much the product of pathology as poetry, and yet for Flesh
this resolution is a happy one, his happiness chemical, but real none
theless. He knows that the Finsbergs are dying, that his Travel Inn
is a disaster and that he w ill soon be strapped to a wheelchair, but
his euphoria breaks through a ll of this, allowing him to fededicate
himself to his vision and to celebrate its realization, and to sing a
Finsbergian hym n of praise to the miracle of existence, one no longer
distinguishable from the sentimental choral affirmations which bring
down the curtain on sc many Broadway musical comedies.
The franchiser dramatizes the passing not so much of a generation
as of a generation's particular mode of thought, the ultimate synthesis
of its elements, fused together in the figure of Ben Flesh, franchiser,
representing simultaneously the culmination of that way of thinking
and its dissolution, its replacement by a sterner, more heartless and
189
inhuman mode of perceiving the world. At the very moment that Flesh
is celebrating the fusion of these elements into a single truth, into
an idea of simplicity and purity, his body—his flesh— is enacting the
dispersing, dissolving process that w ill defeat that vision and destroy
the visionary. For the moment, however, the franchiser vision and the
opposed, disintegrative vision meet and balance each other in a poign
ant equilibrium, their suspension allowing Elkin to accomplish with the
epilogue of the novel what he had planned to do: to write a novel with
20
"one of the saddest happy endings in American literatu re."
190
NOTES
^Stanley Elkin, Boswell: A Modern Comedy (New York: Random House,
1964), p. 285.
2
James Boswell delivers a brief speech on the necessity for stream
lining one's projects and concerns in Boswel 1: "All genuinely great
m en were martyrs whose characters and purposes were lik e those double
ramps in architecture which wound and climbed and never touched in a
concrete illusion of strand. . . . It was the barber-pole condition of
l if e , and we assumed in good fa ith som e matrix com m on to a ll. But
isolate, isolate—that was the real lesson. Hecuba was nothing to any
of us'" (p. 154).
3
The only explicit reference to King Lear in the novel, although
i t does compare Flesh to Shakespeare's protagonist, only indirectly
concerns the denudation pattern of the tragedy. Gus-Ira Finsberg te lls
his sister, Kitty, that Flesh, their godcousin, will soon become "'Ben
Flesh the travelling invalid, Ben Flesh . . . shlepping his roadshow
Symptoms around the Finsberg bases like King Lear'" (p. 281).
4
The paperback reprint of the novel (New York: Berkley Medallion
Books, 1967) omits the subtitle.
5
The phrase is Michael Wood's, from his review of The Franchiser
in The New York Review of Books, 5 August 1976, p. 37.
^The importance of professions in Elkin's fiction is one of the
emphases of Doris Bargen's entry on Elkin in American Novelists Since
World War I I , 2, ed. Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman (Detroit:
Gale Research, 1978), pp. 131-36.
^This argument is made in a ll of the following reviews: Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt (The New York Times, 3 February 1971, p. 39) and J.A.
Avant (Library Journal, 1 June 1971, p. 2008) on The Dick Gibson Show;
Michael W ood (The New York Review of Books, 21 March 1974, p. 17) and
L.J. Davis (Book World-- The Washington Post, 28 October 1973, p. 10)
on Searches and Seizures; and Robert Towers (The New York Times Book
Review, 13 June 1976, p. 5) on The Franchiser. Elkin has responded at
length to this criticism in various interviews, objecting in one that
191
"As a matter of fact, I am concerned with structure and form, and m y
novels are structured and formed. There is n 't a novel I have written
which does not have a very well-defined structure. The Dick Gibson
Show, for example, is not a series of isolated episodes; i t is a
progress." Thomas LeClair, "Stanley Elkin: The Art of Fiction LXI,"
Paris Review, 66 (Summer, 1976), p. 67.
Elkin's relative indifference to the plot element of fictio n is
reflected in his comment to Scott Sanders that "I admire a writer like
Iris Murdoch, whose novels are superbly plotted. I admire a writer
lik e William Trevor, whose novels are masterpieces of plot. An atten
tion to writing ought not to exclude an attention to plot. In m y case
i t does." Scott Sanders, "An Interview with Stanley Elkin," Contempor
ary Literature, 16, 2 (1975), p. 143.
g
In their Iowa Review dialogue, Elkin and William Gass agree that,
as Gass puts i t , "Good books isolate you; they show how individual and
unique and different--and the responsibility of that--experience is."
Elkin adds, "Right. I f m y books have a theme, it is the theme of self,
the self and its diseases, and the disease is health." Jeffrey L.
Duncan, "A Conversation with Stanley Elkin and William H. Gass," Iowa
Review, 7/1 (Winter, 1976), p. 56.
10Phyllis and Joseph Bernt, "Stanley Elkin on Fiction: An Inter
view, " Prarie Scjiooner (Spring, 1976), p. 25.
11
One of the major differences between Feldman of A Bad Man and
the protagonists of Elkin's three other novels is that whereas Boswell,
Dick Gibson and Flesh are a ll content to work with the material the
world offers them, Feldman has "no taste for the available" (p. 220)
and goes out of his way to supply the public with those goods and
services that cannot otherwise be obtained.
12
The ultimate f u t ilit y of Flesh's search for uncompromised sources
of energy is effectively foreshadowed by his exultant discovery of a
blazing lig h t emanating from Columbus, Nebraska, the lig h t turning out
to be ah eternal flame of a monument honoring the town's war dead.
13
Didion compares the sh ift in attitudes and expectations she
(and, she implies, many others) experienced in the late 1960's to the
disease's effect of rerouting the normal neural circu itry of the body
so that the old impulses remain constant but they become expressed
through the wrong nerves. Values, by implication, become sim ilarly
confused for Didion, the a fflic te d , and for her culture because in
ligh t of the disease "all connections were equally meaningless and
equally senseless." "The White Album," in The White A 1 bum (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 45.
192
14
In this Flesh resembles Benny Profane of Thomas Pynchon's _ V
(New York: Bantam Books, 1964), p. 27, who "couldn't work a transit,
crane, payloader, couldn't lay bricks, stretch a tape right, hold an
elevation rod s t i l l , hadn't even learned to drive a car. He walked;
walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a gigantic supermarket,' his
only function to want."
15
The following chapter oh Searches and Seizures discusses the
s tylistic implications of the order/chaos, conhection/disjunction
antinomy which appears so prevalently throughout Elkin's work.
^ g
An unintended irony of Anthony Heilbut's review of The Franchiser
(The Nation, 28 August 1976, p. 151) is that he intuits precisely what
the novel is attempting to do, then decides that that purpose must be
its .fa ilin g . Citing Flesh's speech concerning the endurance of love
despite death and disease, Heil but disapprovingly notes that "One ex
pects a Jerome Kern soundtrack," and he wants a "Richard Rogers
community sing" to accompany Flesh's subsequent realization that he
takes the center everywhere with him. Flesh would, of course, welcome
such accompaniment to his visions.
17
One accessible explanation of the physics of the expanding
universe can be found in P.C.W. Davies, Space and Time in the Modern
Universe (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 149-58.
l O
Duncan, Iowa Review, p. 59.
19
Flesh's image of himself spanning from coast-to-coast here ts
reminiscent of similar self-expansions imaginatively experienced by
other Elkin protagonists. Boswell has a dream which dramatizes his
desire not merely to be one single m an but to be more than this: "I
wanted to be everyone in this room and all the people in the streets
outside the Club and a ll people everywhere who had ever lived. What
did i t mean to be just Boswell, to have only Boswell' s experience?"
(p. 366). Compare too Feldman's vision of himself " fin in g the world,
a ll its desert spaces and each of its precipices, all its surfaces and
everywhere under its seas . . ." (p. 336) as the Fisher-led inmates
beat him at the close of the novel.
20
Elkin made this comment in a class of mine at the University of
Southern California in November, 1978. I am indebted to Patricia
Franklin, a student in the class, for making m e a transcript of Elkin's
conversation with that group.
193
CHAPTER IV
SEARCHES IN LANGUAGE, SEIZURES O F DESPAIR
W hen an accomplished novelist is writing at the peak of his
lite ra ry and imaginative capabilities, i t very often happens that the
protagonist of the novel upon which he is working gradually emerges as
an embodiment or dramatization of some central, distinctive element of
the w riter's style, i t following that, as Tony Tanner has argued in
City of Words,1 the character's struggle with circumstance on the plot
level exists in analogous relation to the attempt of the style to mas
ter its chosen material on the work's formal plane. The most fam iliar
and self-explanatory example of this circumstance in modern literature
is to be found throughout Hemingway's more successful fic tio n , in which
characters like Nick Adam s (in third-person narratives), Robert Jordan
or Harry Morgan come to dramatically represent, even defend against
competing visions of re a lity , the style which has created them, so
thoroughly have they come to embody that style, and so thoroughly has.
it.come to imply them. (What went wrong with Hemingway’s fictio n is
equally well known: the style remained, but the protagonists dwindled,
the result being that fin a lly only the attitude, articulated by the
style, was le ft , the essential dramatizing agents of the attitude
proving too insubstantial in the later books to body i t forth once
194
again into compelling l i f e . ) W e see the siam e process at work, as
2
Richard Poirer has demonstrated, in first-person narratives like
Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye in which the protagonists'
struggles to free themselves from the constraints of social convention
have strong s ty lis tic components which have themselves, since the
publication of these novels, come to represent something like
nationally-recognized idioms of rebellion and renunciation. In such
works form is not merely mirroring content, then; style is being given
a dramatic analogue on the level of plot.
The novel of Elkin's in which this circumstance most clearly
obtains is The Franchiser, the work in which he most successfully
conjoins crucial elements of his style with the ideals and concerns of
his protagonist. Ben Flesh, as we have seen, is "a m an of franchise,
a true democrat," one who would "quell distinction, obliterate d iffe r
ence, who would common-denominate until Americans recognize that i t
was America everywhere" (p. 164). He is the perfect protagonist, then,
for a w riter whose favorite rhetorical device is the simile and whose
style is elastic and inclusive enough to incorporate disparate, normal
ly incongruous gatherings of reference, metaphor, allusion and subject
into its heedless forward rush. What his style expresses at its most
basic level—and this is a central lesson of Elkin's Washington Univer-
3
sity writing workshops — is that things look like other things, are
like other things, and in order to demonstrate this truth his style
w ill often transform nouns into verbs ("Esperanto'd judgment,"
"Kopechne'd"); exploit the implications of a concept to translate i t
195
into a metaphor (good health described as having one's "proteins in
the Swiss banks of being," a shopping center where po litical candidates
once gathered to debate presented as "a Gettysburg of the rhetorical");
turn phrases into elaborate adjectives (the "gas-food-lodging synapses
of the American public," "out-on-a-1 imb toe balances,1 1 -'" '.What a .live
wire, go-to-hell-god-damn-it town! 1 1 1 ) or into portmanteau'd verbs, ("on-
the-job trained in hamburgerology"); manipulate fam iliar slogans or
song lyrics into joking descriptions of objects or situations (Flesh
responds to new-model cars with their concealed headlights and wind
shield wipers by wondering "Where have a ll the headlights gone?" and
asking "What, i t aih.'t gonna rain no more, no more?"); i t w ill present
a yoking of terms from discontinuous subject realms as a form of
description (urban renewal depicted as "Real Estate's chemotherapy,"
the characteristic epicenity of one of the Finsbergs expressed as "all
the citries of plangent faggotry"); or i t w ill offer catalogues
proving that apparently dissimilar things are, from another perspective,
closely related to one another (Flesh’s listin g of examples which prove
the extent to which we live in remission—sleep, childhood, weekends
and holidays, Presidents1. f ir s t hundred days in office, armistices,
peacetime, honeymoons and so on). These characteristics do not by any
means exhaust the distinctive quirks of Elkin's style, of course; they
don't begin to account for the almost Joycean plethora of rhetorical
forms with which his work is studded, for instance. They do, taken in
the aggregate, suggest how thoroughly Elkin's style tends toward the
inclusive, the undifferentiating and undistinguishing—toward, in short;
196
the anti-hierarchical.
Elkin's style, though not really resembling the styles of Pynchon
or Coover, is similar to theirs in its parallel tendency to deny
incongruity and difference, in its effo rt to envelope within one frame
all of the apparently disparate material i t can assimilate. What this
suggests is that these three writers' styles are utterly in -, i f not
a n ti-, decorous; by their very character they assume the invalidity of
any notion that lif e can be understood in hierarchical terms, that i t
can be broken up and segmented into distinctions like high and low,
upper and lower, major and minor and so on—a ll the distinctions, in
short, which allow for an understanding of the world which separates
holistic human experiences into parcels and categories. For each of
these writers there are antinomies in existence, but they exist on the
same plane, not cordoned o ff from each other by value-laden compartmen-
talizations, but mixed and mingled in human experience inextricably;
that being the case, their styles can do nothing other than mix and
mingle them in a way approximate to that in which they are experienced
in l if e . A striking capacity of Pynchon's characteristic style, for
instance, is its a b ility to move smoothly from a technical discussion
of rocket telemetry to amusing recountings of old movie plots to
meditations upon the relation between sex and death to the presentation
of burlesque skits, the style of Gravity1s Rainbow all but defying the
reader to raise the objection of incongruity, for i t has made of
incongruity a kind of consonance and coherence. The third-person
narrative voice Coover uses in The Pub!ic Burning, sim ilarly, refuses
197
to distinguish or delineate between the serious and the tr iv ia l,
between terror and cartoon, between culture and crap, its esemplasti-
c ity allowing for the narrative's successful introduction of a comic
folk hero into an otherwise verisim ilar depiction of mid-1950's
Washington, D.C.
Although Elkin's style is seldom called upon to accommodate subject
matters as disparate as those that Pynchon's and Coover's must
habitually assimilate, his work resembles theirs in the extent to which
its very existence repudiates hierarchical perceptions of rea lity and
in its style's, ta c it assumption that life is uni level led and in d ivisi
ble. Ben Flesh addresses himself to this point in perspectival terms
when he rises at a Radio Shack convention to salute a new technologi
cal advance in sound reproduction. "'We live in a century of mood,"'
he te lls his fellow franchisers, "'and until this afternoon only
headphones gave the illusion of "separation." There is n o s separation.
There are no concert halls in life . Nor do we see in 3-D. The chairs
do not stand out. Only in stereopticons are the apples closer than the
pears'" (TF, p. 174). With the exception of what we have been calling
the selfhood theme, no notion so thoroughly permeates Elkin's fiction
as does this idea of the wholeness, the simultaneity and im p a rtia lity
of existence, a fact completely consonant with its representing one of
the primary assumptive underpinnings of his style. I t is hierarchy--
system, chain of command--which Fisher represents in A Bad Man, for
instance, and his description of G od ("God-is design,Grace is covenant")
accurately describes the Creator in The Living End who has ordered the
198
cosmos into earth, heaven and hell, and W ho Himself is revealed to be
a distinctly human, remarkably unotherly deity in the course of the
triptych. Jake Greenspahn has to relinquish his belief in his dead
son's saintliness and recognize that he was not above lif e but in i t
in "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers"; Richard Preminger of
"Am ong the Witnesses" is compelled to give up his bachelor's distinc
tion between wom en one marries and wom en one toys with at resorts (or,
to put i t d ifferently, he learns that there are no resorts from lif e ) ;
Bertie of "The Guest" delights in the prospect of showing the newly-
married Premingers that a clown can be a th ie f, that a schlemeil can
inspire astonishment and fear; and, underlying the whole collection of
stories is the recognition that lif e is fu ll of "criers, ignorant of
hope," and "k ib itize rs , ignorant of despair": "each with his p itifu l
piece broken from the whole of l if e , confidently extending only half
of what there was to give" (C&K,K&C, p. 35). Dick Gibson is thinking
in the same s p irit when he meditates upon his listeners (housewife,
anthropology professor, cave man, rich kid, mobster, and so on) and
the extent to which they (and he) share the same a fflic tio n , "everyone
blameless as himself, everyone doing his best but maddened at last,
a l l , a ll zealous, a ll with explanations ready at hand and serving an
ideal of truth or beauty or health or grace. Everyone--everyone. I t
did no good to change policy or fiddle with format. The world pressed
in. I t opened your windows" (DGS, p. 331). That existence cannot be
categorized or compartmentalized, segmented or arranged into hierarchi
cal planes, is hardly an idea original with Elkin, but i t is nonethe
199
less a central theme in his work, one unmistakably present in both the
content and the form of his fictio n .
Insofar as the basis for such philosophical presupposition in an
author's work can be explained, the levelling tendencies of Elkin's
style and content might be attributed to the idea expressed in the firs t
line of his fir s t novel, Boswel1: "Everybody dies, everybody."
Elkin's preoccupation with death (which he has quite openly discussed
in interviews^) invokes at once the existen tialist writers for w hom he
has confessed a youthful enthusiasm, but i t is suggestive too of
medieval conceptions of death as the great equalizer, as the ultimate
leveller of the arbitrary ranks, roles, and status of humanity.
£
Boswell is not, as a number of commentators have noticed, the only
Elkin character who is obsessed with his own mortality: Feldman of
"In the Alley" sacrifices a ll comfort and dignity to insure himself an
heroic death, one experienced in extremity, while his namesake in A Bad
W an thinks constantly about the "eternal lean years of death" which
await him; Dick Gibson wants his show to counter a ll morbid thoughts,
seeing i t as "a.sign in the night that there was no death"(DGS, p ..206),
and Flesh responds to the passing of the Finsbergs by evolving his
"there are no ludicrous deaths" philosophy, his view that "everyone
carried his mortality like a birthmark and was a good host to his
death" (TF, p. 290). Whether the certainty of mortality can be said to
underlie the levelling tendencies within the form and content of
Elkin's work is debatable, but i t is undeniable that death constantly
appears in his fiction associated with equalizing, undifferentiating
200
tendencies in the world, and that these combine to constitute a com
plex of ideas which is opposed by a contrary formal and philosophical
strain in his stories and novels.
To recognize the 'common-denominating' aspect of Elkin's style is,
in other words, to recognize only half of that style's predominant
effect, to represent i t as only crier and not k ib itize r; i t is to ig
nore as well that element of his style which has been most enthusiasti
cally celebrated by enthusiasts and most roundly condemned by his
detractors. Elkin's style is nothing i f not elaborately and self
consciously poetic in its concern with the sound of the English
language and in its dedication to v ita lity and evocativeness; i t is
tirelessly committed to visualization and novelty, precise and a ll-b u t-
exhaustive descriptions of objects tumbling breathlessly upon out
bursts of puns, neologisms, comic solecisms and barbarisms, apostrophes
and similar rhetorical pyrotechnics, the energy level of the prose
permitted only occasionally and fleetingly to flag. John Gardner's
description of "Elkin at his best*" though its e lf somewhat overwrought,
accurately gauges this aspect of Elkin's characteristic conjunction of
form and content: " It's raw energy that Elkin loves— in prose and in
characters. He's Ahab smashing through the mask with jokes, an
eternal child whose answer to oppressive reason is to outperform i t , to
outshout i t . " 7 Elkin has himself made similar comments about the
O
centrality of energy--often rhetorical energy--as a value in his work,
and i t is not d iffic u lt to connect this aspect of the prose with the
thematic strain in his fiction which counters its levelling, normali
201
zing tendencies— the affirmation of the isolate individual or, as
Elkin summarized the theme in an interview, the notion that "the SELF
g
takes precedence." I t is in no sense surprising, of course, to
discover that the primary conflict we have located in Elkin's fiction
(which might be variously described as a confrontation between
uniformity and individualism, communality and self, the ordinary and
the particular or the personal) creates its e lf reduplicatively in anti
nomies discernible on the formal level of his work, but i t is a point
worth examining with some care because of its special importance in the
novellas of Searches and Seizures, works which dramatize the tension
between these contraries in remarkably explicit terms.
The protagonists of "The Bail bondsman," "The Making of Ashenden"
and "The Condominium," this is to say, have two important characteris
tics in common. They are a ll (as Elkin's prefatory note to the
collection points out) m en extraordinarily aware of their own mortality,
m en whose actions in large part arise out of that very recognition; but
they are also men extremely sensitive to the language through which
they present themselves to the world, constantly considering how that
language works, what i t means, and what i t commits them t o . ^ These
three novellas, then, represent three different versions of the
confrontation between the contraries which underlie Elkin's style,
which constitute its paradox and give i t its sense of tension--the
antitheses of the awareness of death and the a b ility of language to
hold death o ff, to p it form, structure, meaning, against their ultimate
dissolution. Or, to put the opposition in different terms, these
202
novellas dramatize the s e lf’s confrontation with the fact of its own
extinction, and its attempt.to at once deny and reconcile its e lf to
this fate through the self-assertions of language. This basic anti
thesis is expressed in nothing like such Manichean terms in the
novellas, of course: language can be put into the service of death, of
dissolution and the extinction of the s e lf, and the assertion of self
can, conversely, leave the self-asserter with no choice but self-
destruction. The basic antinomy, however manipulated or qualified,
remains a crucial one to the understanding of these novellas, however,
language offering in Elkin's fiction the only medium through which the
self can be reconciled (and then only tentatively, temporarily) to the
imminence of its own extinction. The paradox of and tension in Elkin's
prose, to summarize, is attributable to its denial of distinction and
difference on the one hand, and its simultantous claims to distinctive
ness on its own terms on the other, the style becoming an argument
against death and the dissolution of structures and forms even as i t
demonstrates that everything succumbs to, is levelled and rendered
uniform, indistinguishable by, these forces in the end.
Of the three protagonists presented in the novellas of Searches
and Seizures, the one least concerned with death and least consistently
self-conscious about his use of language is Brewster Ashenden, the
central character of the collection's second work, "The Making of
Ashenden." The relative unimportance of these themes, compared to
their centrality in the other two works, is perhaps attributable to the
fact that i t was only a fter he finished work on "The Making of Ashenden"
203
. , „
that the idea of a sequence of novellas occurred to Elkin, and thus
in writing i t he was not anticipating companion works with com m on
themes and parallel images. The simplicity arid directness with which
these themes are addressed in this novella tends to make them more
distinct and immediately graspable than they are in the other two works,
in which they are more firmly embedded in metaphors and analogies, and
thus i t w ill be useful to discuss them f ir s t in the more accessible
context of "The Making of Ashenden" and then move on to their more
subtle presentation in "The Condominium" and "The Bai1 bondsman."
Brewster Ashenden, the protagonist of the novella, doesn't
in it ia lly think very much about death at a l l, but he knows very well
what language is and what i t is for. Language for him is simply an
index of one's social standing and a barometer of one's taste.
Ashenden's social standing is very high and his taste refined to an
extreme, for he is the scion of a wealthy family, a well-educated and
highly civilized young m an who is welcome in the best je t set hom es on
all continents. His breeding and good taste are, of course, reflected
in the language he uses, which permits nary a.damn, hell, or pain-in-
the-ass (his prissy hedge is "pain in the you-know-what") to intrude
and which insists upon the euphemization and sublimation of any term
or subject which might be judged objectionable on the grounds of being
unpleasant, physical or crude. He teasingly te lls his dying mother,
for instance, that she is a "naughty slugabed" for failin g to leave her
deathbed and join him in a round of golf, his only explanation for such
deliberate fatuousness being that "a code is a code" (p. 136).
204
I t takes very few pages of Ashenden's hyperbolically civilized
patter to convince the reader that he is no mere adherent of a code but
an utterly encoded being, one for w hom taste is a f i t substitute for
experience and whose every action, verbal and otherwise, could be
found to have precedent in the best guides to etiquette and social
deportment. Having no need to earn a living , Ashenden spends his days
undertaking the obligatory aristocratic ritual of self-seeking,
ultimately finding himself in the person of Jane Loes Lipton, a wealthy
socialite so perfectly suited to him that they can both anticipate
precisely what the other is going to say before he or she says i t .
She is the "perfection" which has eluded him in his lifelong journey
from one estate to another, the embodiment of the "magnetic, Platonic
pole, idealism and Beauty's true North" (p. 133) for which he has
searched. Her only drawback (which is , within the aristocratic romance
tradition in which Ashenden and the story are operating, a definite
advantage and seductive virtue) consists in the fact that she is dying,
a case of lupus erythematosus causing her body to produce antibodies
against its e lf, making her progressively allergic to her own chemistry.
To marry her would be to infect himself with the same necessarily fatal
illness, Ashenden understands, and, inspired by the poetry of this
romantic doom, he presses his suit, only to be rejected as unworthy of
her hand because he is not a virgin while she is. And so she sets
Ashenden a task: to purify himself or lose her forever, her challenge
uniting her with a ll the fairy tale princesses who demand similar ( i f .
less earthy) tests of their suitors' ardor and fid e lity . Ashenden
205
resorts ? to mere rhetorical trickery to uncorrupt himself, deciding that
he has attained to a "self-loathing" so extreme that " it Is purity"
(p. 167), and too excited to sleep away the hours before he can bestow
his newly-cleansed self upon Jane, he wanders out into the gam e
preserve which surrounds the estate at which he and she are staying.
He is n 't, as i t turns out, fated to get o ff with a simple s e lf
confrontation, the mere joining of self with its feminine mirror image,
however; his in itia tio n suddenly becomes a much more menacing confron
tation of self and other, other being, in this instance, a bear in
heat. Nor is this task one he can finesse with language as he did the
in itia l one, for the bear has a language of its own through which i t
fin a lly communicates to Ashenden what i t wants of him:
Again i t made its strange movement, and this time barked
its moan, a command, a grammar of high complication, of
d iffic u lt,irre g u la r case and gender and tense, a classic
aberrant syntax. Which was exactly as Ashenden took i t ,
like a student of language who for the f ir s t time finds
himself hearing in real and ordinary lif e a unique text
book usage. God, he thought, I understand bear! (p. 178)
What the bear is tellin g him is that he must copulate with i t or be
killed , and even his attempts to reduce the situation to allegory and
thus dismiss i t ("What this means, he thought, is that m y lif e has been
too crammed with c iv iliza tio n . . . . I have been too proud of m y
humanism, perhaps, and a ll along not paid enough attention to the base"
pp.[179-80]) cannot save him from the raunchily actual necessity of
satisfying the beast. He subsequently discovers that he desires the
bear, but by this point his ardor has cooled and he has to whip himself
back up by regaling the bear with conventional endearments, offering i t
206
seductive Smalltalk and the predictable verbal inducements of the
would-be amorist ( " 'I love you. I don't think I can liv e without you.
I want you to marry me'" [p. 184]), exciting himself into tumescence
with the cheap sentiments of ordinary courtship.
His experience with the bear changes not only his language— " 'W e
are a ll sodomites,"' he te lls himself in mid-coitus, " 'a ll pederasts,
a ll dikes and queens and mother fuckers'" (p. 185}—but also alters
his plans, convincing him to renounce the aristocratically romantic
death he had resolved to share with Jane in favor of travel to places
"further and wilder than he had ever been" (p. 187). What he is repu
diating here is not merely death but a solopsistic kind of self-
extinction, a death engendered by the self's mating with its mirror
image, and one characterized, appropriately enough, by a chemical
pathology in which the victim's system poisons its e lf. His coital
adventure with the bear has also accomplished the very purpose Jane set
him in his task— i t has revirginized him through a purification by
soiling. He is not pure in the sense that she demanded, of course,
but is pure in the sense that his sodomy has redeemed him from a life
so thoroughly insulated by formalities and dictated by forms that i t
was hardly a lif e at a ll, but more of an extended exercise in premedi
tation and mediation. In choosing the language of sensuality and anti
social impulse over the lure of romantic self-annihilation, Ashenden
frees himself into possibility, tempering his taste with the awareness
of the bestial in himself and expanding his notions of heritage to
include among the a ir, earth, water and fir e which are his parents'
207
legacy to him one additional element— honey.
I f i t is through activating the language of bear within himself
that Ashenden manages to escape the prison of forms and formalities
in which he has lived, i t is through a similar process that Elkin's
language leads his reader in the novella. The excessively refined,
fastidious prose with which Ashenden narrates the f ir s t two thirds of
the novella gives way to a third person narration in the bear fuck
scene, Ashenden's particularity being replaced by evocative precision,
IP
his delicacy abandoned in favor of the immediacy of dramatization.
The resulting scene is one of the most ambitious, exuberant and (as
1T -
numerous reviewers were quick to point out ) moving moments in Elkin's
fic tio n , a triumph of language so striking that i t fa irly overwhelms
the protagonist whose experience i t describes. The novella not only
depicts the situation of one whose expanding lexicon emancipates him
from a s terile lif e , then— i t also dramatizes this process by giving
the reader a word experience as extreme, as affecting and as imagina
tively liberating as the one he undergoes.
"The Making of Ashenden" is without question the most lighthearted
of the novellas in Searches and Seizures, the one most consistently
and comically permeated by the mediating presence of other voices,
other books—fa iry tales and Henry James novels conspicuous among them.
"The Condominium," the novella which follows i t , is the darkest of the
three, largely because i t permits of neither the reconci1iatory move
ments nor the peripetia which allow "The Bailbondsman" and "The Making
of Ashenden" to conclude in redemption and the rediscovery of possibi
208
lit y , however qualified. I t is also, consistently enough, the novella
in which language is revealed to have no redemptive value whatsoever,
no power to p it against the in e v ita b ility of death, language actually
coming to play a contributing role in the protagonist's suicide. "The
Condominium" makes no more ultimate or final statement than does either
of the other novellas in the collection, of course, and i f its place
ment at the volume's end does give i t a kind of emphasis which their
positioning disallows them, its real authority is grounded less in its
location than in the unremitting bleakness of its depiction of the
hopeless solitariness of human existence.
Whereas both "The Bailbondsman" and— in a different sense— "The
Making of Ashenden" close upon paroxyms of language which free their
protagonists into possibility once again, "The Condominium" opens
with a lengthy passage of prose which is plainly neither capable of
redeeming or reflective of redemption for its w riter, the narrative
suggesting more than anything else the psychological and emotional
problems facing that w riter. He is Marshall Preminger (no relation,
apparently, to the Richard Preminger of "Among the Witnesses" and "The
Guest"), a professional lecturer inspired to discourse upon the hum an
instinct toward home-building, toward the ownership of shelter, on the
occasion of his inheritance of his father's Chicago condominium. "'A
place to live, to be"1 is his theme, his lecture's central question
being "'Out of what frightful trauma of exclusion arose this need, what
base expulsion from what cave during which incredible spell of rotten
weather?"1 (p. 191). He never completely answers this question—or,
209
to put i t more precisely, he never becomes conscious that he is answer
ing it--because he doesn't complete the lecture, putting i t aside when
responsibilities attached to his new property demand his time. What
the fragment of the lecture does address its e lf to is the evolution of
a New Jersey summer resort at which his parents had once rented, then
owned, a bungalow when he was a boy.^ What he traces in his account
is the decreasing importance that the open a ir comes to play in the
lives of those who inhabit the resort every summer, the canoes, tennis
courts and baseball diamond falling into disrepair through lack of
use as i f the residents '"had no interest in the out-of-doors at a ll,
had repudiated i t , as i f lif e were meant to be lived inside and the
games they once played as bachelor boys and bachelor g irls — "The Good
Sports," "The Merry Maidens"--were over, lite r a lly , the scores frozen,
more final than Olympic records'" (p. 193). What Preminger is
unintentionally prefiguring here is his own fate as a thirty-seven-
year-old unmarried virgin who has never played the games that "bachelor
boys and bachelor girls" play, and whose future i t w ill be to be driven
more and more emphatically inside, not only inside the condominium
which he has involuntarily inherited, but further inside into the
absolute solitude of the lonely, irreducible se lf. His suicide, then,
becomes a partial answer to the question, '"Out of what frightful
trauma of exclusion arose this need, what base expulsion from what cave
during what spell of rotten weather?"'; but that answer is necessarily
a limited and partial one, the actual source of the specific trauma
remaining to be revealed.
210
Preminger's lecture not only addresses its e lf to the problem that
w ill prove fa ta lly irresolvable for him --it also dramatizes i t . As he
traces the year-by-year growth of the resort and its bungalows, he
becomes progressively incapable of cleaving to those issues which make
his oration interesting to others, 'solipsism' (as Dick Gibson would
put i t ) 'drowning out inquiry' (DGS, p. 322) over the course of his
remarks. At various points in writing the lecture he wanders o ff into
fortuitous details relevant only to a nostalgic reminiscence of his
own childhood, gets so excited about the accuracy of his insights that
he must stop and cool down for a day or two before continuing, and
generally proves that ordered discourse, the subjugation of self to
subject, is no longer within his capabilities. But he begins work on
this lecture well after his father's death and his taking possession
of the condominium, and i t is only after we understand what his fath
er's death.means to him that we begin to see what the apartment and
all that comes with i t w ill come to signify for him.
Preminger is summoned to Chicago by an acquaintance of his father's
and he arrives for the funeral only to suffer two immediate surprises.
First, he sees that his coffined father has grown long hair, sideburns
and a mustache since the last Preminger had seen him; second, he learns
that the estate he had anticipated being le ft by his father consists
in the condominium and a backlog of unpaid maintenance assessments on
the place. The financial disposition of the unit is such that
Preminger cannot sell i t without forfeiting a third of his father's
investment in the deal, and thus he resolves to move into the condo
211
minium, having his belongings forwarded from Missoula, Montana,. where
he has been living, because, as he admits to himself, "a lif e like his
could be lived in Montana or Chicago. I t made no difference" (p. 221).
In an important sense Preminger is not so much transferring his life
as he is exchanging i t for another's, however, a point which is not
lost on him. "He was in his father's skin now," we are told, "plunging
into Pop's deepest furniture, but all along the attraction had been
that i t was someone el.se's, that he'd been granted the dearest opportu
nity of his life --to quit i t , a suicide who lived to te ll the tale.
(But to whom?) Wrapping himself in another's lif e as a child rolls
himself in blankets or crawls beneath beds to a lte r geography" (p. 224).
The urge of the son to escape his own lif e and symbolically or
lite r a lly enter the lif e of the father is a fam iliar one, and we are
not surprised, then, subsequently to find explicit allusions to the
archtypal version of this situation appearing shortly following this
passage. A neighbor named Evelyn Riker comes to Preminger's door,
asking to be le t in so that she might explain to him her relationship
with his father, and he is immediately reminded by her of the wom en who
began coming to his parents' hom e after the rise of his father's
fortunes, wom en whose appearance he "associated with the TV, and the
new gadgets and the other merchandise. Perhaps his own low-level
sexuality had to do with his being broke, the hard-on [which he experi
ences when Mrs. Riker embraces him in g rie f] . . . with his being in
his father's house again. Which made him an.Oedipus of the domestic
for whom jealous of his father's place meant just that: place" (p. 227).
212
This ta c it disclaimer notwithstanding, the two senses of place (as
hom e and as sexual access to the wife/mother figure) prove not to be so
easily and neatly differentiable for Preminger, whose 'search' for the
m an whose lif e he is taking over culminates in the discovery of details
of that man's sexual lif e he would rather not have known. That sexual
lif e , to close o ff the circle, is then revealed to have its roots in
the upward mobility and achievement of financial security with which
Preminger so early in the novella associates i t .
What Mrs. Riker divulges in her explanation is that she and the
elder Preminger were only friends, residents of the same building who
would occasionally talk together at the pool; as they became better
acquainted she would write him letters articulating her views on l it e r
ature and po litics, agreeing in return to keep a key to his condominium
so that he might fantasize about her using i t one evening. The two
responded to each other, she insists, purely as "outlets," their
relationship never exceeding the limits of pen pal from one side, and
object of fantasy from the other. He approves her version of their
relationship, surrenders the letters of hers his father had saved and
accepts her promise that she w ill return his key'as soon as she is
able to locate i t . Satisfied with this exchange, Preminger rededicates
himself to the new lif e he has moved into with its possibilities for
redemption of the isolated self he has been, convinced that he can
fin a lly elude the "tourist condition" which was that old lif e and rid
himself of the "unsavory quality of displaced person" he has up to now
given o ff (p. 233).
213
All that prevents him from fittin g in with the "ordinary lif e ,
H.O. scale" of the condominium (p. 234) in it ia lly is his temper, his
tendency to lash out against the regulations of the place causing him
to admonish himself, " If I don't stop violating the dress codes I'm a
dead man. Where do I get m y fury? he wondered. What nutty notions of
m y character have come on m e? What is i t with m e? . Where*do I think I
am--where three roads meet?" (p. 240). This second allusion to the
Oedipus story pushes the reference's significance beyond the previously
established analogue and aligns the father (the victim of the son's
rage at the spot where the three roads meet) with the condominium
whose regulations Preminger flares out against. The aptness of this
parallel becomes increasingly clear as the novella proceeds, i t
becoming progressively obvious to Preminger how thoroughly his father
had come to internalize the condominium's ethic and to become one with
and indistinguishable from the world which i t implies.
Preminger proves equally capable of turning his anger in upon
himself as he is of projecting i t outward upon the world, and i t is this
tr a it more than any other which foredooms his efforts at beginning to
live a normal life among normal people in the condominium. W hen a
group of chairmen of the complex's association committees v is it
Preminger to acquaint him with their functions and activities he is
deeply moved, and he is impressed too by their united front solidity,
their reasonable speeches, their "low-court style like foreign language
converted in dreams" (p. 249). They express the hope that he w ill
become active in committee work, and he seizes the occasion of their
214
solicitude to answer them ( ‘" I think I can give you assurances now,'"
he grandly begins) in the same formally civic tone in which they have
addressed him. I t is only a sentence or two into his remarks that
his gratitude for their concern quickly shades into self-deprecation,
and before long.he- is discomfiting them a ll by explaining his lamentable
circumstances and bemoaning his fate much as he does in the auto
biographical intrusions in his lecture: "'My lif e is a l i t t l e like
being in a foreign country,'" he te lls them. "'There's a displaced
person in me. I feel— lis te n --I feel . . . Jewish. I mean even here,
am ong Jews, where everybody's Jewish, I feel Jewish1" (p. 250). (The
association's spokesman responds to Preminger's confession by pointedly
citing a few of the association's regulations, emphasizing particularly
that its members must approve all new residents: . . . no chinks,
no PR's, no spades,'" he insists, as i f he has just found one of these
living on the premises in disguise.) To be the one alienated m an in
a community of supposed alienated m en and wom en is Preminger's fate,
his loneliness and concomitant certainty that that loneliness is his
just desert convincing him that his fellow residents must "have his
number"—one.
His isolation is temporarily ended by his appointment as l i f e
guard at the condominium swimming pool when a fa ll hot spell necessi
tates its being kept open past Labor Day, the role giving him the com
forts of a prescribed code of behavior and involvement with those who
use the pool. He is encouraged too by his receipt of a f ir s t le tte r
from Mrs. Riker in which she discusses aspects of "our permissive
215
society," a Philip Roth novel, Mike Nichols' films and the heat wave,
concluding with a postscript noting that she has not yet.located his
key, but that she w ill return i t to him as soon as she can 'lay her
hands on i t , ' which she anticipates w ill be soon. He responds
enthusiastically to her le tte r, convinced that she is cryptically
promising him that she w ill soon use the key, sending her a lengthy
telegram inviting her to bring the key whenever she finds i t . Gradual
ly the hopes he had placed in both the pool role and in Mrs. Riker
are proven to be groundless, however, and he is forced back into him
self bearing a devastating knowledge as the only gain of his foray
into the world of others.
The pool proves a disappointment because his role allows him
only a peripheral involvement in the community which gathers there,
the bathers and sunners content to have him listen in on their conver
sations dealing with the buying of their condos, the gas mileage of
their automobiles, their cleaning wom en and other concerns of the
settled in and secure, those whose apartments give them a purchase in
the world, a platform from which to speak contentedly of life 's triv ia .
Preminger, of course, has achieved no such foothold, his ownership of
a condominium notwithstanding, and when he is directly addressed by
any of the poolside kibitzers i t is usually as a representative of the
younger generation whose values aren't their own and whose sympathies
are abhorrent to them. Normally defensive about the position in which
they have placed him, Preminger fin a lly embraces i t while attacking
those who have imposed i t on him on the pool's closing day, criticizin g
216
them for voting Sunday rules into effect for weekdays, thus denying
use of the fa c ilitie s to sons, daughters, and grandchildren, and for
never discussing or exchanging pictures of those w hom their Sunday
rules have excluded. His own father, he angrily insists, could not
have lived this condominium lif e with its im plicit denial that the
residents had ever had a family at a l l ; he must have proudly displayed
pictures of Marshall around this very swimming pool, Preminger is cer
tain, and talked avidly of his son's success on the lecture circu it.
But Preminger suddenly recognizes that his father would have concurred
in the rules change and talked l i t t l e of his son around the pool, so
thoroughly had he bought into the condominium ethos. '"S h it,"' he
complains through his revelation, '"He never said a word. Like the
rest of you. You should see the place. A swinger. He had hair like
a pop star'" (p. 294).
Underlying Preminger's petulant outburst is his conviction that
the bonds of posterity have been utterly eliminated in the condominium,
that the elderly in the complex have abandoned completely their
parental and grandparental concerns w ith 'th eir families' lives and
a c tiv itie s , seeking instead only the gratification of their own private
needs and desires. This sour insight into the significance of his
father's Danish modern furniture and altered styles of dress and hairdo
is the fir s t of two revelations so devastating to Preminger's sense of
the fitness of things that i f they don't actually unhinge his mind
(he te lls the pool side contingent that he is experiencing a nervous
breakdown), they do deprive him of any reason to go on living.
217
The final revelation takes the form of a second le tte r from Mrs.
Riker he finds slid under his door upon returning from his emotional
outburst at the pool. This le tte r is not unlike its predecessor in
its discursiveness, disingenuous humility and banal cordiality, her
narration of a triv ia l argument she once had with her former husband
presented in the same s t if f ly informal, platitude-ridden prose in which
15
she had commented on the work of Roth and Nichols. Nor is that style
altered significantly when she shifts from this anecdote to the
discussion of the circumstances of Preminger's father's death, a death
she not only witnessed but actually caused.
She had decided that she must return his key to him, she explains
in the le tte r, and used i t to le t herself in when no one answered her
knock. She found his father, dressed only in briefs, lying on his bed
looking seriously i l l , and she decided to stay with him in spite of her
awareness that he had misinterpreted the impulse behind her v is it.
She called a doctor and agreed to lie in bed with the sick m an until
he arrived, believing that this would calm him. Fearing that the
erection resultant of his seizure was exacerbating his discomfort, she
"reluctantly" submitted to his entreaties, undressed, and copulated
with him, the exertion of coitus k illin g him. She cleaned away all
traces of their intercourse.and departed, leaving the dead m an to be
found by the doctor she had summoned. Her explanation complete, she
asks Preminger not to answer her le tte r, and promises in a postscript
to get his key back to him.
Nervous breakdown notwithstanding, Preminger understands this
2 1 8
le tte r quite fu lly , and realizes completely too with a rising sense of
horror the conflicting impulses of attraction and repulsion her
narrative has inspired in him. What he comprehends only intuitively
is the fathomless banality of the document he has just read, its
outrageously unintentional dramatization of the extent to which its
writer has rationalized into ordinariness her unquestionable complicity
in his father's death, her bland accounting of the event reflecting
absolutely no hint of an awareness of what impact such revelations
would have on the victim's son. That her le tte r is an exercise in
unimaginable self-delusion is established by her continued reluctance
to surrender the key, with its im plicit unwillingness to abandon the
hope that the game she played with father can also be (and has been)
carried on with his son. Preminger, however,^is concerned with the
le tte r less as a revelation of the bland vileness of Mrs. Riker than
as a vehicle of self-confrontation, his reaction to its contents--his
hope that the complicitress in his father's death w ill use the key
now,:.his awareness that this hope reduces him to the desperate
circumstance in which his stricken, tumescent father hopelessly and
terrib ly waited out the final minutes of his lif e for the sound of the
key in the lock--manifesting to him the abject helplessness and:irre
deemability of his situation. Her second le tte r, then, closes o ff a
series of revelations which began with his surprise at his father's
modish wardrobe, hairstyle and apartment, continue in his realization
that the m an was not the fam iliar dad whose lif e revolves around his
pride in his son but was a late middle-aged bachelor desperate to get
219
laid, and culminate in the disclosure that his reckless and frantic
priapism, acting in concert with a self-deluded, obliging neighbor,
resulted in his death.
Preminger understands too the relationship between his father and
his father's final home, seeing that the condominium in which they have
consecutively lived represents a retreat from the world into private
worlds of fantasy and s e lf-g ra tific a tio n , the older man's imaginary
yet ultimately fatal a ffa ir with Mrs. Riker having clearly dramatized
the point. With this recognition comes the related revelation that the
condominium can never be a foundation upon which to build the ordinary
lif e to which he has for so.long aspired, for despite the complex's
surface communality, its pool side neighborliness and appearance of
social interaction, i t is ultimately a place of withdrawal into the
s e lf, a place which allows its residents to turn away from the concerns
of the world and to triv ia liz e themselves so thoroughly that they w ill
no longer be obliged to notice their lives slipping away from them, or
to have to take the trouble to care i f they do notice. Less clearly
connected in Preminger's mind is his e a rlier cited sense that sexuality
is somehow related to financial success, the rise of one's economic
fortunes, with his father's death in the hom e that, more than any
other, signifies the achievement of retirement security; involved here
too, of course, is the fact that his father died in the arms of a
wom an whom Preminger from the f ir s t had associated with those wom en who
appeared at the Premingers' hom e in the upwardly mobile period of his
father's working lif e . I t is safe to say that he intuits these
220
connections, however, and understands through them that he must push
beyond his father's retreat into a condominium death by withdrawing so
thoroughly from the world that he himself becomes home, eliminating all
purchase in space by leaping from his apartment's 12th floor balcony,
intent upon destroying the self's last refuge, its last and only home--
the body. As he fa lls he tries to deliver his habitation speech, but
finds i t impossible as the wind stops the words on his lip s, his one
final go at articulating the world into some kind of coherence jammed
back down his throat, his lecture halted by his ultimate commitment of
himself to silence and death. His suicide, clearly enough, represents
a kind of response to his lecture's crucial question, then, but the
only trauma i t points to is his own, the only "spell of rotten weather"
the one which led him toward the discovery of his own hopelessness.
For Preminger anthropological questions--all questions--can do nothing
other than become autobiographical, and i t is against this final turn
ing inward, or in complicity with i t , that he hurls himself to his
death.
In "The Condominium" the language that prevails is Mrs. Riker's
epistolary prose, a prose blithely unconscious of and indifferent to
its own effects, a prose chatty, yet a r t if ic ia l, and consummately
bland, a deadly language which destroys extremity by triv ia liz in g i t
and normalizing the extraordinary into the accents of the daily. Hers
is the voice of the condominium without question, and Preminger must
succumb to i t because his own sense of self is too crippled to counter
that voice's tendencies toward dissolution of distinction, triv ia liz a -
221
tion, and sameness with its own force of articulation, differentiation
and self-expression. Of the three protagonists of the Searches and
Seizures novellas, then, Preminger strikes the poorest bargain
between style and substance, proves least able to reconcile the
inevitable hum an conflict between self and other, word and world.
Alexander Main, a m an of primitive impulse, learns the necessity and
value of sublimating that impulsiveness into a style, of formalizing
i t into a constructive verbal means of bearing down on the world, i t
having become clear to him that such compromises with the world's terms
are unavoidable i f that world is to be counted upon to restore him to
his "sense of his possibilities." Brewster Ashenden, by self-proclama
tion "one of the three or four dozen truly civilized m en in the world"
(p. 149), learns to mediate the emptiness of style-for-its-own-sake
with a b it of carnality and impulse, the bear having awakened in him
the awareness of his forgotten grammar of animality. Only Preminger
fa ils to reconcile the opposing strains, retreating progressively
further into the self as the world rejects him and the sybil of the
condo seduces him, perhaps unknowingly, toward the same annihilation
of self into which her sour, banal epistolary song had ultimately led
his father.
The bleakness of this conclusion to Searches and Sei zures is
balanced by the qualified affirmation of the opening novella, the two
mediated by the manic energy of the tour de force resolution of "The
Making of Ashenden," its e lf a dramatization of language's a b ility to
overcome the gravitational forces of formlessness and dissolution.
222
None of the three is intended to represent an absolute statement or
concluding vision, clearly enough, and yet i t is d iffic u lt not to find
Main's reconciliation of the tension between self-expression and
dissolution, between style and nothingness, the most convincing, his
closing gesture the most significant and resonant.
Main--"The Bailbondsman"--has a very clear notion of what the lan
guage his profession imposes upon him is and how he feels about i t .
"I'm called upon to make colorful conversation in m y trade," he explains
early in the novella,
Don't think I enjoy i t . I'm a serious man; such patter
is distasteful to me. W hen day is done I like nothing
better than to ask m y neighbor how he's feeling, to hear
he's well and to te ll him same here, to trade what we
know about the weather, to be agreeable, aloof and dull.
Leave poetry to the poets, style to the window trimmers.
I'm old.(p. 25)
What makes his occupation repugnant for him is not the highhandedness
consequented by his role as determiner of what felons w ill be set free,
liberated back into their crim inality, nor is i t the strong arming he
must occasionally resort to with fugitives who have jumped his bond;
these he likes, these are his exuberant means of "controlling the
sluices and locks of ordinary life " (p. 105), his chosen way (to use
a favorite term of Leo Feldman's) of 'bearing down on the world.'
I f s the rhetoric which the job demands that he finds hateful, the
obligatory use of "colorful rhythms" and 'salty talk' a burden which
nothing else in the trade can make up for, "not the viciousness or the
seamy excitements or m y collective, licey knowledge of the world" . ,
(p. 27). In the course of the novella Main's attitude toward this
223
shoptalk, this "flashy grammar of body contact" (p. 118), changes
considerably, language ultimately becoming the only medium of redemp
tion he can know.
Main requires redemption for a number of reasons. First of a ll,
his hard-edged, unforgiving, bad man's perspective on the world has
succumbed to the emergence of a more gentle, charitable, humanistic
view, his own ideals of revenge, impulse and v o la tility having been
largely replaced by the values of rehabilitation, sublimation and order.
This cultural shift ( i t might be termed, in anticipation of The Fran
chiser, a new dispensation) manifests its e lf primarily in the fact that
business is bad in bail bonding, the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1964
(which empowered federal courts to act as their own bondsmen, thus
eliminating airplane hijackers, interstate kidnappers and other federal
criminals from the independent bondsman's ro lls ), the compassion-in-
spired, legislation introduced by coalitions of social scientists,
.
c iv il libertarians and a left-leaning Supreme Court, and the increasing
politicization of crime a ll combining to reduce drastically both the
number of felons available for bonding and the p ro fit margin involved
in bonding them. Main's Cincinnati bondsman colleagues discuss this
situation at their weekly luncheon in Covington, Kentucky, agreeing
that henceforth they w ill work in concert rather than in competition
with one another, facing adversity with a united front. In addition,
they resolve to soften their hard-guy image by changing tactics: here
after they w ill agree on a lottery system to determine which bondsman
w ill get which prisoner, and they w ill talk any bail jumpers (whom they
224
are empowered by law to use force upon in returning them to custody)
back to prison rather than using violence. While they are formulating
their democratically established concessions to the fact that 'heart
is winning the battle of history' (p. 56), Main is o ff in a Cincinnati
museum, skipping the,lunch so that he can com e here and study the
teeth of extinct animals. He periodically visits this exhibit of the
jaws of long dead beasts for inspiration, gaining sustenance from the
display of an untempered ferocity which he feels has fled the world.
He examines the skull of a young jaguar, noticing that "Skin s t ill
adheres to the palate, the concentric tracery as distinct and fine as
what he touches with his tongue at the roof of his own mouth. I t is
teeth he comes back again and again to see, as i f these were the
d is tilla te of the animal's soul, the cutting, biting edge of its pasrf
sion and life " (p. 60). At the same time that his colleagues are
fraternally agreeing upon policies of capitulation to modern tendencies
toward compassion, fellow-feeling, understanding and leniency, then,
Main is being nourished by an opposed vision, his sense of his isola-
to's integrity reinforced by the realization that the jaguar's palate
is as singular and unreproducable in its detail as his own, "the cut-;
ting, biting edge" of his ow n ''passion and life " confirmed as well by
his recognition of its image in that of the jaguar skull's menacingly
sharp teeth. I t is from a world too sold on sublimation and too
suspicious of impulse that Main wants most to be redeemed, clearly
enough, his own drive for lif e finding no fulfillm ent in a culture
gone slack with convenience, communality, and an incapacitating
225
relativism.
The earlier Elkin protagonist w hom Main most conspicuously recalls
is Leo Feldman, partly because their irascible, uncompromising natures
are similar, and also because they both assume mediatory positions
between law and lawlessness, Feldman supplying contraband goods and
services through his department store basement, Main monitoring the
passage of criminals o ff and back onto the city streets. A more
important parallel between them, however, is that both are e x p licitly
associated with older, more primitive worlds and civilizatio n s, Feldman
linked with the severity of the medieval world, with "a distant,
Praetorianed land, unamiable and harsh" (ABM, p. 42), while Main proud
ly and repeatedly invokes the memory of his Phoenician ancestors, a
desert people w hom he credits not only with the development of the
bailbond, but also with the invention of oasis, innovations which, from
one point of view, could be said to be one and the same. Their "horned,
spiky skin," Main explains, "took the sunburn and converted i t into
energy," energy which they put to the services of resourcefulness,
becoming "sand and water alchemists," "conservationists of the bleak,"
undauntable creators in the desert's arid wastes "growing a world".
(p. 7). The etymylogical relationship which links Phoenician to
phoenix is , quite clearly, what Elkin has in mind in this description
of the creation of oasis from the desert's barrenness, and i t lies too
behind his decision to give Main the nickname of "The Phoenician" in
anticipation of the rebirth from a condition of failed possibilities
Main w ill undergo in the novella's conclusion.
226
That condition is brought about in part by Main's displeasure with
the law's increasing laxity towards criminals, but i t has more to do
with his overall disillusionment with crime its e lf. He offers a
parable of that disillusionment ("My thoughts explode in words," he
muses) to Crainpool, his secretary, appraising him of "the progress of
a liver fluke through a cow's intestine to a hum an being." His account
traces the trematode's journey from cowflop to the blade of grass in
which i t waits, "a befouled phoenix," for the appearance of the sheep
whose liv e r i t w ill attack and sicken, the sheep's poisoned excrement
giving i t s t ill another bourne in which to await the arrival of the
barefoot human offering his unprotected soles to its capacities for
corkscrew penetration and spiral intrusion. The point of his delinea
tion of "'Nature's nasty marathon, its stations of the cross and inside
job'" is that "'What the liv e r fluke can do m an can do. The fix is in,
i t takes two to tango, a ll crime's a cooperation. This I wanted to see.
I've seen i t , show m e something else. Phooey. A Phoenician's phooey
on i t a ll'" (p. 28). What disappoints Main, obviously, is the recog
nition that crime is communal, that even the liv e r fluke needs assis
tance in undertaking its nasty, instinctual break and entry, neither
desire nor impulse being sufficient to liberate i t from its dependence
upon other living things to convey i t to its jobs.
I t is not until the late pages of the novella, however, that Main's
comment "'This I wanted to see'" is c larifie d and the extent and
meaning of his disillusionment with crime fu lly explained. He became
a bailbondsman, we learn there, when he decided that "Crime was the
227
single mystery he could get close to" (p. 106)—when i t occurred to him
that mastering the disc-iplines which address the most profound ques-\
tions of the universe and of m an was beyond his capabilities, and that
he must settle for involving himself in a fie ld in which the mysteries
("who done it? What's the motive?"[p. 124]) are more manageable but no
less obscure. His chosen fie ld ends up disappointing him, leaves him
b itte rly asking his secretary, who has himself been a law breaker and
jumper of Main's bond, "'What does crime come to at last? Nothing.
Crum m y hornbook, lousy primer. Slim volume, Crainpool, pot fucking
boiler, publisher's remainder. You taught m e nothing, mister. And
where did I get the idea that by getting next to aberration I could
. , . '" (p. 124). Main's ellipsis might be completed "'get closer to
the understanding of the whole of existence, know man by comprehending
the nature of his divergences from the norm, from the social.'" He
had hoped, in other words, to find criminals as representative of p ri
mal, irrational hum an urges as he has found prehistoric animals' teeth
reflective of the primitive impulses of those beasts, and he had
convinced himself that the study of both could only reinforce his ow n
raw hunger for life and help him to discover, at the same time, what
that lif e is. He has in the intervening years read all the words in
crime's "slim volume," however, and he has had to recognize that crime
is merely ordinary, that i t reflects no "cutting, biting edge" of
outlaw "passion and life ," but represents only a dull, laughably
circumscribable form of mystery which sheds practically no light on the
larger mystery, the "Mystery that kept him going."
228
Although his experiences in the actual world have been supplying
him with compelling evidence of crime's ordinariness throughout his
bail bonding career, i t takes a dream representation of this fact to
I C
convince him of its indisputable truth. In his dream he witnesses
the violation, robbery and desecration of the tomb of a pharaoh by two
m en he subsequently recognizes to be Oyp and Glyp, the only two crimi
nals ever to have jumped his bail and to have eluded his attempts to
recapture them. Outdoing the robbers of Tutankhamun‘s tomb (upon whose
17
crime Elkin has modelled theirs ), Oyp and Glyp not only destroy
priceless artifacts in the chamber, spill the pharaoh's invaluable
unguents on the floor and collect a ll that is portable; they actually
exhume the pharaoh humself, breaking through his sarcophagus, splitting
his outer and inner coffins, penetrating his golden shell and fin a lly
unwrapping his m um m y so as to get at the riches i t contains, pocketing
not only rings and jewels but the pharaoh's bandage-swathed heart as
well. Their misdeed completed, the two are apprehended immediately
by local authorities, Main, who witnessed the entire crime, following
them to court. Once they have been arraigned, Main feels obligated to
try to win them their freedom once again, and he appears before the
presiding magistrate to make his case for the b a ila b ility of the
offenders. This effo rt compels him to argue what he has known profes
sionally but has never acted upon: the notion that even the most
heinous of crimes is only ordinary, that even the violation of God's
burial ground and the desecration of his corpse are merely mundane ;
sorts of transgressions, misdemeanors committable by common, banal m en
229
in--as Main puns--"under their heads" (p. 98). His argument fa ils to
persuade the judge, but i t does convince him— the dreaming Main—
completely. What Oyp and Glyp has com e to represent to the waking
Main was a romantic sense of crime as that which exists beyond the
boundaries of civilized lif e and of criminals as those who feed upon
the experience of extremity, those who press human lim its to the fu ll
and are exalted by their daring defiance of normality. His dream
allows him to eloquently and persuasively talk himself out of this
misconception, the efficaciousness of its rhetoric rendered dramatical
ly within the dream and without it: in the dream, the judge lets Oyp
and Glyp go free; in waking from i t , Main understands that in fact, or
perhaps only to him, Oyp and Glyp are dead. The progression, as he
sees i t in the dream's end, goes like this: they were,"fugitives once
from his scrutiny and control, then from his intercession, and now from
the earth its e lf. Fugitives from the bullying freedom he needed to
give them who t i l l .now could stand between the law and its violators,
having that power vouchsafed to him, the power to middleman, to doodle
people's destiny" (p. 105). His dream oration leaves him bereft of the
one remaining absorbing passion of his lif e , then--the belief that the
whereabouts of Oyp and Glyp continues to be one of life 's soluble,
mysteries, that they are s t ill out there in the world somewhere as a
two-ply exception to and repudiation of the ordinary. What the dream
forces him to recognize is that they have disappeared without a trace
into the ordinary, that the ordinary has claimed another source of his
interest, his lif e , his passion; from this worst of a ll losses too he
230
must be redeemed at the novella's close.
The ordinary and the exceptional are not the only contraries "The
Bail bondsman" (and for that matter, the bail bondsman) must reconcile i f
Main is to achieve his promised redemption. His preferences in animals
as well as his pride in his ancestors reflect, for instance, his
attachment to the past, as opposed to present or future, a p a rtia lity
suggested too by his insistence that his secretary act and dress like
Bob Crachit and that his own office reduplicate exactly the look of a
bail bondsman's office in film noire. He objects to the present because
i t is only the present, the omnipresence of taste, style and fashion
attesting to its temporal one-dimensionality, to its w illing capitula
tion to the fact that now is only and immutably now. Main is as of
fended by contemporaneity as he is by crimes generated by the law's
permissiveness, e xp licitly linking the two as he walks through Cincin
nati's downtown shopping d is tric t: "They spoke of the breakdown of
law and order," he muses, "but what a discipline was in these streets,
what a knuckling under and catering to the times." The shops "burst
with an egoism of the present tense" (p. 76), the city is "pickled in
taste" (p. 72), but Main has "no taste, only hunger. I have never been
fashionable, and it's astonishing to m e that so much has happened in
the world. The changes I perceive leave m e breathless" (p. 74). The
rapidity of change has led him to conclude that " It's as i f he lives
trapped in the neck of an hourglass. Style, he thinks. As a young
m an he wanted i t , hoped that when he wakened i t would be there like
French in his mouth. N ow he sees i t as a symptom of a ruinous disease"
231
(p. 78). And so he walks the city streets, noticing the Easter
decorations being hung in the trees ("long strips of gold fo il in light
rigid frames, exactly the size and appearance of bedsprings . . . \
inching their way the long length of the avenue like a golden blight"
[p. 71]),.morosely deciding that " It's too much for me—spring, style,
the future" (p. 72).
His argument with the future is that he can't know i t — i t eludes
him as Oyp and Glyp once eluded him, evades his "scrutiny and control"
and thus "limits his power and his precious freedom" (p. 105). What
he would know are those simple things that "a dopey kid of the next
century could te ll him," basic facts concerning the alignment of the
major leagues, what songs become hits, who would be assassinated, what
the new political slogans would be and the like . "'Everything I don't
know and never w ill know leans on m e like a mountain range,'" he te lls
his secretary, " ' I t creams me, Crainpool. I t potches m y brain and
rattles m y teeth'" (p. 120)—threatens, that is , the symbolic locus of
his "passion and life ."
W hen he tries to foresee the future he is foiled by the unavoid-
a b ility of contemporary analogues as well as the time-boundness of
words, and he consequently becomes "depressed by language, the fin ite
slang of his century . . . , . He needed new endings, new punctuation,
a different grammar" (p. 108). He gets no new language, of course, .
but by the end of the novella his attitude has changed considerably
toward thelanguage he does have. The difference between his earlier
feelings toward his rhetoric (his idea that " it was only a foreign
232
language he had learned to speak, the flashy grammar of body contact,
a shoptalk of which he is weary because no one has yet bested him at
it" [p. 118]), and his subsequent, altered view of i t is that he
comes increasingly in the novella to mean what he says and to feel
what he means, his addresses to Miss Krementz, a clien t, and Crainpool
progressively reflecting his willingness to use his "foreign language"
as a medium through which to present his deeply f e lt concerns and fears
to others. Neither of these speeches is marked by an ingenuous
simplicity, of course; both of them treat a variety of subjects, ex
press a number of contradictory moods and rely heavily upon rhetorical
maneuver, their combined effect being to dramatize what Main is feeling
more than to directly express i t . For Miss Krementz he delivers an
account of his lif e story intended as an explanation of why he is
refusing to post bail for her boyfriend, for Crainpool he expounds upon
his frustration at not being able to know the future as a kind of pre
fatory explanation of his imminent banishment of his secretary back
into fugitivedom once again. Both monologues mix autobiography with
business, the habitual, indifferent shoptalk being gradually compelled
to accomodate its e lf to more personal rhythms and more visceral con
cerns. This shift reflects Main's ta c it awareness that language is the
only means through which he can possibly resolve the primary tension
which underlies his personality— "'who wired this tension in m e between
ego and detachment?'" (p. 120), he asks Crainpool—and the only agent
capable of mediating between the other contraries which plague his life .
Language, he comes to understand, is the only tool he has which can
233
mediate between himself and the world in the same way that he has
placed himself "between the law and its violators" (p. 105), and he
recognizes too how crucial language is in resolving necessary conflicts
between self and role.
This insight into the power of language is reinforced by Ma.ih’ s
subsequent realization of the significance language--what he calls his
rhetoric--has had for him throughout his lif e . The two occasions upon
which he mourns the success of Oyp and Glyp in evading his apprehension
are both characterized by his image of the pair hiding in places so
remote and terrains so forbidding "that the inhabitants have no lan
guage" (p. 62) or in exotic locales where they go undetected and undis
turbed because "they don't speak the lingo" (p. 106). To escape him,
Main's fantasies seem to suggest, the fugitives must escape the sphere
of his language, perhaps even lose language as a social tool altogether,
and leave behind the civilized world which empowers him to undertake
his bail bondsman's role. I t is completely consistent with this sense
of language's circumscribing powers that Main realizes that what has
immobilized his other bail jumper, Crainpool, has been his rhetoric,
the "foreign language he has learned to speak" having "held him all
these years, kept him in town while the Phoenician was out rounding up
jumpers," the secretary ultimately becoming a "conossieur of the
Phoenician's abuse" (p. 120). Main has used language, then, to give
others freedom by arguing for and winning them the right to be bailed
out, and he has used i t too to keep Crainpool and other clients where
he wants them; now he has to use i t to free himself from the pall that
234
has descended upon his lif e , the feeling that "I could only recover
with drugs the sense of m y possibilities" (p. 67).
He achieves his redemption through the monologue he delivers
for Crainpool's benefit, a monologue which has as its primary object
the discovery of a means through which he can 'recover the sense of
his po ssib ilities,' but which turns out its e lf to have been ;the means
for which he was searching. Main wakes Crainpool in the middle of the
night to te ll him that Oyp and Glyp are dead, then pulls a gun on him,
threatening to k ill him because he jumped Main's bail years before.
(When Crainpool objects that his eleven years of devoted service to
Main have been restitution enough for that jump, Main responds that he
is going to shoot him anyway because, as the law defines the relation
ship between bailed fugitive and bail bondsman, '"You're the only m an
in the world I'm allowed to k i l l '" [p. 119].) Main's ensuing mono
logue careens from the description of his sense of life 's loveliness
to accounts of the latest scientific theories of "' . , . the universes
. , . leaking into each other . , • this transfusion of law in the
IQ
sky, , (p, 123), to his despair over the mundane facts of the
future which he can never know and the facts of the present which he
w ill never know, his ecstatic narrative culminating in the admission
that, up t i l l now, '"There was always someone to hunt , . , . A mystery
I was good at. M y line of country. But i f Oyp and Glyp are dead
. , (He shoots at his secretary's hand, grazing him, and threatens
to shoot again, sending the m an into wild f lig h t .) "'LONG LIVE
CRAINPOOL]'" (p. 125).
235
Main's secretary, clearly enough, is being catapulted out into the
world to become a replacement for the now extinct Oyp and Glyp, his
whereabouts to become the manageable mystery Main may never be able to
solve, but which he w ill have the consolation of knowing is soluble.
Crainpool w ill provide Main, in other words, with future opportunities
for search, with reasons to remain interested in a world which has come
progressively to close down a ll around him. Propelling Crainpool back
into the world is only the offshoot, the consequence, of a more signi
ficant movement Main undertakes (or, to use the collections's t it le ,
seizure he experiences) in the novella, which is his monologue with
its ta c it assumption that the universe, for all its mysteriousness
and inaccessibility to the mind of man, must nonetheless be perpetually
confronted, must be attacked again and again with the only weapon we
have capable in any sense of piercing its imperturbability and silence
—words. In his peroration on new scientific discoveries about man and
the universe, Main makes reference to the theory that '" a ll lif e is
merely four simple compounds arranged on a spiral spring of sugars and
phosphates'" (pp. 122-3), his description recalling, and ta c itly
likening human beings to, the liv e r fluke, whose spiralling, foul
progress toward his goal he so patiently depicts in his parable of the
communality of crime. The analogy's unavoidable implications are
comically vulgar: i f one must live in excrement in order to progress
toward the state of being toward which a ll of his energies have been
directed, then one must live in excrement, be i t that which provides a
temporary hom e for a liv e r fluke or that produced by an hyperarticulate
236
bail bondsman. Or, to put the idea less scatologically, a ll of life
strives toward some form of completion, som e achievement of an ultimate
which must be gained through the only means that the organism has at
its command, be i t the capacity for spiral locomotion or the a b ility
to best everyone else with one's use of.language.
The liv e r fluke is recalled here too, of course, because of its
explicit association with the Phoenix and with the whole notion of
rejuvenation in the novella, its recovery from a state of torpor and
paralysis prior to the sheep's arrival paralleling Main's similar
ascent from the despair of a world without possibility. The associa
tion of Main and the liver fluke with the Phoenix and the idea of
rejuvenation is given a last reinforcement in the novella's final
image, an image which also reflects a resolution of a number of the
contraries which have undergirded Main's personality and have become
central thematic antinomies in the work. As he exits the hotel from
which he has ejected Crainpool, Main looks around to see where his new
quarry has gone, la zily wondering in which direction the m an might have
fled: “East towards the railroad tracks? Or did he double back? To
the street where he himself had walked that afternoon? Where the
people were more like film stars than the film stars were, as everybody
was these days, handsomeness creeping up the avenues of the world like
the golden bedsprings in the Cincinnati trees?" (p. 126).
The "befouled Phoenix" of a liv e r fluke, the "spiral strings of
sugars and phosphates" which are a ll lif e , "the golden bedsprings in
the Cincinnati trees"--all are symbols of hope, possibility, lif e , the
237
novella's final image adding the last requisite notion to the symbolic
complex: the bedsprings are Easter decorations, suggestive of re
birth and redemption in the world. These "golden bedsprings" and the
handsomeness with which they are associated recall the modernity that
Main rejected e a rlie r, but which he embraces here, his restoration of
possibility having reconciled him to the less subtle, more communal
form that possibility can take for others—contemporaneity, fashion,
the new and the now. By the end of the novella, then, he has come to
accept--tentatively, at least—two of the three things he had earlier
described as being 'too m uch for him.' Spring now has a personal,
immediate meaning for him, and no longer represents merely an induce
ment to meditations upon how l i t t l e in his lif e is susceptible to
regeneration. Style no longer seems "a ruinous disease," but is that
which has saved and restored him, his paroxysm of language having dra
matized for him the realities of his situation and led him to the
recognition that through the idiosyncratic, highly imaginative manipu
lation of language he can--for himself, at any rate—keep possibility
alive in the world. (Crainpool, in fact, very nearly understands the
point of Main's monologue, even i f he does mis-anticipate what its
culmination w ill be. "'You always have to have the last word,"1 he
complains, interrupting Main's speech. "'You always have to do things
big, don't you? Big shot. You'd k ill m e for nothing, for the sake of
your style'"[p. 123]). The future has not been brought under his con
tro l, of course, but he has gained a small victory over i t by exchanging
a distant future in which incalculable and unimaginable things happen
238
for a more immediate, more manageable future, one whose primary,
possible object is the recapturing of a fugitive he himself has created.
O n a number of levels, then, "The Bail bondsman" suggests that
language allows us a few tentative victories over our circumstances,
allows us to reconcile conflicts within our personalities like those of
ego and detachment, self and role, being and style, and even permits
us to occasionally articulate into being ideas and images which w ill,
perhaps only symbolically, perhaps only temporarily, be redemptive.
I t is by no means insignificant that this is the argument of the most
effective and impressive of the three Searches and Sei zures novel!as,
nor is i t in any way surprising that Elkin has admitted that " I, myself,
am closer to Main than any other character [in m y wor k] . The upbeat
conclusion of Main's narrative is not final in terms of its relation
to the Searches and Sei zures collection as a whole, but i t could be
said to represent most accurately the deal Elkin has himself struck
with language. For he, like Main, has resolved to use language as his
way of bearing down on the world, not because that language w ill alte r
the future, but because i t can occasionally be made to effect a seizure
of the present which succeeds in making the present seem more than
simply the present. That that process is no less circular than that
of seeking a fugitive whose fugitiveness is the seeker's own creation
is a contradiction which Elkin, like his protagonist, has learned to
live with. I t is, after a l l , a gesture, and gestures, as an earlier
Elkin protagonist well understands, are crucial. Dick Gibson could
very well be describing in detail Main's action of sending Crainpool
239
out into the world to embody possibility when he presents this apostro
phe: "Gestures, gestures, saving gestures, life-giving and meaningless
and sweet as appetite, delivered by gestures and redeemed by symbols,
by necessities of your own making and a destiny dreamed in a dream"
(DGS, p. 331).
240
NOTES
^Tony Tanner, City of Words (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 19.
2
Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in
American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 27,
39, 45.
3
Elkin discusses the importance of the simile in his work and in
his teaching in Thomas LeClair, "The Art of Fiction XXI" (interview
with Stanley Elkin), Paris Review, 66 (Summer, 1976), p. 86.
4
LeClair, Paris Review, p. 76, and Phyllis and Joseph Bernt,
"Stanley Elkin on Fiction: An Interview," Prarie Schooner (Spring,
1976), p. 15.
5
LeClair, Paris Review, p. 60.
C
The prevalence of death as a theme in Elkin's fiction is a cen
tral issue in the critic a l arguments of Larry McCaffery, "Stanley
Elkin's Recovery of the Qrdinary," Critique, XXI, 2 (1980), p. 43, and
Francine 0. Hardaway, "The Power of the Guest: Stanley Elkin's Fiction,"
Rocky Mountain Review, 32, 4 (1978), pp. 240-41.
^Quoted from dust jacket blurb on the Random House edition of
Searches and Sei zures.
8
W hen asked by Jeffrey L. Duncan what makes Push the Bully and
Feldman admirable characters, Elkin replied, "Energy is what counts.
I t is what is on the good side of the ledger for Feldman and Push.
Whoever has the better rhetoric is the better man, and since Feldman
by and large tends to have the better rhetoric, he is as far as I'm
concerned the more sympathetic character." Jeffrey L. Duncan, "A
Conversation with Stanley Elkin and William H. Gass," The Iowa Review,
V III, 1 (Winter, 1976), p. 61. In another interview, Elkin admitted,
"I stand in awe of the outre. Those characters in m y fiction who are
exaggerated seem, to m e at least, more vital than the ordinary charac
ter, certainly more energetic. It's this energy that engines m y work."
Scott Sanders, "An Interview with Stanley Elkin," Contemporary Litera-
ture, XXVI, 2 (Winter, 1976), p. 132.
241
q
LeClair, Paris Review, p. 60.
1(^Tw o reviews of Searches and Sei zures emphasized the importance
of language in the three novellas; Jonathan Raban, "Books & Writers,"
Encounter (February, 1975), pp. 83-4, and Raymond M. Olderman, "The
Politics of V ita lity : Raymond M. Olderman on Stanley Elkin," fiction
international, 2/3 (1973), pp. 141-44.
11
Elkin discloses this point in the preface to Searches and
Seizures.
12
In addition to the thematic parallels which link the novellas
of Searches and Sei zures to each other, the works also share one
distinct technical sim ilarity, one which appears prevalently through
out Elkin's novels--the juxtaposition of fir s t person narrative with
third person interior monologue narration. Main narrates most of "The
Bail bondsman," but there are passages which reflect a different
perspective upon him and his ac tiv ities; Ashenden narrates two-thirds
of his novella, then gives'way to a third-person account of his
copulation with the bear; Preminger narrates the opening pages of "The
Condominium," which takes the form of his habitation speech, but after
this, save for snatches of indirect interior monologue, his story is
presented in the third person. I t is tempting to think that Preminger
was doomed from the very moment that Elkin decided him incapable of
tellin g his own story, a sure sign that he's not the "better man"
because he doesn't have the "better rhetoric" (see note 8 above).
^For instance, Bruce Allen, "Reviews," Hudson Review, XXVII, 1
(Spring, 1974), p. 130, who describes the scene as "vigorous, raunchy,
painful, smelly—and downright touching."
14W hen asked whether he bestows details of his own lif e on his
characters, Elkin replied, "No. There is l i t t l e autobiography in m y
work. W hen I was growing up, we had a bungalow in New Jersey which
we visited in the summers . . ." and proceeds to explain how he arrived
at Feldman as a nam e for many of his characters. LeClair, Paris
Review, p. 57.
1 C
Although neither so striking nor evocative as the tomb theft
scene in "The Bailbondsman" or the bear fuck scene in "The Making of
Ashenden," Elkin's creation of the letters from Mrs. Riker to
Preminger is its e lf a minor triumph of language, the restraint
necessitated to pitch them perfectly between typicality and parody
observed throughout them, the unconscious, banality of their composition
an effect completely achieved.
^He has dreamed of the fugitives before, we are told, "for though
they are his nightmares, at least in his dreams he is with them,
learning their plans, seeing them in their new settings and fresh
disguises" (p. 63). Earlier in the novella, however, Main had
comtemptuously dismissed dreams as containing only "triv ia l enigma we
forget on rising" (p. 29), a view very m uch at odds with the
determining role a dream plays in the resolution of the work.
17
Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamen's tomb, describes
the actual tomb robbery in The Tom b of Tutankhamen (London, 1923, 1928,
1933; rpt. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), pp. 59-62. Elkin's
exaggeration of the theft makes Oyp's and Glyp's crime seem that m uch
more unthinkable and unpardonable, thus making i t that much more
d iffic u lt for Main to convince the judge that theirs was merely an
ordinary trespass, an average felony.
IQ
Main's notion of a "transfusion of law in the sky" recalls the
sense he has that human law is similarly leaking, deflating. The
analogy anticipates Elkin's more elaborate parallelling of the hum an
world and the physical world in The Franchiser, in which the expanding
universe theory is given a dramatic counterpart in the business sphere
(the wildly accelerating prime interest rate), in the social sphere
(the dispersion of the Finsbergs), and the personal sphere (Flesh's
demyelinating nerves).
^LeC lair, Paris Review, p. 84.
243
CHAPTER V
THE APOTHEOSIS O F ANALOGY, THE CELEBRATION O F STO RY
The aspect of Elkin's fiction that has undergone the most marked
and deliberate evolution in the two decades which separate the f ir s t-
published stories of Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers from
the most recently published novellas of The Living End is not plot,
character or theme— i t is language. Elkin has come increasingly to
refer to fiction as something "which gives language an opportunity to
happen,"1 and as "a stage where language can stand," isolating as one
of its central purposes that of persuading its audience of "the
possibilities inherent in rhetoric." The exploitation of these
possibilities is "what I admire in the fiction of other people and
what I aspire to in m y ow n fic tio n ," he told Scott Sanders,
I'd rather have a metaphor than a good cigar. Cer
tainly there's a pitchman aspect to m y prose, but
I'm not trying to sell anybody anything. I am trying
to upset the applecarts of expectation and ordinary
grammar, and you can only do that with fierce language.
You can only do that with aggression: the aggression
of syntax and metaphor, the aggression, really of
actual by God metered prose, which I try for from
time to time in m y novels.2
The fiercer the language has gotten and the more aggressive the
metaphors, of course, the more Elkin has been taken to task by critics
for insufficiently cleaving to the conventional lite ra ry virtues of
244
naturalism and continuous, consistent plotting, but a more significant
result of this evolutionary movement in his work is that he has been
progressively obliged to provide a locus for this language and these
metaphors in the plots of the works themselves. His habitual means
of introducing rarified language into his work, as a number of his
3
critics have noted, is to choose as his protagonists m en who have
som e professional necessity to use language well: Leo Feldman sells
by manipulating customers through rhetoric; Dick Gibson, radio man,
is, by his own account, 'no more than his words, his voice'^Alexander
Main talks felons into and out of captivity; and Marshall Preminger
attempts to lecture the world into coherence for a living. This
stategy is largely successful in accommodating the protagonists'
voices to the voices of the works' narrators, making possible the
extended passages of indirect interior monologue and the more extreme,
completely deliberate blurring of first-and-third-person narrative
modes, both of which are so characteristic of Elkin's rhetorical
technique. The increasingly greater density and intricacy of Elkin's
language- finds its complement in his characters' progressively
greater fa c ility with words, then, this adherence to a s tylistic
decorum ensuring that there be no disparity between the language the
characters use and the language used to create them.
Significantly enough, Elkin has im plicitly denied the presence
of this sort of decorum in his fictio n , affirming that a ll kinds of
language are available to any of his characters, that he allows any
character his own syntax and diction in the belief that not to do so
245
would be to adhere to a convention of literary fiction no less arbitra
ry than his own convention of bestowing eloquence on practically every
character who makes an appearance in his work.4 (Few of the inmates of
Fisher's prison, for instance, seem incapable of delivering slick, rhe
torically sophisticated addresses o ff the cuff, and Dick Gibson hardly
receives a call on the air which is n 't a carefully articulated and de
scriptively impressive linguistic performance.) One effect of the omni
eloquence of Elkin's characters is that i t equalizes them, levelling
linguistic distinctions between them in reinforcement of the tendency of
his style (discussed in previous chapter) to similarly eliminate d iffe r
ence and minimize variation. For his protagonists, however, the rule of
s ty lis tic decorum has held up throughout his work, and i t has occasion
ally proven d iffic u lt for Elkin to ju s tify —when he has tried to ju s ti-
fy--the Elkinian perceptivity and eloquence of these characters.
Jake Greenspahn, for example, is a grocer, not a poet, and when
he is given the vision of a poet in "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitizers
and Criers," and becomes extraordinarily aware of the world around him,
there must be an explanation. And there is: "Death is an education,
he thought. . . . O n the street, in the store, he saw everything.
Everything. I t was as i f everybody else were made out of glass. W hy
all of a sudden was he like that?" (C&K,K&C, p. 9), He was like that,
we might respond, because Elkin has no story i f he is not like that,
i f his perceptions aren't heightened so as to bring them into something
like parity with Elkin's own. A second protagonist whose profession
only peripherally demands of him or provides him with the occasion
246
for unusual rhetorical s k ills is Ben Flesh, but his speech at the
closing down of his Fred Astaire Dance Studio, his address from the
trademark bucket atop his Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, his diatribe
to Patty Finsberg while they are "in nature" in the mountainous
outskirts of Colorado Springs, his "sex night" revelatory monologue
and a ll his other outbursts of language prove him yet another Elkinian
exemplar of perception and rhetoric. His extraordinary gifts of vision
and articulation must also be accounted for, i t turns out, and the
explanation begins as he studies a hitchhiker he has picked up,
intuiting all manner of characteristics about the m an from superficial
details of his appearance and dress. Interrupting his own flow of
insights into the traveller, Flesh wonders via Elkin's characteristic
reflective consciousness mode of narration, "where did he get these
ideas? how had vision come to perch on his eyes like a pince nez?"(TF,
p. 215). The answer to his ponderings is never made ex p lic it, but i t
is nonetheless clear that his visionary experiences and eruptions of
eloquence are in part pathologically induced, each instance of intuitior
and logorrhea representing a further stage in the degeneration of his
5
nervous system. How better, after a ll, to express the equivocal
nature of vision and perception than to portray their heightening as
a product of the deterioration of the sensory nerves which make them
possible?
One of the effects of the narrative strategy of The Living End--
though probably not one central to the work's original inspiration--!s
to circumvent the issue of reconciling verisimilitude and heightened
247
perceptivity by providing an alternative explanation for the presence
of Elkin's idiosyncratic, endlessly expressive language, a ju s tific a
tion for its permeation of the book not contingent upon one character
being more than usually perceptive or articulate. The f ir s t third
of the volume's opening novella, "The Conventional Wisdom," is narrated
in a pedestrian, unforegrounded, distinctly unElkinian language
which subsequently gives way to the simile-laden, intricately evocative
prose style characteristic ( i f not more than characteristic) of Elkin.
What accounts for the sh ift is the fact that Ellerbee, the central
figure of the novella, has moved from lif e into a fte rlife upon his
murder by a criminal robbing his liquor store, his lexicon being
considerably improved in the transition from one realm to the other.
The angel of death who has ushered him into Heaven points out that
when he was alive he had "'a vocabulary of perhaps seventeen or
eighteen-hundred words,"' and then asks Ellerbee, "'Who am I?'
'An eschatological angel,' Ellerbee said shyly..
'One hundred percent,' the angel of death said. 'W hy do we do
that?'
/r
'To heighten perception,' Ellerbee said, and shuddered."
Heightening perception is , to be sure, a major means and a crucial
end of all of Elkin's fic tio n , and i t is not uncom m on for the reader
to experience a sympathetic shudder in the process of adjusting his
ow n perception to Elkin's expansive and precise vision. (R.Z. Sheppard
recognized this characteristic of Elkin's work when he called The Dick
Gibson Show 1 "a b rillia n t approximation of what i t is like to live with
248
one's eyes and ears constantly open." ) The departure from
te rre s tria ltty --th e departure from its givens and earthbound syntaxes--
undertaken in The Living End, however, allows Elkin to 'give language
the opportunity to happen' in a fashion less encumbered by the
obligations of naturalistic coherence and consecutiveness than that
offered him by the narrative strategies of any of his other works, the
simple, fam iliar features of Heaven and Hell and the general
characteristics of their equally fam iliar inhabitants imposing the
only real limits upon his lite ra ry inventiveness in the volume. The
Living End perpetuates the affective purposes of Elkin's earlier work,
then, but i t does so by maximizing the opportunities for his poetic
language to "upset the applecarts of expectation and ordinary
grammar," by eliminating the naturalistic premises which p artially
dictate the surfaces of his other books and which inevitably contribute
to the determination of their shapes.
There has always been, as we have noticed, a pronounced an ti
naturalist tendency in Elkin's work, a tendency variously expressed
by his intentional blurring of narrative modes, his introduction of
blatantly symbolic or allegorical characters into his work, his
preference for extreme and outlandish plot situations, his penchant for
looping, parallelling and refracting temporal sequences, his conferral
of eloquence on the most improbable characters, and his overall propen
sities toward emphasizing expression over mimesis and for resolving
his narratives through metaphor and symbol rather than through plot.
The Living End, with its celestial beings and inconsolable inferno
249
dwellers, its Lord on high and Holy Family, is not a departure from
Elkin's characteristic literarymode in kind but only in degree, the
triptych allowing him a freedom of invention greater than any he had
previously permitted himself, the "heightened perception" of the
inhabitants of Heaven and Hell giving his expressive gifts free rein
to create and transform and discover. Although neither a culmination
nor the crowning achievement of his career, The Living End nonetheless
represents the purposeful exploitation and expansion of tendencies in
Elkin's work which have been, from the earliest stories, gravitating
consistently toward the affirmation of the supremacy of the imagination
and the liberation of words from the limitations and restraints
of naturalistic depiction.
In thematic terms, the novellas of The Living End address
themselves to questions Elkin's fiction has previously considered,
the triptych lent coherence and pattern through the presence in
each of its sections of desperate, rebellious gestures undertaken
by m en who, although not consequently redeemed or restored from
the absurd injustices inflicted upon them by a petty and capricious
God, are nonetheless reconciled somewhat to their unearned sufferings
as a result of their plucky, impossible revolts. Each of the
novellas takes for its t it l e a fam iliar, platitudinous phrase, the
title s of the second two works ("The Bottom Line" and "The State of
the Art") derived from the pool which gives the f ir s t novella its
t i t l e — "The Conventional Wisdom." I t is worth noting that Elkin's
8
original projected t it l e for the volume was The Conventional Wisdom,
250
because that t it le reflects the centrality of this notion to the
entire triptych, isolating one of its thematic concerns rather than—
as the publisher's t it l e does--merely hanging a nam e on the volume
for the sake of a pun. At the conclusion of the opening novella,
Ellerbee, a Hell dweller for 62 years, realizes what the conventional
wisdom means, and he describes i t both as a preparation for the
resolution of this section of the triptych and as a concept which
w ill inform the following two novellas. ". . . everything was true,"
we are told in Elkin's fam iliar indirect interior monologue narrative
mode,
even the conventional wisdom, perhaps especially the
conventional wisdom—that which made up heaven like a
shot in the dark and imagined into rea lity halos and
h ell, gargoyles, gates of pearl, and the Pearl of Great
Price, that had invented the horns of demons and c le ft
their feet and conceived angels riding clouds like
cowboys on horseback, their harps at their sides like goofy
guitars. Everything. Everything was. The self and what
you did to protect i t , learning the house odds, playing
i t safe—the honorable percentage baseball of existence
(p. 45).
The conventional wisdom, in Ellerbee's definition, means two different
things, then, a place in the communal consciousness where such
culturally conditioned images take root and become real and compelling;
i t means too the rea lity in which Ellerbee, Ladlehaus, Quiz, Lesefario
and the other earthly protagonists of The Living End exist and have
their being, the Hell, purgatory and Heaven in which they w ill, we
in itia lly assume, spend eternity. These two definitions converge and
meet in the mind of God, of course, and i t is against i t and Him—
against the conventional wisdom w rit large and embodied in what
251
Ellerbee w ill subsequently refer to as "the real McCoy Son of a Bitch
God"--that they must stage their merely human, self-affirm ative revolts.
Since Ellerbee's rebellion is the most significant of the four
undertaken by the central hum an figures of the triptych, not merely
in terms of The Living End alone but in terms of Elkin's characteristic
aesthetic, we w ill discuss the revolts of Ladlehaus, Quiz.and
Lesefario before concluding our treatment of these revolts with an
analysis of "The Conventional Wisdom." Jay Ladlehaus, the accomplice
to the thug who robbed Ellerbee's liquor store and murdered its owner,
is not a m an accustomed to making significant gestures, for in life
he had always been the handbag and co-conspirator, so innocuous an
outlaw that he never gained a criminal record in a whole lifetim e
of crime. His strategy for endurance in Hell—insofar as his pain
allows for thoughts of anything other than its e lf -- is , not unlike
Ellerbee's in itia l tactic, to lie low and be as unobtrusive a sufferer
as he can possibly be, but an unanticipated v is it from God suddenly
propels him out of his cultivated anonymity and results in his being
condemned to a new and singular form of punishment. God, in a good
mood, entertains questions from the denizens of Hell on a whim, and is
greeted by the taunting query, "'is there life before death?'"
(p. 55). Outraged at this g ra ffiti of a question, God erroneously
holds Ladlehaus responsible for i t , although i t was someone standing
near him who asked. Ladlehaus is singled out for unusual punishment
not for the question but for his subsequent realization that "He
makes mistakes," a blasphemy which prompts God to expel him from Hell
252
and banish him to his grave, where he becomes the "only m an in the
long sad history of time ever to die" (p. 69)—the only m an to spend
eternity in a grave rather than in Heaven or Hell. Here he gains a
new adversary, Quiz, a caretaker at the high school next to whose track
he is buried who hates the dead and is outraged that one of them is
addressing him and begging to be disinterred. Quiz gets his revenge
upon the dead by staging elaborate theatrical performances around
Ladlehaus1 grave calculated to convince him that there is a civ il war
raging between the twin cities and, later, that he is only imagining
that he is in his grave and is actually in an intensive care ward of
a hospital experiencing com a dream as his family and physicians debate
whether to pull the plug on him. One of the boys Quiz has hired to
play soldier in the Minneapolis-St. Paul war--Flanoy--finally te lls
Ladlehaus what Quiz has been doing to him, and the dead m an takes the
opportunity of God's presence at a recital being held at the high
school to outwit both of his enemies.
God has appeared for the recital because he recruits musicians for
Heaven at such events, drawn to them out of His love of music. Ladle
haus finds that he too loves music but has forgotten about i t during
his time in Hell, has "forgotten harmony, the grand actuality of the
reconciled. Forgotten accord and congruence--al1 the snug coups of
correspondence. He did not remember balance. Proportion had slipped
his mind and he had forgotten that here was where the world dovetailed
with se lf, where self ta llie d with sympathy and distraction alike"
(p. 92). In .life the implementer of plans and never their designer,
253
in death an inhabitant of a realm where connection, coherence,
sequitur are absent, Ladlehaus is struck by his reunion with the"grand
actuality of the reconciled" and inspired by i t as well to make music
the vehicle of his redemption, his notion of i t as a mediator
between self and world recalling Alexander Main's similar discovery
of the purpose of style in "The Bai1 bondsman." Aware now that G od
is ever on the lookout for musicians with w hom to staff Heaven’s
orchestras and choirs, Ladlehaus waits until the deity has succumbed
completely to the charms of a concerto and then suddenly shouts at G od
" 'Get [Quiz]! , . . Get him! He's a composer!'" (p.95). God complies,
smiting Quiz fa ta lly , and thus Ladlehaus is unburdened of his
tormentor and enabled to make his peace with the unusual terms of his
death. He is grateful that he is interred where he can be an eternal
witness to "all the ceremonies of innocence the St. Paul Board of
Education could dream up" to hold upon the fie ld surrounding his
grave, and is reconciled to spending his death "as he had spent his
lif e , accomplice to all the lives that were not his own, accessory
to them,.accomplice and accessory as God" {p. 95).
In "The Bottom Line" as in the other novellas of The Living End
the "snug coups of correspondence" are the point, Ladlehaus' a b ility
to manipulate God into ridding him of his dead-hating menace repre
senting what Dick Gibson would call a "saving gesture." The grandeur
of that gesture is vitiated , however, by the fact that God has timed
Quiz's death to coincide with that moment in the recital when the
children who had already performed would be getting restless and need
254
distraction. Ladlehaus has manipulated God, in other words, but only
with His cooperation. He has, nonetheless, resigned himself to his
plight and even com e to affirm and feel nostalgic about the momentary
mental impulse which landed him in his grave. "A composer, he thought,
I told Him [Quiz] was a composer. Well, He makes mistakes, Ladlehaus
thought fondly" (p. 95), secure in the knowledge that a reiteration of
the blasphemy which put him here can do him no further damage.
Similarly neutralized and assimilated into Heaven's in fin ite plan
are the rebellious gestures of Quiz and George Lesefario, the central
hum an characters of "The State of the Art," a novella dedicated prima
r ily to the interpersonal conflicts of the Holy Family and to the
mind_ of God the Creator. Quiz, precipitously plunged into Hell upon
his sudden demise, complains to his fellows am ong the damned that
he was slain—"Like someone ambushed, snuffed by unions, eating in
restaurants and rushed by hit men" (p. 99)—and that he suspects that
God is responsible. In Heaven, meanwhile, God is having misgivings
about His impulsive dispatching of Quiz, and turns to His Son for
forgiveness. Christ not only forgives His Father, but sees to i t too
that Quiz's sufferings in Hell!are abated and that he fin a lly is raised
up to Heaven so that he might be brought before God as the culminating
step in God's "perfect act of contrition." God refuses to offer
Quiz repentance, but the incident nonetheless dramatizes how thoroughly
He has lost control of His Kingdom, and how far His Son (who loved
being alive on earth, and who holds His crucifixion and death against
Him) is w illing to go in opposing Him. I t is a function of the
255
v o la tility of Heaven that a spiteful, petty, unheroic m an like Quiz
can become the agent of its confusion despite the fact that he does
nothing more to deserve this stature than what a ll the rest of the
damned do—complain. Ever the unwitting rebel, Quiz supposes that he
has been raised up to Heaven because i t was belatedly discovered that
in life he had always stayed in YM C A s whenever he was travelling.
A more hopeful and more potentially heroic gesture is that
undertaken by George Lesefario, in life a clerk in Ellerbee's liquor
store gunned down in a holdup previous to the one in which Ellerbee
died. Having been a fa ta lis t who had decided that his life had no
meaning, Lesefario concludes in Hell that "Death made no sense but i t
meant something" (p. 125), and in order to prove this--or to make i t
true--he sets those suffering in Hell to timekeeping, persuading them
that Quiz had le ft him the precise second, minute, hour, day and year
in an epiphanic moment immediately preceding his translation, and
that they must continue to mark the time because "the meaning of death
is how long i t takes" (p. 128). What Lesefario is doing, of course,
is appropriating eternal duration and translating i t into humanly
conceivable units of temporal sequence, giving endlessness a hum an
meaning. ("We can perceive duration," Frank Kermode argues in a
pertinent phrase, "only when i t is organized."9) Lesefario's heroism
is similar to that heroism Dick Gibson ascribes to Bob Hope, then,
w hom he sees as a m an who 'stands up in time and organizes i t , ' f il ls
i t with jokes, thus conferring upon its meaningless passage a hum an
dimension and a shape (DGS, p. 67).
256
However optimistic Lesefario's gesture, and however many of the
damned agree to join in on the counting, i t nonetheless ultimately
leaves even its originator disenchanted and skeptical, partly
because of the d iffic u ltie s involved in keeping accurate time when one
is ablaze, but also because one of Hell's elder residents convinces
him that his scheme is no more useful and no less crazy than the "fad"
Ellerbee started when he had the damned on their knees in the burning
slime praying to God. Despairing of the hopelessness of eternal
time-keeping, and struck by the ancient denizen's argument for its
f u t ilit y , Lesefario gradually—and, as he subsequently realizes,
tragically--loses count. What Lesefario doesn't know--he hadn't
even been aware that Ellerbee was in H ell—is that Ellerbee's rebel
lious gesture had been, p artially at least, successful, and that the
old man's comparison of the two schemes, although not intended this
way, implies that his counting project, had i t been perpetuated,
could have been effective within similar limits as well. What
neither the old m an nor Lesefario understands, "The Conventional
Wisdom" clearly demonstrates, is the insurrectionary significance
of Ellerbee's apparently petitionary gesture, and the tentative
triumph over God's eternal plan in which that gesture culminates.
Ellerbee's decision to rebel is not arrived at until late in
the opening novella when he learns the reasons for his transfer from
Heaven to Hell shortly following his death. In life Ellerbee had
been a decent, unselfish man, a responsible citizen who had supported
the wives and children of employees injured or killed in holdups
257
before he was himself murdered in one. At his death he ascends to
Heaven, glimpses beatitude and is summarily and without explanation
dispatched to Hell. His in itia l response to his new environs is to
obey the injunction stamped into Hell gate's arch, and abandon hope:
"and with i t memory, pity, pride, his projects, the sense he had of
injustice--for a l i t t l e while driving o ff, with his sense of identity,
even his broken recollection of glory" (p. 34). Because to compare
his present agony with the happinesses he had known in life and the
bliss he had known in Heaven only exacerbates his suffering, Ellerbee
in itia lly resolves to "let them have all of i t , his measly joy,
his scrapbook past, his hope too," leaving him with "only pure pain,
the grand vocabulary they had given him to appreciate it" (p. 35).
His strategy for minimizing suffering is defeated by the arrival
of Ladlehaus in Hell. Ladlehaus' appearance not only compels Ellerbee
to remember, but also to compare, and he is soon feeling anger at
the injustice of the fact that he, the good man, was dispatched to
death before his time, while Ladlehaus, a petty thief and crime's
second banana, lived on past his hundredth year, enjoying an untroubled
old age. Ellerbee tries to escape feeling once again when Ladlehaus
attempts to describe to him his wife's televised reaction to his
murder and other earthly occurances post-dating his death, but he
fin a lly abandons his flig h t from the accomplice and his recollections,
lying down in the river of molten lava and excrement which is H e ll’s
floor. The legions of the damned crowd around this supine figure,
imagining him to be dead, and he becomes aware of "their collective
258
stench like the swam ps of m en dead in earthquake, trench warfare--
though Ellerbee knew that for all his vocabulary there were no
proper analogies in Hell, only the mildest approximations" (p. 39).
Although he is raised from seeming death by a female denizen who
handles his penis to prove that he s t ill lives, his moment in the muck
has not only convinced him that he retains his Free W ill, but has also
led him to the discovery of the means through which he can—tentatively,
at any rate--conquer Hell and outwit God's plan for i t . While the
onlookers encourage him to flee his pain and keep busy--Hell's
conventional wisdom—Ellerbee kneels in the slime, prompting one
of the tormented, then many at once, to see that he "'looks like he's
praying'" (p. 40). His prayer begins by invoking the deity as "'Lord
God of Ambush and Unconditional Surrender, . . . Power Play God of
Judo Leverage. Grand Guinol, Martial A r t is t ," 1 and once Ellerbee has
compared Him to "'an old m an at a picnic1" and evoked His "'zoned
Heaven in Holy Escrow'" (p. 41), God responds, asking Ellerbee
what he wants. "'An explanation,"' Ellerbee replies, and the
analogue upon which "The Conventional Wisdom" is founded gradually
reveals its e lf.
As the novella proceeds, Ellerbee comes to be more and more
exp licitly identified with Job, that other good m an whose
undeserved and unaccountable sufferings lead him to reject the
conventional wisdom offered him by friends Bildad, Eliphaz and Elihu
which holds that God rewards and punishes m en with im partiality and
justice, and prompt him to call God to account for the unmerited pain,
259
loss and misfortune which have been inflicted upon him. God appears
as precipitously to Ellerbee as He does to Job, although Ellerbee,
acquainted with the circumstances of his predecessor's audience with
Him, is not to be put o ff with the argument for His awesomeness which
so thoroughly cowed Job. Ellerbee wants no '"Job jo b ,'" he te lls
the Lord, turning the tables on Him by refusing to hear His 'Where
were you when I . . . ?' taunts and insisting that what he wants
to know is where H is was when Ellerbee was being virtuous and moral, and
why, having lived that kind of lif e , he has been relegated to Hell.
He was damned, God answers in a f i t of pique, because he failed to
precisely honor the commandments—neglecting to honor his parents (whom
he, as an orphan, had never met) at one point and taking God's nam e in
vain at another—and because he thought Heaven looked like a theme park.
That such petty trespasses can result in eternal damnation outrages
E llerbee,^ and he prays that God close down Hell and eliminate the
damned forever, a plea which prompts God to 'lig h t up Hell's blazes
like the surface of a star* in His fury, His response is just what
Ellerbee had anticipated, and he "wouldn't have had i t any other way.
He'd damned him, no surrogate in saint's clothing but the real McCoy
Son of a Bitch God whose memory Ellerbee would treasure and eternally
repudiate forever, happily ever after, world without end" (p. 45).
Elkin's Job confronts God and learns neither ;the’ in fin ite mag
nificence nor the incommensurability of the universe but the petty,
doctrinaire moral ism which permeates the creation and deprives i t of
all seriousness for him. I t is at this point, then, that he realizes
260
the fu ll significance of the fact that "everything was true, even the
conventional wisdom," for the conventional wisdom has been proven to
be the one and only ground of his being, a fantastic realm "made up
like a shot in the dark and imagined into rea lity ," but which is
nonetheless solid, actual, inescapably there for him. This recog
nition leaves him with two choices: to continue to avoid exacerbating
the torments of Hell by renouncing hope, memory, and identity, by
living in i t as Patty Finsberg says Ben Flesh lives in the w orld-
unattached, "'even emptier-handed than the rest of us"1 (TF, p. 210);
or, to accept i t as the only world he's got and oppose its terms as
he affirms its rea lity and assumes responsibility for his existence
within i t . Having watched Feldman of "In the Alley" seek out a
tawdry, degrading and needlessly painful death because i t is the one
death he can truly feel and know; having seen Ed Wolfe strip himself
of his possessions and a ll ties to the world beyond himself only to
find that real freedom is attainable solely through interaction
with others, and having watched bailbondsman Main recapitulate his
process of discovery; and, having watched Leo Feldman realize that he
is no "bad man" but one who affirms and loves his l i f e —having watched
a ll of these resolutions in Elkin's fic tio n , we are in l i t t l e suspense
about what Ellerbee's choice, even in Hell, must surely be. Resolving
no .longer to be’Hell's isolato and alienated man, he determines to find
Ladlehaus, forgive him for his part in Ellerbee's death, and reminisce
with him about Minneapolis-St. Paul, about his wife, May, and her
TV interviews following his murder, and about the life the two of them
261
lived in the twin cities.
I f "The Conventional Wisdom" succeeds, i t succeeds on the sam e
terms that Elkin's other work succeeds—through the elaboration and
resolution of metaphoric (as opposed to philosophical or narratival)
tensions. The relevant metaphor which dictates the resolution of
"The Conventional Wisdom" is metaphor its e lf, or, more precisely,
analogy. Once Ellerbee has recognized that "there were no proper
analogies in Hell, only the mildest approximations"--a discovery he
must "die" to make--he has stumbled upon a central truth about the
netherworld and the source of the torment i t ceaselessly in flic ts
upon its inhabitants: Hell is what i t is and nothing other than what
i t is .** Like the "ultimate inner city" to which Ellerbee compares
i t when he fir s t arrives, Hell represents that which is solid,
inevitable, inescapable, unchanging and inalterably there, a
rea lity as somber, unmediatable and assimilable as the moon. Into
Hell's eternal immutability Ellerbee introduces the analogy, a simple,
hum an rhetorical ploy which, although i t can neither douse the flames
nor dam the excremental rivers which constitute the denizens' primary
sources of torment, can nonetheless subvert the netherworld's
chaos by intruding relation and connection into i t . To say that one
thing is like another is to violate the informing logic of Hell, its
ethos and metaphysics, which insist that all things are separate,
irreconcilable, unrelated, distinct and fixed, and thus in turning to
the analogy—by recognizing the stench of the damned to be like
something else, and by acting upon that knowledge—Ellerbee is
262
repudiating his, earl ier.'propensities toward solitariness, passivity
and self-abnegation and moving toward the relational nexes which
transcend (and to that extent defeat) the open-ended, eternal meaning
lessness and inexplicability of Hell. Ellerbee rises from his figu
rative death to give the damned the g ift of analogy, to prove to them
that 'the grand vocabulary they had been given with which to appreci
ate their pain1 (p. 35) can be transformed from an afflictio n into a
means of counteracting Hell's oppressive irre v e rs ib ility and fix ity .
He has succeeded, in other words, in liberating the imaginations of
the damned that they might have the slight solace of mediating their
torment with similes and analogies, thus altering modestly the
changelessness of Hell, transforming i t , in language at any rate,
from a realm of necessity to one of possibility, from a bourne of
hopelessness to one o f--a lb eit qualified—hope. This explains why,
then, Ellerbee kneels in the muck ("'Looks like he's praying,"'
comments one onlooker, exercising his rusty aptitude for simile);
i t explains too why'God answers his summons, struck as He is by
analogies ("'Lord God of Ambush and Conditional Surrender . . .'" )
emanating from Hell, where there have been "no proper analogies."
God angrily denies Ellerbee's petition that He close down Hell, but
He has in the process of explaining to Ellerbee the reasons behind his
relegation to Hell made of Himself "a memory Ellerbee would treasure
and eternally repudiate forever, happily ever a fte r, world without end"
(p. 45). Analogy enables Ellerbee to outmaneuver God and to bring
to Hell's formlessness and randomness a new relationality and hum an
263
meaning, his discovery allowing him as well the anticipation of one of
the few pleasures the underworld permits: "And one day he would look
for himself in Ladlehaus's glowing blisters" (p. 46). One day, in
other words, he would undertake the most important analogical act of
them a l l —that of recognizing the self by seeing i t reflected in the
sufferings of others.
That God is aware of the revolts carried out against Him by E ller-
bee, Ladlehaus, Quiz and Lesefario is evinced by his attempts at co
opting and mocking three of them. He answers Ladlehaus' challenge
only in His ow n time and according to His ow n purposes, even
though he does com e subsequently to regret having smited Quiz at
Ladlehaus1 bidding. Quiz's rebellion is similarly dependent upon
divine intervention, his translation to Heaven being accomplished
not as a result of anything he did but because Christ willed i t , and
because God could not or would not reverse a decision of His Son. G od
manifests his omnipotence and invulnerability most unabashedly in
relation to Lesefario's failed gesture of heroism, picking up on his
counting scheme after its originator and his adherents have
abandoned i t , His mocking reiteration of the count constituting a
crushing demonstration to the damned of W ho the true eternal timekeeper
is, and His declaring of an end to time so shortly after they
ceased their counting multiplying exponentially their sense of s e lf
betrayal and defeat. Only Ellerbee manages to successfully oppose
God without any other assistance than His explanation of his relegation
to Hell, then, his rebellion allowing him to realize at once that/he
264
retains his free w ill even in Hell, and that he can use i t to define
himself in Hell's definitionless bourne as the unassimilable and
uncompromised man, one whose torment is rendered bearable only by—
to use Push the Bully's term— "the cabala of [his] hate, of [his]
irreconcilableness" (C & K _,_K & C , p. 216).
Ellerbee's resolve to eternally repudiate God places him squarely
in the ranks of those Elkin protagonists for w hom assimilation is an
impossibility and defiance a necessity, those who have "something . . .
reprobate and unreconstructed" in themselves, as Boswell puts i t , ' i f
not the soul, then the w ill or the glands of [th e ir] need' (B., p. 373).
By defining himself through his opposition to the prevailing ethos,
Ellerbee.takes up the philosophical attitude which animates
Feldman of "In the Alley" and Leo Feldman of A Bad Man^ and
Alexander Main of "The Bai1 bondsman," all of w hom share Push the
Bully's feeling that "There is n 't any magic, but your no is s t ill
stronger than your yes", and would similarly affirm his declaration
that "distrust is where I put m y faith" (C&K,K&C, p. 215). Where
Ellerbee diverges most discernibly from his fellow protagonists is at
the point at which he includes the expectation of befriending
Ladlehaus in .his strategy of opposition, his conclusion that
rebellion demands sympathy for the similarly oppressed finding no
counterpart in the Feldman narratives or "A Poetics for Bullies" (in
which individualism as an absolute is the central theme), and recalling,
though exceeding, Main's recognition of the necessity of incorporating
Crainpool's banishment into his efforts at 'restoring himself to a
265
sense of his possibil iti.es' (S&S, p. 67). The difference, of course,
lies in the nature of the adversary; Ellerbee is not contending with
a charismatic power which infects all those around i t with its opti
mistic and calculated illusions about existence, as Push is, nor is his
enemy an order fanatic who has brought everyone inside his microcosm
into the sway of his moralistic vision, as Feldman is; he is up against
G od the Father, creator and embodiment of thd confusing mix of order,
differentiation and meaning (He 'researched the Netherlands,' devised
the distinctive taste of brie and knows all of universal history in
detail) and of disorder, boundary!essness and meaninglessness (He
conceived of, and brought into being, Hell) which constitute what w e
call "the conventional wisdom," which is another nam e we give to lif e ,
to the attempts we make to understand it .
The Living End closes with God's annihilation of everything, a
conclusion d iffic u lt to explain i f we assume--as we have been assuming
--th a t the life-affirm ing gestures of Ellerbee, Ladlehaus, Quiz and
Lesefario represent the real thematic center of the triptych. The
concluding apocalypse comes to seem more explicable and consonant and
13
less gratuitously cynical i f we follow John Irving's cue and read
The Living End not as a satire of Christian eschatology but as an a lle
gory in which a fte rlife stands for lif e , the gestures of the various
protagonists representing those acts which give lif e shape and make i t
meaningful. Such a reading of the triptych necessarily alters the terms
through which we perceive the G od w ho w ill shut i t all down, certainly*
His Judaeo-Christian deity aspect becoming minimized, rendered secondary
266
in importance to His representation of the ground of all being, the
anamating s p irit of all lif e . H e is aligned with and depicted as
inseparable from the conventional wisdom because He is both the life
we seek to understand as well as our attempts to understand i t , both
the existence we know and the complex of assumptions we have evolved
through which to know i t .
Elkin's personification of G od in these d iffic u lt terms is c la ri
fied somewhat by his dissertation's explanation of the G od who appears
in the pages of Faulkner's novels, in which "we are presented with an
image of G od which is essentially sociological in character. One
accepts the sociological slant, of course, but, peculiarly, the socio
logical projection, the Class God, as i t were, turns out to be the G od
14
actually determining events." God--the conventional wisdom--is true,
then, to recall Ellerbee's phrase, because we believe Him to be true
and thus make Him true, that truth becoming the medium in which we live
out our days, formulate our sentences and make our gestures. In this
reading, consequently, The Living End comes to be seen as an allegory
of life which ends in apocalypse because all lif e ends in dispersion
and dissolution, the work's fiction that such annihilation is general,
universal and simultaneous, rather than personal, individual and
temporally incoincident ju s tifie d --if i t needs justification--by the
dramatic closure i t permits and the linguistic extravagances i t allows.
By portraying G od as both the source of all life and as the embodiment
of the intolerable restraints i t imposes upon humanity's rapacious will
toward freedom, by depicting Him as a personification of all we know
267
about lif e and of all that—because of that knowledge's conventionality
and fam iliarity, its necessary 1imits--prevents us from finding out
more, Elkin manages to express in allegorical terms the same basic
ambivalent attitude toward existence we have found throughout his work.
It is the same anbivalence we find articulated in Meyer Feldman's
epiphanic vision of "'All the beauty . . . All the beauty'"^ in the
midst of a city's squalor, the same that we find in Leo Feldman's a b ili
ty to affirm his existence at the close of A Bad M an in spite of all
"wars, histories, deaths of the past, other people's poverties and
losses" (ABM, p. 336); i t is the sam e ambivalence im plicit in Ben
Flesh's celebration of "the bouncy anthems of our firms, tears in m y
eyes in the face of all this blessed, sacred, smarmy hope even i f I
know, as I do know, what I know" (TF, p. 75), and the sam e ambivalence
expressed by Alexander Main's contemplation of the mysteries whose
solutions have eluded him ('"Why is life so lovely? The night sweeter
than the day, and the day more joyous than the night? W ho alive can
grieve? , . , W hy doesn't desire die? W hy is i t that it's the one
thing which remains intact, that has som e fucking stranglehold on
immortality?'" [S&S, p. 119]); i t is the same ambivalence manifested in
a number of other deeply fe lt monologues which appear in Elkin's f ic
tion, monologues made possible by the temporary suspension of the
works' gravitational pull toward dispersion and dissolution so that the
protagonist can briefly and sentimentally panegyrize the fullness and
plentitude of existence. The G od of The Living End is, in short, a
personification of the im p a rtia lity of existence, a dramatization of
268
the inseparability of life 's terror from its triv ia , its grandeur from
its crap, its beauty from its loss. I f His annihilation of everything
on the closing page of "The State of the Art" doesn't e lic it a shudder
of anxiety from the reader, consequently, the allegory has failed,
leaving The Living End nothing more than a cartoon version of Christian
eschatology. The book is , as we have tried to demonstrate, m uch more
ambitious and much more effective than that.
dust before He relegates Heaven, earth and Hell to oblivion, G od
decides to reveal to the living and the dead the whys and wherefores
of the creation, and once He has given them a brief review of the
tria ls , punishments, blessings and covenants He has visited upon
humanity over the long centuries of time, He fin a lly explains why i t
was a ll necessary, what i t was done for. Not so m an would have free
w ill, He assures them, and not because He ‘"gets off on goodness,'"
either; " 'I t was Art! I t was always Art. I work by contrasts and
metrics, by beats and silences. I t was all Aft. Because i t makes a
better story is why1" (p. 144). For Elkin, as for God, " it makes a
better story" i f things end apocalyptically, and anyone doubting the
validity of this analogy need only glance at the rear panel of the
book's dust jacket with its depiction of Stanley Elkin ascending through
clouds, or consider that G od is closing down the creation "TBecause I
never found M y audience'" (p. 148)—a familiar and ju stified Elkin com-
plain t--fo r additional persuasion. This final analogy has its amusing
overtones, of course, a fact consonant with the comic purposes of The
Living End, and i f i t seems not completely compatible with the trip
269
tych's alternative perception of G od as the creator and embodiment of
the conventional wisdom, the point i t allows Elkin to express may
ju s tify the minor disparity. There is a good deal of evidence, in
other words, that the value that underlies a ll of Elkin's God's crea
tion is a value that underlies all of Elkin's creations as well.
The most persuasive demonstration of the centrality of story as a
value in Elkin's fiction is not the plethora of stories incorporated
into his short stories, novellas and novels; more compelling is the
frequency with which the resolutions of his works are dictated by his
protagonists' attitudes toward and relationships to the stories they
have to te ll and the ones which they act out. Leo Feldman learns
through the narration o f the story of his relationship with Dedm an that
he is not a "bad man," but is a m an who loves his life and affirms i t ,
the recounting saving him from despair and perhaps--although only
through inadvertence--from a fatal beating as well. Alexander Main,
w ho has won m en their freedom or denied i t to them according to the
narrative of their histories he has chosen to present to judges and
magistrates, liberates himself by creating a r tific ia lly a story--the
mystery of the whereabouts of Crainpool--which will keep alive his
curiosity and reinvigorate his passion for lif e . Ellerbee decides that
an aspect of his opposition to G od and His plan for Hell will be the
exchange of stories of their shared past in Minneapolis with Ladlehaus,
the gesture in a small way subverting the netherworld's purposed rela
tion! essness and aconnectionality. And then there are the protagonists
for w hom defeat, not redemption, is associated with story and story
270
tellin g : Dick Gibson, who finds in middle age that the Franklinian
paradigm he has attempted to live out has le ft him distinctly unaltered,
unmythic and unreified, and who responds to the nothingness he conse
quently feels surrounding him by asking his listeners to f i l l i t with
their open-ended, meaningless narratives, rather than (as his hero, Bob
Hope, did) trying to impose a shape, a story, upon time himself. The
deterioration of Ben Flesh's physical condition is clearly reflected by
his self-betrayal in turning the circumstances of his hospital friend
ship with an R.A.F. lieutenant named Tanner into a story for the
edification of a m an he doesn't even know at a gas station in Alabama,
the narrative he delivers help!essly replacing truth with a facile
irony, accuracy with drama. Marshall Preminger's destruction is
assured by the banal and tawdry story of his father's death which he is
powerless to insulate himself against'or'assimilate, and which is re
lated to him by a wom an too blandly unimaginative to understand what
such stories can mean or what they can do to their hearers. And
fin a lly , Lesefario abandons the effort to "humanize time" in Hell "by
giving i t form," the "tick-toc.k" he has briefly imposed upon i t (to
use Kermode's model of the simplest possible plot) neglected as "purely
1 6
successive, disorganized time," Hell's durational meaninglessness,
reasserts its e lf upon his disaffection from his hopeful purpose.
The difference between having one’ s defeat or redemption associa
ted with story is the difference between accepting the stories we have
and knowing what stories we need. For Elkin's protagonists the only
redemption to be had is that gained through pushing toward unaccustomed
271
stories and unfamiliar analogies, the "possibilities inherent in
17
rhetoric" (to recall a favorite Elkin phrase) as real and as hopeful
as any possibilities they are lik e ly to encounter. Language, analogy,
story: these then are the means through which Elkin's protagonists and
his fiction attempt to intrude between now and the annihilation to com e
the consolation of "the snug coups of correspondence" and the litera ry
image of "the grand actuality of the reconciled" (p. 92).
272
NOTES
^Phyllis and Joseph Bernt, "Stanley Elkin on Fiction: A n
Interview," Prarie Schooner (Spring, 1976), p. 16.
2
Scott Sanders, "An Interview with Stanley Elkin," Contemporary
Literature, 16, 2 (1975), p. 133.
3
Jonathan Raban, "Books & Writers," Encounter (February, 1975),
p. 183, and Robert Edward Colbert, "The American Salesman as Pitchman
and Poet in the Fiction of Stanley Elkin," Critique, XXI, 2 (1980),
pp. 52-8, discuss Elkin’ s tendency toward choosing professional
rhetoricians as his protagonists.
4
W hen asked in an interview about his propensity for ignoring
decorum in both prose style and dialogue, Elkin responded, "Yes.
And I suppose what you're also saying is that there are people in m y
work w ho suddenly speak lik e Ph.D.'s or Ph.D.'s lik e slumlords, but
this is simply a convention of fiction and drama. Did people in
Elizabeth's court speak blank verse? Did the children in the
nineteenth century speak the way children in Henry James speak? I
allow every character m y diction. And may it serve him better than i t
serves me." Sanders, Contemporary Literature, p. 141.
5
Although euphoria is listed as one of the disease's symptoms in
the novel (TF, p. 134), logorrhea is not.
Stanley Elkin, The Living End (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979),
p. 25.
7R.Z. Sheppard, "Don't Touch that Dial!" rev. of The Dick Gibson
Show by Stanley El kin, Time, 1 March, 1971, p. 82.
8
The book actually went through three changes of t it le , moving
from The Conventional Wisdom to The Bottom Line to The Living End.
Letter received from Stanley Elkin, 3 September, 1978.
g
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967), p. 45.
273
Elkin briefly discussed the Job story in his Faulkner disserta
tion, arguing that "The god of organized religion is fa ir i f H e is
nothing else. At the end the Lord gives Job twice as much as he had
before. Despite the proverb, the Lord of established religions does
not move in mysterious or wondrous ways." Stanley Lawrence Elkin,
"Religious Themes and Symbolism in the Novels of William Faulkner,"
Diss. University of Illin o is 1961, p. 369.
^E lk in 's inferno most closely resembles Dante's in its change
lessness, the absence of growth and development in any form one of
their shared characteristics.
12
The line of descent which links Ellerbee to Leo Feldman is
evident i f we compare Ellerbee's angry prayer to G od to the following
prayer of Feldman's: "'Lord G od of hooked scourge and knotted whip, of
sidearms and sidecar, of bloodhound and twoway radio, vigilant G od of
good neighborhoods and locked Heaven--!end us thy anger. Teach us, 0
God, revulsion'" (ABM, p. 228).
13
John Irving, "An Expose of Heaven and Hell," rev. of The Living
End by Stanley Elkin, New York Times Book Review, 10 June 1979, p. 7.
14
Elkin, "Religious Themes and Symbolism in the Novels of William
Faulkner," p. 374.
^Stanley Elkin, "A Sound of Distant Thunder," Epoch, V III, 1
(Winter, 1957), p. 57.
16
Kermode, p. 45.
17
Phyllis and Joseph Bernt, Prarie Schooner, p. 16.
274
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